(Gawp:- to stare with incredulity)

Once again, we’re on the Ocean Cruising Club cruise around Long Island Sound, and I’m sure that will bring back some memories for a few readers. Once again, the locals are showing us around their home ports and favourite anchorages.

As some readers will know, our “home port”, Bridge of Allan, is a small village of around five thousand souls just outside the city of Stirling in Scotland.

The village was first mentioned in 1146 when those in charge, at that time the nuns of North Berwick, were in a bit of a to-do with the monks of Dunfermline Abbey over who should get the taxes from the, no doubt, poor, impoverished villagers. Some things never change.

Later, much later, the village became famous as a spa town where the wealthy would come to “take the waters. Robert Louis Stevenson, the prolific but poorly author, had a splash around but ultimately opted for the somewhat better, all-year-round climate of Samoa.

From the mid to late eighteen hundreds, the village’s fame, its waters and its proximity to Glasgow and Edinburgh made it an ideal commuter town for Glasgow’s merchants and shipping magnates.

Consequently, Bridge of Allan boasts a few grand estates and a sizeable number of what can only be called mansions. However, the extensive estates, like the shipyards, are now essentially given over to housing for the riff-raff, and the grand estate houses have been converted into apartment blocks.

However, many large, sandstone mansions sitting majestically among their rhododendron bushes and Douglas Firs remain.

Of an evening, before we took to the waters in our own way, Anne and I would often enjoy a walk along Kennilworth Drive where most of these mansions sit at the end of their long, paved driveways.

All in all, right on our doorstep, we have a plethora of beautiful homes.

The difference between home, the Bridge of Allan, and where we are now, Long Island Sound, is that at home, we walk down just one road to see all the grand houses. Out here, you can gawp at similar-sized grand mansions costing several millions of US dollars, with their lawns rolling down to the sea, but you can do this, not for one street but for hundreds of miles. And half of them are holiday homes.

Isn’t it just lovely to see the colony doing so well.