The "Huts", Bogany Farm, circa 1960s AI enhanced
Home Thoughts from Abroad
There are certain songs that follow us through life with a quiet persistence. They do not demand attention; they wait. They surface unannounced, years later, carrying with them not only melody but entire seasons of who we once were. Clifford T. Ward’s Home Thoughts from Abroad has always been one of those songs for me. Gentle, almost hesitant, yet luminous in a way that is difficult to explain. It does not overwhelm. It lingers, like the kind of memory that does not fade so much as settle deeper into the bones.
Ward himself seemed to belong to that same quiet register. An English schoolteacher before recognition found him, he carried none of the urgency of performance. His songs feel spoken rather than sung, as though confided across a table. When I first heard him, I was young, and though I could not have explained it then, I felt that his songs were not performing for me but sharing something with me. We met somewhere in the middle of experience, even if his years were far ahead of mine.
His Home Thoughts from Abroad reaches further back, drawing from Robert Browning’s poem of the same name. Browning’s lines are not grand declarations; they are acts of noticing. Blossom, birdsong, the slow return of spring. Beneath them runs a current of longing—not loud or theatrical, but steady and human. It is not simply nostalgia. It is recognition. The sense that somewhere, there exists a place that fits the shape of us, even when we are far from it. A call back to nature, perhaps, but also a call back to something within ourselves that we fear losing.
Ward understood this instinctively. In both the poem and the song, place is never just geography. It is emotional ground. It is belonging. And belonging, I have come to realise, is not always something we are given. Sometimes it is something we spend a lifetime trying to name.
This came back to me one recent Saturday evening, sitting with friends over a meal. Among us was a friend from Mongolia, and as she spoke of home and I sensed a deeper meaning than just Mongolia. There is a word in the Mongolian language—нутгаа санах (nutgaa sanakh). Like most untranslatables, it does not fall neatly into a box; it is often reduced to “homesickness,” but that feels too thin, too casual from what I read. What I sensed when speaking to her was something deeper: a rooted longing, an emotional tether that stretches across distance but never breaks. A sense of homeland that lives within the body as much as in any physical place.
I listened, and found myself quietly envious. Not of the place itself, but of the certainty. The clarity of belonging. I realised that I had never quite felt that. Nowhere has felt like home to me, albeit, my heart is in the Hebrides and Norway and a place I shall tell you, but I never grew up in these places.
I was brought up in the heartland of the Clydeside shipping industry, in a landscape that offered little to romanticise. It was a place of labour and soot, of function rather than beauty. There was nothing there to envy. And yet, there was a kind of grace hidden elsewhere.
We had a cabin on the island of Bute, set between Rothesay Golf Course and Bogany Farm. Each year, when the summer holidays began, I would go there for the full six weeks. It was, in every sense, another world. Loch Ascog lay to one side, still and watchful, while the Firth of Clyde opened itself out in a wide, patient horizon. At night, the sky was dark in a way I had never seen in the city—stars not scattered, but cascading.
My days were spent fishing, or wandering without urgency. Evenings gathered themselves around campfires, where friendships were formed quickly and dissolved just as easily at the end of the season. There was no permanence, and perhaps that was part of the magic. We belonged fully, if only for a while.
One memory remains with particular clarity. Late summer, I think. The cabin had no running water or electricity. My task each day was to fill containers from the communal well. The cows would approach slowly, cautious but curious, their presence both unsettling and companionable. The smaller ones edged forward, as though drawn by the novelty of it all.
At dusk, we lit paraffin lamps. Their soft, sibilant burn filled the cabin with a low, steady sound that seemed to quieten the world. My father would read aloud—Heidi, Tales from 1001 Nights, Chinese folk stories. We listened without interruption, held by the rhythm of his voice. Pancakes were eaten, sweet with jam, accompanied by small glasses of stout that felt, at the time, like something ceremonial.
The lamp would flicker as it consumed the kerosene, its light growing softer, heavier. Sleep came not suddenly, but as a kind of surrender.
Lying in bed, I would watch the stars through the window. Not one or two, but all of them. And I would wonder—whether somewhere, far beyond my understanding, a Chinese farmer boy or a Bedouin shepherd or a milkmaid in the Swiss mountains might be looking at the same sky. Whether they felt that same quiet awe. It was not a thought I could fully form, but it carried with it a sense of presence. As though, in those moments, the universe leaned closer, and something like God made itself known, not in words, but in stillness.
And then, inevitably, the leaving.
Packing for the ferry. The return to school on Monday. The slow re-entry into the tenements of Clydeside. It brought with it a heaviness I could not quite explain then. A kind of quiet grief. As though something had been taken, or perhaps left behind. It felt, in some small way, like the stories of islanders after Viking raids—an absence where something living had once been.
And yet, in that leaving, something else became clear. For the first time, Rothesay—the cabins near Bogany Farm—felt like home. Not in the sense of permanence, but in the sense of truth. Life there had a richness to it, something akin to the simplicity of Walton’s Mountain, where nothing extravagant was required for something to feel complete.
Years later, I came across a word in John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: kenopsia. The eerie, hollow atmosphere of a place once full of life, now empty. The silence after the crowd has gone. The ghost of presence lingering in absence.
I recognised it immediately.
I feel it each time I return to Bute, walking the stretch between Bogany Farm and Canada Hill. Where once there were fifty or sixty cabins scattered across the land, there is now only overgrowth. Nettles reclaiming paths. The shape of what was, barely visible beneath what has taken its place.
I walk there, and the cows look at me as though I do not belong. As though I am the intruder. And perhaps I am. The land has continued without me. It has formed its own continuity, one in which I am no longer central.
There was a time when that field was alive. Evenings filled with barbecue smoke and song, with burnt toast and laughter carried on the sea air. Campfires under slow-turning stars. Children running barefoot, voices spilling freely into the dusk. Adults leaning back, storing sunlight as though it might sustain them through darker months.
Memory, I have come to understand, is not entirely honest. It softens edges. It rearranges. Like a Potemkin village, it presents a version of truth that is more bearable, more beautiful. And yet, even if it is not precise, it is not false. It tells us what mattered.
In those recollections, people seem kinder than they perhaps were. Lighter. More open. Whether that was the effect of unhurried time, or the influence of the sea, I cannot say. But something about that place allowed us, however briefly, to become better versions of ourselves. As though the land itself permitted it.
Now, the cabins are gone. The voices have faded. The field stands, but it does not hold us in the same way. And yet, walking there, I am not entirely alone. The land remembers.
Robert Macfarlane once wrote that landscape is not a backdrop to human life, but a participant in it. Standing in that meadow, I feel that truth. The land holds what we have given it—the sounds, the moments, the ordinary acts that, together, formed something meaningful.
Time, in this way, is both a thief and a gift. It takes what we cannot hold, but in doing so, reveals what was worth holding in the first place.
Perhaps that is where the idea of home begins to shift. It is not always where we come from, nor where we return to. Sometimes it exists only in fragments—in songs, in remembered light, in the echo of voices that are no longer there. It is not fixed. It moves with us, even as we move away from it.
I never had the certainty of nutgaa sanakh, that deep-rooted longing tied to a homeland. But I have something adjacent to it. A quieter, less defined version. A sense that home is not a single place, but a convergence of moments that once made us feel fully present.
And that is enough; home is not something we possess, but something we recognise—briefly, imperfectly—before it changes.
Like a song, heard once in youth, that never quite leaves us.
P.S. I met a lady five years ago who had Clifford as her English teacher.
