The Scotsman Tuesday 17 August 1999
Jim Gilchrist continues his efforts to escape the tumult of Edinburgh's Festival frenzy by lifting off into the quiet skies.
The caravan of cars speeds across the Lanarkshire countryside, in hot pursuit of the balloon. And that's before it has even lifted off. A hot air balloon launch can be a tricky business, very much governed by the prevailing wind: Graeme Houston, balloon pilot and proprietor of Scotair Balloons, had intended to launch us from Kames Country Club outside Carnwath, But after sending up a couple of little balloons to test wind direction, although there seemed hardly a trace of a breeze, he decides he doesn't want to risk alarming the inmates of a nearby ostrich farm.
So off we speed in convoy behind Graeme's Landrover and trailer, the balloon basket in tow looking for all the world like a prop from some extravagant horticultural display. Finally, at Shieldhill Hotel, a venerable establishment outside Biggar, the not inconsiderable business of unpacking and inflating the balloon gets underway. It's quite a circus, Graeme's black Scottie, (somewhat disquietingly named Jinx) although a fairly experienced balloonist itself, bounds about delightedly, taking the odd chew of the crown rope, or anything else that offers itself. The basket, which with its propane gas cylinders and burners weighs half a ton, is manhandled off the trailer, the balloon unfurled across the lawn, a giant party squeaker. A couple of motor-driven fans inflate the bag initially with cold air. People start spilling out of the hotel bar to goggle at this giant, tumescent thing swelling on their lawn. The balloon's gas burners start roaring and a few of us hang on the now straining crown rope to help keep the balloon in shape while it inflates, it's airy bulk looming above us.
Eventually, 12 of us clamber into the basket; this is more than I'd bargained for but apparently the balloon can take 15. They're building them these days to take 26. Lift-off is almost imperceptible: a few blasts of the burners, a gentle swing of the basket under our feet, then the hotel and its grounds are dropping away. Already the surrounding fields are spreading themselves out below us, their planting and cropping and barring of tractor tracks all etched into meticulous relief by the low sun that gilds the landscape this perfect summer evening.
I find myself comparing this serene ascension with that of James "Balloon" Tytler, Britain's first aeronaut, who on 27 August, 1784, took off in a far less sedate manner from Comely gardens near Edinburgh's Holyrood palace and flew about half a mile to Restalrig. Tytler, flawed genius, tatterdemalion chemist, printer, writer, piper and perpetual debtor, who was also engaged at the time in editing the second edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, had been dogged by bad luck, inexperience and particularly penury. His original balloon basket had been smashed by an angry crowd when he failed to take off a couple of weeks earlier, and he couldn't afford another basket big enough to take a stove; he simply tethered the balloon over a fire and heated the air inside till the balloon was straining at the leash. At 6.30 in the morning, he lifted off, later writing: "With this monstrous power I suffered myself to be projected upwards, seated in one of the small baskets in which earthenware is carried, without ballast or indeed without thinking of any. The balloon set off from the ground with the swiftness of an arrow… For my own part, I had scarce time to taster the pleasure of an aerial journey, and during the little time I was in the air, I amused myself with looking at the spectators running about in confusion below. My reception from the ground was much more rude than I expected and though insufficient to hurt, was enough to warn me to proceed no more in this way".
Tytler's balloon was 40ft high and 30ft in diameter, made of cloth, originally lines with paper but, after its rough treatment by the crowd, he stripped out the paper and simply varnished the material. Our satin-backed and colour panelled beauty is some 100ft high and 70ft in diameter, made from 10-92 rip-stop nylon with a polyurethane coating on the inside, plus treatments to prevent mildew and rot. Out big basket, is still the traditional wickerwork, although heftily constructed.
"Right, it's time to go high", says Houston, and he lets rip with the burners, aiming for a couple of thousand feet. We ascend at a rate of 500ft a minute, although it doesn't feel like it. I can think of no more tranquil, almost imperceptible, mode of traveling through the air, with the air.
The jagged peaks of Arran rise into site in the brazen western sky. People have started Ben-spotting. We're on a level with the summit of Tinto Hill; behind us, a pallid moon hangs above Culter Fell. Below us, the little white blobs of cattle throw long shadows. In between irregular roars of the burners, there is a silence that is broken only by awed and enthusiastic conversation between the passengers, all of us first time balloonists. From the ground drift the faint bark of a dog, the distant bellyaching of sheep.
"My definition of a philosopher", wrote Louisa May Alcott, "is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down". No reflection on family and friends, but you could indeed get pretty philosophical up here. I was about to write that our vantage point was Olympian, or at least Elysian, but in fact, there is something quite humbling in this near-static hanging above the earth, perceiving quite uncluttered, and at a manageable pace, all the world's wonder, and a few of it's blemishes, disposed below you. It makes you wish that you had the insight to interpret more of the landscape thrown into such sublime relief below: how that hill formed, how this river meanders, why this field here and that wood there?
There is, Graeme Houston agrees, "something very magical" about ballooning, and it still captivates him, even though he's doing now for a living. A burly, 34-year-old with a shaven head , glinting spectacles and an easy manner with people, he got involved, almost by chance some years ago, when Loganair, with whom he was working on ground staff, bought a hot air balloon for promotional purposes. He went up for a flight in it and that was him hooked. The pilot started giving him lessons - then left the company. Houston was promptly told to get someone to train him and to take over ballooning duties. "I got my balloon pilot's licence, then decided to go the whole hog and got my commercial pilot's licence". Within six months of gaining the commercial licence, he was offered a job at Skipton, Yorkshire, which he held for a season before returning to establish his own company, Scotair Balloons, based in Lanarkshire.
He has never looked back, though during spells of good weather like this, he can be up at four in the morning and not finish until midnight. The evening flights he runs, at £130 per head, are generally full, the early morning ones less so.
It is such a leisurely mode of travel, and the evening is so placid, it's hard to imagine anything dangerous happening. Graeme believes that a balloon pilot has to know his limitations, "Try to fly outside these and you can be guaranteed a bumpy ride".
He has had one or two hairy moments himself: On one memorable occasion, he flew the Channel to raise funds for a cancer charity. "We landed in France doing 30mph", he recalls wryly. "We were really motoring. Balloons haven't got any brakes, and we were dragged for 200 meters"
So far as Scotair landings are concerned, the main risk is from the occasional irate farmer. An essential part of the kit for flying is the bottle of whisky, with which his young assistant, Derek Burrough, placates farmers on whose fields Graeme inevitably has to land. "Most of them are fine. A lot of them have actually paid to fly with me".
He has brought us down low now, angling for a breeze. A train slides below us, cattle gallop away as we approach, burners roaring, our monstrous shadow trailing in our wake. One sympathises with the "two trembling shepherds" who greeted the pioneer Italian Balloonist, Lunardi, who made such an impact in Britain fast on the worn-out heels of Tytler, when he landed in Alemoor in Selkirkshire after flying from Glasgow. Cresting a forestry plantation, we can hear startled birds careering through the foliage; as we approach the Clyde, we skim so low across a field luxuriant with still-green barley we can virtually count the ears. "Your lifejacket is under your seat", some wag calls out.
"You can see everything from a different perspective from up here", says 70-year-old Jim Hutchins, who turns out to be a former secretary and treasurer of Carstairs State Hospital - which, coincidently, we're approaching, having crossed the Clyde - twice, I think, for here it meanders into extravagant loops which illustrate with text-book clarity how oxbow lakes form. His comment about perspective is echoed by other passengers. Jim has done a bit of sailing in his time, but remarks: "This beats getting your bottom wet in the cold".
Beside him, Matt Brownlie, a property developer, finds it relaxing. "You're going at a pace you can take it in".
Then Matt lets slip that his flight was a 50th birthday present. On my other side. Liz Beveridge from Alloa confesses that her flight is also a birthday present - "a two-year late 40th" - and the basket resounds in a chorus of "and me", "and me", "and me"… Clearly a balloon flight has become such a sort of aerial rite of passage by which those over a certain age mark their years. And, according to Graeme, It tends to be people in their forties and upward who book his flights: "The older they are, the more they appreciate it. Younger people don't know what they are seeing, they get impatient".
He is looking for somewhere to land, communicating by radio phone with Derek who has been following us on the ground in the Land-Rovers, remarking that the farmer's taken a cut of sileage out of the field he's sizing up. "I'll take us up to the end of the field and avoid the wet stuff", he tells us. Why from this height we can virtually count the cow pats. A microlight is circling us at a distance, possibly in ghoulish expectation of a disastrous landing; he's disappointed, as we touch down at Ravenstruther with hardly a bump. We stow the balloon - an impressive team effort which makes packing away a wet tent look a doddle, and celebrate with champagne in the farmyard.
Ballooning? Nothing like it. Airborne philosophising, champagne, and the smell of sileage in the evening.
