Arran: A History

By Thorbjorn Campbell

A Scottish historian provides an original, fascinating, and comprehensive account of the Isle of Arran from the prehistoric era to the 20th-century.
 
Arran is an archaeological and geological treasure trove of stunning scenic beauty. Its history stretches back more than five thousand years to the great stone circles, whose remnants still decorate the plains of Machrie. Runic inscriptions tell of a Viking occupation lasting centuries.
 
Later, in 1307, King Robert the Bruce began his triumphant comeback from Arran. Subsequently, the island was repeatedly caught up and devastated in the savage dynastic struggles of medieval Scotland. After the 1707 Parliamentary Union, came a new and strange upheaval: Arran became a testing ground for the Industrial Revolution. The ancient ‘runrig’ style of farming gave way to enclosed fields and labor-saving methods, which eventually lead to the socially disastrous Highland Clearances.
 
The misfortune of the times was culminated by the Great Irish Potato Famine of 1845. At last, the area settled into a stable mixture of agriculture and tourism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9780857905901

Thorbjorn Campbell

Thorbjorn Campbell (aka K.T.S. Campbell) was born and bred in Ayrshire. Educated at Ayr Academy, Glasgow University (where he studied Greek, English and aesthetic philosophy) and at Jordanhill Teacher Training College, he then worked as a civil servant and a school teacher and is now retired.

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Arran

A History

This eBook edition published in 2013 by

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This edition first published in 2013 by Birlinn Limited

Copyright © K.T.S. Campbell 2007, 2013

The moral right of K.T.S. Campbell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-590-1

Print ISBN: 978-1-78027-110-1

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I.M.

Gladys Srivastava

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction and Acknowledgements

Chronology and Currency

1. Early Times

2. Human Colonization

3. The Ancient Monuments (1)

4. The Ancient Monuments (2)

5. The ‘Dark Ages’

6. Myth and Religion

7. The Early Middle Ages and Arran

8. Reorganizing the People

9. Arran in Bruce’s Wars

10. Arran under the Stewart Dynasty

11. Heads roll: the ‘Good Duchess’ to the rescue

12. The Eighteenth Century: Squabbles and Sin

13. Enclosure, Clearance, Disruption, Famine

14. Napoleon, the Press Gang, the Smugglers

15. Development of Services in Arran

16. Arran in the Nineteenth Century

17. The ‘Modern’ Age

Appendix 1

Songs in the Gaelic of Arran

Arainn Bheag Bhoideach Bonnie Little Arran

Marbh-Rann Elegy

Oran Gaoil Love Song

Am Bas Death

Fuadach a’ Ghobha Bhig The Poacher

Oran Na Dibhe Song on Drinking

Màiri Òg Young Mary

Oran a Rinneadh le Domhnull Macmhuirich The Smugglers

Appendix 2

Traditional Tales in the Gaelic of Arran

Am Figheadair Crotach The Hunchbacked Weaver

Na Sithichean – Claoinead The Fairies of Claoinead

Sithichean Dhruim-a-Ghineir The Fairies of Druimaghineir

A’ Bheann-Ghluin agus na Sibhrich The Midwife and the Fairies

An Tuathanach agus na Sibhrich The Farmer and the Fairies

An Tuathanach agus a’ Chailleach The Farmer and the Old Woman

The Lost Piper

Na Mèileachain The Bleaters

A’ Bhean Chrodanach The Hoofed Woman

An Tuathanach agus an Uamh-Beist The Farmer and the Monster

An Leannan Chrodhanach The Secret Name

Uruisg Allt-Uilligridh The Uruisg of Allt-Uilligridh

Innis Eabhra Island Eabhra

References

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

Arran seen from Caledonian Isles coming in to Brodick

Drumadoon Cliff

Standing Stone at Drumadoon

Courtyard of the Arran Heritage Museum, Rosaburn

Chirotherium (‘Hand-monster’)

Torrylinn Chambered Tomb

Survivors of Megalithic Ring at Machrie Moor (with millstone fragments in foreground)

Megalith at Machrie showing scale

Excavated and reburied (Haggerty): Circle 11

Excavated and reburied (Haggerty): Circle 11 looking towards Circle 1

Machrie Moor: Suidhe Coire Fhionn, Fingal’s Cauldron Seat

‘Cup and ring’ markings at Stronach Wood above Brodick

Torr a’ Chaisteil Dun near Corriecraivie

Ailsa Craig and Pladda Isle with lighthouse

Holy Island and Lamlash Bay

Crosses carved on rear wall of St Molaise’s Cave, Holy Island

Lamlash Village seen from Holy Island

King’s Cross Point Dun & Viking Grave with Holy Island in background

Kildonan Castle

Lochranza Castle

The ‘Good Duchess’ Anne: detail of portrait by David Scougal.

Old print showing Holy Island and Duchess Anne’s Quay at Lamlash.

The Lagg Hotel, 1791

Typical Arran Cottage, 19th century

‘The Cladach’, now Arran Brewery

Brodick Castle

William Alexander Anthony Alexander, 11th Duke of Hamilton: statue in front of Brodick Primary School. Goat Fell in background.

Princess Marie of Baden, wife of 11th Duke of Hamilton

La Masion Dorée

Glen Sannox paddle-steamer (Courtesy of Arran Heritage Museum)

Ivanhoe paddle-steamer

Blackwaterfoot Harbour

Arran Postbus at Lochranza

‘Heavy Traffic in downtown Lochranza’

Introduction

I first became conscious of Arran as a wee boy, paddling on the Ayr foreshore with the then (late 30s) obligatory bucket and spade. The island’s sharp profile remained in my mind, but my impressions were easily confused at that stage and I mixed Arran up with Ireland, and later, during the war, with ‘Canadia’ – where the Canadians came from. (I was staggered, quite recently, to discover the same confusion in the mind of a grown woman, also a long-term resident of Ayr; this, in the age of mass popular tourism in Scotland, is one of the reasons why I thought I’d better write this book – for the better information of my fellow citizens.)

There is a long-standing Ayr joke to the effect that if you can see Arran it has either just been raining or is about to rain, and if you can’t see Arran, it is raining. Certainly both Arran and its satellite Holy Island often disappear entirely under heavy cloud – which made me think of the legends of vanishing or floating islands, like the sacred island of Delos, alleged to be secured to the floor of the Aegean sea only by a golden chain. At night, too, when I took a lonely stroll along the Promenade, a light would glow out from Pladda or Holy Island, or there was a strip of red sunset under the western clouds, almost like a grin from south to north, belonging to some colossal devil which had Goatfell as a fang, the rest of the countenance masked. I would shiver and hurry home.

So much for childish imagination. Yet, a supernatural aura certainly seems to linger on Arran: I fancy you can feel it when you stand alone on the bleak plain of Machrie in the frowning presence of the giant megalithic ruins. They are uncanny in their silence, but you seem to hear faint voices and outcries in the chill wind. Machrie is a rather a terrible place, and I believe that its name, Sliabh nan Carraigean, can bear a ‘spookier’ interpretation than its normal English version, ‘Moor of the Stones’. See here.

To go by the great numbers of standing stones, stone circles, rock carvings (‘cup-and-ring’) and chambered tombs on Arran, it has almost certainly been a sacred island, a place of concentrated holiness in which the presence of the gods is almost palpable. People would fall to their knees and worship in adoration and fear.

The same people that erected the stone temples of Machrie 4,000 years ago also grew corn and herded cattle, lit fires, built houses, lived, gave birth and died – and ignorantly farmed the soil to exhaustion, destroyed the once-luxuriant forests, and covered Arran in sterilizing peat in which nothing would grow. It was probably the bloodthirsty Vikings, three to four thousand years after the Megalithic times, who revived Arran as an agricultural entity, with improved methods of soil management and cultivation. Another eight hundred years elapsed before the Agricultural Revolution arrived, heralded by the indefatigable reformer John Burrel, whose preoccupation with efficiency and productivity blinded him to the human costs of reorganizing the traditional systems of landholding. The new broom led to the traumas of Clearances, emigration and pauperization of great numbers of the countryfolk of Arran. Yet, although the efforts of Burrel and his followers succeeded in raising agriculture from the condition of mere subsistence-farming to that of relatively profitable industry, the importance of agriculture itself began to dwindle, and Arran today earns more from tourism than it does from farming.

Besides the tortured historical course of the island’s agriculture, Arran politics has always followed a painful path of repeated transformations, with linguistic and cultural shifts, quarrels of ownership and nationality, and devastation after devastation by the armed men of different factions.

I do not claim that this book is a work of profound scholarship or original research (despite the number of references listed in its pages). For instance, I have not plumbed the depths of the Hamilton family archives, and many secrets therein await unlocking. I have, however, trawled many existing authorities and learned journals, and have kept in mind a primary objective, to facilitate public access to sources no longer in print or contained in journals with a circulation confined to scholars. In particular I have depended heavily upon the works of two past ‘biographers’ of Arran, William Mackenzie and Robert McLellan, neither now in print. The fruits of their work, together with that of others, should be preserved and renewed for the twenty first century.

I owe much to my great predecessor, William Mackenzie, author of the second volume of The Book of Arran (1914). Since his time conditions in Arran have changed radically, probably beyond his wildest imagination. The two major wars of the twentieth century have fatally undermined the basis of civilization in Arran as everywhere else. Apparently solid foundations have been knocked away and the whole cultural structure is in imminent danger of collapse. Language, folk-songs and folk-stories have vanished ‘like snow off a dyke’. The ancient Arran dialect of Gaelic was last heard about 1950, and the custom of story-telling – bed-time stories and old wives’ tales – has withered irretrievably. Belief in the supernatural has simply disappeared. Folk-song has given way to the barbaric yawp of the pop-song.

The more precious, then, are the survivals, or the recorded echoes, of genuine folk culture. It was perhaps pure chance, a stroke of great good fortune, that led Mackenzie to make a collection of the folk-songs and folk-stories that he still found current in the original Gaelic dialect, spoken by old people, in the Edwardian twilight before the Great War. He published them as the two final chapters of his Book of Arran together with translations, having had them checked over for dialect-linguistic authenticity by competent scholars. These pieces are of inestimable value to both philology and history. However, the two volumes of The Book of Arran themselves are rare and expensive finds, long out of print – even the 1982 reprint. The best tribute that I could make to Mackenzie is to make these folkloric survivals available once again to a wider public. A fair number of them now appear in two appendices at the end of this volume. For permission to reproduce I must thank the Arran Society of Glasgow and their Honorary Secretary, Miss Nan Murchie¹, and, for reviewing Mackenzie’s Gaelic (I have none), Dr R.D. Whitla of Lamlash.

I must also thank Edinburgh University Press and Messrs Edwards and Ralston for permission to reproduce in this work the clear and succinct tabular guide to the current systems of carbon-fourteen dating and notation appearing on this page of their invaluable Scotland After the Ice Age. Similarly my gratitude must be expressed to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland for permission to reproduce one of Dr Alison Haggerty’s diagrams of the timber monument in her article ‘Machrie Moor, Arran: recent excavations at two stone circles’ (PSAS vol. 121 51–94).

In addition, with especial warmth, I must thank the Isle of Arran Heritage Museum in Rosaburn near Brodick Castle, and its devoted staff of volunteers – in particular Mr Stuart Gough, the Archivist, Mrs Grace Small, the President, Mr Tom McLeod, the Secretary, and Mrs Jean Glen, the author of Brodick 1897–1997: a Century of Golf, a book which gives an accurate picture not only of golfing during that century but of its social and historical context. To these four people I have had constant recourse for advice and assistance over a two-year period – as well as for physical research facilities within the Museum itself. Mr and Mrs Peter Bowers of the Lagg Hotel, Kilmory, deserve special mention for invaluable background information and in particular for drawing my attention to the affecting nineteenth-century poem ‘The Cairgen Weans’, originally inscribed in an early Visitors’ Book belonging to the hotel (see here of the present book); Mrs Bowers’s mother, Mrs Margaret Maciver, formerly of the Torrylinn Creamery, helped very much with information on the milk industry and its present state on Arran.

Thanks also to Mr Kenneth Thorburn, Property Manager, NTS Brodick Castle; Miss Isla Robertson, NTS Edinburgh; Mr Andy Walker, Scottish Forestry Commission, Arran; Mr Paul Gavin, Analytical Services Division (Science and Analysis Group) of the Scottish Executive Environment and Rural Affairs Department (SEERAD); Mr Tommy Loudon and Ms Liz McKinnel, Ayrshire and Arran Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group; Mr Ian Fraser; the West Highland Free Press; the staffs of Ayr Carnegie Library, of the Ayrshire Archives Centre, of North Ayrshire Library Headquarters, Ardrossan, of Glasgow University Library, and of the Ayrshire and Arran Tourist Board (Brodick Pier Office). I should acknowledge my use of the free ‘Canmore’ database of Historic Scotland. Finally, I should record my profound gratitude to Mr Hugh Andrew and Mr Andrew Simmons of Birlinn for advice, patience and understanding; to Mrs Kate Blackadder, copy-editor and to my sister, Mrs Aase Irvine, for her usual unstinted support and help.

Chronology and Currency

Chronology

A word about the dating system or systems employed in the first part of this book, in the sections devoted to prehistoric times. The familiar way of dating the ‘prehistoric’ was to use the birth of Christ as a marker: events and eras which occupied time before then were labelled before Christ, BC, and those which came after that occurrence were Anno Domini, AD, ‘In the year of our Lord’. Rome was founded in 753 BC, and the Norman Conquest of England took place in AD 1066. However, since the discovery of radioactivity and its long-term decay over a fixed period sometimes covering hundreds of thousands of years, scientific archaeologists and others have sought to make use of it in dating, and have been successful in creating a ‘carbon-fourteen’ system, which seems to push historical phenomena further back in time than formerly accepted. A difficulty arises when attempting to correlate this scientific system with the historian’s conventional BC/AD chronology: ¹⁴C years are bewilderingly ‘out of sync’ with BC/AD years. A third, independent method, dendrochronology (‘tree-ring dating’), had to be introduced to provide a secure basis for comparison, allowing statisticians to work out a system of calibration between ¹⁴C and conventional BC/AD as a reliable guide to past chronology. This system’s notation, however, can be very cumbrous; when it is necessary to date an event, many workers choose to give both methods side by side, and this can be bewildering, especially when the ¹⁴C date is quoted as ‘BP’ (‘Before the Present’ – the Present being taken as AD 1950). For example: Edwards and Whittington give dates for ‘the inception and extension of blanket peat’ at two different locations in Scotland, widely separated in time: (1) Carn Dubh (Perthshire): ‘9,800–9,200 BP [9040–8320 cal BC]’; (2) Starr (Ayrshire): ‘2,415±25 BP [520–400 cal BC]’. However, since I have drawn my prehistoric examples from a variety of sources, and it would be impractical to reduce them to a common format, the most expedient course will, I think, be to quote directly from Edwards and Ralston’s guide to the standard notation of dates and in this book to adhere as closely as possible to their system as set out in their recent publication Scotland after the Ice Age:²

(i) Uncalibrated radiocarbon dates will be cited in years BP.

(ii) Calibrated radiocarbon dates will be cited as years cal BC or cal AD . . . but only for dates more recent than 10,000 BP. Figures following BP dates, and labelled cal BC or cal AD as appropriate, identify the corresponding calibrated chronological ranges at one standard deviation. The term ‘cal BC’ will be applied to longer time-spans (e.g. millennia) where the period concerned has been primarily defined by use of calibrated radiocarbon dates.

(iii) The use of BC or AD [by themselves] in relation to a specific date will mean that this has not been derived from radiocarbon, but normally from historical sources.

(iv) The calibrated radiocarbon date derived from a raw radiocarbon determination (i.e. including the ± standard deviation associated with it) will be expressed, rounded to the nearest decade, as a one standard deviation corrected range or the extremes of corrected ranges where these are produced (e.g. 3,880±60 BP becomes, upon conversion and rounding, 2460–2200 cal BC.’

NB It should be noted that in the above instructions there is a difference in meaning between large CAPITALS and small CAPITALS.

Currency

Here and there throughout the book, monetary values have had to be mentioned, especially in connection with the major economic difficulties experienced in Arran during the fifteenth century. Sources indicate a ‘pounds, shillings and pence’ basis for calculating rent, along with the system of ‘grassums’ – contributions to rental in kind with monetary equivalents. In the twelfth century David I established a silver standard in which a pound of silver was divided into 240 pennies (12 pence to a shilling, 20 shillings to a pound). This system, originally English (Norman), suffered devaluations and massive fluctuations throughout the centuries, and in the end the most comprehensible estimates are of the number of pennies minted from an ounce of silver. In late Viking times eighteen or twenty pennies had made up an ounce of silver. In Scotland in 1440 the number of pennies to the ounce is recorded as 64, but in 1453, at the height of the Arran devastations, the number was 96 pennies to the ounce and in 1458 it had soared to 140. During this period and later, the unit of preference was the mark (or merk) Scottish, and this stood at 13 shillings and 4 pence, i.e. two-thirds of a pound or 160 pence. I have chosen to use the merk to express monetary values at this time.

It is relatively simple to express fifteenth-century merks in terms of modern values, using the price of silver on today’s markets, but to deduce from this a purchasing power is a more formidable problem, and I do not pretend to have solved it. In mid-fifteenth century an Arran ‘mart’ – a cow or an ox – was valued at five merks, £3 6s 8d, which could perhaps be ‘translated’ into approximately £58 at present-day silver values. But the average value of a cow or ox last year (2006) was £1,000, and one greatly prized specimen – from a Campbeltown farm, just across the Kilbrannan Sound from Arran – went at a Carlisle sale for 2250 guineas in August 2006. How to reconcile these values requires greater financial expertise or wizardry than I am able to command, and at least indicates an astonishing improvement in beef quality in our times – and colossal currency inflation.

From the period of the Union of Parliaments(1707) onwards, the English and Scottish currencies were officially brought into line, although the Pound Scottish continued to be used as an accepted unit of exchange north of the Border at about £12 Scottish to £1 sterling until nearly the end of the eighteenth century. After that, both English and Scottish pounds are subject to the same inflationary pressures. I have not attempted to convert nineteenth-century prices into present-day equivalents, but have left them to speak for themselves.

1. Early Times

Geology

The Firth of Clyde in south-west Scotland is big enough to be called an inland sea, bounded on the west by Argyll and the Kintyre Peninsula and on the east by the Ayrshire and Galloway mainland. In the middle of the Firth is an archipelago of islands, the most striking of which are Ailsa Craig and Arran. Arran is the largest, more than four hundred square kilometres in area.

The first thing that you notice about Arran when viewing it from the Ayrshire coast is a marked contrast in silhouette: the north is spectacularly mountainous, with jagged, lofty heights; the south has a much lower profile, appearing from a distance to be almost flat. (It is in fact rolling moorland with its own ups and downs.) The contrast is superficial only in a special sense: the two halves of Arran have actually floated and collided on a kind of basalt surface from almost opposite ends of the earth, in what is known as continental drift.

In Cambrian times, nearly 600 million years ago, there was no Atlantic Ocean, and the northern section of Arran, together with most of Scotland, was a part of what is now Canada. It lay much further south than at present, and the climate was sub-tropical. England and Wales, with what was to be the southern section of Arran, were further south again, in a colder position on the globe.

Throughout the hundreds of millions of years the continents slid together and apart, and oceans opened and closed in very slow motion, with a kind of swirling movement. When the land-masses collided, as they often did, the results were spectacular distortions, folding and crushing of the earth’s surface, and orogenies, episodes involving the birth of mountain ranges.

Arran’s northern mountains were born during the Caledonian Orogeny, in the Silurian age about 400 million years ago, affecting Scandinavia, Scotland, Greenland and what is now eastern North America. A great stretch of water known as the Iapetus Sea closed up, bringing together Scotland and England with their respective halves of Arran.

Much later, about 65 million years ago (in the ‘Tertiary’ era), the North Atlantic opened up and the Alps were formed during the Hercynian Orogeny, the result of a collision between Europe and Africa. This was accompanied by intense volcanic activity, which is still going on in Iceland. Both halves of Arran were left on the east of the ocean. The north of the island is the southernmost part of what is known as the Tertiary Volcanic Province, one of the five geological areas into which Scotland is divided. Other parts of the Province include several Hebridean islands and the Ardnamurchan Peninsula.¹

The north of Arran is dominated by four clusters of spectacular granite mountains, jagged and craggy. The tallest of these is Goatfell (874 metres), which rises impressively above Brodick Castle to the north of the coastal village of Brodick itself. Above the village and below the granite slopes of the mountain is a high bank, the Thousand-foot (300 metres) Platform, which forms a girdle round the entire northern part of Arran. This platform represents the oldest rocks in the island, the ‘Dalradian’ schists, dating back to Cambrian times – although the section from Corrie to Brodick also contains younger rocks, two layers of Old Red Sandstone as well as other varieties. It was through the Dalradian schists that in Tertiary times a great eruption of lava burst from depth, forming a ‘pluton’ (a mass of solidified rock) two kilometres below the surface, where a kind of giant blister or dome formed. Through erosion and pressure from ice this blister weathered into the fantastic shapes of the peaks as we now see them.

South-west of Brodick is the site of an actual surface volcano (the ‘Central Ring Complex’, an oval area nearly five kilometres in diameter), which in the Tertiary period poured out lava across the southern half of Arran, covering basic Permian and Triassic sandstones.² This process has created the typical ‘organ-pipe’ crystalline cliffs of the Arran coastline, with headlands at Drumadoon Point, Brown Head, Clauchlands Point and elsewhere, including the mighty upward curve of Holy Island. At Drumadoon Point a small volcanic vent can be seen, tilted on one side like a ladle in a steel-works, with a faulted lava sheet spreading out in front of it. An almost identical formation is to be seen at the south-west point of the Heads of Ayr on the eastern shore of the Firth of Clyde.

Evidence of widespread eruptions, producing similar cliffs, can be seen all along the eastern rim of the present North Atlantic – in the Faroes, St Kilda, Staffa (‘Fingal’s Cave’) and the Western Isles. In Arran, cataclysmic folding and distortion of the rocks has led to very complex stratification, e.g the inverted succession of strata at the north-eastern coast (North Newton to Corloch), where different layers of rock are arranged in mirror formation around a slate core.³

Much of the surface geology, indeed, consists of mudstone and sandstone of two main varieties, Ordovician and Permian, but at all points throughout the island a kaleidoscopic jumble of layers and epochs is immediately evident to the eye, from Dalradian (Cambrian) and Ordovician to Old Red Sandstone, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous through to Tertiary, all in close proximity to one another, with innumerable subdivisions and rarities. Hence Arran has been a geologist’s paradise, a prime site for researchers and students, right from the days of the father of Scottish geology, James Hutton (1726–97). Hence too, the present notices warning against damaging rare kinds of stone by too free use of the hammer.

Geological folding relates the rocks of Arran to other formations in the mainland of Scotland, the Cowal and Aberfoyle Anticlines, and more generally to the Highland Boundary Fault.⁴ This fault passes right through the centre of the granite Goatfell complex, showing the relationship of North Arran to the Scottish Highlands as opposed to the gentler landscape of the south.

One of the ways of telling the age of rocks is by the fossils of creatures embedded in the rocks and revealed by weathering as well as quarrying and mining. For example, an animal that inhabited the area now included in Arran was detected in 1975 by its fossilized spoor, indented in a stretch of sandstone about a kilometre north-west of Laggan. This was a gigantic centipede-like creature, Arthropleura, which grew up to six feet long, although this specimen seems to have been only three feet in length. It may have lived about 320 million years ago, in a coal-swamp habitat in the delta of a large river running through central Scotland. It fed on forest litter and thus was an important contributor to early soil-formation.⁵

Fossilized tracks of another kind of animal were found in 1992–93 on Levencorroch Hill, and the western shore south of the King’s Cave near Drumadoon. This was the Chirotherium, literally ‘Hand-Monster’, so called because of a fancied resemblance between an enormous human hand and the footprint. The creature appears to have been a predecessor by some hundreds of millions of years of the dinosaurs, not a dinosaur itself. It lived in the Triassic period, and moved on four feet. It may have had a long neck and a small head. One can imagine this creature lurching and squelching through the primeval swamp, going down to drink. It would leave footmarks that dried in the sun. In the course of time these were covered with blown sand later impacted into solid rock: thus a fossil was born.

That the animal lived in a part of the world that later became Arran is of course the result of pure chance: similar tracks have been discovered as far apart as Arizona, Argentina and Europe. No fossil of the actual creature has so far been discovered anywhere, but a likely representation of it is displayed in the Arran Heritage Museum in Rosaburn, Brodick.⁶

Other fossil remains include plants and bark, creatures such as brachiopods and coral, and bivalves from the Arran coal-measures.⁷

Intense vulcanism can produce several varieties of gemstone, and precious and semi-precious stones have often been found in Arran. Among these are sapphires (of rather uncertain quality) discovered near the Rosa Burn. Quartzes include rock crystal, citrines and amethyst, and topaz, beryl, garnet and tourmaline have been found, as well as agates, chalcedony and opal.⁸

The Ice Ages

Æons after the last major volcanic outbreaks, the great Ice Ages set in. The phases of these are measured in thousands rather than millions of years, and provide an intelligible time-scale against which the history of humans in these islands can be measured. The latest intense glaciation (the ‘Devensian’) appears to have reached a maximum over most of Scotland and North England about 23,000 or 22,000 BC. The ice then started a long period of gradual retreat northward, punctuated by pauses and even ‘re-advances’. Its withdrawal left a landscape recognizably modern, including valleys gouged out and hills rounded and depressed by the great weight of ice sometimes kilometres thick. The word ‘nunatak’ (taken from the Inuit language) has been used to describe the topmost bits of mountains sticking up from the ice cover, as for example in the present Greenland: the peaks of Northern Arran may have been nunataks during the Ice Ages, and this may explain why they have remained jagged rather than smoothed and rounded like the southern hills.⁹

Glaciers are like slow-moving rivers of ice. There was a massive glacier flowing south from the Argyll and Loch Lomond region. Arran stood in its way, and the island was robust enough to divide the stream. Through the centuries the ice trenched deeper and deeper on either side, producing Kilbrannan Sound on the west of Arran and the Firth of Clyde on the east. In spite of being surrounded by billions of tons of ice in this manner, Arran had a distinct local glacier, which produced valleys radiating from a centre probably in the cluster of high mountains in the north.

The weight of ice split the original northern volcanic dome with three clefts running north and south. There are actually four major valleys in the northern part of the island, each with its own river system: (1) Glen Chalmadale – North Sannox, (2) Glen Rosa, (3) Glen Iorsa – Easan Biorach, and (4) Glen Catacol – Loch Tanna – Glen Scaftigill; there is one additional system in the middle part, Gleannan t’ Suidhe – Glen Shurig. The river systems represent ancient glacier courses, with characteristic signs of decayed glaciation, such as moraines, drumlins, kames and eskers (all names for differently shaped heaps or ridges of broken or crushed stone¹⁰). The slow movement of glacier ice is also responsible for the transport of massive boulders (erratic or wandering blocks) from their original sites, such as the Clach a’ Chath (popularly known as the ‘Cat Stane’ north of Corrie on the east coast).

As the ice receded, the volume of water in the oceans correspondingly increased, drowning many coastal locations. Gradually, however, the land which had been crushed by the weight of the ice began to rise again (in isostatic recovery), leaving raised beaches which can reach 15 to 20 metres and upwards above the present shore line. Raised shore lines can be traced round most of Arran’s coasts. It is often upon raised beaches that we discover signs of early human habitation on Arran and in other locations in Britain.

OS references

Geology

Drumadoon Point NR 882 287

Brown Head NR 902 252

Clauchlands Point NS 057 237

North Newton NR 937 157

Corloch NR 993 485

Laggan (Arthropleura) NR 978 507

Levencorroch Hill (Chirotherium) NS 005 216

King’s Cave NR 884 308

Drumadoon NR 891 291

Rosaburn NS 004 369

Glen Chalmadale NR 950 503

The Ice Ages

North Sannox NS 009 466

Glen Rosa NR 990 380

Glen Iorsa NR 920 383

Gleann Easan Biorach NR 948 485

Glen Catacol NR 920 470

Loch Tanna NR 919 430

Glen Scaftigill NR 905 405

Gleann an t’ Suidhe NR 960 355

Glen Shurig NR 992 367

The Cat Stane (Clach a’ Chath) NS 020 444

Corrie NS 026 434

2. Human Colonization

Mesolithic times

Human beings colonized Britain before the great glaciation, but no signs of these ‘Palaeolithic’ – Old Stone Age – peoples have survived in Arran as far as we can tell at present. Ice made most of Britain inhospitable to non-Arctic life until about 10,000 BP, although there had been a break in the very cold conditions for about 1,500 years after 13,000 BP.

In the pioneering archaeology of Scotland and indeed Arran, modern research has brought to bear the techniques of pottery dating, soil science, palynology (pollen analysis), stratigraphy, radiocarbon dating and more, all subject to constant methodological revision. But the more that we reveal by the application of these techniques the more we discover our ignorance: we now can tell the approximate period at which humans started to colonize Britain after the ice-age, and recognize that there were two stages – Mesolithic and Neolithic – in the development of early Scottish civilization; however, just when the transition took place between the two phases remains obscure. The best we can say is that the change-over between hunter-gathering (mesolithic) and farming (neolithic) happened at different times in different places, was gradual, and may have involved the older and the newer strands running side by side in certain places.

The bare ground left by the ice around 10,000 BP was almost completely sterile, made up of silt and coarse gravelly rubbish. A few clumps of sedges of one sort or another were the only growing things in the desolation. Then, over the next thousand years or so, mosses of different kinds formed a carpet in isolated locations, and heaths and grasses began to come in, followed by small shrubs and low tundra plants such as juniper and whortleberry. About 9,000 BP the first trees, birches, began to spread north and group themselves into forests. Later the hazel appeared. For the next several thousand years, new tree species proliferated, in rather warmer conditions than now – elm, oak and pine, ultimately forming the Caledonian Forest, of which a few remnants survive to the present day. And, with the forests, post-glacial land animals roamed into mainland Scotland as the conditions improved – wolves, wild horses, aurochs (the predecessors of modern cattle), deer, beavers, wild cats, and pine martens.

Not many of the animal