The enduring charm of the Scottish seaside

IN THE Black Bull, Danny Bunce takes a reflective sip of his pint and sighs the sigh of a man who, having satisfied his drouth, will now speak a great truth.

"There's only one problem with Rothesay," he muses about his seaside holiday destination. "There's that many old people here."

Bunce is 77.

Rothesay was the most popular Scottish holiday resort from the 1930s through to the 1950s. It was, in essence, Glasgow-on-Sea, Weegie-super-Mare. Each July, the population would expand almost sevenfold from approximately 6,000 to 40,000. Since those glory days, however, the decline has been steep and unrelenting. In common with many - perhaps most - seaside towns in Scotland and throughout the UK, Rothesay has suffered from the rise of the motor car and the explosion in overseas travel. "Ma, pa and the weans don't come down for a fortnight like they used to," says Robin Ritchie, the fishmonger. "But we struggle on."

The town looks, these days, a little shabby in places. Many of the Victorian buildings in its centre are in need of a lick of paint; their roofs and chimneys - verdant with weeds - could use some of the careful hoeing lavished on the flower beds along the promenade. It was announced last week that 1.5 million of lottery money is to be spent on regenerating the buildings on and around Guildford Square. The idea is to improve Rothesay's image among tourists so that those who do come return.

On the opposite coast, there is a plan to use public art to revive the promenade in Edinburgh's Portobello. Scotland's seaside, it seems, is enjoying some overdue TLC.

No doubt such makeovers are welcome, but I love the seaside towns the way they are, peeling paint and all. In fact, the peeling paint is part of the appeal. No one wants to see a town fail, but visible weathering, like wrinkles on a face, is a sign of life lived. Wemyss Bay, Gourock, Irvine, Troon, Largs and Lamlash, Girvan, Dunoon. These traditional resorts have a mood all of their own, a rather winning combination of vulgarity and melancholy, at once brash and elegiac, and summed up perhaps by Rothesay's war memorial - a verdigris angel, discoloured by age and salty air, but with one arm raised, defiant.

"A crackin' wee toon," is the verdict of Andy The Hat, a 62-year-old ex-Gorbalsite in beard, sandals and stetson (to keep the rain off his hearing aid) as he takes a break from karaoke in The Palace Bar. He waves an expansive arm towards the view. "Look at what you waken up to every morning. I've been here 20 year and I would never go back to Glesga."

There's something very moving about places such as this, built on strata upon strata of happy memories; a sort of emotional geology. Those who fall for Rothesay fall hard, and often their love is nostalgic and bound up with layers of personal history. Kevin Lalley, 48, a plumber from Glasgow, spent a fortnight during every summer of his childhood here. His father, Jimmy, would organise a 52-seater bus to take the family and friends from Cranhill, Carntyne and Easterhouse to the coast. When their father died in October two years ago, Lalley and his brothers scattered his ashes on Canada Hill, a beauty spot high above the town, toasting with whisky the man and what this place meant to them all. When they went back in April, the daffodils they had planted were through.

"I still get a buzz today out of going on the upper deck of the ferry and watching Rothesay coming into view," says Lalley, for whom this vista has the iconic quality of the Manhattan skyline. "You see the pier at Craigmore, then you see the Glenburn Hotel, then the old swimming baths where we used to go after mass, then the Commodore Hotel, then the Kettledrum Cafe, then you dock. That excitement is still with me. I'm a big kid, coming to Rothesay."

Spending the day in Rothesay, however, it quickly becomes apparent that it is facing a serious basic problem - very few people are visiting. OK, it's early in the season, the Easter holidays are over, and summer hasn't quite kicked in. But still. Walking off the main drag is to experience a deserted, shuttered feeling. Were it not for Andy Stewart's Scotland Yet blaring from a downstairs window on Castle Street, this could be southern Spain during the siesta hour. "You're never alone in Rothesay," says Margaret Kidd, a pensioner out walking her Scottie, Bonnie, by the putting green. She means there's a sense of neighbourliness here, which may well be true, but it is certainly possible to feel quite alone on the town's streets.

There are, arguably, many reasons for the slump. But what you hear time and again on Rothesay is that the price of the ferry from Wemyss Bay is deterring day-trippers. It costs more than 50 in return fares for two adults and two kids over five to travel with their car. So it stands to reason, say locals, that potential visitors will instead carry on down the A78 to Largs and spend their fifty quid there. Colin Cuthbert, 45, owner of the fish and chicken bar on East Princes Street, voices the angry feelings of many when he says: "CalMac are killing the island. I wouldn't be surprised if at the end of this summer another five or six businesses shut."

It may not be great for the Rothesay economy, but many who visit and settle here do so precisely because they value the serenity. On the Esplanade, laughing as her young children Tyler, Morgan and Georgia throw bread to brassy seagulls and glossy jackdaws, Gemma MacDonald, 30, explains that she is planning to move here from Dunoon. "It's overpopulated there and doesn't feel safe. You're not comfortable having your kids at more than arm's length from you," she says. "Here it's so peaceful. If it was too busy it would be spoiled. The kids love it and the weather is always lovely. Or at least it doesn't seem to matter if it rains. It's too pretty to matter."

Rothesay is pretty, unquestionably. The view across the bay to the Cowal Hills is, for me, one of the best sights in Scotland. Yet the town's aesthetic appeal is not limited to the obvious. There is a beauty in the clumps of pink sea thrift rooted in cracks in walls. There is a beauty in the stacked jars of tofymints and barley sugar in the window of the Post Office. There is a beauty in the clipped green grass of the putting green, the drooping tulips laid as a memorial on an empty park bench, and the brittle swishing rattle of the cold wind in the palms.

Those who have made the effort to come here are stoic souls undeterred by the unreliable climate. Sitting on a bench near the putting green are Andrew and Doreen Barry, 47 and 70, a mother and son visiting from Leicestershire. They are relentlessly upbeat, despite being given the evil eye by a hungry sea gull with designs on their lunch. "It's lovely when it isn't raining," says Doreen, brightly. Her son, meanwhile, is experiencing a Scottish rite of passage - his first ever deep-fried pizza supper. How is it? "Very nice!"

For one elderly couple, the weather is the point. Marion White and her husband Ray Bloss, who looks amazingly like Dick Van Dyke, are trundling their suitcases away from the ferry, arriving for their annual four-month stay. They rest of the year they live in Florida. "We come over here for the cold," Ray explains. His wife, who is originally from Kirkcaldy, laughs. "I'm an inverted snowbird. I come to Scotland to escape the southern summer."

Generation after generation, few visitors to Rothesay leave without eating chips or ice cream or both sold to them by a Zavaroni. Fat and sugar are as much part of the sensory experience of the Scottish seaside as cold damp sand and the sardonic cry of herring gulls with their ink-dipped wing tips. Margaret Zavaroni, 58, cousin of the late Lena, runs the cafe on Albert Place. She is quite a character: metallic eye-shadow, deep tan, bright pink lippy, bright green eyes. Famous locally as Maggie Zav, she sings Tina Turner and Shania Twain in the Taverna pub each Friday and Saturday night, and spends the rest of the time busily purveying Top Hats - a proud Zavaroni invention, a cone crowned by a marshmallow snowball - to a public keen to sample this local delicacy. "This island is special," she says, "and people all round Britain should come and see what we have here."

Next year will be the 200th anniversary of the first steamer, the Comet, arriving here from Glasgow. Before leaving Bute, I climb to the top of Canada Hill - all hawthorn and pine and the electronic burble of skylarks and the coconut-oil smell of the whins - and look down on the 21st-century ferries crossing the Firth of Clyde. From up here, the boats seem like bath toys and Rothesay appears entirely elegant and carefree. Maggie Zav is right - this is a special place, and one can only hope that its future is as bright as the sun peering between the clouds above Arran.

As I walk back down the hill towards town, the rain is coming on again.