The Lumber Room: Sherlockian Sojourns #58: 'For a second or two we might have been a group of statues' [STUD]

Having spent the previous day at the Edinburgh Fringe, including watching a dramatisation of ‘The Speckled Band’, it was time for the last day of my mega-sojourn. Stowing my excess luggage in a locker at Glasgow’s Buchanan Street Bus Station, I caught a bus to Ayr, where having picked up a local bus I continued on for a further ten minutes.

Getting off the bus I made my way into Rozelle Park, home to ‘Story Stroll’, a family-friendly self-led trail featuring 11 spectacular willow sculptures of literary characters with a Scottish link, specially created by local artist David Powell. These unsurprisingly featured a Sherlock Holmes sculpture, picked due his literary agent being Edinburgh-born Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I have previously visited Sherlock Holmes statues in London, Edinburgh (which was due to be returned to Picardy Place after several years of roadworks the next week), Meiringen in Switzerland, and Dorsington.

Using my printed off map, I made my way to the Holmes sculpture first, initially having trouble finding it due it being on the other side of a hedge. Photos taken from all sides, and I was moving off to the next sculpture.

This was Squirrel Nutkin, as Beatrix Potter’s family had strong connections to Scotland and she holidayed frequently in Perthshire. A short distance away were the next two – the Sorting Hat from the ‘Harry Potter’ books written in Edinburgh, and Katie Morag a young girl who lives on a fictional Scottish island in a series named after her.

I then made my way to the Duck Pond, where on the far side I found Captain James Hook, from ‘Peter Pan’, written by Scottish novelist and playwright (and Conan Doyle’s collaborator on the opera ‘Jane Annie’), JM Barrie. There was no sign of a Peter Pan sculpture that should also have been there, but a quick check of the park website revealed that he was ‘visiting Neverland just now’, but would be back soon. (It also indicated the Peter Rabbit sculpture was ‘on his holidays). A short distance away was Shrek, seemingly due to his Scottish accent in the film (the author of the original book was American). The website also indicates that VisitScotland honoured Shrek with a kilt made in a specially designed tartan by Lochcarron of Scotland.

A short walk took me to Stick Man, the title character in the children’s book by Julia Donaldson, who has lived in Scotland for many years. The penultimate sculpture was Long John Silver from ‘Treasure Island’ by Conan Doyle’s contemporary, Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scottish novelist and poet.

I then visited Rozelle House, which was originally a mansion house at the centre of a country estate built in 1754. As the town of Ayr and village of Alloway had grown around the estate, and the estate had become increasingly expensive to run, the Hamilton's of Rozelle gifted the mansion, and grounds to the people of Ayr in 1968 to be used for culture and recreation. It is now the permanent home to a collection of fifty-four paintings based on ‘Tam O’ Shanter’, arguably Robert Burns most famous poem. The House is also the home to the Ayrshire Yeomanry Museum. Next door, the Maclaurin Gallery had a collection of traditional and modern works by commissioned artists and works purchased by the Maclaurin Trust who are the benefactors of the gallery.

Making my way back to the bus stop, I passed my final sculpture of the day, Rupert the Bear. Although Rupert’s creator, Mary Tourtel, was from Canterbury, one of the illustrators who brought his adventures to life was Alex Cubie, who lived in Girvan, South Ayrshire.

After around five minutes wait, I was catching a bus back into central Ayr, and then a bus back to Glasgow, where I spent the afternoon at the Cathedral, the Charles Rennie Mackintosh House, and the Riverside Museum (which featured a full-size Stormtrooper in its 1980’s Toy Shop window display), as well as undertaking a trail of murals across the city centre, including tributes to its most famous sons, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Billy Connolly, and coming across a familiar looking blue police box.