All you need is Durness: John Lennon and a remote Scots village

JOHN Lennon knew Durness very well. Between the ages of nine and fifteen he spent many happy summers there in the company of his cousin, Stan Parkes, who lived in Edinburgh.

In later years, globally famous as a Beatle, Lennon kept in touch with Parkes, sending him postcards and Christmas cards. Scotland had a lasting impact on him, to the point where, in a letter in early 1975 - five years before his death - he told his aunt Elizabeth: "I miss Scotland more than England". 

Stan Parkes at the Lennon memorial garden, August 2002 (Image: Clive Grewcock/BBC Scotland)

Ken McNab, Scotland's leading Beatles author, says today: "There's no doubt that the Highlands fired a teenage Lennon's imagination and opened his mind to new possibilities".

Lennon had been raised by his aunt Mimi, who during the summer holidays shared responsibility for him with her sister Elizabeth, known in the family as Mater. Her second husband was Bert Sutherland, an Edinburgh dentist whose family owned the croft in Durness. Mater’s son, Stan, who was seven years older than Lennon, took him under his wing during the summer holidays.

Sango Bay beach at Durness (Image: Shutterstock)

He became accustomed to meeting Lennon at Edinburgh bus depot when he got off the bus from Liverpool. The two boys would spend a week at Stan’s family house at 15 Ormidale Terrace, near Murrayfield rugby stadium, before travelling all the way to the croft at 56 Sangmore, at Sango Bay. 

“He had a tremendous affection for Scotland”, Parkes told Ken McNab for his book, The Beatles in Scotland. “These holidays in Durness were very special to him. It was a different world to the one he was used to. The area made a lasting impression.

Singer and guitarist John Lennon before the formation of The Beatles, circa 1959 (Image: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

“I never heard him say a bad word about Durness all his life. These were very happy times for John and I suppose that’s why the memories stayed with him. And I was so glad to share them with him. 

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“We had a very special bond. He was always great fun even though he was a bit of a rascal from time to time. But I remember the other kids in the village always looked forward to seeing John because he was so much fun to be around. He was a real boy, full of energy and always looking at things differently”. 

Iris MacKay, who ran a shop in Durness, told McNab: “We just played together. We behaved just like children normally do, hit each other with seaweed and chased each other on the beach.

“We were always glad to see them. We didn’t see that many kids from England at that time. It just added to the whole holiday feeling. They came several times over a period of a good few years. John wasn’t famous then, of course. He was just another boy on his holiday”. 

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Interviewed by The Observer in 2008, Donald Campbell spoke of his memories of the young Lennon. Standing outside the conservatory of his home he pointed to the neighbouring croft. “That was the house Lennon would visit”, he said. “I remember young John running out of those gates and all of us boys racing to the beach ... just standing here brings back memories of short trousers and grazed knees”. 

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Parkes also told McNab that Lennon played the mouth organ on one bus journey from Liverpool to Edinburgh. The bus conductor, impressed, give him a professional mouth-organ that had been accidentally left on the bus, months earlier. 

Lennon and Yoko Ono in Edinburgh (Image: Unknown)

Parkes took Lennon to the bus station to collect the new harmonica. “He had it for years”, Stan said, “and in fact he played it on some of his records. Eventually he took it to America and had it in the Dakota building in New York”, I believe. The harmonica was used on the Beatles’ first two singles, Love Me Do and Please, Please Me. 

According to Parkes, who died, aged 82, in February 2016, Lennon loved Edinburgh and had fond memories of the Military Tattoo. 

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The musician’s final trip to Scotland, in the summer of 1969, ended badly, when he and his wife Yoko, accompanied by their children Kyoko and Julian, were involved in a road accident near Durness. 

John Lennon and Yoko Ono prepare for a trip up to Durness in their Austin Maxi with their children (Image: Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)

Lennon swerved to avoid an oncoming German tourist and his Austin Maxi car ended in a ditch. The adults both suffered facial injuries and were taken to the Lawson Memorial Hospital at Golspie, fifty miles away. Once word got out, members of the media descended upon Golspie in force. 

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The accident, on July 1, happened just two days before the death of the Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones. 

In the mid-1980s Parkes, who by then was living in Durness, told the story of his friendship with Lennon to a local primary school headteacher, Graham Bruce. This was the catalyst for the opening, on August 14, 2002, of a John Lennon Memorial Garden, part of an area around the village hall landscaped by a team from the BBC Scotland television programme, Beechgrove Garden.

April 1964: The Beatles perform on bagpipes and marching drum to promote their concerts in Glasgow and Edinburgh. From left: Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison (Image: free)

The focal point of the garden are three standing stones created by a local craftsman, Neil Fuller, and bearing lyrics from the Beatles song In My Life, which is said by some to have been partly inspired by Lennon’s love of Durness. 

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In 2007 a Northern Lights John Lennon Festival was staged in Durness, featuring the former Runrig singer Donnie Munro and a reunited Quarrymen, John Lennon’s very first group. 

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In November 2020 Lennon's younger sister, Julia Baird, 73, revealed she had a conversation with him in which he said he would have bought Durness had he known it was for sale.

Ken McNab, whose latest Beatles book, Shake It Up, Baby: The rise of Beatlemania and the Mayhem of 1963, is published by Birlinn Polygon on September 5, said today: "Lennon had a very comfortable.middle-class upbringing in Liverpool. But remember, the city still bore the scars of having been bombed by the Luftwaffe.

"There were derelict buildings were everywhere and many areas were pockmarked by bomb craters. Smoke and grime were everywhere. Contrast that then with the unfettered freedom of the Scottish Highlands.

"John loved going to Durness. It was a world removed from post-war Liverpool: fresh air, rolling beaches, mountains and endless fields.  

"There's no doubt that the Highlands fired a teenage Lennon's imagination and opened his mind to new possibilities.

"It accelerated his artistic instincts. John always spoke very warmly of Scotland and it was those holidays in Durness that were the bedrock of those carefree summer days on the north coast long before his days as a Beatle ... and long before he changed the world alongside Paul McCartney,  George Harrison and Ringo Starr".