Isle of Cumbrae

This is a very special island for my chapter of the Clan Lamont. As youngsters we spent our summer holidays from morning until belly-rumbles in the evening with no adult supervision. This is a stark contrast to freedoms young people experience today. Being a parent from mid-nineties onwards I don’t think millennials live with regret or have feelings of missing out. For me that the total freedom I enjoyed on an island 2.5 miles long by 1.2 miles wide in the Clyde estuary formed many happy memories for which I am very thankful.

Shoes endured many dry-wet-dry cycles in a day from endless expeditions across the rocks by the shoreline. Time did slow down on that island as days seemed to last longer than at home. You’d meet-up with friends you only met for weeks each year. First holidays began on trikes, growing into stabilised bikes then flying on two wheels. I recall completing a trip around the island in twenty-seven minutes, a personal best on a racing bike going anticlockwise –  which was shorter. Later on I’d enjoy travelling around Scotland on my bike via the Scottish Youth Hostel Association.

See Isle of Cumbrae part two

This is an old arrangement of large stones and boulders shaped many years ago into rectangular blocks. They were stacked in this bay on the western side of the island near low-lying fields. In times past potatoes were grown in the fields and exported by sea via this “tatty” pier. They lay as they were, encrusted in barnacles.

See Isle of Cumbrae parts two and three