Sorrowful Sorn #2.

It's been a while since a post featured the full set of bikes, beer and bygone boozers, but it's not as far in the past as when man last set eyes on the dark side of the moon.

It had been over half a century since a human last passed behind the moon and it had been over half a century since I last pedalled through Sorn. NASA was about to do it again and so was I. A big birthday was looming and I was going to spend it in Ayrshire visiting some of the places remembered from my childhood and youth. In addition Mrs Bygone Boozer and I would be setting wheels on some of the islands in the Firth of Clyde, ferry services permitting.

Just as Apollo has evolved into Artemis so my 5-speed Raleigh has been replaced by an 11-speed Sonder and our first outing saw us wheel our steeds off the MV Argyll and onto the Isle of Bute.

Hardly blue skies, and feeling as if it was hardly above freezing, we wound our way along the island's quiet roads...

...to Kilchattan Bay where we sat in the window of the Post Office cum café, consuming our scrambled egg and cafetière of coffee, whilst looking out on hardier souls than we doing the same thing at an outside table.

Refreshed, we wound our way around the rest of the island, back to Rothesay and the ferry back to the mainland where the loos at the pier provided what was probably the highlight of the day. I think that the only loo that I've been in that was more spectacular than this was the one in Kensington Palace, which is hardly a public convenience.

The following day, the big day, started with breakfast...

Can't beat a Scotch pie for a bangin' big birthday breakfast!

...before heading to Largs to catch the ferry across to Great Cumbrae where we pedalled around the perimeter road anticlockwise...

...and then clockwise...

...before heading inland and up to the island's highest point of Barbay Hill, and its Glaidstane, at 417 feet above sea level...

The trig point at the Glaidstane, atop Barbay Hill.

...and then back down again for the ferry back to the mainland.

Once back at our accommodation, showered and changed it was time for a birthday beer. One thing about visiting different places is that you come across different brews, even in the local Tesco.

Fraoch is Gaelic for Heather and this 5% brew by Alloa brewers William Brothers plays on the fact that heather ale has been brewed in Scotland for around four thousand years. This modern take, in addition to using heather flowers, also includes bog myrtle and ginger in the recipe.

Now I'm normally pretty much of a Reinheitsgebot person, believing that beer should consist of malt, hops, yeast and water and that's it, but in this case the additions to these ingredients were pretty subtle and I found that I enjoyed it. There was a slight peatiness in the aroma and on the palette there were hints of honey with a maltiness and just a tiny hint of the ginger. This sweetness was balanced by a dryish finish. All in all very quaffable.

The day following the big day was a little day, the result of a combination of the fact that my legs were now in their eighth decade, the Fraoch was too drinkable and the bottle of 12-year-old Glengoyne that my brother had given me to mark the occasion. Not the whole bottle, you understand, but enough of it. Back in 1973, as intimated above, I pedalled through Sorn accompanied by my mate Paul, who sadly never made it to the three score years and ten, where we had an illicit pint of Tartan in the now deceased Greyhound Inn, as described in this earlier post. To mark me reaching three score years and ten plus a day Mrs BB and I pedalled through a number of Ayrshire villages, including Sorn.

Sorn is now devoid of pubs, but the Greyhound used to have a bit of competition from the Sorn Inn. The postcard below shows the inn on the left, but with no people displaying the height of fashion and with there being no motor vehicles in sight, just a bike against the wall, (No, it's not mine! It wasn't quite that big a birthday.) it makes it rather hard to date.

That's not my bike in whenever.

Dating this view is easier.

That is my bike in 2026.

Unlike in the case of the Greyhound, the pub isn't listed in the Ordnance Survey's Ayrshire Namebook of 1855-7 and the earliest that I've been able to trace the inn back to is 1871 when Robert Aird is listed as an innkeeper in Sorn in that year's census in. The pub wasn't named, but it wasn't the Greyhound, so...

Robert was there a decade later too. I've managed to acquire a photo of him, courtesy of Alex Wright. It's always nice to be able to put a face to a name.

Robert Aird: landlord through the 1870s.

Robert had moved by 1891 and I haven't been able to track down who was at the Sorn Inn until 1921 when Slater's directory shows Elizabeth Duncan there.

Extract from Slater's 1921 directory.

From around 1940 until the mid-50's the Sorn Inn was in the hands of Tam and Jean Muir. Here's a pic of Jean in the pub in the 1940s...

Jean Muir on the right. Pic courtesy of Stuart Robertson.

...and one of the exterior of the pub taken in 1953, probably decorated for the coronation.

The Sorn Inn in 1953, courtesy of Ian McCutcheon.

Back at the time of my previous pedal through the village, in 1973, the owner was Jim McEwan who moved on to the Dumfries Arms in Cumnock to be replaced by Davie Kleinberg.

Davie left to run a hotel in Kilmarnock in around 1980 and was replaced at the Sorn Inn by the appropriately named John and Anne Tavern. Anne took this pic of the pub during her and John's tenure.

The Sorn Inn in the early 1980s.

In the latter part of 1998, whilst in the hands of Bill McFadzean, the inn caught fire...

After the fire. Courtesy of Ian Mason.

...and didn't reopen until the summer of 2000.

By 2003 the Sorn Inn was presenting itself as a gastropub, and not too successfully according to this review in the Sunday Times in 2005.

The Sorn Inn (during its gastro phase in 2006). © Gordon Brown

The Sorn continued, more as a restaurant than a pub, until around 2020 when it finally closed...

The former Sorn Inn in April 2026.

...and it has since been converted into holiday lets.

NASA is planning that Artemis will revisit the moon in two year's time. We enjoyed our time in Ayrshire so much that I may well, once again, be pedalling through Sorn on my Sonder before that.

Gordon Brown's image is copyright and is reused under this licence.

Some of the landlord information, as well as a number of the images, are courtesy of www.ayrshirehistory.com. They have been linked to the source and credited as requested.

If you've read this far, then thank you. Possibly, like me, you may have some sort of interest in bygone boozers. Clicking here will take you to a searchable/sortable index which you can use to see if I've already featured any lost locals from your locality. You can also subscribe to ensure that you don't miss any future posts. Simply click here to return to the home page (opens in a new tab), follow the 'Subscribe' link and complete the form to receive an email notification of any future post. Or you could simply follow the link at the top of this page.

©2026    www.bygoneboozers.co.uk