THE Prince and the Miners - sounds too unglamorous to be a Disney production. But in its own way it is bringing a touch of vibrancy and colour to an overlooked tract of Scotland.
If you head south into Ayrshire, turn left at Kilmarnock onto the A76 that meanders through the swathes of Ayrshire away from the coast, all the way to Dumfries. The villages you pass through are not the quaint enclaves of tourism brochures. Auchinleck, Mauchline, Cumnock, New Cumnock, all owe much of their history to coal mining. But life has not been kind since the mines closed. New Cumnock had a population of 7000. It has dwindled to under 3000. Not only did the mines shut, but the other big employer, textile firm Hall's - makers of sports socks - also closed down.
East Ayrshire Council, with little money to throw around, deployed a survival plan that merely consisted of bulldozing the empty council houses, and closing the library. Just as it was down, the village was then kicked in the teeth by an architecture magazine awarding it the Carbuncle Award four years ago for basically being the most dismal place in Scotland. Harsh.
So if you drive to New Cumnock now on the A76 you will see an unremarkable concrete wall on the left-hand side. You might assume it is the ground of one of the fearsome Junior Football clubs that pepper the area. But go in the entrance and you will drop your jaw in awe. There, shimmering before you, is a beguiling rectangle of blue water. It is Scotland's only outdoor heated freshwater swimming pool. It is 25 metres long, and 2.6 metres at the deep end - a sizeable eight-and-a-half feet. And it is open all summer, with a cosy 30 degree temperature.
It opened for the season last week with 50 children lined along the side for the big dive in. As the disk jockey helpfully shouted: "If you cannae swim, make sure you're jumpin' into the shallow end. We have lifeguards here, but they're no' planning on getting their uniforms wet." I'm reminded how painfully shiny white Scottish bodies are that have not seen daylight for months. There are no fake tans here.
Now the pool was built in the sixties by the then Ayr County Council and has the utilitarian look you would expect of council-inspired sixties architecture. But it is spick-and-span, freshly painted, clean, and inviting in a minimalist way. And it only survives because the people of New Cumnock said enough was enough and saved it. You see East Ayrshire Council's plan was also to close the pool to save money. There is though a no-nonsense determination about mining folk. Volunteers took it over. Each year they have to raise £60,000 to keep it going. Just filling it with water costs £8000, then there is the boiler, the heating bills, the lifeguards. Yet it only costs £1.50 for a child to spend as long as they want there.
"You can bring the kids, have a roll and sausage for lunch, and still only spend a tenner aw day," says secretary of the pool committee, Gette Fulton, herself a miner's wife. Now Gette would only speak to me if I emphasised that this was a team effort. No one gets too big for their boots in a mining village.
There are coffee mornings, book sales and so on to raise money. There are funds they can tap into. There is still some open-cast mining, and because of the scars on the countryside, there is money from the mines for local charities. "The Minerals Trust it is cried," says Gette. "I think it's half-a-croon a ton they pay into it. They've been very good to us." Money comes also from a similar fund for the windfarms nearby.
There have been set-backs. Some teenagers, not local, broke in one night, vandalised and broke everything they could. The volunteers who arrived the next day simply rolled up their sleeves and started the big clean-up. Word got around. Firms donated paint and brushes. Before long £10,000 had been collected to repair the smashed boiler. More recently the boiler-room was flooded when the River Afton, not being as sweet as Rabbie Burns described it, burst its banks. That meant yet another clean-up. Being on the committee, one realises, is a lot harder work than simply keeping the minutes.
Then one day Prince Charles looked in. Unannounced, he just wanted to see what they were up to. The Prince is masterminding the resurrection of Dumfries House, a few miles up the A76. Admittedly, miners are not natural royalists. But as Gette tells me about the prince: "A nicer man to speak to, you couldn't meet."
Now the Prince himself doesn't spend money. But he knows a lot of people who do. He opens doors that ordinary folk can only dream about walking through. There is the Great Steward of Scotland's Dumfries House Trust. The Prince has more titles than Rangers and Celtic put together and one of them is the Great Steward of Scotland. His trust, which is making Dumfries House and its grounds a growing tourist attraction, wants to help New Cumnock as well. Their plans, in conjunction with the pool volunteers, is to create a new town square at New Cumnock which the pool will look onto. The walls and roof of the swimming pool complex will be renovated to make it look more of an attraction and less of a concrete fortress. The basic changing rooms will be improved. The old town hall across the road is being renovated. A heritage centre will be built. New Cumnock might one day win an architecture award rather than attract denigration.
But I have to ask Gette. An open air pool? I know it's heated, but doesn't it rain an awful lot? "Oh that's the best time to come," she says. "The cold rain hits the warm water and you swim through clouds of steam. It's marvellous." Let's hope that's a word we hear more of about New Cumnock. The folk deserve it.
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