KYQ4: Fife

Monday, 31 August 2015

Fife

New aircraft carrier sections on the way to Rosyth

I don't know what it is about Fife, but I just don't get on with it. Why is it a kingdom? Why do so many fifers leave Fife? True, there are lots of bridges, and another is on the way. The west coast of Scotland and its islands are magical places and the Highlands from Stirling to Sutherland have landscapes and settlements that constantly inspire further exploration. Dumfries and the Borders are rural idylls, but Fife is a bit like Lanarkshire. It is the part of Scotland that the tourists give a miss, as was recognised in Edwin Muir's 'The Scottish Journey'. I had lived in Lanarkshire for two years and discovered the humour and warmth of its people compensated for the foreboding natural and manmade environment.

My numerous trips to Fife mainly resulted from some of the family hailing from Dunfermline. One of our offspring had flown the nest for St Andrew's, which was also the venue for dozens of conferences. I was only inspired twice in Fife: once by a crazy midsummer party near Lundin Links in the 1970s and again on a perfect May day on the beach with our young family at St Andrew's in 1991. Otherwise, my images of Fife are shivering by the north sea fishing villages, travelling through the industrial dereliction from former coal mining and shipbuilding centres and heading for the Forth, Tay and Kincardine bridges that are the escape routes from Fife.

My feelings are not shared by other members of the family, so when I needed some hedging plants, I decided that a trip to Fife would be in order. The nursery was in Glenrothes, not the finest monument to civic architecture and planning. The nursery looked forlorn on Saturday lunchtime; they had almost gone bust during the recession, as the manager told us, "the population of Glenrothes does not generate much expenditure on plants, even in the best of times". Instead, the nursery had focused on online sales, and this allowed the business to flourish, with sales to the public now a marginal activity.

The nursery exemplified much about Fife, a place that exports people and things. The exodus of workers to Edinburgh is so strong that a new road bridge is under construction just a couple of hundred yards upstream of the present one. The massive Amazon warehouse, or, as it prefers to be known, Fulfilment Centre, serves the whole of Scotland with goods made elsewhere, and even the fabrication of the new aircraft carrier at Rosyth has been a case of welding together sections brought in from elsewhere. Fife has been the home of influential folk like Adam Smith, Gordon Brown, Andrew Carnegie, the Proclaimers, Singing Kettle, Jocky Wilson, Nazareth and Rebus, but even these made their fortunes or reputations in other places.

We continued to Falkland and had a simple lunch and a walk around this attractive village. It was heaving with visitors even on a cold March day. We returned by the Coalpit burn road through the Lomond hills, and then dallied at the coastal towns of Aberdour and Culross. They had the faded charm of the twentieth century about them, but lacked the Gulf Stream effervescence of the west coast villages.

Ian McEwan, the novelist of the Rebus books, has an interesting take on his home region. "No, Fife is a strange place; it is shaped like a terrier’s head. Later on, I learned that Fifers were seen as being different from other Scots. One saying from folklore had it that ‘ye need a lang spune to sup wi’ a Fifer’. I think this means we are close-knit … or maybe just keen to hold on to what we’ve got. The region of Scotland of which Fife is part was in ancient times known as Fib, which can, of course, also mean a lie, and Fifers have always been great storytellers." It explains a lot.