Loudoun clear

October 10, 2023, 6:41 am , by Richard Lutz

Richard Lutz waits for the murk to rise. And posts a spoiler alert

That looming mass lost in moody cloud is Loudoun Hill. As I walk towards it, the mist lifts. It’s a thousand feet above sea level and vertical cliffs on the north side emerge …

…. along with a skirt of stone walls and brooding trees around its lower edges….

On top there’s a 360 degree view. For millennia it’s been a strategic spot for defenders, invaders, brigands and armies.

The hill is a volcanic plug and that’s pretty familiar stuff around here, in Ayrshire, south of Glasgow: there’s Ailsa Craig floating in the sea, Knockdolian, Mochrum and, farther afield, in Northern Ireland, more volcanic steppingstones that decorate a topography left by a changing earth.

Today Loudoun Hill is luckily a bit quieter than in volcanic times. It overlooks The Windy Wizen, a curvy part of the cross country A71 road first created by the Romans to link inland Britain with the sea.

It’s the site of not one but two battles of Scots v English (win-loss record, by the way, is Scotland 2/ England zip) and a skirmish during the bloody religious wars in the late 17th when government forces hunted down hardline Covenanters.

So, Loudoun Hill has history etched in its rocks, now used not as a fort or a killing field but more as a challenge for rock climbers, weekend strollers, backpackers….a fine destination overlooking The River Irvine Valley.

And talking of Destinations, I’ll wander down Tangent Lane and offer a quiet word about the difference between what is True and what is False in the world of destinations. It goes something like this:

Loudoun Hill in Ayrshire is a destination. You head for it, drawn towards it, allured by an undefinable urge. As are, I guess, the headwaters of the Amazon, the Taj Mahal, Big Ben or a neighbourhood pub.

What gets me is people heading for a destination that doesn’t exist. For places that live in their confused minds. Such as this place…

It’s The Dark Hedges in Northern Ireland. To you and me it’s a nice day out in County Antrim. But for tens of thousands of folks, it’s the imaginary King’s Road in tv mega-series Game of Thrones. Here’s what it looks like with tour buses:

Tv devotees walk the very route used by Arya Stark as she escapes from King’s Landing. But she never escaped and (spoiler alert…) there is no King’s Landing. Nor is there, for that matter, an Arya Stark. It’s all fiction. Make believe.

But what is real is that the road now is closed to traffic because the tourist crush harms the very trees the fans want to see. If this stretches your sense of the absurd, let me assure you there may be a dram or two of help at hand. The real Dark Hedges- the 250 year old line of beeches- is near the Bushmills Whiskey Distillery. There you can drown your anxieties over the addled and delusional state of the human brain.

Now, let’s go back to Loudoun Hill.

It’s a destination crammed with history and the fingerprints of geology. It’s not produced by a scriptwriter nor a production team nor CGI. There are no tour buses to Loudoun Hill. It’s real. As is the track to the site and the green swards of dairy pastures to the south, the moorland to the north, the white farms dotted up and down the valley, the rushing River Irvine heading for the sea and the mist rolling in and out as autumn cools the world around us.