WAY A Buddie brilliant boyhood
WE REVISIT DEREK PARKER’S RAMBLES THROUGH RENFREWSHIRE
Mine of information
Call me an old-fashioned technophobe, but I squirm when I hear politicians and businessmen calling for more young, sedentary Scots to spend more time surfing the internet.
The cynic in me suspects much of the campaign is about computer sales and encouraging internet shopping.
But, of greater concern, is the damage caused to our children’s health from hours in front of computer screens.
Fifty years ago, youngsters of my generation enjoyed healthy outdoor activities all day long, exercising body and mind while playing happily in the woods and fields of sylvan sanctuaries on Paisley’s doorstep.
It’s 50 years ago but I recall, nostalgically, cheery childhood visits to conifer-cosseted Foxbar and Durrockstock Dams, where fir trees echoed the serene songs of cooing doves and magnificent white swans glided ghost-like across silvery surfaces ring-marked by speckled trout rising from the dusk-dappled
Derek Parker knew many of Paisley’s secrets – the grimy and the good.
He wandered every corner in search of the clues that would unlock Renfrewshire’s rich history.
These tales were shared with readers in his hugely popular Parker’s Way column.
We’ve opened our vault to handpick our favourites for you.
water to feast on hatching mayflies on sultry summer evenings.
And I have happy memories of clambering up the bracken-mantled hillside, behind the hen farm and piggery, just off Foxbar Road, to the Bonnie Wee Well tea room on the breast of the Gleniffer Braes, where buttered scones and orangeade awaited at the end of an odyssey enhanced by vistas of medieval Stanely Castle, evoking visions of fair maids and warrior-knights, as it soared in splendour from the shimmering waters of Stanely Dam.
Down through the years, recollections proliferate of ‘dooking’ at the High Dippings on the Brandy Burn; golden ‘stooks’ of oats studding stubble fields at Foxbar Farm in autumn; and the intoxicating fragrance of newmown haystacks at Amochrie, Fulbar and Stonefield Farms when Paisley’s precincts were rural realms.
As boys, we imagined we were explorer David Livingstone discovering foam-flecked Zambesi Falls in darkest Africa, as we gazed in wonder at weaver-poet Robert Tannahill’s Dusky Glen, with its crescendos of cascades gushing in grandeur through the cliffclustered, wooded ravine.
In my imagination, skylarks intone immortally above purple, heathermantled moors at Sergeantlaw and cuckoos clamour around woodlandwreathed Foxbar House.
Swallows skim swiftly above buttercup-bespangled meadows at Stanely Green, and sleepy-eyed owls hoot hauntingly from twilit trees around Leethland House.
The choral cadenzas of songbirds will always resonate and fragrant flowers will forever bloom in the Elysian Fields of Paisley’s pastoral paradise where unwithering memories remain evergreen.
And I shall be eternally grateful for my boyhood on the beautiful braes which were the happy haunts of so many Buddies’ springtime years.