Seeing all this neglect depressed me, but I wasn’t sure why. Nobody particularly regretted Largie’s demise

The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 8 By Mary Gladstone

Lochgilphead looks bleak and empty but rhododendrons are in bloom, not the common purple ponticum that runs riot everywhere, but the more recherché sort with crimson, cream and yellow flowers. I roll down my car window and sniff. Wood smoke. There’s little wind, just a dampness in the air. A sea bird sings. It’s an oyster-catcher, I think.

The last lap is long as I swirl past people-less hamlets. At the isthmus’s head is Tarbert followed by a chain of by-passed villages. Where have all the people and their homes gone? I drive past the entrance to Ballure, the lodge house still standing but tidied up and kept now, I guess, for holiday lets.

The road to Largie, the place where Mummy was born, is blocked by a dilapidated hen-run belonging to a resident at the steading.

Stopping my car in the courtyard, I make for the old walled garden. It’s water-logged. Rain teems down and I hear a clap of thunder. Hens scatter for cover and I curse myself for not having worn my wellingtons.

Trying to keep my feet dry I dodge the puddles and scramble out of the garden through briar and bracken.

Concealed

There’s no obvious path but plenty of fallen trees, toppled beeches, and rhododendron, some still flowering. I look for the site where the castle once stood. Where though?

Even the pile of rubble, all that’s left of Largie, is concealed. And the pond? Surely something remains of that.

I am disoriented. Once a huge chestnut tree grew by the drive. Has that fallen too?

Somewhere, in amongst the vegetation, I find a mound of moss and realise it is a pile of stones. That’s it. Largie.

I climb to the top of the rubble and try to gain a view of the islands out west, but a galvanised steel shed and some ash trees conceal it.

A tractor has scoured tracks on the ground, and where it is boggy someone has laid sheets of corrugated iron to prevent vehicles from sinking into the soil. It begins to pour again.

“They shouldn’t have done it!” my father protested. “It was a fine example of Scottish Baronial.”

As an architect he was particularly vocal against the razing of historic buildings. “It wasn’t a real castle!” argued my mother. “It was just pretend.”

“It was a very good pretend.” This was true. My grandfather’s grandfather had it built for him after his wife, Mary Jane, died in 1851.

While she was alive, I like to think she was a restraining influence on her mate, the Hon. Augustus Moreton, Conservative MP for a Gloucestershire constituency and the second son of a newly-created English earl.

She was confident in her ancestry (the Largie Macdonalds traced their line directly back to Somerled and Ranald Bane) and was happy to live in the old Largie, which was little more than a fortified farmhouse.

Augustus had other ideas. With Prince Albert heading the trend at Balmoral, he was one of the many Victorians who fell for the charms of the Highlands, wishing to scottify himself.

Why not upgrade the ancient family he had married into by building a proper ancestral pile, one that looked old even if it was not?

Entertainment

Glasgow-based Charles Wilson won the commission and drew up plans with a distinct antiquarian approach.

The only remit received from the impractical Augustus, whose intentions for the new building were for sport and entertainment rather than serious living, was to forget about convenience and concentrate on aesthetics. This Wilson managed.

Bay windows were out. If any visitor to the new Largie wished for a panoramic view of the Gigha, Cara, Jura, or Islay ribbon of islands, he was to be disappointed.

Wilson installed small, sash windows in keeping with the French chateau style of the 16th and 17th Centuries and sacrificed large rooms and sprawling wings for vertical dimensions with a tower at the centre, its rooms accessed by a spiral staircase.

Even the exterior walls covered in pebble dash or harling were intended to look ancient and hoary.

“It was bloody uncomfortable!” was my mother’s defence.

This was also true. The glass entrance leaked when it rained, and the stairs were a nightmare to climb especially for Jock, my mother’s brother who inherited Largie.

While in France at St. Valery with the British Expeditionary Force in June 1940 my uncle (Angus’s oldest brother) stepped on a land mine which severely injured his leg, and shortly after his evacuation back to England it had to be amputated.

“The tower only had one room to a floor so it was all stairs,” my mother explained. The Architectural Association, my father felt, was entitled to have the last word on the matter.

It was bucketing down now, and I stopped trying to keep dry, my only recourse being to shelter under a tree, one that had not fallen like a soldier on a battlefield.

I felt miserable. Seeing all this neglect depressed me, but I wasn’t sure why. Nobody in the family particularly regretted Largie’s demise.

“If it was still standing,” said my cousin John who inherited the estate “we could never afford to keep it up.”

Vanished

Built on the ill-gotten gains of an Englishman married to a Highland heiress, Largie had been toppled after only four generations.

I realised I didn’t mind that Mummy’s childhood home had vanished, but the ground on which I stood was still there, and that was where my roots lay; even though the tree was ravaged they were still strong and deep.

I looked beyond the wood and saw a deer bounding across the grass. My spirits lifted as I watched the animal sprint for cover.

Hope, I reasoned, is never far from despair. The deer’s grace and agility were a symbol against all this decay.

I applauded Jock, my uncle, for tearing down the castle, elegant sham that it had been.

Tucked up in bed that night in my cousin’s house, I could not sleep. My mind darted from one subject to another, resting first on Angus, my uncle, then on Mummy and her Largie childhood.

Finally, the Luss statue came to mind. I had missed it on my drive to Kintyre, because the road by-passed the place where the figure stood.

(More tomorrow.)