Every spring for decades my neighbour, Jan Moore, who has died aged 96, would fly 10,000 miles from her home in Brisbane, Australia, to the Ayrshire harbour village of Maidens. There she would spend the summer in a cottage overlooking the Clyde and the Isle of Arran.
Her annual pilgrimage was down to her Scots blood; she was born and raised in Maidens, and vowed in the mid-1960s that she would return each year. Her cottage in the village was near mine, and that is how we came to know each other.
