Peter Ross at large: The old curiosity plot

Published on Saturday 2 January 2010 18:55

ST CYRUS, a small village on the east coast, a few miles north of Montrose, is a part of Scotland which, if it can be said to be known at all, is known chiefly for its first-class beaches and as the last resting place of the poet George Beattie, who, in 1893, shot himself in the head after his lover left him for a wealthier man. Now, however, St Cyrus has developed a happier association; it is home to Steptoe's Yard.

As the name suggests, Steptoe's Yard is a junkyard of sorts. But that word does it a disservice. It is a place from which to buy antiques, curios, knick-knacks, bric-a-brac, ephemera, esoterica and eccentric relics. Tens of thousands of items are arranged in the grounds and outbuildings of a former beef farm, including a gargantuan barn filled with old furniture. Not everything is in the best of order. Some of the tables, for example, provide a variation on Orwell – four legs good, three legs bad.

Though advertised rather grandly as "the only museum where everything is for sale" and a "museum of cultural household items", Steptoe's Yard can be summed up in one word: junkopolis. The man in charge, the mayor of junkopolis, is Peter Harrison, a solidly built 60-year-old sometimes known as Old Steptoe. His crown of office is a flat cap.

Harrison has had this farm for 21 years. However, the BSE crisis left him unable to export beef to France. He needed a new source of income, but the idea for the yard did not strike him straightaway. "I didn't have the slightest interest in this sort of thing," he says. "Then, about five years ago, we started doing up the house and buying bits and pieces of furniture. We ended up with quite a bit more than we needed. Somebody suggested we hold a car boot sale to get rid of some of it, and it's never stopped since then."

We are talking in the farmhouse, a large building which feels cosy on account of the cheery smell of roasting pheasant and the astonishing clutter. Harrison and his wife Heather, 51, seem to make little distinction between their business and their home. Harrison is sitting on a leather couch which is also occupied by several lengths of copper pipe. On display around the room are several animal figurines, mainly horses, and on one windowsill there is a large statue of a jolly Italian waiter, all jowls and moustache, from whose ample girth hang dozens of golden necklaces. "Funny enough, that's the absolute double of a friend of my brother," says Harrison. "But he hates you to mention it."

Sam and Fester, two Jack Russells, yap and scrabble to be let up on the couch. Fester is named after the festering infection from which he suffered as a pup. "His heid," says Heather Harrison, fondly, "was one big abscess."

Steptoe's Yard seems fairly well known in the Northeast and, via word of mouth, is being discovered by people in other parts of Scotland. I first heard of it a few weeks ago from a retired postmaster in Huntly who had been buying old bottles for the Wild West-style saloon he had built in his back garden. Steptoe's Yard attracts visitors from such exotic locales as South Africa, New Zealand and Brechin. It exerts a gravitational pull on anyone who appreciates quirks, strangeness and charm. It also has a serendipitous knack of matching customer and object. "It's amazing what people find," says Christina MacLeod, a tall, dark-haired woman who works here. "We had a customer once, an Australian lady. Peter asked her, 'Have you found anything?' And she said, 'Well, I've found a picture of my Uncle Eddie.'" There he was, photographed in military uniform during the Second World War, before he emigrated to Australia. "The lady was flabbergasted," MacLeod recalls.

To reach Steptoe's Yard from Montrose, take a right just past the old bridge over the River North Esk and you'll know it when you see it. The farm is beside a nature reserve and the surrounding fields are hoaching with curlews. On a dry winter's afternoon, the sunlight is golden and the sky glittering blue.

Amid this natural beauty, Steptoe's Yard is impossible to miss. "You either love this place or you hate it," says Harrison, and such extreme reactions are understandable. It is a blot on the landscape, certainly, but then it's rather an interesting blot and the landscape looks better for the contrast. In fact, today, Steptoe's Yard has a weird beauty in its own right. Snow lies an inch deep on the dozens of tables lined up in front of the farmhouse, and the hundreds of small Hummel figurines on display look as though they are knee-deep in a blizzard. This effect is particularly amusing in the case of several life-sized pottery robins, especially when a real live robin goes bobbing and hopping among them.

Perhaps because of the weather, I am the only visitor, but Steptoe's Yard acknowledges no seasons – the place is open 364 days a year. "We're not even properly closed on Christmas Day," says Harrison, "but we don't really want folk then." Heather laughs. "When four cars pulled up one Christmas," she recalls, "I jist stared oot the windae at them. Then there was that guy last year with the pint glass. What a state!"

This was a man who had bought a set of pint glasses, marked with the Tennent's logo. On Christmas day his wife broke one and he drove angrily to Steptoe's Yard for a replacement. "Oh, he was grumpy," Harrison recalls. "But I served him to make the day a bit easier on his wife."

They get all sorts coming by. "From the very wealthiest to the very poorest," says Harrison. Lady Strathmore, whose home is Glamis Castle, is said to be a regular. The Harrisons have a website, www.steptoesyard.com, through which they intend to sell goods, as they already do via Ebay, but there is really no substitute for browsing the place yourself.

"We keep all the good stuff inside," says Chris Bolam, one of the staff, heading for a bonfire with a wheelbarrow full of broken fishing rods. The yard outside is interesting, though – more art installation than viable business. There is a pile of ladders, a shopping trolley full of rusty shears, and enough pitchforks to arm several angry mobs.

In one of the outbuildings, a golden bust of a pharaoh stares down regally on a tatty fox fur and a tumbler commemorating the 1937 coronation of King George VI. Every year a businesswoman jets in from Italy and buys the best crockery to sell in Rome and Milan, though presumably she wouldn't be interested in the willow pattern tea cup with "A Present From Cumbernauld" written inside the brim.

"Once, when Peter still had some cattle, 24 bullocks got loose and ran through the yard," says Christina MacLeod. "One put its foot in a box of cups and saucers and not one got broken." Proof at last that bulls can be trusted in china shops.

Another outbuilding is full of books and vinyl LPs, Abba abutting Stravinsky, and the books and magazines are arranged on shelves in haphazard order. Peter Harrison is not of a particularly literary bent. "I spent four years at university and got fed up reading. I swore when I left that I'd never read another book, and I haven't."

Perhaps as a result, the range of titles is huge and chaotic. There's a one shilling programme for a stage version of The Black and White Minstrel Show, a leather-bound Scottish Psalter and Church Hymnary from 1929, and the 1975 edition of The Aberdeen Pub Companion, a publication which seeks "to inform the visitor where to go if he wants to meet the real Aberdonian – the bonneted labourer or tooried harbour worker". On the matter of where to go if you would prefer not to meet real Aberdonians, the little book is silent.

There is a distinct sense that none of the items for sale arrived in Steptoe's Yard by a process as prosaic as house clearance, but rather migrated here, like the birds in the nature reserve, flocking together of their own volition. The same could be said of the people who work here. You get the feeling that they are not just employees; that they are part of the stock.

Christina MacLeod, in particular, seems perfectly at home. She came one day to buy a tea set and, somehow, five years later, is still here. Remarkably, she carries in her head the location of every object and could, at any given moment, lay her hands on anything from a pool cue to a cool pew. And, even after all this time, she is still enchanted by the place.

"Look at this," she says, with something approaching awe, while wiping a gold and red dinner service with a tea towel. "I found it under a table, covered in cobwebs."

By the time I leave Steptoe's Yard, the icicles hanging from the beak of a stone owl by the gate are beginning to melt. But whatever the temperature, each treasure on Peter Harrison's farm will remain frozen in time, waiting for the right person to come along and discover it. "When you next visit," he says to me, tugging his cap down against the cold, "make sure and bring plenty of money with you."