All around the watchtower

May 20, 2024, 7:25 am , by Richard Lutz

The coast is guarded by its sentinels, reports RICHARD LUTZ

It’s been sitting, observing, staring, peering west for eighty years. And as you follow the Ayrshire Coastal Path, you are compelled to stop.

The watchtower was built in the early days of World War II. Over the decades, it’s slowly been hollowed out by wind and weather. But never forgotten. It stands as sentinel over the Scottish coastline.

It’s a quadrant tower, one of many that dot the British shores. It was used by the military as an observation post to gauge the accuracy of planes during practice bombing runs. Now, it’s a ghost, a concrete and brick skeleton. It’s not handsome. It’s almost an eyesore. But it is an integral part of the coast and its history. It joins the more rudimentary stone towers that also sit on the shores that still await a Napoleonic invasion that never invaded.

The tower stands on one of the most attractive sections of the 100 mile South Ayrshire coastal route, on a dogleg of the path on a tilted headland. There’s a pasture on one side and the wide wide sea on the other. Fifteen miles across the Firth of Clyde estuary are the mountains that cap the Isle of Arran. Further west is the Mull of Kintyre peninsula (yes, the one that Paul McCartney sang about fifty or so years ago) and, to the southwest, wreathed in evening light, the volcanic plug called Ailsa Craig.

This week the headlands dipping to the sea are filled with red campion and carpets of bluebells

Haws bloom by the path side. They love the salt air

All ‘round the watchtower there’s spring growth….such as wild garlic on steep steps off the beach.

The quadrant tower isn’t as romantic as Dunure Castle three miles up the coast- it’s used by the tv show Outlander for locations.

And it’s not such a draw as Culzean Castle two miles the other way looming over seacliffs

It’s more removed. There’s no car park. No signs, no crowds, no admittance charges

You have to find it, get there, stumble across it, sit on its ruined steps, let the kids jump around it, stop and wonder what it was, why it peers west over the sea, take in how quiet it all is.

Photos by Mary Hogg, Ian Knox, Janepix, others