Howling Sand Wilderness
If I had not got my work here, Ardeer would certainly be the most depressing place in the world. Picture to yourself everlasting bleak dunes with no buildings. Only the rabbits find a little nourishment here; they eat a substance which quite unjustifiably goes by the name of grass, and of which some few traces are to be found here and there. This is a wonderful sand desert, where the wind always blows, and often howls, filling the ears with sand which also drifts about the room like a fine drizzle. There, like a huge village, lies the factory, and most of the buildings have hidden themselves behind sandhills. A few yards away the ocean begins, and between us and America there is nothing but water, a sea whose mighty waves are always raging and foaming. Now you will have some idea of the place where I am living ; as I have said, without work it would be intolerable. But work beautifies everything, and thought creates a new life in which we can dispense with luxury and comfort without missing them, and in which we are never forced to feel the leaden oppression of boredom.[1]
We had been delivered to the peninsula at first light in a small fishing boat by two undercover operatives, we will call them ‘Malcy’ and ‘Bob’. A shroud of paranoia immediately engulfed us as we made our way along the collapsing pier as distant voices could be heard floating across the still waters that seemed to be discussing our probable whereabouts. The illicit nature of our endeavour was brought home to us by the appearance of a drone high in the sky making us scurry for cover, this was to be a hazardous undertaking that could indeed end in disaster.
The late autumn air was as sharp and fearsome as a fresh batch of nitro-glycerine and the level of activity going on in and around the ‘decommissioned’ site kiboshed any hopes we might have had of emulating the hoard’s of urbex ninjas who had infiltrated the old bomb works and anyway we had already vicariously explored every inch of it what with devouring the voluminous amounts of drone footage uploaded to YouTube by clandestine three tooners. An afternoon contemplating endless groynes and the arc of sea and sky beckoned as we followed the strains of a jaw harp along the foreshore, realising we’d picked a site that was overwritten to the point of illegibility.
Cunninghame’s Tongue
With more obscure beetles, fanciful wasps and recherché bees than you can shake a walking pole at the Ardeer Peninsula (and adjoining wetlands) is one of the prime wildlife habitats in Ayrshire, if not in Scotland. It is teeming with flora and fauna almost to the point of absurdity and highlights just how bereft much of our heavily redacted countryside actually is. It is so impressive that, of course, there are plans in place to utterly transform it into a giant leisure/housing facility that will benefit… who exactly? Not the wasps and the beetles, not the Water Rail and the Egrets.
Development and developers are everywhere now. That lovely bit of woodland on the edge of your town or village? Earmarked as a fast food eatery or an executive retirement facility. That wee park that you take the kids to? Not for much longer you won’t as they want it for a new supermarket. Ideally Ardeer should be left to the bees and the beetles and the Water Rail. An injunction should be served on the frenzied developers to step away from the lovely nature pal, back off or else. Why should it be saved then? What is land for? Surely nature must make way for jobs and housing and supermarkets? In the past it was a given, just wave it through at the cooncil offices thank you very much, but now? Now that we know what’s at stake? The ‘Special Development Order’ vintage 1953 is a particular sticking point here as it essentially says: ‘hey you come and smash this place up asap!’ and should be revoked as of yesterday. Ironically the fact that the area was so off-limits due to its potentially explosive nature has facilitated a re-wilding that highlights the importance of this approach to the land. If we allow them to destroy this place then we deserve what’s coming to us and it won’t be pretty
But there is more. The Peninsula is a lost landscape, a secret country, it has to all intents and purposes fallen off the map and is only now being rediscovered. To go there is to enter a mysterious zone where time seems to play by different rules – the hermetic and repetitive brick and concrete structures that litter the place and the endless shaggy dunescape conspire to render it null and void. It would be a good place to escape to or get lost in and there is no doubt that people do so. Like all edgeland places it attracts the lost and the lonely, obsessives and misfits, lovers and losers.
The Black Powder
(26/01/1697) To divert you with some remarkable things fallen out of late, it is confidently asserted here, that the river of Clyd went dray for 14 miles, so that children went over it, which ran with a most impetuous current immediatly before; I doe think this must hav fallen out by some chasm in the earth, into which the river hath run into some subterranious vacuity, till which time that was filled up it could not return to its former course, I am told it was once so befor.[2]
As a Hairy-horned sand beetle and a Dune Chafer crawled towards me over the substrate a group of friendly aculeate hymenopterans danced a little dance, or so I fancied in my heightened state of awareness brought about by my inadvertent ingestion of The Black Powder. A Fan-bearing wood borer was trying to explain the importance of the adjoining wetlands and a rare and rather excitable Magdalis duplicata perched on my shoulder gesticulating wildly as it held forth on the extent and variety of the suite of habitats present at Ardeer and its uniqueness in Ayrshire and indeed in Scotland.
On Nitro-Glycerine Hill
As justification for turning the wild sandhills of Ardeer into what was at one stage the biggest explosives factory in the world, Alfred Nobel sought to legitimise his enterprise through one of the oldest tricks in the book – declaim the area as wasteland. If nature wasn’t pumping out capital it would have to be ‘improved’: enclose the commons, kick the people off the land, and blast that rabbit warren to smithereens.
Nobel hadn’t been the first to try and subject this untameable desert to rational ordering and rescue it from its deplorable ‘state of nature’, mineral extraction had been bothering its edges since the early modern period and attempts had been made to drain its northern territory in advance of cultivation. We read of the enlightened busybody, Revd. Patrick Warner, smuggling the latest canalising techniques from Holland to make a ‘cut’ called the Master Gott, a foreshadowing of the Stevenston Canal. As a counter to this negation of landscape we carried with us a copy of John Smith’s Prehistoric Man in Ayrshire (1895), an indispensable guide for anyone wishing to walk the peninsula’s past in the present. Smith’s modest claim was to have “traversed nearly ‘every inch’ of the county on foot”[3] and “collected with my own hands hundreds of prehistoric relics from caves, crannogs, shell-mounds, rock-shelters, sands, gravels, etc. taking measurements, and making drawings”[4]. If, for Nobel, the peninsula was “the most depressing place in the world”[5] for Smith it was “One of the greatest emporiums in the West of Scotland of antiquarian articles”.[6]
Smith and Nobel were contemporaries and, given that they would have presumably navigated the same social strata, perhaps even crossed paths. In his account of Ardeer and its antiquities no mention is made of the explosives factory, which by 1895 – when Smith published his report – would have advanced to the very northern extremity of the peninsula. Smith would have beaten a route by edging along the factory’s boundary fence, a route we would mirror on our own journey. We imagined him sifting the sands for relics at the foreshore: the pounding of waves at his feet, the pounding of dynamite at his back.
We see from what has been stated that what is now a howling sand wilderness, always shifting, or seldom at rest, was at one time a populous locality.[7]
We weren’t sure if the incessant drone was from unseen machinery or from the upwards of 80 different species of bees and wasps that work the grasslands. And we’d hoped to have stumbled across the site of the near-legendary hamlet of Pipersheugh—makers of the ‘jaw’s harp’ or ‘trump’ as it was known in Scotland—but darkness had fallen like black powder and a meal and a pint at the Champion Shell Inn beckoned.
Schuck, H & Sohlman, R (1929), The Life of Alfred Nobel, London: Heinemann, p. 225. ↑
Howell, T. B. (Compiler):(1816.) A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors. London, TC Hansard, Vol. 13, p. 930 ↑
Smith, J. (1895) Prehistoric man in Ayrshire. London: Elliot Stock, p xi. ↑
Ibid., p. xi ↑
Schuck, The life of Alfred Nobel, p. 225 ↑
Smith, Prehistoric man in Ayrshire p. 30 ↑
Ibid., p. 41–2 ↑
