Pt3 -13:
SCOTLAND
29th August - 15th September
Glengennet
Farm nestles in the verdant Valley of Stinchar near the charming village of
Barr a few kilometres inland from the coastal town of Girvan. Vera Dunlop
greeted me with a warm “Hello Rawb!” when I arrived late in the afternoon and,
quickly dispensing with the formalities, showed me to my well-appointed room. There
was enough time before dinner to take in the views from the second floor
window. Through waves in the old glass I
watched as the late light bronzed distant hills which seemed to rise like soft
buns in the cool air. Across the treetops I could make out a few sheep and a
couple of cows silhouetted against the creamy sky. Heroically accepting the
need to radically expand the subject of my thesis from just English country
pubs to Country Pubs of the UK and Ireland, I brewed tea in the little
stainless steel pot and thumbed through the guest information folder for dinner
options. In Barr they consisted of The King’s Arms or The King’s Arms. I
settled on The King’s Arms. I can highly recommend the steak pie and Caffery’s.
Before
breakfast this morning I drove in to Barr for fags and a paper at the small
village store. A little bell tinkled when I entered. As I waited at the counter
I heard noises coming from the back room and realised after a moment it was a
woman sobbing. I was weighing up whether to leave quietly when a middle aged
lady came through, her eyes red and puffy, with a wad of tissues in her hand.
“Are
you alright?” I asked.
“Princess
Diana’s dead,” she said, and blew her nose. Suddenly the space contracted and
in the instant I knew this small shop in the Scottish countryside and the sad
lady across the cluttered counter would be with me for as long as I draw
memory. The scene went into the same mental drawer as the family kitchen where
Aunty Margaret appeared one morning when I was nine years old to announce JFK’s
assassination, and the Valiant station wagon I was working on when I learned of
John Lennon’s death seventeen years later.
The
woman explained how the paparazzi had hounded Di and Dodi Fayed to their
shocking deaths in a Paris tunnel. I offered my sympathies and retreated to
Glengennet. The mood was predictably subdued although Vera did her best not to
wallow, explaining when I asked for the full brekky that she didn’t “do eggs
very well”. When they arrived the eggs were properly solid, just the way I like
‘em. Vera was very sweet.
I
spent the next few days walking the many paths through the valley and exploring
around Girvan. The bullet was also due its 10,000km service which I organised
in the nearby town of Cumnock. Cumnock wasn’t looking its best in the grey
drizzle but Rhona, the lovely girl on the front counter, was a little ray of
sunshine and got the workshop “boys” onto it straight away. “Come back in an
hour Mr Cawks,” she said, so I headed for the nearest newsagency and then to
find a coffee.
The café was full of women, all smoking furiously as they exchanged theories on the Di/Dodi tragedy. The front half of my Times was all potted bios, photo essays, articles, reports, opinion pieces, comments, quotes, colour pics. There was a graphic high angle shot of the twisted wreckage floodlit on the road and a grainy, heavily enhanced still of seven paparazzi in the back of a police van. You could only make out one face clearly, a moustachioed Latino type with a hand clamped over his mouth. I enjoyed the irony of a pap shooting paps, vultures feeding on vultures to satisfy the voyeur in us all.
I
drove out of Cumnock at 10:40 with the idea of pushing on to Glasgow, but the
further up the motorway I got the more foul the weather became. There’d be
another opportunity to visit the city on the way back down from Oban on the
return journey so I changed course for the coast, which I reached via Alloway
following signs to the Heads of Ayr. I missed the heads because the signage
suddenly stopped; it was like someone was thinking ok, we’ve got you this far – no more clues! I ended up instead at a
funny little village called Dunure.
Dunure
was never a port but it must have been important to someone at sometime. The
view across the Firth of Clyde took in the southern reaches of the Mull of
Kintyre and the peaks of Arran. To the north you could make out the Ayr shoreline.
There was a modest marina with a squat tower at the entrance, like a miniature
Venetian harbour. The tower was too small to be a defensive structure and not
really tall enough for a navigation light. The grey sandstone exterior was so
weathered it looked very much like a decomposing skeleton held together with
white concrete cartilage. Up on the headland the moody ruins of Dunure Castle
confirmed that it had once been significant; just a few precarious stone walls
and a robust looking dovecote now, it had been the seat of an Earl. Around the
corner two men sheltered from the weather under a blue tarpaulin as they laid
stones with mud and trowel.
Further
down the coast I swerved in to Culzean Castle. Pronounced Cullane, it’s a
proper pile perched dramatically 150 meters above the mildly disturbed sea, you
couldn’t call it wild or angry, breaking on the rocks below. The sky was
beginning to clear from the west, a brittle sunshine revealing extensive and
beautifully manicured gardens full of spring colour. As a mark of gratitude for
his generalship during WWII the Scottish government bequeathed Dwight
Eisenhower a suite in the castle for the term of his natural life. Eisenhower
took up the honour, visiting four times including once as President. There’s a
small shrine here to the great man featuring some rare memorabilia.
Back
in Girvan I bought a salad roll and a can of coke and took them down to the
waterfront. The island of Ailsa Craig lay 16 kilometres offshore, floating like
a massive scone in a salty haze between the aluminium sky and the stainless
steel sea. I’d barely cut the engine when another car pulled into the carpark
beside me. The driver’s door flew open. Out jumped a little black terrier with
its lead attached. The dog ran off into the park. It was closely followed by a
large woman struggling out of the car with a pair of walking sticks and cursing
roundly.
“Barney!!”
she yelled, “Come here you!” I climbed out of the bullet as Barney disappeared
into the distance. “Wretched dog,” the woman said, “They just went for each
other.” It took me a moment to realise there was a second dog in the back seat,
difficult to spot through the reflections in the window. “I just want to see if
he’s hurt…she is,” she jerked her head at the dog in the car and heaved herself
around on her sticks. “Barney!” she yelled again, “Come here!” I wouldn’t have
come if I was Barney either. At this point I reminded myself this was Scotland
and she might be calling Bonny, but it was a he-dog so I joined in the chorus.
“Barney, come on boy…you’re a good dog,” I lied. Barney ran down onto the sand.
“I’ll
see if I can catch him,” I said.
“O,
would you please.”
I
followed Barney to the water’s edge, where he stood belly deep lapping at the
ripples. I cooed again what a good dog he was and he approached me, then he
caught himself and raced off back up to the park. Little bugger.
“He’ll
come when he’s ready,” I told Sticks when I got back to the car. Just then a
woman came along with a Labrador on a lead. Barney forgot he was in trouble and
came to join us. While he sniffed the Lab the lady reached down and grabbed him.
As soon as Sticks bundled him in the car the two dogs went at it again. Sticks
waved her weapons around but all I could see through the reflections in the
window were bared teeth and the whites of lethal eyes. Eventually Sticks got
one of the dogs in the front and things settled down. “I think I’m back in charge
now,” she said, “I’d better get them home.” The whole drama had lasted less
than ten minutes.
Apart
from frilly bedclothes, the room at Glengennet boasted a deep bath and large
fluffy peach coloured towels. I added the “Camelia Moisturising Foam” and sank
luxuriously into the warm suds. I wonder what’s on the menu at The King’s Arms
tonight…
*
There
was just one topic on the radio as I motored north-east towards Pitlochry in
grey, increasingly heavy drizzle: panels, debates, interviews with someone who
knew someone who went to school with Di’s third cousin twice removed, obits,
opinion pieces, much pious moralising on the role of the scumbag paparazzi with
only the rare concession that they exist at all because there’s an insatiable
demand for their amoral product. I was in the middle of a national catharsis
which I could only observe, a figure moving through a landscape defined by
inconsolable grief. Everyone had lost a mother, a sister, a wife, a daughter;
every village had a shrine piled high with flowers, cards, portraits, soft
toys, surrounded by locals with heads bowed as they paid their respects in
silence. The weather brought an appropriately Shakespearean gloom to it all.
*
Pitlochry boasted two attractions I just had to see, a fish ladder and Scotland’s smallest distillery. Coming from a part of the world where fish have no limbs I was intrigued to find out how Scottish fish climbed ladders, and the small distillery appealed to me for precisely that reason.
Turns
out the fish ladder isn’t a real ladder at all, but a cleverly devised detour
around a small hydro dam for salmon spawn. It is a chain of ponds curving up
the north bank in a shallow hairpin like the first bend you might take off the
valley floor into a steep pass. Connected by fifteen inch pipes, each pond is 4
by 6 meters with three larger ones for slack water where the fish can rest.
According to the digital readout on the wall of the observation tank 3,288
salmon have already make the journey this season, about 2000 to go to reach the
annual average. The water in the observation tank was like black toffee so
there wasn’t actually much to observe. I could learn much more for the price of
a multi-media presentation in the adjacent exhibition room. Frankly, it’s hard
to see how you can make salmon spawn that exciting so I went to plan B instead.
How
can you not love the name Killicrankie? The display in the visitor’s centre here
was oodles more interesting for someone who likes twiddling knobs and pulling
levers, you can even stick your hand into a series of boxes for a feelie. The
first box was nut husks and the second contained rabbit fur. The third box felt
like a petrified volcano of cow poop but was actually a large black hoof
fungus. I got to push a bunch of levers on the tree identification display and
later, on the way down to Soldier’s Leap, I was able to identify a beech tree. There
was also a sound identification game where I got to twiddle a few knobs, pity
the sounds were boring, stuff like trains and ducks quacking.
A
damp path descended into Killicrankie Pass and bottomed out above Soldier’s
Leap. This is the sight of the first battle of the Jacobean Uprising in the
1600s, a campaign I would follow all the way to the fields of Culloden where
the final act played out in 1746. Here, though, the clansmen routed the
Royalists. One soldier, Donald Maclean, leapt 18ft across the ravine with the
clansmen in hot pursuit. The rain closed in again as I contemplated an extended
walk through the pass, so I changed my mind and made for the wee distillery
instead.
The
low white buildings with slate rooves and red doors ran along the banks of
Edradour Burn. The distillery is indeed an intimate operation, with only three
hands on the floor. It takes more staff to run the popular tours and the gift
shop. A personable young chap in a Campbell kilt and long socks led just five
us around, another bonus since the tours before and after us were both
busloads. We were treated to tastings of their premium single malt while we
watched a professional video of their process. They produce in a year what a
large distillery does in a week so it’s a genuine cottage-scale family
industry. We were assured their House of Lords blended whisky is obtainable
only here and in the actual House of Lords, so on the way out I purchased a
bottle from an old fellow who, from the luminous purple of his nose, clearly
enjoyed his own product a little too enthusiastically. I drove out of the
carpark with the aroma of peat and barley on my palate.
I swerved into the Aldchlappie Hotel near Kirkmichael for bangers and mash washed down with a cold Guinness or three. At a table across the room an Aussie couple and a Kiwi couple were trying to outdo each other with travel stories at increasing volume. They were the Dunnits; done this city, done that cathedral, done somewhere else like they were one night stands. By the time I bailed out they were almost yelling.
*
I
approached Edinburgh in the wrong frame of mind, out of a sense of duty rather
than any particular interest. I think I’m over cities for the moment, ready for
the rugged drama of the Highlands. I stopped just once on the spin down from
Pitlochry, to admire the Forth Bridge. The bridge, opened in 1890, spanned the
Firth like an immense Mechano sculpture. In its time it was the largest iron
structure on the planet and the longest cantilever bridge. I struggled to open
the car door against the howling gale that whipped the waters of the Firth into
foaming white caps, so I didn’t, choosing instead to take the road bridge into
Edinburgh.
I
parked on The Mound, paid and displayed, and wandered up the hill to The
Carwash, which is the obvious name for a café with multi-coloured walls, house
music, flashing video games and wonky stainless steel furniture. I drank coffee
and studied the city map. The lanes behind Princes St looked worth a poke but
since I was nearer the High St I went there first. A piper played at the corner
of the cathedral, his box open for offerings.
There’s
something quirky, even whimsical, about the layout and architecture in this old
part of town, The Royal Mile. Lots of turreted tower thingys like Rapunzel
would’ve leaned out of beside weirdly placed and ornately worked sandstone
gables that for me echoed Bavaria and Prague. I took a left and passed down
across North Bridge heading for a group of stone buildings in the shadow of
Holyrood Palace, which brooded on a knoll to the right. I turned left again
along Princes St making for the lanes. People were laying flowers for Di at the
foot of the gothic Scott Monument. Several blocks further on Edinburgh Palace,
perched on a precipitous eminence overlooking the city, began to dominate the
cityscape, all flags whipping at half-mast in the crisp breeze.
The
lanes I’d hoped to find lined with interesting shops were a disappointment,
which probably says more about my state of mind than the proud city of
Edinburgh. In two hours I felt I’d exhausted the possibilities and made my way
back to the car. As I trudged up the hill past the National Gallery I thought I
detected the malty aroma of whisky distilling and mentally installed myself at
the Kirkmichael Hotel for dinner and a few ales tonight.
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