Notes

One of my earliest memories as a small child in the late sixties was catching a glimpse of Concorde, the supersonic passenger jet then being flight-tested in the skies above Kintyre. If you missed the sight of the aircraft, you couldn’t fail to hear the loud sonic boom as it broke the sound barrier. In a way, this plane heralded the dawn of a new age in the decade that defined much of the modern world in which we now live. Though Concorde itself no longer flashes through our skies, new and faster ways to travel will continue to shrink our world.

Some may quietly opine that we were better off and more content in simpler times, but as is the way of things, the march of progress, welcome or not, is inevitable. The airbase at Machrihanish, then in the hands of the RAF, was the site chosen for this testing because of the length of its runway. Indeed, it is one of the reasons that Kintyre may yet find itself the location of the UK’s spaceport – another massive leap forward.

Again, back in the late sixties, you would have found a busy fishing port at Campbeltown, with small wooden boats crowded in the space between the town’s twin piers. Sadly, modern fishing methods, combined with almost inexplicable political interference, have led to a catastrophic decline in the numbers of fish in our seas, and the fishing fleet in Campbeltown, as elsewhere, now numbers only a handful of boats.

Andrew Robertson, the ex-Campbeltown fisherman mentioned above, looked back on this loss with much regret. He lamented the disappearance of the fair contest between fish and man, as larger vessels worked together trawling the sea, giving their quarry no chance of escape, or time to replenish.

Fishing became a massive industry in the eighties. Many of my former classmates made my eyes water with tales of the money they were making back then. It didn’t last, and the connection between the fishermen of Kintyre and the sea, which lasted for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, has almost been lost. Hopefully, as modern and better informed attitudes prevail, sustainable fishing will again become the norm.

I have tried to capture a fictional taste of a life at the fishing, which – almost as a by-product – spawned such wonderful yarns, songs and poetry. For a more factual account of these days, and long before, please seek out the works of Freddie Gillies and Angus Martin, both great chroniclers of times past in Kintyre.