There is barely a ripple on the water. It’s the same colour as the sky above, metallic, like the dull grey of the plates of the great ships we built on this river, when one in every five of them cutting through the world’s oceans came from the Clyde.

Now, we can’t even manage to bring in a couple of ferries on time and on cost.

It is the morning after the dream before – not that it was much of a dream just to get to the next stage of the Euros – and already the recriminations are under way. That’s something we are good at. 

The ferry MV Argyle – built for CalMac, not on the Clyde but in Gdansk – is heading for Rothesay with just a sprinkling of passengers, which is just as well because the notice pinned to the wall at the bottom of the gull’s neck leading to the quay at Wemyss Bay warns that it’s first come, first served and only 84 foot passengers will be allowed.

You can’t even buy a through ticket from Glasgow on the connecting train – you have to chance that the ship quota won’t be reached and you’ll be quick enough, or lucky, to make the cut. Not that swift feet or sharp elbows are neede as there are less than a couple of dozen people wanting to board.

Bay watch
WEMYSS Bay station is a treat, an architectural gem, all metal looping arches and glass, and the curving, descending walkway which has suffered the footsteps of tens of millions of Glaswegians, tramping the floor of massive wooden sleepers, like a boardwalk with attitude.

Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute, used to have its prosperity packed into two weeks in July, when the engineering works and the shipyards heaved to a stop for the Glasgow Fair as the workers and their families went down the Clyde on holiday. Sure, there was the September weekend, too.

The rule was that the working classes went to Bute, the middle classes – and they were few – to Arran, probably by car.
Central Station then was heaving as thousands of people with squalling weans (I was one of them) waited for one of the many trains and then squeezed into the soot-blackened carriages.

At the other end, after disembarking, densely packed in the hundreds, holidaymakers marched down to one of the waiting boats, probably a paddle steamer – the Jeanie Deans, the Caledonia or, the last one still surviving, the Waverley.

There was an armada of them then – they seemed to queue up to wait for a berth at Rothesay. Then they would spill even more people into the douce streets for the hotels, the B&Bs, the pubs, the dancing at the Pavilion (now fenced off and fruitlessly hoping for  reincarnation), or the acts – the comedians and showgirls at the Winter Gardens which is now, or will be when it reopens, the Isle of Bute Discovery Centre.

Lack of vision?
THEN came the package holiday – where it was cheaper to fly to Benidorm for booze and sunstroke rather than two weeks with iffy weather, a seaside landlady, putting and Punch ’n’ Judy – which put tourism on life support on Bute, where it remains. Didn’t anyone see it coming?

It’s not as if it arrived overnight in a squadron of Thomson budget jets. Why was there no vision, no diversification plan – and why isn’t there still?

Bute is a beautiful island with lovely beaches, hills, the neo-Gothic Mount Stuart House, a historic castle, woods, Ardencraig Gardens (now under threat) – and it’s in easy touch of Glasgow, or it would be if ScotRail and CalMac could co-ordinate properly. 

It also has a declining population: down 10 per cent in a decade, to 6,498 in 2011. Inexorable it seems. Tourism too. How long before the last tourist drops the last pokey hat on Rothesay Esplanade?

My three-coach, ancient and dirty train from Central chunters on for just under an hour, stopping at stations like Paisley and Bishopton and Port Glasgow, but missing out IBM Halt outside Greenock. 

From the window, the bones of what was our early Silicon Glen are poking through the weeds, the concrete skeletons stretching over a mile along, marking where the factory buildings were, where 5,000 people used to work, until Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and their micro-computers finished IBM and local production. 

By September last year, all the buildings on the Spango Valley campus had been razed. The Easdale Brothers Sandy and James, local men who are owners of McGill’s bus group, former investors and directors of Rangers, bought the site and are planning a £100 million mixed-use retail and housing development on it, which would involve reopening the station. Well, we’ll see.

On Rothesay’s seafront half of the shops and hotels which might be preparing for an influx of tourists or staycationers are closed, marked by the peeling signs on facades of grand buildings. 

Hotel closures
AMONG the closures is the elegant, imperious Glenburn Hotel, on a hill overlooking the bay with a view to the Kyles of Bute and Loch Striven, and 97 steps (I counted) from the iron balconies and balustrades where pink gins were sipped, down through palm trees and rhododendrons to the street. 

You wouldn’t know it was gone if you didn’t get up close – no shuttered windows or heavily-barred doors. Looking through ground-floor windows there are still bottles on tables, a plastic bag next to chairs, and cleaning materials beneath chunky wooden furniture.

It’s as if there has been a fire alarm, or some other event, to clear out staff and guests temporarily and they’ll be back shortly. They won’t.

The place used to put up not just wealthy visitors but also politicians like Scottish Secretary Willie Ross and trade union barons such as Mick McGahey, drinking malt whiskies into the wee hours. Then they went elsewhere for their conferences and jollies, and not to the Winter Gardens or the Glenburn.

The then-four-star hotel was owned by leisure and tourism company Shearings, sustained for years by its coach parties of people mainly from working-class towns in the north of England, seeing the sights through the windows and with entertainment laid on in the evenings. Next day they would board the buses and move on to another hotel and dance troupe.

Jobs disaster
IN 2016, Shearings sold out to two Malaysians Alvin and Peter Tey, and two Chinese men, Jingye and Xuejia Wang, who had adventurous plans.

Then last April the tour company folded, owing £200m with the loss of 2,500 jobs – and the busloads of visitors stopped coming to the Glenburn. Who knows if they ever will again?

This isn’t a lament for a lost Scotland – much of what has gone deserved to go – but it doesn’t say a lot for us when a place which should be bustling and thriving, which has the basic elements, is so forlorn.

They’re turning them away on Skye, campervan owners are battering each other in lay-bys on single-track roads in the Highlands, but Bute is bypassed. 

There is never going to be the tourist glut again and I doubt if even a stay at home summer will help. Is it sentimental to wish for something other than managed decline? Is it unrealistic to expect it?

When I get off the boat back at Wemyss Bay, the connecting train is waiting at the platform. Just as I and other passengers are yards from the platform the guard waves it off and we are left watching its rear end disappear.

I am trying not to think it symbolic.