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I once found a gun, propped against a tree in Fullerton Woods. It was an American air rifle designed not to fire pellets or shells, but make an enormous bang by discharging a powerful blast of air through the barrel. I kept it for maybe a year, causing (hopefully) temporary deafness to many of my chums by firing it right into their eardrums. We played incessant games of Dead Man Falls with it, using the municipal golf course bunkers as dugouts. It’s fair to say this caused some annoyance to greenkeepers and sandwedge wielders.

Today, the town of Troon in Ayrshire is all about sea, sand, golf, cafés and vast numbers of shops that appear to exist mainly for tax purposes, soaking up profits made elsewhere. There are some great restaurants and pubs,but it’s a bourgeois watercolour of the town I grew up in. That was both a holiday resort and a working coal port with a shipbuilders, a shipbreakers and a railway carriage works. There was an edge to Troon then that’s only evident these days when the Cumnock Young Team or some over-Buckfasted Glaswegians arrive on a hot day.

We ran wild as kids, beneficiaries of that post-war parental immunity to risk that simply does not exist anymore. I would spend long summer days with pals miles along towards Prestwick at the Pow Burn, stabbing flounders off South Beach, diving into the brown waves off the main sewage pipe. This was pre-teenage, and not an adult in sight.

But Fullerton Woods, up behind the municipal golf courses, was the real adventure. When we arrived in 1962 the old Adam-designed mansion house was still standing. By the time it was demolished in 1966, we wee boys had been through its spooky rooms with their glaring murals. Crosbie Kirk, these days spruced up to within an inch of its repointed life, was impenetrable in ivy and rubble, and almost as scary as the ice house that lurked deep in vegetation, all that remained of the ancient Crosbie Castle. From the age of nine, with friends and alone, I explored, rampaged, annoyed dog walkers and launched catapult attacks on bicycling teachers. Bad, bad boys.

Later, as the land was sold, trees torn down and private house building began on a large scale, we clambered through half-built homes, crawled for hundreds of yards along (dry) sewage pipes deep underground, stole nails and wood, teetered on open rafters. How we came to no harm or avoided arrest I do not know.

I can remember only one vaguely threatening encounter with an adult who claimed to be a policeman, but he only wanted to throw sticks at the chestnut trees, or so he said, and then wandered off.

Fullerton is now a groomed and quiet public park, and a very nice one, with a ‘Fairy Trail’, probably the cleanest public toilets in South Ayrshire, and a playpark which occupied my granddaughters for a good hour or so the other day. I gazed at the twin pediments which used to flank Fullerton House, remembering how as a nine-year-old I would climb the tree beside one of them and balance on the very top of the stone pillar. It seems unthinkably dangerous, but this was where we cut our teeth on risk, threat and explored our physical boundaries; where we conquered our fears, or gave into them. As teenagers, we raced old moped and scooters along these paths and onto the golf course. Until you’ve Evel-Knieveled a Vespa over a Darley sandtrap, you haven’t lived.

We played golf too, whole summer term afternoons where at Marr College you could choose to avoid cricket, hockey or running and just use your fiver-a-year junior three-course season ticket on Darley, Lochgreen and Fullerton.

There is tragedy and sadness at Fullerton now, though. The ‘Memory Tree’ which is part of the Fairy Trail is festooned with mementoes of lost loved ones, including a lot of dummies, baby bottles and toys, reminders of dead children. Are there forlorn hopes of pagan healing? It reminded me of the Clootie Well at Munlochy in the Highlands, so ancient and heartbreaking in the thousands of pleas for supernatural help hanging from trees and bushes.

And then, deep in the Fullerton forest you suddenly come upon a near-life-size sculpture of poor wee Lachlan Mackenzie, who died just next to the playpark nine years ago when he….fell out of a tree he’d been climbing. It’s both moving and disturbing. Especially when I remember my own tree-climbing obsession as a kid. That was how I reached the top of that stone pillar, scrambling through the branches next to it. Admit it, I was trying to get to the crows nesting there, looking for eggs.

My own childhood here was thoughtless, careless and sometimes bruising, but never, in the end, fatal to anyone I knew. And we did some terrible, if innocent things.

I wonder who left that gun, propped against the trunk of an old sycamore, now just a stump? I swopped the rifle for a James Bond Walther PPK and told everyone my dad was a secret agent, not a dentist. Being a dentist was far more frightening.