Skate trips to Callendar
Reasons to head to the Trossachs
For those not in the know, Callendar (and it is spelt like that) is a small, nearly in the Highlands town to the north of Stirling and Dunblane. Andy Murray and a horrible school shooting, are pretty much all Dunblane is famous for; it was the nearest train station to Callendar, but you couldn’t get a bus from there, so I had to get off the train at Stirling and catch a blue bus that took about an hour to do the 15 mile journey to Callendar, which included going into a very small village and then reversing back out - and I am not making this up!
Once upon a time there was a TV series called Dr. Finlay’s Casebook, an early Scottish drama - that was Callendar; it was a quaint town of wool shops, American tourists and tea rooms. It had one secondary school and many of the students had to board, as they came from all across the district.
In addition to that, there were three skaters, actually there were only two, one came from Dunblane. As my memory fails, I can only remember Pete Cummins, who I will talk about later.
Anyway, this was the early 1980’s and I was about 17, and I would go there many weekends in a row to skate. The scene was changing, and whilst we had Livi, the next big thing was vert ramps. We were exposed to these via skate mags and the main one I remember is Fallbrook.
Callendar looked nothing like this! Perhaps the only resemblance was there was countryside in the background. Those days were long hot summers, showing off very basic tricks on a very rickety ramp to tourists who wandered past. The ramp itself had been built by the locals out of whatever they could find. The platform was, pretty much, a sheet of 8 x 4 ply with minimal support. How it managed to hold a couple of skaters, I’ll never know.
The ramp was in an old railway cutting, so the tourists would stand at the top and wonder at the exploits of the teenagers below as we did rock ‘n’ rolls, grinds and little else, as it was about 12 foot wide, didn’t hit vert and had transitions like a ten bob bit. But it was our Fallbrook, our special summer place.
The cutting would also become a place of embarrassment for me. One weekend Aljo (Alan Burr?) came over on his new Motocross bike; as it was gravel I tried wheel spinning it, until I final hit some compacted ground and I flipped the thing on top of me.
The skaters who I can’t remember, one lived in an apartment in a very old Scottish stone building overlooking a river. His dad was, I believe, an architect and he was pretty eccentric. I remember him playing us, very loudly on his impressive stereo a piece of classical music that had the words “Hail the sea”; he would repeat it over and over, embarrassing his son.
The other, the one from Dunblane, was the son of a Church of Scotland minister. Occasionally I would get a lift to Dunblane station on my return journey.
Pete Cummins, who now IS an architect, was the one whom I remember most. We all frequently stayed at his house. I think they did bed and breakfast, but we mainly crashed in his room. He had a cute sister and I remember spending a night with her listening to the Teardrop Explodes in their sleep out in the garden - happy days.
It was around this time that a few interesting things happened. At this time I was hanging with Allan Niblo (better known as ‘Nibs’), one of the Grangemouth skaters, and he was also a frequent visitor to Callendar (he’s in the second picture, red t-shirt at the top of the bank). I had a mobile disco and got the gig to do the weekly Scouts disco, which largely consisted of playing Sweet Home Alabama and various AC-DC tunes along with current hits. Nibs had acquired a Fiat 127, and despite not having a licence, we would use that to get to the hall. It was also a great opportunity for us to meet the local girls, of whom there were many fascinated with the out-of-town skaters. Nibs 127 was maroon; he eventually got busted driving with a car full of skaters.
Also around this time Pete Cummins got into the Velvet Underground, so plenty of time was spent learning ‘Sweet Jane’, with a view to forming a band, which never really materialised. Someone had a Casio VL-10, and this seemed to be a part of the band too.
These formative years were a part of me growing up; I spent time in England with Nibs too, at my mother’s house, but our friendship sadly broke down once I moved to England.
I often wonder what became of the ramp, and I have not been back to Callendar for probably 40 years - I am pretty sure it was located here