I’m standing with my mother on a grassy lane outside the house she grew up in, the sun dazzling on a rare, flawless Scottish spring morning. Mossend – a neat Victorian estate cottage just outside the main town of Brodick – sits modestly back from the road. It’s hidden by fields of dozing cows and framed by the hulking presence of Goat Fell. The wooden window frames have recently been repainted a confident racing green, but otherwise, it looks exactly as it must have done when my mother, Kathleen, lived here as a child in the 1950s.
She points out the frayed remains of a rope swing her father made for her more than 60 years ago, still looped around the thick branch of a slightly stooped oak tree beside the house. Time has softened the knot and weathered the rope, but it remains tied. So too does my mum, in a way – tethered to this place by memory, by family, by the quiet, insistent pull of Arran.
