Qualla: Machrihanish https://qualla.com/machrihanish en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:13 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/g/g/machrihanish-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Machrihanish https://qualla.com/machrihanish Machrihanish: Introduction https://qualla.com/machrihanish/ Photo credit Leslie Barrie, CC BY-SA 2.0. The runway at Machrihanish is 10,000 feet long. You do not need a runway that size to land a Cessna, or even a turboprop. You need it for B-52s and Backfires, for the heavy strategic bombers that the Cold War expected to scramble west across the Atlantic at short notice. The village of Machrihanish — population a few hundred, tucked behind a beach on the western edge of the Kintyre peninsula — was for forty years one of the places NATO planned to defend North America from.

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Image: Leslie Barrie | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/g/g/machrihanish-wp/gcgg-machrihanish-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Machrihanish: The Forecast Knows This Place https://qualla.com/machrihanish/ Photo credit Steve Partridge, CC BY-SA 2.0. Anyone who has ever listened to the BBC Shipping Forecast — that slow, formal litany of sea areas read four times a day from Broadcasting House — has heard Machrihanish without knowing it. The Met Office takes its weather observations here, and the readings feed into the bulletin...

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Image: Steve Partridge | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/g/g/machrihanish-wp/gcgg-machrihanish-the-forecast-knows-this-place.mp3 0:06 2 full Machrihanish: Where Old Tom Morris Walked https://qualla.com/machrihanish/ Photo credit Leslie Barrie, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1879, the club engaged the fifty-seven-year-old Tom Morris Senior — the most influential figure in nineteenth-century golf, four-time Open champion, greenkeeper at St Andrews — down to Kintyre to lay out a course. He found duneland by the bay, made an immortal pronouncement th...

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Image: Leslie Barrie | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/g/g/machrihanish-wp/gcgg-machrihanish-where-old-tom-morris-walked.mp3 0:06 3 full Machrihanish: The Airfield That Watched the Atlantic https://qualla.com/machrihanish/ Photo credit Patrick Mackie, CC BY-SA 2.0. RAF Machrihanish, on the flat ground behind the bay, was during the Cold War one of NATO's key forward operating bases for transatlantic operations. Its 10,000-foot runway could take any aircraft in the Western inventory; its position on the westernmost tip of Britain put it clos...

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Image: Patrick Mackie | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/g/g/machrihanish-wp/gcgg-machrihanish-the-airfield-that-watched-the-atlantic.mp3 0:06 4 full Machrihanish: The Voice Across the Ocean https://qualla.com/machrihanish/ Photo credit J M Briscoe, CC BY-SA 2.0. Long before the airfield, Machrihanish was already a place that talked across the Atlantic. In 1905 the Canadian-born inventor Reginald Aubrey Fessenden built a radio transmitting station on the dunes with a 415-foot mast — the tallest structure in Scotland at the time — to test ...

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Image: J M Briscoe | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/g/g/machrihanish-wp/gcgg-machrihanish-the-voice-across-the-ocean.mp3 0:06 5 full Machrihanish: What the Painter Saw https://qualla.com/machrihanish/ Photo credit Steve Partridge, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Scottish marine and landscape painter William McTaggart kept a house in Machrihanish in the late nineteenth century, and the western light off Lossit Point became one of his subjects. McTaggart was already in his fifties when he started painting here; his sea pieces, with the...

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Image: Steve Partridge | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/g/g/machrihanish-wp/gcgg-machrihanish-what-the-painter-saw.mp3 0:06 6 full