Largie’s rooflessness frightens me. The castle has no chimney pots, rafters, slates or tiles

Ihad forgotten how her home smelled different to our own, with its whiffs and pongs of the farm.

Hers had a suggestion of the past, of old country houses where camphor, lavender and lemon verbena fragrances reigned.

They wafted from old mahogany canisters whose lids, when opened, revealed dried flowers and pomander.

I heard a sound like a rifle shot as Granny sat down. It was her knee joints.

When we were all seated and eating our lamb chop, I detected another.

It was the rattle of Granny’s dentures as she chewed and by the end of the meal these chimed in unison with the tinkling of her pills, as she lifted them in their mother of pearl container from the table’s dumb waiter. “Go and play in the hall, children!” Granny said. In this drafty precinct were portraits of a young boy and girl.

These were of Jock and Douna, my mother’s eldest siblings.

The boy’s face was handsome and thick-set, his hazel eyes twinkling in the evening light, while his sister, with pointed features offset by a white lace collar, looked elfin and other-worldly.

Missing portraits But where were the portraits of the other children, of Simon, our mother and Angus, the uncle nobody talked about?

If my grandparents Daisy and John had commissioned portraits of their eldest two, why weren’t the rest of their offspring painted? Had money been tight? Perhaps the First World War had intervened and all the available portraitists, instead of having children to sit for them, painted servicemen instead.

Were Jock and Douna more important than the other three and if so, why? Birth order was significant in our family, which kept property intact by leaving the lion’s share to its oldest son.

So, as the eldest it made sense to have Jock’s portrait done but didn’t they also want one of Angus, their second son, himself the future inheritor of a large estate in central Scotland? If one existed was it removed. Was that after he failed to return home from the Far East after the war?

But a child has little desire to think more about someone she has never met and I was no exception. Angus was gone and I’d little idea what he was like.

The following morning we drove farther into Mummy’s past, to Largie Castle itself. The steading and old coach house are empty. So too is the gardener’s cottage nestling by the big iron gate into the walled garden.

Only a couple of semi-detached houses standing apart from the others are lived in.

Washing hangs on the line of the nearest dwelling and I notice a pair of overalls next to a floral apron.

Mummy drives us past the houses, up a slope with fields on our right until we reach a wood with chestnut and beech trees. There in the clearing is the ruin of Largie Castle. Mummy leaps out of her seat, slams the car door shut, thrusts both hands deep in her jacket pocket and strides from us.

The song of a bird is incongruously mellifluous in such a setting.

The eeriness of the ruin commands a bat’s shriek or at the very least a rook or crow’s cry. “A blackbird!” Mummy’s smile overlays a sigh. The sound of the wind in the trees ebbs and flows much like the rhythmic swell of waves at the sea.

Running towards an open space unobscured by trees and looking towards the islands, I can see the line of the shore below.

Sea artery The sea is all around us, playing a part in our lives as it has done for generations, first as a barrier, then an artery to Gigha, Cara, Jura, other parts of the mainland, to Ulster and Ireland itself.

It has transported traders, fishermen, pirates, pilgrims and saints.

Its disasters are etched in men, women and children’s memories: fishermen who went off and never returned, yachtsmen drowned in a squall, swimmers caught in treacherous cross-currents.

The last war brought a spate of maritime calamities like the Aska, a British steamer, which in 1940, after being bombed in Belfast, fetched up on the north coast of Cara.

The paved ground by the castle’s south elevation gives way to a large hole in the ground; this was the pond where Angus and Simon floated toy boats that dodged water lilies and skimmed over fish that swam in the water’s lower reaches. There’s nothing left but a tangle of briar and bramble.

Looking up at the tower’s smooth walls, its skin of harling missing, we notice a thatch of creeper around the doorway: Russian vine or ivy, dark and luxuriant. Largie’s rooflessness frightens me. The castle has no chimney pots, rafters, slates or tiles; its guttering has gone and the drainpipes are missing. “Don’t go inside!” Mummy warns. “Why?” “A stone might fall on you!” But I want to see where Mummy spent her childhood, where she learned to walk and talk, to discover where she hung her coat after going outside, where her boots stood and what kind of floors she trod: tiles, floorboards, stone, or parquet.

I long to see the colour of the walls, the mouldings encircling each ceiling, the size of the window panes.

I’d like to shove my weight against each door, hear the echo of feet on the drawing room floor.

Which passageways she ran through and if the staircase banisters were low enough for her to slide down? Where did she escape to when brother Simon bullied her and when they had guests, which rooms they used?

Was there a special one, a secret place where she could compose her dreams and aspirations.

What fragrances rose from the flower displays and how pungent were the kitchen aromas? Where did they celebrate Christmas, hold parties or arrange trysts?

Above all, I want to see, smell and feel inside the rooms in which she had slept, dreamed, laughed and wept? There stands Largie Castle, cast off like an abandoned coat, forlorn and despoiled. “Why did they take the roof off?” “It was too expensive and also quite uncomfortable to live in,” Mummy explains in a throwaway voice.

Pursing her lips, she leads us to the wood and halts at a stream edged on both sides by bamboo thicket.

Lis runs fast up a path wedged between long, tall shoots that shiver in the wind, before moving to a wet hollow below the castle, where rhododendron bushes grow with olive green leaves and stems of peeling bark.

(More on Monday)