It’s difficult to imagine a more beautiful setting for a cottage than the fringes of Orchardton Bay near Palnackie.
But for farm worker Kenny Irving, Douganhill is also his place of work, its rich acres home to both livestock and people.
Over on the other side of the Almorness peninsula the Urr meets the sea at Kippford, a river in which, as chairman of Castle Douglas Angling Association, Kenny takes a special interest.
Born at Cresswell maternity hospital at Dumfries, Kenny tells me he’s the eldest of four children and spent his first two years of life in a farm cottage at Ecclefechan.
His father George and mother Ina were hard working folk and in 1965 the family moved to Lanarkshire when George got the dairyman’s job at Teaths farm, high above Kirkfieldbank on the River Clyde.
“What a view you got – the farm sat up on the hill overlooking Lanark to the right and in the other direction you could look straight down the Clyde Valley over to Motherwell and Hamilton,” Kenny recalls.
“At the time the blast furnaces at Ravenscraig were on the go and if the slag doors were open when they were cleaning them out you could see the glow of the furnaces, plain as day.
“We stayed in a wee agricultural council house and a wee minibus would pick us up to take us to Hawkshill Primary School.
“I mind one year, maybe 1969, they experimented with a two-hour clock change which meant in winter it was pitch black when the bus picked you up at 8.30.
There was an awfy row about it in Scotland – up in the isles the days were even shorter and it just lasted a year.”
At Teaths, from a young age Kenny was helping his father round the place.
“I would be feeding calves when I was seven or eight then when I got a bit older I’d help with the hay,” he says.
“The mainstay for winter forage was wee square bales of hay and my job was to steer the tractor.
“My father would jump off the trailer to throw the bales on and I’d stop now and again so he could build them up.
“I’d do that until enough men were there to help him.
“And that’s how I learned to drive a tractor.
“It was a nice place – there was an old derelict cottage which had a nice orchard-type garden with gooseberry and blackcurrant bushes.
“We would get sent to pick the fruit when it was ripe.
“If we were at the hay at the time I hated doing that – I would rather be in the fields.”
At the age of 12 the Irving clan moved to Whiteside at Waterside, a small village outside Lesmahagow.
“Low Whiteside was the main farm and we stayed at High Whiteside,” Kenny recalls.
“We had some really bad winters up there – we missed weeks of the school some years.
“The wee farm road was sunk into the ground and every time it was cleared of snow the wind blew it back in again.
“It only needed two or three inches – the wind would fill in the road to three or four feet deep and nothing could move.”
Whiteside had quite an advanced dairy for the times, Kenny explains, with a “herring bone” parlour comprising a central spine of milking machines handling 12 cows at a time, six stationed at each side.
“You would not get a dairy that size these days,” reflects Kenny.
“One farm near us has 2,000 cows and a lot round here are all into robots.
“It’s factory farming now, like.”
After attending Lesmahagow High School Kenny tells me he went to Larkhall Academy and got three Highers – Maths, English and Chemistry.
“All through school I always got put in the top English class but I could never understand why,” he laughs.
“I never thought I had a good grasp of English.
“We were encouraged to do a foreign language up to second year then you could choose your options.
“But I bloody refused to do French – I got 73 per cent in my second year exam but got two of the belt off the teacher because she thought I should have been in the eighties!
“So I didn’t take it and I kind of regretted that when we went into Europe.”
In late 1970s Scotland, the youth of neighbouring towns and villages were often bitter rivals – and Lanarkshire was no different,
“We were lucky staying in Waterside,” he says.
“We had Coalburn, Blackwood, Lesmahagow and Kirkmuirhill who all had their ain wee gangs.
“At the start of the school year they had to stamp their authority and there was some battles used to go on.
“The buses would stop directly outside the school playground and the Kirkmuirhill bus would arrive before the Coalburn one.
“The Kirkmuirhill boys would lie in wait and ambush the Coalburn boys – they could hardly get off the bus.
“It was a right battle – there were chains and belts being used.
“There were big meetings in the school and the police got involved and it got better after that.”
Kenny recalls with a smile how he discovered the joys of fishing – a pastime for which his enthusiasm remains undimmed.
“We had the Nethan and Logan burns near to where I stayed,” he says.
“When I was about 13 my next door neighbour Ian Harrison, who was a year older than me, got me into fishing.
“I went once or twice and caught the bug and spent a lot of time down the river learning myself.
“It was always with a worm or spinner to start with – and if you caught a nice three-quarter-pound broonie you thought you had landed a monster.
“I quickly learned how to gut them and mother would score the skin, rub them in butter, roll them in oatmeal and fry them in the pan.
“They were brilliant.
“Ian and his older brother were down the water most days.
“Once I got to know what I was doing when the trout season started on March 15 it became a competition between the three of us to see who could catch the first fish of he season.
“I loved getting out and about when I was a boy – I was interested in birds and would rake round all the hedgerows watching for all the different species.
“But the fishing took me away from the birding – it was the thrill of the tug, as they say.”
Kenny remembers the first time he made the switch to what most anglers consider to be the truest form of the sport – the fly.
“I would be about 16 when I started dabbling with the fly rod,” he smiles.
“My school pal used to go and fish the Clyde and this day me and him went down the Logan, which flows into it.
“I was using a wee Black Pennell fly and my pal said ‘you’ll no catch anything wi’ that!’
“And what happened? Hey presto, a wee troot grabbed it – and that was me hooked on the fly fishing.”
Despite spending hours on the riverbank Kenny still found time to land a bigger prize – his future wife Andrea.
“We met at an 18th birthday party of a mutual friend,” he smiles.
“Basically that was that – I would have been 19 and we married in 1986, when I was 23.
“We moved into a wee cottage at Drumalbin near Biggar.
“I was a general farm worker and the farm had a dairy and sheep.
“It was only summer cover because the farmer’s son was at agricultural college – but I was kept on for five years.
“I was up at 7.30am to feed the calves and the outside stock then depending on the season it would be the silage or hay.
“If it was the spring they would grow a lot of grain crops, oats and barley.
“Some barley was grown to be malted for whisky but it got rejected a lot and would end up going for feed.
“I enjoyed the job very much – the farmer, William Bannantyne, was a worker as well and would not ask you to do anything that he would not do himself.
“It was a different ethos from some of these management agency places.”
Kenny’s fishing progressed on the Clyde and Douglas Water and on odd days he would head down to the Haugh to fish the Urr for salmon.
“I caught my first fish in October, 1988, on Castle Douglas Angling Association water at the Salmon Pool on Spottes Estate,” he says.
“It was a grilse (a salmon returning to the river for the first time) of six or seven pounds.
“Then the next week I went to Wigtownshire and caught another grilse at Dalreagle on the Bladnoch.
“‘This salmon fishing is easy’ I thought – but it took me three years before I caught another one!”
Kenny and Andrea came to Galloway in 1989 when he landed a job with James Biggar at Chapelton at the Haugh of Urr then in 1996 came to Douganhill, where “Our two lassies were born when we were at Chapelton, Laura in 1990 and Molly in 1993,” Kenny smiles.
“When I was at Chapelton I heard about this job by word of mouth.
“One of the boys that worked on the estate was pally with one of the boys I worked beside.
“I came down for interview thinking the job would not be for me but they came back to me a said if I wanted the job it was mine.
“At Chapelton the main problem was that they had an outside team of four men who were all in their sixties.
“The farm was keen to get younger blood in with different ideas and that was me.
“You had to manage this team of older boys but they were not for changing anything – they were that set in their ways.
“The biggest problem was young blood telling them what to do.
“They had been there since their teenage years.
“They knew what they were doing and were not going to change for nobody – even the boss man struggled.
“I went there in 1989 and left in ’96, when I was 33.
“When I came here the estate manager stayed at the place.
“You had free rein and if there was any problems the factor was a practical man and would help.
“But two years after I came he moved on and a management agency took over and the atmosphere changed overnight.
“Every penny was a prisoner – before them things were being done because they needed done and it was the right thing to do.”
Shortly after he arrived at Douganhill. Kenny joined the committee of Castle Douglas Angling Association.
He’s been chairman for the past eight or nine years and is currently secretary as well.
“Membership of the club is 70 plus but when I came down in the 1990s it was over 100,” he tells me.
“There seems to be a generation missing – there’s the older ones then a gap.
“You have to try to get your juniors but it’s very hard.
“We offered under-16s a free ticket and gave out ten or eleven but out of those only two are active members.
“It’s social media, mobile phones and computers the young ones are more interested in.
“This year we are linking up with Dalbeattie Angling Association because they are finding the same problem.
“Between the two associations we are looking at ways of encouraging more young ones into the sport – if you don’t get juniors you wont have any clubs.
“We are trying to focus on the juniors who are keen to talk to their pals to get them to come along.
“There’s no better way to get the young ones involved than if they are talking among themselves.”
Kenny reckons the club is in a stronger position now thanks to concerted efforts to steady the ship.
“Shortly after I joined the committee the meetings started to fall by the wayside and I could see that unless we pulled our socks up the club was going to go to rack and ruin,” he says.
The Urr remains an important salmon river and although much smaller than the Spey or Tweed carries a lot of power when in spate which Kenny explains can create different problems.
“In December, 2015, a lot of the riverbank got totally washed out in a record flood.
“It came right over the banks and was 4.5 metres above mean level – that’s 15 feet.
“The Galloway Fisheries Trust do electro fishing every year and we were surprised when their 2016 survey still showed a healthy population of salmon fry in the river which meant the our fear of the salmon spawning redds being washed out were not realised.
“The fight you get from a fresh run salmon is thrilling – the tug is the drug as they say.
“CDAA is lucky because they have got Loch Roan – this year there has been no water in the river at all.”
