Scotland 1 - Kidnapped

The Road to the Isles

A far croonin' is pullin' me away
As take I wi' my cromach to the road.
The far Cuillins are puttin' love on me
As step I wi' the sunlight for my load.

The Road to the Isles

Kenneth Macleod.

I am in Edinburgh.  I dine with gentlemen of distinction: Sir James Dunbar Nasmith; the President of the Scott Club; The Chair of the Royal Celtic Society.  

I have oysters and lamb, for the record.  I ask Sir James if he had known Basil Spence.  My conversation is limited.  Adam Smith may also have been present….. 

Later I sip Glenmorangie on the terrace, in lonely isolation with a slightly stained stoney  Queen.....

In the morning I am ribbed, via North Berwick, to the Bass Rock, where, along with a plethora of gannets,

A number of puffins and several guillemots,

I am reminded that Robert Louis Stevenson was nothing but the cousin of the man who designed and built the Bass Rock Lighthouse. 

The waters are cold. I see no sand eels.

To Ladybank, where I am held, in significant comfort and relative luxury, in a remote Steading.  I meet a man with restless eyes and a young woman who leads scouts and rings bells (though not mine).  A lamb’s leg is carved in ritual.  We speak of Gavin Maxwell and his discomforts, and of the insurmountable difficulty of electrifying the Forth Bridge, almost as if they are linked.... 

A tree creeper lightly touches the silver birch on the drive.

The next day I am taken to Crail.  Fishermen bait lobster pots and disappear.  An hotel claims to provide fresh fish….  Breaded or battered.  The shellfish shack is void.  Curlews in a field. Whaups would always be whistling….. (though these are black-throated divers....)

Later, in St Andrews (a city once archiepiscopal); I beg for Cullen Skink, in memory of the Battenbergs.  As Boswell recorded, Saint Andrews seems to be a place eminently adapted to study and education, being situated in a populous, yet a cheap country, and exposing the minds and manners of young men neither to the levity and dissoluteness of a capital city, nor to the gross luxury of a town of commerce, places naturally unpropitious to learning…..  [This might have been Charles’s prospectus for his son - the redshank....]  

No white-tailed eagles are seen.

From Ladybank to Pitlochry, where I am allowed haggis and neeps at the Old Mill Inn.  And thence to RSPB Loch Garten, close betwixt the Spey and the Cairngorm, and a forced induction smacking of The Prisoner; various Number Twos acting on uncoordinated orders from the unseen Number One.  My quarters are thin, the hut commander terse, dry philosophy her craic - enough to give a great spotted woodpecker a headache.  

No ospreys are seen. 

Nowhere.....

But I walk from Glen More to Nethy Bridge, taking shelter at the Ryvoan Bothy, making my bed of heather bushes which I cut for that purpose… there was a low concealed place, where I was so bold as to make a fire: so that I could warm myself when the clouds set in, and cook hot porridge, and grill the little trout that I caught with my hands under the stones and overhanging banks of the burn…. 

In the dark of Abernethy Forest the chaffinches elude me with their northern accents, but the Willy Wobbler is the same,  a sudden immigrant with his waterfall sing-song.

And then the redstart, sparkling at me in the slanting rain.....

His little love shaking her tail feathers at him in shameless rite of instinct....

We break away.  The Road to the Isles strides across the glens. Past the commandoes at Spean Bridge, over Telford's Neptune’s Staircase at Banavie on the Caledonian Canal in the Great Glen, lowered over by massive Ben Nevis, then past Kinlocheil to the safe place of Arisaig, from whose silver sands Bonnie Prince Charlie set sail to France in 1746, and where the Scottish SOE had their HQ in WWII.  The foul airs from the Jacobite Steam Train (aka Hogwarts Express) smut Mallaig, where ton bags of organic remains are unloaded to feed the ravenous salmonds…..

I am hoisted aboard an open ship, Spaniards and Italians abutting me, pitching across the Sound of Sleat, where no cetaceans breach the surface.  No white tailed neither.  

Smoke rising from remote Knoydart.

On Skye, to Armadale [Sky. Armidel.  Boswell: Armidel is a neat house, built where the Macdonalds had once a seat, which was burnt in the commotions that followed the Revolution….] Past Sligachan the faeries are busy, their parking filled to the shining brim, the adjacent hard brows of Cuillin furrowed by the passionate tourist.  

Under Sgurr Alasdair, Glenbrittle Beach disremembers me, from forty or more frozen years past, the black scree of tinned cheese and tubed milk little more than spume on a camper windscreen.  

Here I climbed, unsteady and unsure, a twenty-something novice in thrall to life.

Now no ring ouzel.  No ptarmigan.  But oysters, from Ullapool, above the Talisker distillery [Talisker is the place beyond all that I have seen, from which the gay and the jovial seem utterly excluded….  Boswell]; and then hurriedly to the four-car Kylerhea ferry and the graveyard at Glenelg, near where Boswell and Johnson stayed in 1773; (Of the provisions the negative catalogue was very copious.  Here was no meat, no milk, no bread, no eggs, no wine.  We did not express much satisfaction….)

R L Stevenson in my head. The desperate chase through the heather, the frightened fugue of dispossessed and Francophile anxious to avoid the Brexit party, the red-faced, red-coated ferruginous ambassadors of phony imperialism.  We duck and weave to dodge the spilling fighters, the cocksure arrogants, and trek by memorials, personal and touching, pausing at the Bealach Ratagan 

with its view of the Five Sisters of Kintail and then down Glen Shiel and up along Loch Ness.  But for the details of our itinerary, I am all to seek; our way lying now by short cuts, now by great detours; our pace being so hurried..... and the names of such places as I asked and heard being in the Gaelic tongue and the more easily forgotten.....

In Abernethy Forest, in the forward hide, the dawn glows briefly over an empty nest.  Stoical EJ, faithful for sixteen years, now aged at twenty-two, does not return.  Age perhaps the enemy; perhaps deathly inclement weather?  The grassy nest, the spread of a double bed, shudders in the wind atop the RSPB tree. For the first time in around sixty years, no raptor sinks onto spangled eggs within this view.

I wake from slumber, the silent dawn punctuated by the electronic burr of a passing capercaillie, his brazen baritone a blare across the otherwise deserted mist.  No EJ.  No Odin. How strange the kidnapped quiet of highland Scotland.  Painfully beautiful in the absence of a much beloved foreigner.  

I climb the stair in the darkness, naively reaching for the door to heaven, and then, flashlit by lightning, I stop, disillusioned by my misstep.  Then I hear a voice, brushed by a cough:  There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people.

And I think, in all innocence, how good and humble was that wonderful bird who returned here year after year, to attempt to raise fifty chicks through snow and wind, aggression and hunger, who flew some 120,000 miles in accord with primitive instinct, daring to mate and lay and incubate and feed and nurture and protect in full view of our curious eyes…..

In Edinburgh I dine with Professor Sir James Duncan Dunbar Nasmith, 92 years of age, native of Dartmouth, pupil of Winchester College and Cambridge, conservation architect, resident of Findhorn.  His full and worthy life is more than a book, and his eloquence and composure put me to shame.  But, and I do hope he won’t mind me writing this, I cannot help but feel that EJ, our beloved missing osprey, is at least as remarkable a being as any good and humble man……

(chorus) Wi' ma pipes below ma oxter an' ma sporran neatly pressed

 Ma pockets full o' porridge for the road.

 Wi' some Crawford's Tartan Shortbread an' some tattie scones as weel

 An' ah'm jist aboot tae paint masel' wi' woad. Oh - yo!

Leo McGuire’s Song

Billy Connolly

 








With many thanks to Lindsay and Pauline, who made all this possible.

Also, thanks to R L Stevenson (Kidnapped) and James Boswell (Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland)



[Editor's note: All pictures by the author, but some do not necessarily correlate exactly with the places mentioned in the text]

Edinburgh

City of the Dead

Edinburgh's Disgrace - The National Monument

Perhaps it was because I was reading Ian Rankin's Standing in Another Man's Grave on the train to Edinburgh that I arrived with thoughts about mortality.  Not gloomy ones; just reflections on rituals of burial, and the finity of life. 

The Dugald Stewart Monument, Calton Hill

The feeling doesn't go away as I walk up Calton Hill, past the Old Calton Burial Ground with its austere obelisk of the Political Martyrs' Monument, dedicated to five Botany Bay deportees punished for their role in the fight for electoral reform in 1793.  Then, atop the hill, there's the incomplete National Monument to the dead in the Napoleonic Wars, with columns that somehow resemble more Battersea Power Station than the Parthenon.  Then there is the inverted telescope of the Nelson Monument, remembering Trafalgar (what will become of this come independence?) and the iconic Dugald Stewart Monument, designed by William Henry Playfair (who also designed the National Monument).  Acropolis: Necropolis!

A little while later, wandering up the Royal Mile, a sign for the City of the Dead caught my eye, and from then on everyone I met seemed to be dead.  

David Hume, Lawnmarket

David Hume reposing half dressed by the side of the road called out to me, To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive.....  

David Hume, Old Calton Burial Ground

Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson greeted me, lifelessly, in The Writers' Museum, which is in a seventeenth century building known, appropriately (there is no lift), as Lady Stair's House.  

The Writers' Museum, Lady Stair House (1622)

As I wandered the rooms I heard Scott, seated at his dining table, rambling on about how he invented the clan tartans, 

One Tartan Kilt (Courtesy of Walter Scott)

and organised the visit of George IV to Scotland in 1822; 

George IV was here (courtesy of Walter Scott)

then he invited me to a game of chess.  Robbie Burns, clutching his swordstick, muttered, almost quoting Bob Dylan, My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here;/My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer..... and Stevenson showed me the ring made from tortoiseshell and silver, inscribed Tusitala (teller of tales), which was given to him by a Samoan chief; he was wearing this ring when he had his fatal cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 44 (in 1894).  Outside, in the flagstones of Makars' Court (which takes its name from the Scots word for a poet or author, and also gives its name to an honorary post for three years for the City's Literary Ambassador) are inscriptions celebrating other Scottish writers, such as the fourteenth century poet, John Barbour, and Sorley MacLean, who died in 1996.

Arthur's Seat, from the Castle

Up the road, the Castle broods, full of weapons of destruction, like Mons Meg, and dead pets.  There are mementoes of glory, to be sure, but the most affecting parts, for me, were the Prisons of War, where in 1781 some 1,000 men were incarcerated, for the most part captured in the American War of Independence.  

At that time, the old tenements of Edinburgh were hardly less crowded, and the swamps that were once known as the Nor' Loch (now Princes Street Gardens) were infamously fetid and fowl.  I am inspired, by the motto over the gate (Nemo mi impune lacessit - watch it, pal) and by the way the great buildings rise from the volcanic rock, a natural glasswork blown in black and grey; and I am inspired by the views, across to the Firth of Forth and out to Arthur's Seat.  Up the Outlook Tower in the Camera Obscura I see distorted films of shadows walking, buildings quivering, traffic shivering.  Hogwarts appears out of the turrets of George Heriot's School, and the gothic pile of the Scott Monument seems about to launch itself skywards to leave Waverley behind.

Hogwarts - in the Camera Obscura

I am guided by Ian Rankin through the Old Town.  Or perhaps I am guided by Rebus.  Whichever, there's a wealth of death!  

Charon will be back in a minute

The gate to the Greyfriars Churchyard stands ajar, and I slip in to pay my respects to  Greyfriars Bobby, one of the more famous dead of this great city. 

The Greyfriar's Bobby

Popularised in a 1912 novel by Eleanor Atkinson, and then sweetened by a Disney film in 1963 (which I went to see under the misapprehension that it was about Billy Bunter?) the story is of a Skye terrier who refused to desert his deceased master, maintaining a vigil over his grave for fourteen years.  Also in the graveyard I note some iridescent plastic flowers at the foot of a monument.  

George Buchanan, tutor to Mary Queen of Scots
and James VI of Scotland and I of England

Who, I wonder, still reveres the memory of George Buchanan, tutor to both Mary Queen of Scots and James VI, who died in 1582?  I must brush up my Latin, and study De Jure Regni apud Scotos, published in 1579, condemned in 1584 and again in 1664, and burned by the University of Oxford in 1684.  Some recommendation!

The Royal's Mile - John Knox's View

At the Netherbow Port, I meet John Knox, a hard man to like.  His house, or that that bears his name, dates from the fifteenth century and, despite many changes, its metre-thick walls, erratic steps, painted ceilings and tiled fireplaces evoke times, and lives, past.  For part of the sixteenth century this was the home of a jeweller and goldsmith by the name of James Mossman (executed 1573 for insurrection), who let parts of the ground floor to other merchants.  Having been ordained a catholic, but then in exile a pupil of Calvin, from 1560 until his death in 1572 John Knox was a Minister at St Giles Cathedral, where his influential preaching led the Scottish Reformation.  He was instrumental in the abdication in 1567 of Mary Queen of Scots, who had resisted his entreaties to leave the Church of Rome and to adopt a more austere lifestyle, though his own second marriage, to a sixteen year old when he was in his fifties, did not impress her favourably.  

The Royal Smile - Mary, Queen of Scots

She is reputed to have said, I fear the prayers of John Knox more than all the assembled armies of Europe, and indeed  Knox's preference for a King brought up as a Presbyterian had consequences for us all, partly through his effect on the Scottish Covenanters who, in 1638, declared their right to national sovereignty. 

The empty chair - John Knox's House

The house was rescued from its decline as a slum tenement by the Church of Scotland in 1850, and it stands as a memorial to Knox and his circle, which included George Wishart (Wisehart), who was burned at the stake in 1546.  On the wall of an upstairs office a board bears Knox's prayer: And so I end.... Rendering my troubled and sorrowful spirit in the hands of the Eternal God, earnestly trusting at His good pleasure, to be freed from the cares of this miserable life and to rest with Christ Jesus my only hope and life.  

Walter Scott paid 30 shillings to see him die.....

Tripping on the seventh stair as I return to earth, I marvel at how one man alone can have so much influence on a whole populace, though once more I hear the voice of David Hume:  Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.

Robert Fergusson - not grave

Down Canongate I pause in front of the statue of Robert Fergusson, whose arm is filled with pink flowers.  In his 24 years he achieved such fame that Robbie Burns lamented him as his elder brother in the muse.  His poem, Auld Riekie, caught both the life of eighteenth century Old Town, and the public imagination...

On stair wi tub, or pat in hand,

The barefoot housemaids loo to stand,

That antrin fock may ken how snell

Auld Reikie will at morning smell:

Robert Fergusson's Grave

Following a head injury, perhaps the result of falling downstairs, he was taken from his mother’s house and locked in the Bedlam next to the Edinburgh poorhouse. He died within weeks and was buried here in an unmarked grave.  It was Robert Burns who, thirteen years later, commissioned a headstone for him, and then, later still, Robert Louis Stevenson intended to renew the stone, though he died before this was carried out.  The statue, by David Annand, was unveiled in 2004.  The late poet, Robert Garioch, recalled Fergusson as: faur apairt/in time, but fell alike in hert.....  Touching sympathy.  Adam Smith, political economist and philosopher, best known for his book The Wealth of Nations, was also buried in this Kirkyard, in 1790.

I walk on down, passing the curiously maritime architecture of the Scottish Parliament Building; past the traditional Palace of Holyroodhouse, and up the path above Salisbury Crags towards Arthur's Seat, in Holyrood Park.  

But the weather closes in and soon the city is obscured, a white mist furled across the scene like a sea of porridge.  

The road to Arthur's Seat.....

A figure ahead, walking a dog, reminds me of Rebus, but faint-hearted, I return to the comforting dark of the city streets.

As dusk settles, and rain begins to shine the stones, I seek shelter within the enticing brightness of pubs and bars.  

The HalfWay House

A drink in The Halfway House is a convivial treat, and then a visit to The Cafe Royale reveals a different clientele, surrounded by opulence and fed with style.

Medusa, the Oyster Bar, Cafe Royale

Medusa at the next table turns my scallops to stone, but I only see her through a prism.  

The Gorgon leaves

Outside it is wet now, the cherry blossom plastered to the cobbles, the ochre walls darkened by the rain.

I wander the New Town, to see Prince Albert on his horse, catching his death no doubt, and to admire the neoclassical harmony of Charlotte Square, which Robert Adam designed just before he died in 1791.

On the north side at number 6 is Bute House, the official residence of the First Minister, though it seems deserted just now, and curiously vulnerable.

A few streets away I catch up, eventually, with Ian Rankin, drinking with Jackie Leven in The Oxford Bar, a pub that nicely breathes a bygone air.  It was mid-evening quiet.  Rebus was seated in the back room with an IPA and the Evening News when I arrived.  I asked him if he wanted a refill.  Have I ever been known to refuse?  

Drinking with Rebus - The Oxford Bar

In Standing in Another Man's Grave, John Rebus finished the paper, while sounds of laughter came from the bar area.....  He lifted the empties, preparing to join the throng in the front room.  Then he paused, remembering the drive to Tongue and back: the isolation and stillness, the sense of a world unchanged and unchanging.

Where are you?

Nowhere.  Quite literally.

'But I prefer it here,' he told himself, making for the bar.....

I know how he feels.

Let virtue distinguish the brave
Place riches in lowest degree
Think them poorest who can be a slave
Them richest who dare to be free

Both Sides of the Tweed
Dick Gaughan

Multiple Self Portrait with Marilyn  (World of Illusions)