PILGRIMAGE TO SCOTLAND

Evening Star, Issue 22817, 27 November 1937, Page 3

PILGRIMAGE TO SCOTLAND

I.: THE JOURNEY NORTH [Written, by Douglas Stewart, for the ‘ Evening Stax.’] , If I were to tell the full story of this pilgrimage, which ended when Alexander Stewart, of Achnacone, Appin, wished me good luck as I drove away past the grey silence _ of Loch Linnhe rippling about the ruins of the island castle where once _tho Stewarts lived, the curtain would rise on a small boy poring over a book of the clans, and deciding that no tartan could compare with the red blaze of the one he could call his own. But the true story begins in the pantry of a cargo boat, where I rowed my way to England with a scrubbing brush.

That was good fun, and it was good fun, after the cold grime and the noise of London, to stand amongst the seapinks and the paper bags at Land’s End and say: “ From here, the most southerly point of England, I make for John-o’-Groats, the northernmost point of Scotland.” From Cornwall our route took us through the green tunnels of the Devon hedgerows, where every gap showed the patchwork loveliness of leaden turnip crops and green grass and golden wheat and red ploughland, to Somerset, where the earth is white and the landscape has the green sensuality of Taranaki, and so to Wells, where the cathedral defies unending time and astonishing dirt with the massive splendour of its arches. Next on the map was Bath, where one takes the waters (they taste like the morning after), and, in the gigantic excavations of the Roman baths, has a swift vision of whit© togas flitting between the pillars. Did they, you wonder, bathe in those long white nightgowns, or were there trunks and silly neck-to-knee regulations? Past Gloucester, and past the fields so criss-crossed with stone walls that they look like monstrous cross-word puzzles, lay England’s most perfect village, Broadway, a sonnet in golden stone, which is kept purs in rhyme and scansion, alas, by the ideal of fleecing the tourist on his way to Stratford-cm-Avon.

I did not meet Shakespeare’s ghost at Stratford (as later, at Dumfries, I was to meet a red phantom I feared was Burns), but I did meet a curiously soulful barmaid who said that she liked the green fields and “ Nature in the raw,” and was sick of living in a place that was only a side-show for tourists who didn’t care a hoot for Shakespeare anyway. Wo saw Ann Hathaway’s cottage, and hurried on to a fantastic village where at least a hundred old women who had presumably been attending either a witches’ Sabbath or a convention of grown-up Girl Guides marched in single file up the road, each, carrying a basket, and on a perfectly bright sunshiny day, a large, open, black umbrella! A road that opened into a great four-track speedway took us through dingy Nottingham and on to Newcastle-on-Tyne and the Border of Scotland at last.

We had come 500 miles in two days, but for the next fortnight the north was to put such a spell on us that it was all we could do to tear ourselves away from on© magic valley to the next. We made for Edinburgh, and saw, in the midst of the, castle so grim with granite and history, _ the sad splendour of the Scottish National War Memorial. Solid and rugged from the outside, the building within has the majesty of a cathedral, beautiful with sculpture and stained glass, the bronze friezes standing out like a pageant suddenly frozen with sorrow. As we came out a woman with a London voice said: “ It makes you think. It makes you think about war and all that a bit, doesn’t it?” I said: “ They should give those books to the armament manufacturers to read.”

I was cold with horror, for I had been reading the great volumes in which are preserved the names of all the Scottish war dead. Great books like encyclopse-, dias, but the only subject they cover is death; the only information to be gained is that thousands and thousands of men who are now only names in a book were alive, but died in the war. We saw Holyrood, rich with memories of Mary Queen of Scots, and then, as the ferry carried us over the Firth of Forth we stared at the mile-long bridge, one of the engineering marvels of the world, and a fine sight, too, towering in red over the grey water. Of this the story is told that a man spends his whole life painting it; as soon as he has worked his way to one end of the bridge it is time for him to start all over again. True or not, it’s a story worth thinking about. There are lots of Forth bridges we spend our lives painting. , ' Now we began to see what Scotland was really like. Oak trees lined the highway, and between their great trunks we saw the fields stretched out in many-coloured squares of fertility. One or two innkeepers, who could not be bothered with tourists, were ferociously rude to me, and a man whom I asked what was by a monument by the roadside said, “ Ah, I dinna blame ye for seekin’ after heesKnowing how the Scot can blame if he has the mind to, I felt immensely relieved that he approved, and we hurried on to the sweet woods of‘Glands and Balmoral, a countryside that with the dignity of rivers and pines is as royal as its lairds. Then, with dramatic swiftness the landscape grew mountainous. The great hills were shaggy with heather and seared with the white flames of falling water. We saw the long-tailed black-faced Highland sheep with their curling horns, and there were anglers fishing the remote hums. Yarning to two fishers at a bridge, £ told them the average trout in New Zealand weighed two or three pounds. They looked at each other and suddenly burst out laughing. “ Weel,” said one of them at length, with an air of “ now I’ll tell one,” “ ours may be only as big as your finger, but we took six dozen between the pine over yon and this bridge one day. Coming out of the purple wilderness into quieter country, where the rowans swung their scarlet constellations over the roadside, we reached Inverness and drove to the ragged moor of Culloden. The bare landscape has not changed since that black day when Prince Charlie’s weary Highlanders were shattered by the hordes under the Duke of Cumberland, and you can still see the stone from which the duke directed the battle, while in a field nearby still stands a cottage that was there when the battle was fought. A cairn marks the site of the encounter, and stones mark the graves of the clansmen. Seeing engraved on one, “Clan Stewart of Appin,” I attempted to cry or crow a “ Hoigh!” and we sang “ Speed, bonny boat, like a bird on the wing” as the rather inappropriate little car purred on to the Highlands. (To be continued.).