Читать книгу An Island Odyssey - Hamish Haswell-Smith - Страница 11

AILSA CRAIG

. . . This rock in the summer-time abounds with variety of sea-fowl, that build and hatch in it. The solan geese and coulterneb are most numerous here; the latter are by the fishers called albanich, which in the ancient Irish language signifies Scotsmen. . ..

When Ailsa Craig’s ethereal shape materialises out of the mist, soaring to a height of nearly 340 metres (over 1100 feet) above the sea, one can under-stand why it was named fairy rock (aillse creag) by some ancient Celtic mariner. But it has also, more prosaically, been called Elizabeth’s rock or Alastair’s rock and its popular name nowadays is Paddy’s Milestone. It is more than twelve times the area and three times the height of the Bass Rock, which is a mere pimple by comparison, and it is so precipitous that even the sea birds find it impossible to nest on some of the cliffs.

A glacier flowing down the Clyde valley 25,000 years ago, when Scotland lay smothered under a thick sheet of ice, broke off pieces of Ailsa Craig and scattered them between Wales and the Pennines in the English Midlands. They still lie there today. The rock is mainly volcanic basalt but there is a seam of reddish fine-grained micro-granite which is the ideal material for curling stones. These were quarried and cut on the island then polished on the mainland and a few are still manufactured today for connoisseurs.

It’s more than a decade since I landed on Ailsa Craig. We sailed there in a trusty bilge-keeled ketch – Jeananne – which belonged to my present-day sailing partners. She drew only one metre which let us lie in shallow water alongside the small wooden jetty. Anchoring is not easy as the sea bottom is steep and boulder strewn.

A rusty narrow-gauge railway line runs from the jetty past the quarrymen’s cottages to the old quarry on the south side. A century ago almost thirty people – quarrymen, lighthouse keepers, and their families – lived here but the quarrymen left and the lighthouse is now automatic. There are heaps of miniature Henry Moore sculptures – waste granite pieces from which the spheroidal curling stones have been cut leaving voluptuous curved forms.

A zig-zag path starts near the lighthouse and climbs past the old square keep 100 metres up the slope. It was said to be a retreat for the monks of Crossraguel Abbey (near Maybole) and that the Catholics once held it on behalf of Philip 11 of Spain. Further up, the path passes over the shallow valley of Garraloo and beside the tiny Garra Loch before making its way to the top. Here the world falls away in a sudden vertiginous plunge to the sea far below and the view is enthralling. Beyond the white lace of the surf lie the wide stretches of the Firth of Clyde with Arran, the Ayrshire coast, and the long dark shape of Ulster on the south-western horizon. Experienced climbers may prefer to go directly up the slope from the landing place. This is not difficult but in places the route leads over steeply inclined slabs.

Ailsa Craig is noted for its immense gannet colony which accounts for about five per cent of the world’s total gannet population. There also used to be many puffins and an ornithologist reported in the 1860s that there were at least 250,000 pairs and that when he disturbed them ‘their numbers seemed so great as to cause a bewildering darkness’. But in 1889 brown rats arrived off ships ferrying supplies to the newly built lighthouse and by 1984 they had wiped out the entire puffin population. (Rabbits, incidentally, were introduced about the same time by the quarrymen to supplement their diet – and were later claimed to be interbreeding with the rats!) In 1991 a massive rat eradication programme was instituted and, to date, it seems to have been successful. Puffins are, at last, visiting the island again.

Instead of climbing it is possible to complete a relatively easy two-mile circumnavigation of the island. The exposed corner at Stranny Point in the south-west is the only minor obstruction. It has to be negotiated to reach the dramatic Water Cave when coming from the east past Little Ailsa so try and time it near low water.

The names of features on Ailsa Craig are pure poetry – for example, Spot of Grass, Bare Stack, Doras Yett, Ashydoo, Rotten Nick and Kennedy’s Nags. Ailsa Craig itself is mentioned in the poetry of both Wordsworth and Keats but, strangely, not by Burns who grew up within sight of it.