In Scotland

In Scotland there are millions of sheep but very few billboards. The roads are narrow but the people are sharp. As you drive up the A82 from Crianlarich to Glencoe, through Rannoch Moor, especially in the fog, you could almost imagine yourself on the moon.

There is no fog on the moon, however.

One problem with the Highlands is that you often don’t know where you are. Most of the villages have Gaelic names, which mean nothing to most of us. What’s worse, those names often have so many silent letters and are so hard to pronounce that you don’t know where to start. If you can’t say them, it makes it hard to remember them. I spent a week trying to get a handle on Drumnadrochit and never did get it right, though we stayed there for three days, in a modern, well-designed cottage in an orchard on a green hillside above Loch Ness with chickens and a lily pond at the bottom of the hill.

Hilary got the names down better than I did because she was the one typing them into the GPS of our rental car—some sort of Hyundai with far too many buttons to figure out. (But aren’t most rental cars like that? You diddle with enough things to get them going, and find out maybe four days later that you’ve been driving in “antiskid mode” the whole time.)

The Scottish Highlands rank among the most sparsely populated regions in Europe. And the fact that the landscape is largely covered with grasses, bogs, and woods rather than corn and soybeans adds to the sense of isolation. There are lakes (they call them lochs) and massive hills (they call them mountains) all over the place, and in the most beautiful and challenging stretches you’ll see hikers trudging along, across, up, and down the landscape like ants.

You’ll also see quite a few camper vans. We encountered many on the road, and saw many more in the parking lots. Evidently it’s legal to park your van and spend the night at any pullout you happen to come upon.

It’s become somewhat of a thing to “do the 500,” an enterprise that consists of driving the 500-mile coastal route around the top of the island. One problem with this approach, we were told by a couple who’d done it, but were now traveling by car, is that “you never meet anybody.” They were from Bristol, and they’d just returned from a week on the island of Lewis, a three-hour ferry trip from the mainland.

“What I never knew about Lewis until we went there,” the man said, “is that there are no trees!”

Hilary and I maintained a comfortable pace throughout the trip, in part because we had no agenda, no “must see” destinations. We met lots of interesting people during our two-week visit; that was certainly one of the highlights of the trip. Everyone seemed eager to talk.

 In the Trossachs we met a couple from Manchester who told us “it was so hot this summer that the only birds we got on our feeders were starlings.” We met a young couple from Southhampton while we strolling a shingle beach in Oinch who had climbed Scotland’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis.

“We took the ten-hour route, rather than the seven-hour route,” the man said.

“Did you use ropes?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“We should have had ropes,” his girlfriend muttered.

They were perhaps the only couple we met who took a passing interest in Minnesota. “Is it in the middle? Is it flat?” To most Europeans, the US consists of New York, Miami, Las Vegas, L.A., and maybe the Grand Canyon.

The next morning, while taking a stroll around a small loch near Glencoe, we met a woman from Devon who was enjoying a “free” day during a week-long tour organized by a firm called HF Holidays (founded in 1914). She told us about the program, and we talked politics briefly. She consoled us for our current regime, and we offered condolences for Brexit and the string of bad prime ministers Britian has suffered under recently.

“How long did Liz Truss last?” I asked. “Forty-nine days?”

“Oh, don’t say that name,” she replied with a shutter. “Our new prime minister did good things in Manchester. We have high hopes for the future.”

On our first day in Drumnadrochit. We drove west on one-lane roads to Glen Affric (Dappled Glen) where we ran into a couple from Dundee. They were staying at a farm nearly for a week, hiking and studying the rewilding projects hereabouts; Glen Affric offers one of the few remaining chunks of Caledonian forest in Scotland.

When he heard we were from America, the man asked, “Why come to Scotland?”

“Landscapes. Birds. Outdoor stuff,” I replied. “We’re not much interested in the folklore, and couldn’t care less about Bonny Prince Charlie.”

“I’m with ya there,” he replied. “He was a wastrel, and he made a lot of bad decisions at Culloden.”

We took a hike up the glen along a bubbling stream, the crossed and climbed the steep hillside opposite, marveling at the rich vegetation—not only the towering Scots pines but also the ferns and heather and various unidentifiable ericaceous plants that covered the rocky understory. Along the way we passed several solo backpackers heading out into the brush with large packs. And on the way back up the glen on a one-lane road we passed a group of oddly garbed young men dragging canoes through the brush down to the river.

We toured the battlefield at Culloden the next day, late in the afternoon. Earlier in the day we’d driven a few miles down the coast of Loch Ness from our cottage in the hills to the ruins of Urquhart Castle, which changed hands many times during the wars with the English in the late seventeenth century, was later given by the English invaders to a noble family from the Aberdeen coast to maintain, and dynamited and abandoned a few decades later when it lost its strategic importance.

The ruins sit on a rocky shelf extending out into Loch Ness, and the views from the castle are superb, naturally—the buildings have no walls! (We didn’t see the monster … but we weren’t really looking.) The site is now equipped with a classy museum and a giftshop loaded with plaid scarfs, tiny bottles of Scotch, postcards, walking sticks, and other kitsch. We ate lunch in the café, which served fish and chips, meat pies, and vegetarian burgers loaded with exotic middle-eastern spices.

The people we got to know best were the ones who ran the B&Bs we stayed at. I’m thinking of Karen in Edinburgh, Graham in Ullapool, Moira in Dumgoyne, and Mairi in Oinch. Several had left home early in life and returned in late middle age for one reason or another.

Mairi might be the classic case. Before showing us to our room, she brought us into the breakfast room and pointed out the window at a cluster of distant buildings. “My aunt lived there, and I grew up in that house with the brown roof.” She pointed. “We moved away. My husband worked at the embassy, in security. But I always wanted to come back. There’s something about the landscape. It becomes a part of you. You miss it.

“I think I know what you mean,” I said. “We hadn’t been here long before I started thinking to myself, ‘Photography cannot capture the beauty. It’s all around you.’”

“Well, we bought this place,” she went on, “and started to run it as a B&B, invested in fixing it up as we built up some cash. Then Covid hit. We didn’t think we were going to make it.”

The next morning we found ourselves at a large square table in the company of a young man from Aberdeen and his girl-friend, a woman of Asian extraction who’d been raised in Germany. (They met in the Yucatan.) Seated next to them was a young woman with a long face and black hair who told us she was from Bologna.

“We’ve been to Bologna,” I said. “We flew in, rented a car, and toured the Umbrian countryside looking for paintings by Piero della Francesco: Urbino, Sansepolcro, Ravenna….”

She almost shrieked. “I’m actually from Ravenna, but I never mention it because no one’s ever heard of it.”

“What?” I said. “The mosaics, the proto-Byzantine architecture? The first time we ever had a wood-fired pizza was in Ravenna.”

“I was about to remind her that Ravenna was the capital of the Roman Empire—at least the western part—for several hundred years. But she had wisely drifted off to attend to her boyfriend, a frizzy-haired young man who didn’t understand a word of English and looked uncomfortable throughout the breakfast.

The young man from Aberdeen and his girlfriend had spent the day doing long hikes up local mountains (recommended by Mairie), while also finding the time to visit the spot where, in the Harry Potter movies, the train runs over the Glenfinnan Viaduct. They timed their visit so that the train would pass by while they were there. “We saw it,” he said, “along with about two thousand other people,” he said with a laugh.

We had no such glamourous tales to tell. I mentioned that we’d eaten at a very fine seafood restaurant out in the middle of nowhere a few miles from town, and asked Mairi why the waitresses had been so unfriendly. It turns out she’d known the chef since childhood, and told a long story about how she’d been assigned by her friend to discipline the woman’s son, her own son’s best friend at the time. He’d developed the habit of stealing bottles of gin from the restaurant.

“Did you visit him later in prison?” I asked. The remark passed unnoticed.

Graham, our host in the tiny hamlet of Letters, across the bay from the attractive town of Ullapool, was a different kettle of fish. He’d spent much of his adult life in California and upstate New York, but mostly on the road. working as a sound technician for touring rock-and-roll bands. It was clear that at the age of 69, he still loved rock-and-roll.

“I haven’t listened to rock-and-roll for ages,” I told him. “The last album I bought was The Beatles Second Album.” In an effort to keep the conversation going, I mentioned that a bit later in life I’d taken an interest in the music of Tom Verlaine.

“I knew Tom,” he said. “Very bitter. He was bitter because he felt he’d been neglected. But Marque Moon was a landmark album. It pointed the way to grunge.”

Graham was a staunch separatist. He’d voted for Scottish independence and grew heated as he described the lies that had been spread by the English during the campaign. “And the Crown!” he exclaimed. “They own vast parts of Scotland. They even own the sea. Don’t pay taxes. And the constitution prohibits the passage of any law that might harm the financial interests of the royal family.”

Graham’s wife, Natasha, happened to be at a UNESCO World Heritage Convention in Nepal.  We met their daughter, aged 15, briefly, while we were eating breakfast the morning after we arrived. “I’d like to stay and chat,” she said shyly as she stood in the doorway, “but I have to catch the school bus.”

After she left, I said, “You must have married late.”

“Three times,” he replied. “Too bad Natasha’s not here. She would have enjoyed meeting you.”

Graham knew the region well, of course—he’d grown up there. We told him we were planning to visit the Bone Caves, which were mentioned in several guide books.

“Waste of time,” he said. “The bones are long gone and the caves are only three feet high. You should go to Stac Pollaidh. It’s ten miles north of Ullapool.”

We’d never heard of it, but it turned out to be good advice. The peak is described online as a Graham (a Scottish mountain between 2,000 and 2,500 feet). It formed as a nunatak (a rocky peak protruding above an ice sheet) during the last Ice Age. Its smooth lower flanks were shaped by ice flows, while its jagged crest, made of Torridonian sandstone, has survived eons of frost-shattering weathering.

When we arrived at the site, we met a woman in the parking lot wearing dark silver sunglasses. She had a large pack on her back.

“Are you going camping?” I asked her naively.

“No. Just out for the day,” she said with a smile.

“What’s in the pack?”

“Ropes.”

It was a windy morning and we kept to the steep but smooth lower flanks. A climb past a gate along the cobblestone path put us in possession of an exhilarating view across the surrounding landscape of grass-covered peaks and valleys, with a small loch at the bottom. Isolated clouds were moving swiftly across the sky, throwing large chunks of the scene in shadow. Three antlered red deer were feeding on the hillside. We were passed on the trail from time to time by hikers a generation or two younger than us. One young man carried an infant on his back.

On Graham’s recommendation we continued north to a smallish café an hour away called the Lochinver Larder, regionally famous for its meat pies served with peas, mash, and gravy. The food was good, but the drive was better. A small two-lane road wound its way through gorgeous grass-covered hills for forty-some miles, reminding me of the Unaweep-Tabeguache highway in western Colorado, not in character, but in its isolation and ever-changing magnificence.

Our final stop of the day was the town of Ullapool itself. We’d visited the previous day before checking in with Graham. That day had been relentlessly gray, and when we stepped into the Ceilidh Place, a long white typically Scottish building a block off main street, it seemed like heaven. A bookstore was to the left, a hotel reception deck to the right. Four or five backpacks were lying on the floor behind a kiosk, belonging, I surmised, to travelers who’d be checking into their rooms later in the day. The tables and chairs in the back, visible through the windows of an interior wall, turned out to be part of a casual bar/café attached to the hotel. The entire place was fitted out with warm lights and well-worn wooden furniture. Two men were chatting at the reception desk, people were laughing a few rooms away, and a general bonhomie pervaded the place.

After perusing the books we went into the café and asked to see a menu. The waitress advised me to move our car to avoid getting a ticket, and told me precisely where to move it to. Once we were settled into a table, I asked a passing server about the langoustine.

“Is that like shrimp with everything still attached? Shells? Antennae?”

“That’s right. They come in a bucket, served cold.”

Hilary decided to take a chance and ordered the shrimp. I ordered the Cellidh Place bowl, a sort of hippie concoction comprised of chickpeas, quinoa, beets, cauliflower, carrot chutney, and garlicy yogurt dressing.

The langoustine, locally caught, were huge—maybe seven inches long—and beautiful to look at, in a beady-eyed, sinister sort of way. But there wasn’t much meat on them. And the waitress forgot to bring the “chips.” The salad was interesting, in that vaguely Middle Eastern vegetarian way involving cumin, garlic, and just a touch of cayenne.

The sun was shining when we pulled into town the following afternoon after our exploratory romp across Wester Ross. The boats in the harbor were more colorful, people were sitting at tables along the waterfront drinking beer. We stopped into a liquor store to buy a bottle of wine and examine the colorful labels of the many Scotch bottles, boxes, and tubes—a local industry we’d been ignoring throughout the trip. And out of curiosity, we went into the ferry terminal to ask about the trip out to the island of Lewis, 50 miles offshore.

“It’s roughly a three-hour trip, depending on the weather,” the woman behind the counter said.

“So you probably can’t see the island from here.” I said.

“No. Definitely not.”

 The next morning at breakfast Graham asked us where we were headed next.

“Skye,” I said. I added that I we had no idea before our trip what a popular destination that was.

“At the car rental desk they asked everyone if they were going to Skye, and everyone said yes.”

“Oh, yeah,” Graham said. “For many tourists, a trip to Scotland means Edinburgh and Skye, Edinburgh and Skye, Edinburgh and Skye.” He said it three times, each time flapping his forefinger back and forth like a windshield wiper along with the words. “Edinburgh and Skye.”

We went to Skye because it’s one of the few islands you can access on a bridge. We reserved a tiny cottage on the Sleat Peninsula—the quiet part of Skye, as they say—because it fit our itinerary and was among the few reasonably priced lodgings we could find. Our plan was to check in the first afternoon and get a feel for the place, drive up through the island the next day, visiting a few of the notoriously overcrowded geological wonders and anomalies, and head back to the mainland the next morning.

We’d crossed the bridge and were motoring south along the island’s inner coast when the tire pressure light came on. That doesn’t necessarily mean much, but when it started to blink a few minutes later we knew we were in trouble. The woman behind the cash register at a gas station we stopped at told us the nearest hope of a repair would be Broadford, sixteen miles away. Our BnB was only three miles away, and it was on the way, so we pulled in there, met our hosts, and explained our predicament.

“It happens all too often around here,” Anthony said. “You’ve got to call the car rental company.“ Once I’d reached the proper line, Anthony took the phone, and an hour later a 24-hour tire service van was pulling into the driveway.

We spent the evening on our little gravel patio looking off to the east across the Sound of Sleat toward the mainland. The next morning we headed back up the island coast toward Portrie and the weird formations of the Quiraing beyond. But the rain grew heavier to the point where we decided to turn around. The landscapes were largely obscured by rain and fog, and the driving, never easy in Scotland, had developed a treacherous aspect.

Lucky for us, there was a castle, a museum, and a café in Armadale, a few miles south of our cottage. The museum was excellent, covering everything from pre-history to the Picts, the Romans, the early Christian missionaries, and the Vikings, to the clans, the wars with the English, crofting, the enclosure movement, the pivotal visit of George IV in 1824, and much else.( The same material had been available in the local museums of several of the larger towns we’d visited, I’m sure, but we’d been passing them by.)

After a pleasant lunch at the café we took a stroll around the grounds and on to the castle, which was merely a shell, though from a more recent era than the ruin we’d seen on the shores of Loch Ness a week earlier.

Before returning to our cottage, we took a series of obscure one-lane roads north across hilly country to get a good look at the Cullens, the biggest mountain range in Great Britian. The road seemed to have been merely pasted onto the landscape with no attempt at serious engineering, and I wasn’t keen on making the trip, but Hilary had her heart set on it. I'm glad we went.

When we reached the opposite coast we drove through the ungentrified villages of Achnacloich, Tarskavaig, Tokavaig (where a good-sized stream rushed into Loch a’ Ghlinne), and Org,  with the ruins of Dunscaith Castle visible on the opposite shore. We saw the Cullens in the distance, I think, maybe ten miles away, though in the mist it was hard to tell how big they really were.

On our way back across the peninsula, we got a pretty good look at a golden eagle.

There was still plenty of light in the sky when we got back to our cottage, and we decided to take a walk pask the Torabhaigh distillery and down through the woods to the waterfront, where we could get a better view of Caisteal Chamuis, the third in a trio of castles that once served to defend a seafaring kingdom. When was that? Who were these people? To judge from the names, I’d say they were Vikings. Norwegian settlers arrived on Skye around 875 AD.

But the woods were muddy and we gave up the project, though along the way we met up with a little boy carrying a fishing rod in a tube.

“Did you catch anything?” I asked.

“No. It was my first time,” he said. “But I’ll come back tomorrow.”

That’s the spirit!

Ten minutes later we came upon a mother and daughter (or granddaughter?) who were gathering blackberries in zip-lock plastic bags. (Perhaps they would call the berries “brambles.”) The elder woman told us they were on holiday from the Midlands.

There are still some good ones right over there.” She pointed.

“Are you going to make a pie?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “We’re going to make a crumble.”

 We spent our last night in Queensberry, on the south bank of the Firth of Forth, a fifteen-minute drive from the Edinburgh airport. The inn has been there since the mid-nineteenth century, and it has a warm, old-fashioned feel. It’s not hard to believe that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote part of Kidnapped there.

 The Forth Bridge, a dramatically cantilever orange structure completed in 1892, runs almost directly overhead. In 2016 the bridge was voted Scotland’s greatest man-made wonder, and it’s also been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

While we were strolling the riverbank after our evening snack we met up with two men by a ticket booth near shore, feeding crackers to a crow. Hilary noticed that they both had binoculars (so did we) and we went over to chat. It turns out they were professional bird-spotters who had been hired by an environmental agency to survey the bird life in the vicinity.

“We’ve seen skuas, graylag geese, black-headed gulls coming through recently,” one of them said. “The firth is a east-west migration route this time of year.”

Who knew?