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SCOTLAND’S AMAZING BLUE BADGE GUIDES, Scottish Life USA, by K Aitken, inspired by Iain MacDonald
Having your own personal guide to pull back the curtain on Scotland's many attractions is a great way to go.
“One of the advantages of a Blue Badge guide,” remarks Iain MacDonald, pointing the way expertly through the gardens behind Robert Burns’s cottage at Alloway in Ayrshire, “is that we always know where the loos are.”
It is, of course, one among a whole high heap of advantages. If you’ve visited Scotland, you will almost certainly have met Iain or one of his colleagues from the Scottish Tourist Guides Association. They are the people who hop nimbly on and off coaches, spooling off an apparently effortless succession of ripe tales and cogent facts through the microphone. They are the people who invite your questions at the end of trips around historic houses or formal gardens or brooding Highland glens, and who are never stumped for an answer. They are also, increasingly, the people to whom discerning visitors are turning for bespoke, customised and reliably insightful personal stewardship around the mysteries and majesties of Scotland.
A growing proportion of business in recent years for the 500 or so STGA guides has been the one-to-one tour: the option of hiring a guide for one or more days to conduct you expertly around a personalised itinerary of your own devising, or the guide’s, or - best of all - a combination of the two. And since 2009 marks the 50th anniversary of the STGA (and the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns’s birth), the moment seemed apt for Scottish Life to try out the service for itself. Which is why a wet and none too warm autumn morning finds your correspondent nursing a welcome cappuccino in a roadside hotel in Ayrshire, and tossing ideas back and forth with Iain MacDonald for a day out in Burns country. Iain is always ready to adapt an itinerary to a customer’s whim, or to one of those abrupt changes in the weather that the visitor to Scotland had better come prepared to enjoy. “I’m always driven by what the customer wants,” he says modestly, “but I can usually chip in a few suggestions of my own.”
Taking the weather into account, we settle on an agenda of largely indoor appeal. We will start with Alloway, where we will inspect Burns’s Cottage, linger over the priceless books and manuscripts in the Burns museum, sample the excellent multi-media rendition of his most famous poem in the grimly-named, but cheery, Tam O’Shanter Experience, and give such attention as the downpour permits to Kirk Alloway, the Burns Monument and the Auld Brig o’ Doon. Then we will take the coast road to Robert Adam’s Georgian masterpiece of Culzean Castle, where this writer’s unashamedly nerdish fascination with American politics has engendered a lifelong wish to sneak a peek at the special apartment that was kept there as a private retreat for President Eisenhower. Finally, hoping the downpour will abate long enough to afford us a glimpse of the striking basalt isle of Ailsa Craig, alias Paddy’s Milestone (which it does), we will take a turn past the championship golf course and famous grand golf hotel at Turnberry, before following the inland road back north via the cottage of Souter Johnnie (Tam’s drinking crony in Tam o’Shanter), the 13th century ruin of Crossraguel Abbey and the restored 17th Century Kennedy castle at Maybole. We climb into Iain’s immaculate VW people carrier, and are off.
Iain, a former senior Glasgow policeman, is tall and genial and bears a marked resemblance (which I’m not quite brave enough to mention) to the actor Robert Vaughan. He converses easily on any topic, with a fund of stories that are full of information but liberally spiced with jokes and anecdotes rather than a dry chronology of names and dates. He is, in short, an excellent story-teller. But he is also a diligent listener, cordially eager to hear his client’s story too. This, he tells me, he regards as a perk: he enjoys meeting interesting people from far-off places. But I sense that there is something more to it, too. As he listens, he quietly measures the client’s prior knowledge of, and level of interest in, the topics that the day’s agenda has to offer, and adjusts his commentary accordingly. I can’t be certain how good he is at this for others, but he gets it spot-on with me.
As we pull in to Alloway, Iain courteously dropping me at the door to escape the rain while he goes off and parks, I become aware another big privilege of having a Blue Badge companion. He greets staff at the various buildings by name, suavely introduces me, exchanges a few quiet words, and before I know it I am enjoying a private viewing of the audio-visual presentations. The National Trust for Scotland is busy transforming the Alloway campus into a national museum centre, and Iain cues in staff to answer those few of my questions about it that he can’t answer himself.
Becoming a Blue Badge guide is not a matter of casual affiliation. Entry standards are high, and the usual route to a badge is a two-year course of study organised by Edinburgh University and the STGA. The training course, for which students pay fees and expenses that can run into multiple thousands of pounds, is rigorous and the tough exams at the end of it put a candidate’s commitment to stringent test. Once qualified, guides are offered continuing personal development via courses and talks to update and expand their knowledge, and there are frequent networking events, at which guides exchange information, stories and experiences. It is a demanding system, widely copied, as the STGA is proud to tell you, by many other countries.
The STGA’s anniversary celebrations vividly illustrate the diversity of its membership. At the same time as two founder-members, aged 97 and 100 respectively, are given honorary life membership, two new Kirkwall guides, aged just 18 and 19, are awarded Yellow Badge status. Yellow Badge guides are qualified in respect of a specific site; Green Badges denote expertise in a specific area or region; and Blue Badge guides are qualified to guide throughout Scotland. At time of writing, there are around 500 STGA guides, 300 of whom hold Blue Badges. Between them, they offer fluency in more than 18 languages, including Russian and Mandarin.
A central appeal of the STGA is the infinite flexibility of its guides to tailor the services they provide to the specifics of individual customer demand. A Blue Badge guide may be leading a walking tour for a small, specialist group one day, conducting a coach party the next, and driving a single customer around a idiosyncratic itinerary on the third. For seasoned guides like Iain, the variety is a big part of the attraction, as is the opportunity to work – or not – when it suits him. All the guides are self-employed, but they are offered work through the STGA’s central booking system, covered by its comprehensive insurance for both professional indemnity and public liability, and, of course, trained to its exacting standards.
Iain has been a guide since he left the police in the mid-1990s, having studied for his Blue Badge at the University of Strathclyde in the evenings and at weekends (there are also distance learning options). Among recent engagements was a two-day tour for a certain Mrs Woods, while her son Tiger was otherwise engaged at the British Open at Troon. Iain sees the STGA as a source of bookings and as a lobbying voice but also, perhaps above all, as a guarantor of standards: “There’s no doubt about it – we are good at what we do,” he says proudly. “We do tend to be very professional at what we do, and the Association looks after the service. It does a bit of marketing and it has started a new initiative, whereby groups of guides and facilitators come together to share good practice. The bottom line is that if you don’t do a good job, you’ll never get asked back by anybody – that’s the quality control!”
Each year, the STGA publishes an invaluable directory of its guides, which includes their contact details, their location, their command of languages, their preferred maximum length of tour and their specialist areas of interest – which range from ghosts and model railways to medicine and Mary Queen of Scots. There is a central booking service, accessed by telephone, fax or e-mail (details below) but no price list. Prices are determined by negotiation with individual guides, thanks to a ruling under UK competition law which prohibits the STGA from publishing even indicative prices. But the examples I’ve heard seem surprisingly modest. You can book a fully qualified guide to drive you around on a one-to-one basis for not much more than £200 a day. Try getting a plumber for that.
Iain, meanwhile, is in full anecdotal flow as we pass the coastal ruin of Dunure Castle, ancestral home of the Kennedy clan, hereditary Earls of Cassilis. In the 16th century, he relates, the family had a minor business disagreement over a land deal with one Alan Stewart, Abbot of Crossraguel. They eventually resolved the issue by inviting Stewart to dinner and roasting him on a spit until he signed the requisite documents. Listening, I make a silent mental note to stay on the right side of the distinguished Kennedy descendant who publishes Scottish Life.
By the time Iain has finished this story, he has brought the car purring to a halt in the middle of the road, just beyond what appears to be the crest of a hill commanding stunning views over Croy Bay to Ailsa Craig. Gently, he eases the handbrake off and, to my vocal astonishment, the car starts to roll uphill. Iain is mischievous enough to try his luck with a tall tale about a hidden electromagnet at the top of the hill. The truth is more prosaic, but no less weird. This is the Electric Brae, one of the strangest places in all Scotland, where by some peculiar optical illusion, the road slopes in the opposite direction from the way your eyes tell you it slopes. You can get some idea of it from the photograph on www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/dunure/electricbrae but there is really no decent substitute for visiting in the company of a local driver who knows exactly where to stop to experience the mystery to its fullest effect.
We pass through the wooded grounds of Culzean Castle by a route other than the one marked for visitors, and pull up in the central courtyard by the main entrance. Strictly speaking we are not, Iain explains cheerfully, allowed to park there (he waves vaguely at a distant public car park, “but I usually get away with it.” Inside, it is not hard to see why, as he once again engages easily in first-name studded conversations with staff. Culzean is eminently worth a visit at any time and in any circumstances (See Scottish Life, Spring 2001), if only to see Adam’s fabulous unsupported circular staircase. I wander contentedly from room to elegant room looking, at Iain’s prompting, for the tiny toy figures that the curatorial staff hide in each room to divert bored children. But the bit I really want to see is not accessible to the general public. Iain’s negotiating skills, it turns out, have opened that door too.
In 1945, the then owners of Culzean – those Kennedys again - offered Dwight D Eisenhower exclusive lifelong use of a specially created apartment complex built around the circular top floor of the castle, in gratitude for the General’s wartime leadership. The family stayed numerous times, including a couple of visits while Ike was President, and the apartment still contains a mock-up of his travelling Presidential office. After his death in 1969, the National Trust for Scotland and Scottish Heritage USA converted it into six top-of-the-market suites, available to rent (double occupancy, bead-and-breakfast, 2008 prices) for £250-375 per night. It is not generally open to itinerant interlopers, like the present writer. Thanks to Iain, the duty manager indulges me with a personal tour of all six suites. Fascinating.
At the end of the day, I have genuinely learned a lot about an area I thought I knew quite well, and have enjoyed every minute. Iain too appears, even after all these years, to have relished the challenge of once more bringing an area alive for a visitor, and we part with friendly wishes. I am one of his last bookings of the season, ahead of a rest over Christmas and New Year. The seasonal nature of the job, he says, is a drawback, though scarcely a compelling one. “I love what I do, and the great thing is that I can always say no. It’s fascinating work. It’s great work. I like my country and I like showing it off to people. Scotland has so much to offer – we may not have the monopoly on countryside or scenery but, by God, we’re class!”
Especially, of course, when you know where the loos are.
By Keith Aitken
Ends
Further information
The Scottish Tourist Guides Association (STGA) is based at Norrie’s House, 18b Broad Street, Stirling FK8 1EF. It publishes the annual STGA Guides List.
The STGA Booking Service can be contacted (telephone & fax) on 0044 (0)1786 451953. Email bookings@stga.co.uk
The STGA’s administrative team can be contacted (telephone & fax) on 0044 (0)1786 447784. Email info@stga.co.uk
‘Thanks are due to Keith Aitken (author), Scottish Life in USA (publisher), Iain MacDonald for being such an ambassador for the STGA and also to Judith Sleigh for pulling everything together.’