Every first Saturday in June, a wooden bird is hoisted up the clock tower of Kilwinning Abbey, and archers gather in the kirkyard below to try to shoot its wings off. This is the papingo shoot, a contest the Ancient Society of Kilwinning Archers traces back to 1483, and it tells you something essential about this North Ayrshire town: history here is not a museum piece. It is something you still do, on a Saturday in June, with longbows and a willing crowd. About twenty-one miles southwest of Glasgow, set on the banks of the River Garnock and known locally as the Crossroads of Ayrshire, Kilwinning is a working town of around seventeen thousand people whose ordinariness conceals a remarkable thickness of story.
The town carries the memory of a saint nobody can quite identify. Scholars have argued the case for centuries. Some place him as Saint Finnian of Moville, the late sixth-century Irish missionary. Others insist he was a Welshman called Vynnyn. The Aberdeen Breviary of 1507 claims him for Scotland outright. In 2001, the University of Glasgow's Professor Owen Clancy added a fresh twist by arguing that Saint Ninian and Saint Finnian were actually one and the same, separated only by a medieval scribe's slip of the pen. If Clancy is right, the missionary to the Picts and the Irishman who landed at Cunninghame may have walked the same path under different names. Whoever Winning was, his cell or 'cillean' gave the town its name, joining Kilmarnock, Kilbride and Kilbirnie in a quiet roll-call of Ayrshire's Celtic Christian past.
Kilwinning's most peculiar distinction is masonic. When the Lodges of Scotland were renumbered, Kilwinning was kept as Lodge Number Zero, the Mother Lodge of Scotland. The Schaw Statutes of 1598 and 1599 already named it the heid and secund ludge of Scotland, and the lodge's own legend pushes its origin back to the twelfth-century building of Kilwinning Abbey, when foreign masons, perhaps from Italy or Cologne, were said to have arrived to raise the Gothic stonework. Whether or not the legend is literal, the fact remains that Freemasons around the world trace their lineage through this small Ayrshire town. The original abbey itself passed to Kelso Abbey around 1140, then to the Earl of Eglinton after the Reformation. The old tower was restored in 1789 and replaced in 1814, but the medieval Abbot Adam's Bridge, widened in 1859, still carries traffic over much of its original stonework.
Just south of town stand the ruins of Eglinton Castle, built between 1797 and 1802 in extravagant Gothic castellated style: a hundred-foot central keep flanked by four seventy-foot towers, second only to Culzean in grandeur. The foundation stone was laid by Alexander Hamilton of Grange, grandfather of the American Alexander Hamilton, an odd transatlantic footnote for an Ayrshire afternoon. In 1839, Archibald Montgomerie, the 13th Earl, hosted the Eglinton Tournament here, a revival-medieval extravaganza that drew thousands. Among the guests was the future Napoleon III. Excursion trains, among the first ever run in Scotland, brought spectators from Ayr before the line was formally open. The tournament was magnificent and, in retrospect, ruinous. It coincided with bottomless spending on Ardrossan harbour and the Glasgow, Paisley and Ardrossan Canal, and the Eglinton fortune never recovered. The castle was unroofed in 1925, used for Commando demolition practice in World War II, and reduced to its present level in 1973.
Kilwinning was a noted centre of archery in medieval times, then a place of coal, quarrying, iron-founding and textiles. The Pringle knitwear company began here. Older residents still call the Blacklands area the Ironworks, after the Eglinton Iron Works whose enormous slag hill towered over the neighbourhood until 1979, when it was cleared and the stone hauled away to build the terminal at Hunterston. The site became Almswall Park. Nethermains Community Centre is the only Iron Works building still standing. Modern Kilwinning has reinvented itself in plastics and electronics; nearly a quarter of its workforce remains in manufacturing. The town does not pretend the industrial losses were painless. The 2012 figure of thirty-seven percent of working-age residents holding no formal qualifications, against a national average of thirty-three percent, is part of the same story as the regenerated Main Street and the new James Watt College that opened in 2000.
Kilwinning has sent talent into the wider world. James Service, born here in 1827, became Premier of Victoria in Australia. The Yukon poet Robert William Service, of 'The Shooting of Dan McGrew' fame, spent part of his childhood with his grandfather here. Colin Hay, frontman of Men at Work, grew up locally. The composer James MacMillan, the novelist Andrew O'Hagan, and Helen Muir Bearpark, a pioneering Australian sleep researcher who was born here in 1942, all carry Kilwinning addresses in their biographies. Kilwinning Rangers, founded as a juvenile club in 1899, play in blue and white hoops at Buffs Park and remain proudly the first and last Ayrshire club to win the Scottish Junior Cup in the twentieth century. The Buffs, the archers, the Mother Lodge: a town that has held onto its peculiarities.
Located at 55.65 degrees North, 4.70 degrees West, on the west coast of Scotland. Glasgow Prestwick (EGPK) lies about thirteen miles south on the A78; Glasgow International (EGPF) is roughly twenty-one miles northeast. The town sits between the Firth of Clyde and the inland Ayrshire hills, recognisable from the air by the River Garnock, the bypassing A78 dual carriageway, and the Kilwinning Caledonian viaduct. Best appreciated in the clear weather windows between Atlantic systems.