I built this beach by hand (but it took me 33 YEARS!)
The remarkable and uplifting story of one man’s painstaking labour of love for his community – a secret swimming haven
tHE path to inner satisfaction takes many forms. For some, it is reached through exotic meditation techniques at expensive weekend retreats.
Roland Chaplain, however, knows exactly where to find his path to happiness.
Beside a rough forestry track, a clearly defined trail drops away under the canopy of ancient woodland before stopping abruptly at the edge of a freshwater loch. By a beach, a pristine arc of sand that reaches out to embrace the warm shallows glinting in the early June sunlight.
We are in the heart of the Galloway countryside, many miles from the nearest stretch of coastline yet the eyes do not deceive – this is a genuine strip of sparkling sand complete with separate areas for swimming and sunbathing.
What is more, this is no naturally occurring phenomenon, chanced upon during a weekend ramble, but the brainchild of a clever and determined dreamer.
For Roland Chaplain, the beach at Woodhall Loch, near the hamlet of Laurieston, represents not only his favourite place on earth, but almost half his life’s work.
Now aged 76, this tall twig of a man has spent the past 33 years scrambling over the neighbouring hillside, digging and fetching and carrying the materials needed to carve a waterside haven from what was nothing but mud and stones and thick reeds.
This stirring tale is all the more inspirational when he reveals that the entire project was achieved with the aid of a couple of garden trowels, numerous rubber gloves and an endless supply of gumption.
‘I suppose I’m pretty satisfied with what has been achieved,’ he said, an almost perpetual grin splitting his face. ‘People have always swum in this loch, at least as far back as the 1800s, but before I started, it was difficult for them to get in. Now we have a sandy beach which can be used by people of all ages. They can wade right in.’
The fact that this man-made mini-promenade exists at all is down to a promise he made to give something back to a community which had welcomed him and his family when they first settled in Scotland. But thousands of hours of punishing manual labour would also bring its maker unimagined benefits and healing in times of personal loss.
mR Chaplain first visited on holiday with his wife, Jeannie, and young son John in the early 1980s drawn in part by his wife’s connections to nearby Laurieston Hall, an Edwardian mansion where her father had once run a TB clinic. Taking the water was an important part of the healing process, and patients would slither through the overgrown vegetation and over slippery rocks and mud to reach the water.
‘It can’t have been much fun, bashing your feet on the rocks and so on,’ said Mr Chaplain.
They fell in love with the area and soon decided to move north from Leeds where Mr Chaplain worked as a meteorologist. His seven-yearold son became firm friends with children living at Laurieston Hall, then run as a commune, and he would often use their snooker and table tennis facilities. Soon the mutterings started about what Mr Chaplain could contribute by way of recompense.
A keen outdoor swimmer (‘I always say that I only stop swimming when it takes longer than half an hour to break the ice!’), a thought popped into his head. ‘I just said almost jokingly, “I want a decent beach here and you need one too”.
‘I had already noticed that Kenick Burn was depositing a lot of sand and gravel into swampy undergrowth near the loch.
‘I thought if there’s some way we can get the sand to collect in one place, then that would be the beginnings. From there, really, it was trial and error. I don’t think anyone believed for a second I would do it.’
It was 1985, the summer of Live Aid and Comic Relief and the year that heralded the first mobile phone calls, the dawn of CDs and the rise and fall of the Sinclair C5. All Mr Chaplain remembered was the constant downpours that accompanied one of Laurieston’s wettest ever summers.
‘It rained very heavily for most of July and August. It was around my 44th birthday on August 7 when I got so fed up with the weather that I decided to take a trowel out and set to work.’
After securing the permission of Laurieston Hall and neighbouring landowner, the Forestry Commission, he selected a strip of the lochside just south of the Kenick Burn which bowed in slightly, creating a natural bay. His plan was to dig out a shallow channel through the swampland near the bottom of the burn and stack boulders further down the loch to form a breakwater which would trap the sand flushed out by the storms. Then, it was a question of keeping the channel clear and letting the power of nature do its work.
‘Almost all the hard work has been done on the burn, working my way further upstream to free more sand and gravel and boulders and then getting the boulders I needed out of the burn or rolling them through the forest down to the beach.
‘About 98 per cent of it, I did myself with a trowel, wearing out several hundred pairs of rubber gloves not to mention lots of old bags and sacks mostly gleaned from roadsides. I got through rather more right-handed gloves than left-handed ones, but then I am right-handed.’
Some of the largest rocks needed extra manpower and Mr Chaplain occasionally roped in friends and his son to lift them. ‘There’s one very large rock that was rolled down the hill by a group of men and is now buried so deep under the beach that I don’t know where it is any more,’ he said.
But nothing more mechanical than sinew and muscle was used: ‘You couldn’t bring machinery down here. I was working with a long timescale; I knew it would take a long time. At first, I was working very hard seven days a week on a meteorology project with BBC Radio Scotland called Weather Watchers and my wife was very ill and I was acting as a carer and a single father, in effect.
‘I would only come down for the odd hour or two in the afternoons after finishing my forecasting. And you didn’t want to stay too late because the place would become overrun with midges. It’s less midge now because I’ve cleared away so much of their natural habitat.’
When his wife died about five years after he started, he immersed himself ever deeper in his Herculean task. There was never a moment when he considered giving up.
nO, no, no. It’s been great, to me it’s almost a symbol that I have some time for myself, I’m not going to work myself into the grave like some of these workaholics who’ve just destroyed their lives, destroyed their relationships and everything else by not giving themselves the space to reflect and be at peace. It was a place I could get physically fit as well as relaxing.’
He has since found new love and moved with his partner, June Hay, to the village of Balmaclellan 11 miles away. He would travel by
bus, car or bicycle depending on the weather to carry on what was becoming an obsession. The Nineties came and went, as did the Noughties and his son grew up and emigrated to Australia where he now has his own young family. And yet Mr Chaplain’s devotion to his beach never faltered.
He can trace his interest in waves and water patterns back to early childhood and his parents’ arrival as impoverished refugees from Germany just days before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Born in 1941 when the family lived by the sea in Bournemouth, he found an instant connection with beaches as a youngster.
‘My mother was half-Prussian and half-Scottish and my father was a nomadic trader who remained stateless throughout his life, so it was difficult in the war,’ he said. ‘There was a lot of racial bullying and I ended up a bit of a loner, I suppose. When the bullies realised I was quite physically tough they ran, but I still tended to do things on my own and I think I am not easily distracted once I want to do something.
‘We were really poor and learned how to get out and pick chestnuts and brambles and I even remember going to shops and begging for food. I also became pretty adept at beachcombing and finding things I could sell for money after storms. That’s where it all started, this understanding of how sand behaves with different wave structures. It has kept with me through my career in meteorology.’
His experience with forecasting and reading weather conditions equipped him with the know-how to manipulate the flow of sand onto his beach at the southern end of the mile-long loch.
‘I needed northerly winds to blow down the loch, producing big enough waves to sweep the sand along to my beach.
‘The trick was to build curved breakwaters which would cause the currents induced by the breaking waves to spin round gently and deposit sand and gravel but carry only the finer mud and leaf debris out into deep water.
‘Just a little bit of wall allowed me to trap a good bit of sand to start. Now it stretches out for more than 12 metres (39ft) and took hundreds of rocks and boulders to build.’
Everything is explained with a boyish zeal that lights up his cartoonish features and reinforces the impression that Mr Chaplain might have stepped from the pages of a Roald Dahl novel, with his tangle of bleached wire for eyebrows and shock of white hair.
Yet the net results of 33 years of excavation are truly breathtaking. The once-shallow channel at the end of the burn now easily swallows up Mr Chaplain’s rangy 6ft 2in frame. The beach ‘complex’ now incorporates a sandy bay looking north-east with its elegant lines of stone marking where the sand trails off gently into the positively balmy waters and a separate, high-backed sun-bathing zone of fine gravel facing south-west.
SMALL fish nibble lazily at wildflower seeds floating on the loch shaded by birch, beech and alder. ‘It is very satisfying, seeing how it has evolved and how it behaves in different weather conditions,’ said Mr Chaplain as he surveyed his handiwork.
It has been described as ‘land art’ – similar to the stylised works of such practitioners as Charles Jencks and Andy Goldsworthy – where form and function merge and submerge.
Mr Chaplain is wary of such praise, arguing that nature has created its own aesthetic. ‘It is meant to look as natural as possible, while still working as a beach. But I don’t neatly line up all the white boulders together or anything like that.
‘It’s not pretty-pretty art, it was built for recreation and you could just smash it up any time and start again.’
Not that he wishes destruction upon his hard-fought creation. ‘I would love to pass this on to others to maintain it. I’m getting older now, I’m not going to do very much more to it. To extend any further out would need a huge amount of material to build up the wall.
‘I now come down here mainly to have my swim or just to enjoy nature, to see otters playing or swans and ducks with their young or just to listen to the waves breaking on the rocks.’
It may have taken more than three decades, but Roland Chaplain appears finally to have found his own patch of heaven on earth.
For him, life truly has been a beach.