Quoth Banks:
This is the Ballast-Mound, the World-Hill, Prentice,” she said, and I could just make out her small thin smile by the light of the gibbous moon. “When the ships came here, from all over the world, for whatever it was they were shipping from here at the time, they would sometimes arrive unladen, just ballast in them; you know?”
She looked at me. I nodded. “Ballast; yeah, I know what ballast is; stops ships doing a Herald of Free Enterprise.”
“Just rocks, picked up from wherever the ship last set sail from,” Ash said, looking to the west again. “But when it got here they didn’t need it, so they dumped it —»
“Here?” I breathed, looking at the modest mound with new respect. “Always here?”
“That’s what my grampa told me, when I was a bairn,” Ash said. “He used to work in the docks. Rolling barrels, catching slings, loading sacks and crates in the holds; drove a crane, later.” (Ashley pronounced the word “cran’, in the appropriate Clyde-side manner.) I stood amazed; I wasn’t supposed to be getting ashamed at my lack of historical knowledge until Monday, back at Uni.
“‘Hen, he’d say, ‘There’s aw ra wurld unner yon tarp a grass.»
It’s a lovely idea for those who are inclined towards travel and romanticised, exotic, long sea journeys; and although the site described in the book doesn’t exactly exist, it turns out that there is at least one, perhaps more than one, actual “exotic” – or perhaps “metropolitan” – ballast mound in the world.
Over to Tom:
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