Headquarter of "The Jolly Beggars". But for the
successive invasions of the railway, Saltcoats might have worn until today
some considerable part of its garment of picturesque antiquity, particularly
within that which has formed for a century and a half the centrifugal orbit of
its life.
Just as the forces of civilisation broke through the croft
of Grisel How to make an inclined road to Dalry, so the iron way crossed the
northern boundary of another croft beside it to connect the town with the iron
industries of Ardeer and the transplanted shipping activity of Ardrossan. The
first station, which lay near the rocks of the East end, was removed to the
Drakemyre on 1 July 1858, the operations begun in 1857 by Black, the first
contractor, having been continued by Edward Miller. When the railway came
through the town, gates were put on the crossings at Raise Street, Jack's Road
and Ardrossan Road, with a man at each, the company by the Act of 1840 being
bound for these. There was some difficulty in dissociating from the minds of
children that these little men with the little red and green flags and the
little watchhouses, were got up for their amusement. Jack Good had such a
sentry box at "Jack's Road", which the bairns very naturally thought
was his own particular road; and they would come to see him making little
wooden spoons with his knife out of apple-tree wood. These were indeed very
simple days, for remember we are speaking over sixty years ago and children
were children then.
The planting of a station and goods sidings opposite the
end of Green Street did not make any appreciable alteration on the appearance
of the Drakemyre. Indeed, the presence of a railway system brought its swarm
of industrial limpets to cling to its loading banks and dull platforms and
structure that had ever been thrown up to tantalise the artistic sense of the
inhabitants. Railway Companies are ever obdurate to public opinion or feeling
and so, although driving a line through the centre of the town had not
entirely the effect of closing the gates of its northern and southern
divisions, that was the very thing which was destined to happen. Accordingly
in 1882, when the station was to be thrown further back towards Kyleshill and
Raise Street was to be closed, the proposal was met with sturdy opposition.
The population of Saltcoats at that time was nearly 5100. Of this number 904
had their habitation in the higher land of Raise Street. The proposed
operation of the Company were distinctly unfavourable to the highlanders; but,
after much wrangling and the offer of two new streets, the public were advised
to give way and a great transformation took place. The Drakemyre was swept of
its ancient glories and a long red wall drawn over the former perspective of
"thatcher". The old and interesting triangle that had once lain at
the foot of the Flush was cleared away, turning Countess Street into a large
open square. This ground that had been two little "nine-yards" in
the days of old and alongside which the stream had flowed to the village
green, disappeared as if it had never existed. Away went Mrs Reid's possession
and the possession of the McAlisters, famed bakers of their time. The
surroundings were cleared and a new road connected with Kyleshill. The first
Bank in Saltcoats (when the late W B Orr became agent for the Ayrshire Bank)
was abandoned and its portico and windows have since remained boarded up. The
old line of the Yard, which had belonged to an Irvine Sailor, "Orr's Nine
Yard", going back to Bradshaw Roading, was framed and shaped to suit the
official rules of uniformity and Dan McAlister's house was submerged beneath
the Station buildings.
The Ardrossan Parish commenced at the old Countess Street
Well, which stood at the foot of the lane. With the houses between the well
and the railway taken down, there was no longer need for such an ornament and
it disappeared. Across the railway other wonderful alterations took place.
Near the foot of Raise Street had stood the house long occupied by the
Victualling Society, the forerunner of the Co-operative Stores. This house was
built by David Craig, a flesher and his shop was kept by "Peggy Mackie",
who was famed for making oat-cakes. It disappeared to make way for the other
new street. "Tam McWhirter's gates" vanished; and today, thanks to
an unstudied effort of the authorities, one can trace, in the shape of the
causeway stones, the exact line along which was "the goat" or ditch
that ran through the town, dividing the parishes of Stevenston and Ardrossan.
Workmen tore down the property of William Wilson, the carrier, a large
building erected by John Cunningham in earlier days and which, with its
capacious stables and houses, manifested the extent of the old pre-railway
carrying industry. Into these sheds went all the merchandise, for there were
no goods depots and no parcel offices. Wilson's byre stood at the corner of
Raise Street and the Goat Lane; the garden entered from the lane, being
stocked with fruit trees and bushes. William Wilson's house of course touched
part of the ground through which the Earl of Eglinton had carried his original
scheme of continuation long before. The original possessor seems to have been
a salt officer of old Saltcoats named James Miller.
The widening of the line cleared away the old paths so
close to the railway that in walking along one could have touched the passing
trains. On the opposite side was curious old ground, dating from 1788, sold to
the Railway Company in 1867. It lay to the northwest of James Barber's yard,
where there was the back wall of an old malt kiln connected with an ancient
brewery, of the beginning of which there is no definite trace. Beside it,
almost under the shadow of the Western Bank, lay a house which sometimes went
under the name of the "Goat House", but was not that celebrated
institution. It was the house of Francie Wood, a contractor in the busier days
before the railway.
Behind the house of the Woods, at the end of the narrow
pathway leading from kyleshill to Raise Street, stood the distinguished Goat
House, its gable touching the lane called the Roading, close beside Janet
McAlister's rig. While some confusion has arisen as to both claimants for the
honourable identity, the memory of those who lived there and the letters and
figures on the door-lintel "D M B" 1700, sufficiently indicate the
precedence of the house nearer the school. It stood exactly at the point where
the lane to the school joined the continuation of the Goat Lane, after it had
come across the railway. Strange were the stories told of the Goat House in
days gone by when it was a model lodginghouse and the meeting place of
"the Jolly Beggars" of Saltcoats (as McKillop sings) :
"Parboilt bacchanalian wretches,
We' haggart looks an' tatter't breeches
Held hard and fast in Clootie's clutches".
These were the mendicants and prowlers who subsisted on the
proceeds of their gatherings, filling their sacks with oatmeal and enabling
the poor to fill their larder at a cheap rate. Many a merry night was spent
under its old roof. Latterly it was used as a house and room and byre all
succeeding each other. The days of the pedlars and " pedlars' meal"
came to be forgotten and the house for a time fell upon better days. One
resident speaks in tones of affectionate remembrance of the old tree upon
which the bairns slung their swing, their feet being able to touch the
opposing gable of the house of the Woods. That tree still stands in the midst
of its abandonment and the tough old gable of the Goat House is a cairn of
stones behind an advertising hoarding stretched along the last remnant of the
Goat Lane.
The site of the present Kyleshill School was a field until
1884. Within its low-lying expanse had rested the historic Bog Cottages, the
last of the which a mere little toy of a dwelling, near what is the eastern
gate of the school was occupied long since by Frank Thomson, a vendor of
delectable candy, which sweetened the mouths of a past generation, Further
back had lain the Flush and moorland rigs often overrun with water in such a
way as to form a lake. Dwellers by Kyleshill came to draw water from "the
lake" in preference to pursuing the long descent to the town. Each of the
principal dwellers in the town had there as much of the Flush rigs as would
grow three pecks of lint seed. The lint shaws were gathered there for many a
day and used by the early village dames in the industrious distaff. An elderly
lady describes them as haveing something like the appearance of "Wheat
Shells".
Before the very old school on the crown of Kyleshill was
built, the rocky piece of waste ground bore so much of the appearance of more
ancient days and protruded its jagged brow with such impressive prominence
that children spoke of the Kyleshill Rock In hushed and awe stricken tones.
There was a great gloomy cavity which was said to "gang through to the
ither side o' the Toonhead and naebody o' this side o' time had been able to
fathom it". It was, in fact the "forbidden cave" of Saltcoats
youth and none were so daring as to venture more than a foot or two within and
fill the cavernous depths with brain-splitting shrikes. The Slaughter Houses
sit upon the old house and steading possessed by Skipper Rob Brown in 1718 and
were acquired by the Commissioners in 1897.
