COAST And Country — Inspired By Winter’s HillsNOVEMBER, the first true month of winter, has a reputation for being dark and dismal in this rainy corner of Scotland, writes David Carnduff.
With the galoshins and bonfire season finished for another year, it’s a case of battening down the hatches for the long haul past Christmas and Ne’erday until spring makes a tentative return.
Yet, given the right weather, some November days surpass anything that July or August can offer. In clear, frosty conditions there is a quality of light and a palette of winter colours that are hard to beat.
Inverclyde’s north-facing position means that the hills on the opposite side of the Clyde are never far from our gaze. They are at their finest when winter’s low angled sun sends long fingers of light to illuminate their steep slopes rising from Holy Loch and Loch Long.
The view inspired novelist Alan Sharp who dedicated his book “A Green Tree in Gedde” to Greenock … “to its buildings and chimneys and streets and the glimpses they have afforded me of the river and hills.”
As a Greenockian, and former yard worker, Sharp must have often pondered these hills through his writer’s eyes and in the opening lines of the book, published in the Sixties, he describes how they are seen “across an expanse of roofs and chimneys, the slates dull purple scales and the ridges presided by clumps of lums, cans churning and smoke cannons flying.”
In the view from Inverclyde, one hill in particular stands out — the big bulk of Creachan Mòr which, at 2,156ft, dominates Loch Long. I guess Creachan Mòr pictured, from McInroy’s Point, Gourock, must have registered with Sharp because he writes about the hills having “great tawny flanks”, and that description certainly fits this Argyllshire giant which turns warm ochre in the probing winter sunlight.
Despite being separated by only a couple of miles across the Clyde, Greenock of old and Argyll were worlds apart, not just in landscape but also in language and culture. However, Gaeldom was to have a significant influence on the town as people came south in search of work and Gaelic was the first language of a large number of Greenock’s inhabitants in the 18th and 19th century.
Perhaps they would have known the meaning of Creachan Mòr. A check of the online Gaelic dictionary suggests that a creachan is a tool, a “hauk”, though I am none-the-wiser what that is. Could it be that a “hawk” used to hold plaster or mortar?
While the big hill remains a constant and familiar landmark on the Argyll skyline, Alan Sharp chased other horizons in his writing career. A Green Tree in Gedde, set in Greenock, is a gritty story of how three young men and a girl travel different roads on a journey of self-discovery.
It was to have been the first novel of a trilogy but Sharp completed only two before he left for Hollywood where he wrote screenplays for Western movies. When he died in Los Angeles in 2013, his obituary in The Scotsman described him as one of the greatest Scottish writers of the 20th century.
