A tunnel linking Scotland and Northern Ireland? Fantasy has replaced British modesty | Ian Jack
The proposed route stirs memories of a lost, romantic train journey and is stoking the imaginations of politicians
Galloway, as John Buchan wrote in The Thirty-Nine Steps, is “the nearest wild part of Scotland”, by which he meant the nearest to England, and in this particular context to the London railway terminus of St Pancras, where his hero, Richard Hannay, boards a train on a morning some time before the first world war, a fugitive from a foreign enemy and English law. He heads north, and changes at Dumfries to the slow Galloway train that “rumbled slowly into a land of little wooded glens and then to a great, wide moorland place, gleaming with lochs”.
The familiar story unfolds. He leaves the train at a wayside station, enjoys the hospitality (ham and eggs, and scones) of a luckily encountered shepherd’s wife, and the next morning, hoping to throw his pursuers off the scent, strides out across the moors to a station further west, intending to take a train back towards Dumfries and London. This second station is described in detail. The moor “surges up” around it, leaving just enough room for a single line of track and a slender siding, together with a waiting room, an office, the stationmaster’s cottage and “a tiny yard of gooseberries and sweet-william”. A lonely place: “There seemed no road to it from anywhere.” A loch – “a little tarn” – lies close by. Hannay buys a ticket and doubles back on the next eastbound train.
