Arran Banner Letters – week 32, 2024

Apologies in advance

Sir,

I see former CalMac chief Robbie Drummond has joined McGill’s buses - Former CalMac chief makes switch to Scottish bus firm: The Herald, July 30 2024.

Can Banner readers suggest some CalMac style apologies the company might want to use should bus delays follow this move?

Yours,

Hilary Patrick,

Machrie.

Heritage tales and trails of Whiting Bay

Sir,

Whiting Bay Memories group was awarded money from Scottish Power Renewables’ Beinn an Tuirc 3 Windfarm Fund by Arran Community Council in June 2023 for its Heritage Tales and Trails project.

Group members have worked steadily over the last year to produce the heritage trails and tales.

The project has led to many interesting stories emerging and a wealth of historical facts have been found which have been included in, or linked into, guided walks around Whiting Bay. The walks and the stories can all be found on the project website at whiting-bay-memories.com/heritage-tales-and-trails

For those with an interest in Arran history and Whiting Bay, the project website provides hours of fascinating reading. You don’t even need to walk the trails – information, maps, photographs past and current and linked tales are all there to be enjoyed.

There is so much information on the site you may not know where to start. One suggestion is to go to one of the most recent additions - the story of the bus shelters and boats, which tells the story of the village’s beautifully painted shelters and flower-filled boats and how these came into being.

There is a family quiz attached to the story which you can complete while walking through the village. It features shelter and boat-related questions, as well as other interesting things to look out for.

The possibilities for more tales and trails are almost endless so the group hope to add more over the coming months.

The group thanks the funders and Arran Community Council, which oversees the fund, for making this possible. They have really enjoyed taking part in it and hope visitors to the website, wherever they live, enjoy it just as much.

Yours,

Barbara I’Anson,

Whiting Bay Memories.

Divine glory in the skies

Sir,

Lord Martin Rees wrote a 2001 hardback of 180 pages entitled Our Cosmic Habitat.

The British Royal Astronomer’s book begins with a dark preface by Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950): “I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filled with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.”

The vastness of space can certainly make humans feel insignificant.

But Martin Rees ends his book with this observation: “No mystery in cosmology presents a more daunting challenge than the task of fully elucidating how atoms assembled - here on earth and perhaps on other worlds - into living beings intricate enough to ponder their origins.” 

Did a mass of atoms split the atom or does nuclear power and nuclear explosions affirm the traditional Christian vision of humanity: humans made in the image of God who are a great deal more than accidental accumulations of atoms-possessing personhood, thought, consciousness, conscience, freewill?

The miracle of human life in a vast cosmos arguably affirms traditional theism. Emergence from random chaos demands a much bigger leap of faith than belief in a creator and designer. Sparsely populated rural Scotland, with its minimal light pollution, presents the divine glory on a clear and starry night.

Yours,

James Hardy,

Belfast.