Kintyre

The Kintyre peninsula in the southwest of Scotland is famous for two things. Firstly, the song Mull of Kintyre by Paul McCartney and Wings which was the UK Christmas Number One in 1977 and seemingly for many months afterwards too. McCartney owned a farm in the Mull of Kintyre, the very end of the peninsula, and the song suggested he was rather fond of the place. The other thing is that it is shaped like a penis. True, it is a penis with a rather nasty gash near the top caused by West Loch Tarbert but it looks like a penis nevertheless. To add to the rather juvenile humour the island of Arran lies adjacent to Kintyre and together they give the impression of a giant cock and bollock. This may well be unique in the limited world of phallic-shaped geographic promontories though please feel free to suggest others. The land around that area was shaped by glaciers in the last ice age and despite being within sight of the shapely Paps of Jura, Kintyre has remained resolutely flaccid ever since. Indeed, it is said the British Board of Film Classification utilised the Mull of Kintyre Test whenever nudity appeared in movies to gauge an acceptable level of tumescence for the male genitalia. If the angle from the vertical was higher than that made by Kintyre on a standard Mercator projection map then that penis had to be cut. Ouch!

I really must apologise for the childish toilet humour in that first paragraph. I should really have higher standards than that. Three quarters of the way down Kintyre, just before the, erm, bell end (aargh, sorry, I can’t help myself) lies the town of Campbeltown. It is in fact the only town on Kintyre and as such is the centre of all things Kintyrish. It lies just 58 miles from the centre of Glasgow as the crow flies yet driving there would put 140 miles on your car’s odometer. Initially you head northwest before winding round a number of mountains and sea lochs before finally heading southwest in the vague direction of Campbeltown. The roads are by and large decent but certainly not motorways. Allow yourself three and a half hours to get there. Alas, the rail building boom of the Victorian era never got as far as Kintyre so getting there has always been a challenge. Apart from a seasonal weekend ferry service from Ardrossan, an extension of the regular Arran crossing, you’ve got just two choices of public transport: bus or plane. Being the sort of chap I am I thought it would be quite a good idea to compare them. Perhaps March wasn’t the best time to undertake this task as severe weather can affect both forms of transport but I was in luck. The day I chose was a brief respite from wind, snow and rain. So it was that I found myself at Glasgow’s Buchanan Bus Station on a bright Monday morning awaiting the 09:15 Citylink service number 926 to Campbeltown.

Ah yes, buses. With the exception of London buses for some reason, I can’t say the thought of bus travel really appeals to me. Once, in the dim and distant past, Elaine and I did one of those holidays where you travel for a day on a coach to your destination, in our case it was the Austrian Tyrol, had a week’s holiday, and then have a 24 hour journey back. The experience of the first journey meant the thought of the second put a severe dampener on the intervening week. Whilst not every bus journey involves overnight travel of course, the experience rather put us off coach travel for life. Add to that the stories of the strange people that traverse the country by National Express and long distance bus travel has become a definite no-no. Of course those stories are almost certainly apocryphal and I should stop being snobbish but old prejudices die hard. As it happens my fellow passengers on the bus were perfectly normal people who just had the need to get from A to B. Well, apart from the bloke who got on in Clydebank and sat in front of me. He had a subtle, yet slightly concerning odour which got stronger whenever he scratched his scalp. I wasn’t too displeased when he got off at Tarbet. The tedium of over four hours on a bus would have been overwhelming had we been travelling down the M6 but this particular long haul had a redeeming feature. About fifty minutes into the journey we escaped the clutches of urbanisation and entered the scenic bit which would last all the way to Campbeltown. Tracking north along Lomond’s bonnie banks, Ben Lomond on the other side of the loch looked superb, its snow covering somehow magnifying its magnificence. At Tarbet we cut through the hills to Arrochar and Loch Long before heading west over the stretch of road called the Rest and Be Thankful. There we briefly climbed above the snow line before descending again to round the tip of Loch Fyne. In Inveraray we had a brief stop allowing us to utilise the facilities – there was a toilet on the bus but no one appeared to get so desperate that they had to use it – then we continued southwards to Lochgilphead. Here, many passengers got off whilst many others replaced them, that’s what happens on buses apparently, and we continued south to finally enter the Kintyre peninsula. At Kennacraig there was another mass exodus from the bus, those travellers heading for the awaiting ferry to Islay in a desire to get home before the forecast storms hit later that day. The road then took us down the western side of Kintyre before cutting across the peninsula into Campbletown and journey’s end bang on schedule. As spectacular as the scenery had been I was happy to get off the bus.

I had four hours to kill. I’m going out on a limb here but I strongly suspect that Campbeltown on a March Monday morning isn’t the best place to kill them. It seemed a nice enough place, a bit bigger than I’d expected, but there was really not much going on. The cafe I thought I might lunch in was closed on a Monday and there didn’t seem to be many other options. I found another one though, a small, basic place but the proprietor was friendly and did and decent jacket potato with tuna so that was good. Cash only though, none of this Apple Pay nonsense. There was a marked absence of big high street names on the not so big high street and the independent shoe and clothes shops, hardware stores and so on gave the town a feeling of a bygone age. It didn’t take long for the novelty to wear off, however, and I set off out of town westwards. My destination was three miles away and followed the main road and then a single track road to Campbeltown’s other transport link to civilisation.

Campbeltown Airport serves around 9000 passengers a year. You would think an airport with that limited amount of throughput would be tiny and indeed the terminal is rather bijou. The airfield is, however, huge. Its sole runway is over 10,000ft long, the longest in Scotland. Or rather it was. Formerly known as Macrihanish after the nearby village, an airfield has occupied the site since 1918. In the Second World War it was a naval air station and remained so until 1963 when it became RAF Macrihanish. Despite the RAF prefix, the station was used by the US Navy as a weapons store and a base for the special operations Navy SEALs. Throughout this time there were many conspiracy theories about what exactly took place there. It was claimed that the top secret spy plane, the Aurora, was based there. This was denied of course as is the existence of the Aurora itself, but the airfield’s location many miles away from a major population centre just seemed to fuel the theories of covert operations. Whether there’s any truth in the rumours or not I’ve no idea.The US Navy left in 1995 and the following year Highlands and Islands Airports Ltd (HIAL), the government owned company that operates a number of small airports in Scotland, received a licence to operate the airfield as a commercial airport. It was still owned by the MOD until 2012 when the western half was sold to the Macrihanish Airbase Community Company for a nominal £1 to be developed for commercial use. The eastern half still has over 5000ft of runway at its disposal, more than enough for the Loganair Twin Otter that operates its only scheduled service.

Loganair connects Campbeltown with Glasgow twice a day. The service is operated under a public service obligation (PSO) with Scottish Government subsidises. Barra and Tiree are also served by PSO flights and two Twin Otter aircraft are owned by HIAL specifically for Loganair to operate these services. It was one of these, appropriately registered G-HIAL, that would transport me back to Glasgow. I was the first of the eight passengers on the flight to arrive. A good old fashioned cardboard boarding pass was issued and I was informed that they don’t do security checks at the airport. We would, however, be met by security at Glasgow and escorted into the building. This seemed a little odd but I was more than happy to go with it. The inbound flight duly arrived and eight passengers got off and within a couple of minutes we were escorted on to the aircraft to take their places. A briefing by the First Officer was given and with that the engines were started and off we went. Despite the runway being half the size it used to be the backtrack of runway 11 seemed to take a long time but once we’d turned, lined up and the throttles were opened we were airborne in a few seconds. The flight to Glasgow took 30 minutes from take off to touchdown. Due to cloud the views on the way back were not quite as spectacular as those going but with more than three and a half hours saved it would be churlish to complain. We’d departed early and arrived 25 minutes ahead of schedule.

What then to make of it all? To get to Campbeltown without driving you can take the bus or the plane. The bus cost me £22, though had I left it for two and a half years it would have been free with my wrinklies bus pass. For that you get a nice trip through the some of the finest scenery Scotland has to offer. It is still over four hours on a bus though. The plane cost me £33 and would still cost me that if I was over 60. For that you get the journey over and done with in a jiffy. Also, flying in a small aircraft like a Twin Otter is rather good fun. True, the bus takes you from city centre to town centre but not everyone needs that convenience so for me the plane wins. Will I ever feel the need to go to Campbeltown again though? Probably not. The most spectacular scenery I passed was further north. Kintyre, whilst pleasant enough, wasn’t really any better than the countryside around where I live. Paul McCartney may like the isolation he finds in the Kintyre, but for me it remains no more than an amusingly shaped geographic feature on the map of Scotland.