Great Toilets of the World Part 3: Victorian Toilets, Rothesay Pier

The Victorian Toilets on Rothesay Pier, Isle of Bute

I spent last week 'doon the watter' on the Isle of Bute, celebrating my granny's 90th birthday with a host of relations, some drawn from the other side of the world for the occasion. I go to Bute at least twice a year, but my visits are usually of the smash and grab variety; utilitarian trips in which I visit all the necessary family members in the minimum possible time before high-tailing it back up the road to Inverness. This longer visit allowed me to get out and about a bit more than usual and provided some material for my occasional series 'Great Toilets of the World'. Previous installments have been inspired by locations as diverse as the Cairngorms and Utah's Canyonlands.

They don't make toilet seats like that anymore

Despite having lived on Bute continuously for 17 years and part time for many further years, my first glimpse of the palatial pissoirs of the Victorian Toilets was on the television about 10 or 15 years ago. Captivated by the mosaic floors and shimmering marble, I resolved to pay them a visit. That it took so long to get around to inspecting them can be attributed to two causes. Firstly, I am not, as a rule, particularly interested in urinals. A sightseeing trip to a public toilet is, therefore, very easy to put off for another day. Secondly, they are located on Rothesay Pier. I prefer the shorter crossing from Colintraive to Rhubodach as it is cheaper than the Wemyss Bay to Rothesay route and it avoids the fiendish traffic queues of Glasgow city centre. Accordingly I have not often passed by their door. 

The Rothesay ferries and Inverkip power station photographed from Montford

The Victorian Toilets may be sumptuous, but the town of Rothesay is looking a bit rough around the edges. It was a lively and popular holiday destination until the advent of cheap package tours but it has been on the slide ever since. The place had been enjoying something of a renaissance in recent years but now looks to be degenerating into the depressed and shabby state that I remember from my youth in Thatcher's Britain. Nothing stays the same, not even the countryside. On revisiting my boyhood haunts by the Glenmore Burn I was surprised by its dynamism, pools that I remembered had disappeared, others had sprung up to take their place. I ran over the hills of the north end one morning - Windy Hill and Kilbride Hill - and found them grassier than of old, the heather having retreated ,through climate change or overstocking with cattle and sheep or a combination of the two. As a boy I remember an old timer commenting that in the 1950s the whole hillsides were purple with heather. I wonder if by the 2050s there might be none left at all?

Outcrop of columnar sandstone south of Kilchattan Bay - Old Red Sandstone that has assumed a hexagonal  structure on cooling after it was heated by an adjacent igneous intrusion - perhaps unique in the UK

My main impression of Bute is of how small the island looks through adult eyes. Growing up on an island that is 15 miles by 3 has a profound effect on one's sense of scale. Ten miles seems a long way, even in a car. As a teenager I couldn't wait to leave the place and broaden my horizons. Much as I enjoy visiting the place, after a week's holiday a very similar sensation begins to develop and it is always a relief when my wheels touch the tarmac of the mainland.

Jonathan Meades: Off Kilter in the Outer Hebrides

Jonathan Meades has been a favourite commentator of mine for some years. Despite his predilection for the tackling of esoteric and often unfamiliar subject matter, a combination of insightful criticism and beautiful cinematography make his television programmes a joy to watch. It was a delight to see the great man bring his rose-tinted spectacles and considerable vocabulary to bear on a subject close to my own heart in a programme entitled 'Off Kilter'

He started with a irreproachable but cutting demolition of all the twee and sentimental things that are commonly held to represent Scottishness: tartan and bagpipes; tribal patriotism; the roots racket with its attendant glorification of the 'good old days' of poverty, overcrowding and feudalism. The latter portion of his programme was spent on the Long Isle of Lewis and Harris where he was captivated by the elemental beauty of the landscape and was, I think, at his Meadsian best when describing its built environment.

 The Butt View Stores, so called because its position on the west coast of Lewis affords it a fine view of the equally amusingly named Butt of Lewis

Partly for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar with Meades, but mostly to satisfy my own curiosity, I have transcribed a passage below. Rendering his uniquely verbose rhetoric presented an amusing educational opportunity, liberally spattered as it was with words that I had not yet ushered into my own vocabulary. In some instances I had to make repeated attempts to convert an unfamiliar sound into aprocession of letter interpretable by Google. Rather than smugly parade my newfound knowledge I have elected to come clean about my recent ignorance by providing below the definitions I was forced to look up in the course of the transcription.

'This is perhaps the only place in the world whose townships and villagescapes, urbanism and landscapes, are wholly infected by the Calvinist mentality; that is by a blindness to prettification, by an aesthetic bereavement so absolute that it is a sort of insouciant anti-aesthetic. In a way the everyday buildings are the very contrary of Mathieson's (Stornoway Castle). They suggest that to complete with this most magnificent terrain would be both hubristic and certain failure, so they simply didn't bother to compete. The unsurpassible strangeness of the island resides in the chasmic gulf between the naturally evolved and the negligently created, between scarp and scrap, between the sublime and the substandard........... The island shackscape is the apogee of the Northern Hebridean anti-aesthetic. Members of the National Trust and of kindred bastions of insipid taste will no doubt fail to acknowledge the beauty of what is here; these scapes are beautiful in the way that a lupus is beautiful, or mould on fruit, or decaying meat or scar tissue, or amputations, or diseases of the skin, or anatomical freaks.'

insouciant – marked by blithe unconcern, nonchalant

apogee - highest point, culmination

lupus - any of several forms of ulcerative skin disease

This was one of very few gems that make paying for a TV license worthwhile. Why oh why was the first episode withdrawn prematurely from the iplayer before I was able to fertilise my mind with what was surely another rare counterstrike against the dumbed down populist drivel that makes up the majority of the contemporary televisual output?

The third and final part of 'Off Kilter' is broadcast on BBC4 tomorrow (Wednesday).

The Quiraing:Trotternish, Isle of Skye

Wild places are in a perpetual state of flux, yet they appear constant when considered on the timescale of our short human lives. On the eastern flanks of the Trotternish Ridge on the Isle of Skye lurks such a timeless place, the Quiraing. Its towers of kidney-textured volcanic rock enclose a collection of chasms and amphitheatres. We picked our way up steep paths, enjoying the novelty of carrying an infant through the type of scenery more usually found on a rock climb or in a winter gully. Bright images of island and sea presented themselves unexpectedly, framed between the pinnacles.

By contrast, it is rare to revisit an urban area and find it unchanged, even a tiny conurbation like Uig, the port from which the ferries linking Skye to Uist and Harris sail. My first visit to Uig was in 1993, courtesy of an audacious hitch that bordered on car-jacking. In the car park outside the village shop in Staffin we had found an elderly woman and her dog sitting in a car. She planned to drive over the hill to Uig to procure a tin of paint. We asked if we could have a lift and while our request was being considered we loaded ourselves and our packs into the back of the car. When the husband emerged from the shop he found his car fully loaded.

Fifteen years ago the shabby pub on Uig pier was typical of the Scottish hostelries of the era. The choice presented at the formica-topped bar was a simple one - lager or heavy. It has now been freshened up and re-branded. Extensive signage invites the passing tourist to enjoy good food, local beers and freshly ground coffee.
Looking back from the smoke free 21st century it seems ludicrous that joints were openly smoked as we played pool in that bar while waiting for the ferry to arrive. It is easy to think of travel only in terms of distance covered and places visited, yet our journey through life is a voyage through both time and space. Revisiting a place can suddenly bring home how much the world has changed in the intervening years. Suddenly I felt old, and my mind drifted back to the eternal spires of the Quiraing.

Lewis and Harris now a viable weekend venue!

I was delighted to learn that last Sunday, the 19th of July 2009, marked the first Sunday sailing between Stornoway and Ullapool.

My friend Kris and I spent a Sunday in Stornoway during a hitching trip round Scotland in 1993. There was little to do and had there been a ferry we would have left the island. In those days the swings were padlocked and there were no pubs that officially opened their doors. Fortunately we had been tipped off by a local that the Crown Hotel unofficially opened its back doors between the hours of 1100 and 1300. As we walked through the deserted streets to the securely bolted front door we felt sure that we had been spun a line, but on turning into the car park at the rear of the premises a faint noise of revelry reached our ears: the chink of glasses; the muffled roar of barroom chat. We entered through a fire exit which lay ajar and passed through the gents’ toilets to the packed main bar. The fun came to an end on schedule at 1300, but the locals left with bulging carrier bags, beer cans straining at the sides, to continue their celidh elsewhere. I realised there and then that Sabbath Observance is not the will of the people; it is a reflection of the fact that in our supposedly secular society an unacceptable amount of power still rests in the hands of the church.

I returned to the Long Isle of Lewis and Harris in the spring of 2007 while cycling the length of the Outer Hebrides northwards from Barra. The sanctity of the Sabbath was being threatened by Sunday ferries and we saw notices advertising a protest that had been planned by the Lord's Day Observance Society. Protesting the proposed Sunday ferry presented the Society with a terrible conundrum. They could hardly form a picket line on the Sabbath. Accordingly their protest would pass unnoticed, consisting as it did of indoor prayer and sermonising. Was this an echo of the past, destined to grow fainter with every funeral, or were the ranks of the Sabbath Observance Society swollen with earnest young suit-wearing men like Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses?

Those island residents who were in favour of Sunday sailings were quick to point out the double standards of the Lord's Day Observers. They reported that the very same people who were so vigorously opposed to Sunday ferry sailings had no qualms about using other forms of public transport on the Sabbath, conveying themselves to church by bus and taxi.

I welcome sunday sailings. Not only does it make Lewis and Harris a viable weekend venue from Inverness, it is a sign that democracy is gaining ground over hypocrisy in the Outer Hebrides.

Isle of Erraid

Caught in my torch beam, a tiny plover chick crouched low to the sand and froze. All the colours of its adult plumage were mirrored in its coat of fluffy down. The thin golden ring round its neck sparkled like tinsel. I looked up to prospect the much anticipated midnight wade across the sound of Erraid and was mildly disappointed to find the channel completely dry, as though the the waters had been parted.

Night marches with heavy pack are normally the preserve of the winter season. We had been served up an opportunity to enjoy one in the height of summer courtesy of the 2230 ferry from Oban and the best part of forty miles of Mull single track from Craignure. To make the walk a bit more sporting Donald and I were carrying a case of lager between us in a Tesco bag-for-life. As we crossed the hinterland of Erraid towards Traigh Gheal, the white beach, heather and dwarf willow tugged at the bag, impeding our progress across the moor. The night was moonless. Above the lurking shadows of the craggy granite hillsides stars began to sparkle.
It is always a great pleasure to emerge into a beautiful landscape from a tent pitched in the dark. The campsite was pristine, short grass beside a beach of whitest sand. Litter was conspicuous by its absence, there was not even the usual flotsam – no fishing nets, floats, rubber gloves or shampoo bottles. Orange and yellow lichen complimented the feldspar pink of the granite domes.
An otter hunted for crabs amid submerged broken blocks. As he enjoyed his catch he floated on a fringe of seaweed, its spaghetti strands pressed by the wind onto the surface of the turquoise water. A warm sunny day was dawning, perfect for a morning's climbing on the clean granite crags that had drawn us here.
The area is featured much more prominently in Gary Latter's new Scottish Rock guidebook than in it was in the old SMC guide so it is bound to grow in popularity. I hope it remains unspoiled. The rock is excellent, the location peerless.

Pioneering Puffins on Handa Island

Back in June we took a trip to the Handa Island nature reserve. It is located off the northwest coast, near to the village of Scourie. Access is granted by a small motorboat capable of carrying ten or so passengers. It was the prospect of viewing puffins that drew us there. I am very glad that puffins exist. Viewing them cheers me. I view with suspicion anyone not uplifted by their presence.


There puffins do not nest on the island itself, but on top of the Great Stack of Handa (above). The stack is very close to the island so the birds are still easy to observe. The main island is was previously infested with rats who would eat the eggs and young, so the puffins wisely retreated to the sanctuary of the stack. The pamphlet provided by the warden reported that although the rats were exterminated in 1997, the puffins have yet to recolonise the main island .

We did see one pair of pioneering puffins on the main island, nesting in a burrow among the thrift flowers (above). The twelve year gap shows that being born after the extermination of the rats was not in itself sufficient to encourage the puffins to recolonise the main island. Perhaps the puffins stayed put until the last of their number who could remember the rats had passed away, and the association between nesting on the main island and the threat of predation by rats began to fade from the folk memory of the puffins.