Ghost lines

3 days ago , by Richard Lutz

They’re the ghost lines (writes RICHARD LUTZ), the old British railways that don’t exist except for traces on the skin of the land, bumps on the earth, with bridges that won’t budge, tunnels to nowhere, muddy trails that once carried freight, passengers, labour, cattle, grain.

More than 5000 miles of tracks are abandoned, closed, dismantled, disused or mothballed. But some, happily, are accessible, sometimes with ease, other times with a bit of grit, muscle, willpower and a map or two to help you along.

Last month, I walked along some portions of these tracks, these bootprints from the past.

One was a 72 mile route that crossed the southern Scottish county of Dumfries and Galloway. It was completed in 1861 and closed in 1965, part of the so called Beeching cuts which was a government policy to reduce unviable train routes.

I was guided in a late summer blast of rain and wind through sections of the ‘Paddy ‘Line’, so called because it linked the county towns to the harbour of Stranraer with its ferries to Ireland.

The stretch is almost indiscernible now. Cattle roam across its westerly journey, rich ploughed farmlands have obliterated its course, urban expansion has buried its routes. But old bridges, stone hard, remain:

as does an old station now snuggled into the hills and transformed into a tidy cottage:

Once in a while plans emerge to re open The Paddy Line (also known as The Port Road) and reconnect towns such as Dumfries, Castle Douglas, Newton Stewart, Port Patrick and, of course, Stranraer. But it’ll probably never happen. Big structures such as The Stroan Viaduct across Black Water of Dee with its four arches are ok for feet…

and the views from its ramparts are great….

Fifty miles north of The Paddy Line is the ghost of the Maidens and Dunure Light Railway in Ayrshire. Today it continues its empty journey through sandstone cuttings…

…and on top of a raised bed that tracks south across coastal fields ….

and it chugs on, muddy and untended, through forgotten woods linking shoreline villages…

The line opened in 1906 and was the idea of local landowner Lord Ailsa who owned the Culzean Estate and had a hand in building Turnberry Hotel and its new golf course, now owned by a certain Mr Trump.

Lord Ailsa wanted to ensure better transport not only for remote farms but also for his own estate’s produce and he engineered the completion of the line. It goes without saying that the new route and Turnberry (and its own station), opened on the very same day all those years ago. Funny that…

The line more or less shut at the end of the 1950’s. It wasn’t a victim of the Beeching cuts but of the unstoppable progress of car and road haulage.

All that’s left today are the vague traces of the little twenty mile route, as in this picture north of the harbour village of Dunure ..

Curving through this rolling perfection is a double bend of trees and hedges.

It is the graceful ghost of the Maidens and Dunure Light. It’s been closed for more than six decades now. But its history still follows the elegant contour of the fields that dips to the sea and bows to the island mountains of Arran. Other than that, not a trace. The line has disappeared. It’s gone. It’s another ghost route.

pictures: additional photos from Geograph