That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Dunoon. Any reference to a town not shown on common maps or listed in recent guidebooks would have interested me, and the old man's odd manner of allusion roused something like real curiosity. A town able to inspire such dislike in it its neighbors, I thought, must be at least rather unusual, and worthy of a tourist's attention. Time permitting, I would stop off there and so I asked the man to tell me something about it. He was very deliberate, and spoke with an air of feeling slightly superior to what he said.

"Dunoon? Well, it's a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the Clyde. Used to be almost a city - quite a port after the War - but all gone to pieces in the last thirty years or so.

"More empty houses than there are people, I guess, and no business to speak of except shoplifting and cigarette smuggling. Everybody trades mostly either here or in Gourock or Greenock. Once they had quite a few mills, but nothing's left now except one Buckfast refinery running on the leanest kind of part time.

"Noo, are ye gonnae buy a Big Issue or are ye gonnae get tae fuck and stop annoyin me?

With profound apologies to H.P. Lovecraft, as the above was ripped mercilessly from his short story "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" to make a clumsy point about the Scottish town of Dunoon on the Cowal Peninsula.

Thats 4 times I've had to travel to Dunoon in the last 2 weeks, and the atmosphere in the place gets weirder every time. It's only about 30 miles in a straight line there from Glasgow, but given the sea lochs and fuckin great river in the way, it’s a bit of a hassle to get to. The quickest route is by driving to Gourock and catching the Western Ferry to Dunoon. Reasonably easy, but it can take 90 minutes to 2 hours to make the trip. Mind you, to get there overland, you need to take a huge detour and end up driving something like 70 miles through some pretty serious West Highland countryside.
So despite only being 30 miles from the centre of Glasgow, Dunoon feels pretty fucking remote. All it would take is some stormy weather to cut off the road and interrupt the ferries and you'd be stuck there.
With wooded hills looming over it, one road in and out, the reliance on river ferries, the general air of decay and it's infamous soapstone carving of Dagon in the town square, it would make a fucking great location for a horror story. Unfortunately, that story has already been written and was called "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".

Bastard.

There's a vague, undefinable air of unreality going on. It’s quiet, dead quiet. You can see civilisation, almost touch it, with Gourock being just over the river, but it might as well be on the other side of the moon.
Fuck sake, I think I must be the only person in the history of the written word to describe Gourock as “civilisation”. That is how rattled I am.
Consider, where else in Britain could you expect to hear stories of US Naval vessels threatening to fire on civilian passenger ferries?

Seriously.

During a recent exercise, some over sensitive US vessel threatened to sink the Kilcreggan to Dunoon ferry for getting too close.
That ship has issues.
I know US vessels have been attacked in friendly waters before, USS Cole for example, but for fuck sake, that was because it was parked in Aden, not cruising off fucking Helensburgh.

Master of understatement that he is, the Captain of the Kenilworth said:

"If you've got a big battleship loaded with guns bearing down on you and threatening to shoot, it's quite scary."

No fucking shit.
That said, the cunt driving the ferry needs his ticket revoked for letting the side down in shocking style by his response to the US ship's radioed warning:

"Unidentified vessel approaching on my starboard side, please identify yourself. If you fail to do so, we will open fire on you with live ammunition."

The perfect response, in keeping with Clyde naval tradition, would of course have been, simply,

"Come ahead ya cunt"

rather than the more likely

"ohfucknodon'tfuckinshootI'lldowhateveryouwantjustdon'tkillmeeeeee!"

Understandable, but still disappointing, I mean, what was the USS Intimacy Issues actually going to do? Sink a passenger ferry in the middle of that notorious maritime flashpoint, the Firth of Clyde?
Not being a Naval man, I don't really know how that would go down, exactly, but I get the sneaking suspicion the guy that issued that order would have some explaining to do.

However, it's not just Innsmouth, sorry Dunoon that gives me the willies, that whole area of Argyll makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I’m not entirely sure why.
Maybe it's the scenery, the typical weather or it’s relative emptiness compared to the nearby central belt, or a combination of all those things.
Could be.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's the fact that the area is home to possibly the greatest concentration of nuclear explosive power in western Europe, with Faslane Naval Base on the Gare Loch being home to our Trident submarine fleet and Coulport on Loch Long being the storage facility for Trident's nuclear warheads. For added nuclear fun, up to relatively recently there was also a US Polaris submarine base in the wonderfully named Holy Loch.
Put another way, the detonation of all that megatonnage would provide enough heat, by conservative estimates, that the women in my office would stop complaining about the cold and allow me to open the window a few inches.
So, the proximity of all that hardware tends to focus my mind a little bit. The thought of all the reciprocal Soviet megatonnage pointing the other way, i.e. at me, tends to focus it intensely enough to cut glass with.
Kind of hard to appreciate the wonderful view when your minds eye keeps picturing everything for miles around vanishing instantly in a hellish nuclear firestorm.