PILGRIMAGE TO SCOTLAND

Southland Times, Issue 23374, 4 December 1937, Page 14

PILGRIMAGE TO SCOTLAND

11. Beauty Of The Highlands

[SPECIALLY WRITTEN FOR THE SOUTHLAND TIMES)

By

DOUGLAS STEWART

If you want to see the unspoiled Highlands you must go west from Inverness, for the straight road up to the east coast, where the tourists go, has little to show you but fishing villages that remind you of Cornwall, and pastures that sweep to the sea with the docility of Devon.

The western road is a wild one, and it begins at once to be interesting by taking you along the shores of Loch Ness. The monster was brooding in the depths when we went by, probably practising the bagpipes, but the lake was very pretty. Incidentally, the only piper I heard in Scotland was a beggar at Ullapool, and a woman in a shop there told me that people gave him quite a lot of money to go away. The road, in a silver twilight, took us to Aultbea, and on up the west coast to a lonely district of sea and hills, where the fields were blue with scabious, and the roadside a delicate blue with harebells, and the slopes triumphant with heather. Like cairns of stone, marking a grim battle with the earth, the lonely cottages of the crofters stood up between the mountains and the sea, and that evening at Little Gruinard my landlady told me that the Gaelic was the common tongue of the district, and she spoke some for me in a soft voice like the wind among the wheat. THE VILLAGE POSTMAN In the gathering darkness I climbed a hill where the rabbits were all at play, and came back down the bank of a bum above whose rocky torrent the rowans were like a fire. It was here that I held an interesting conversation with a brown speckled frog who sat up and listened to me with the oddest air of respect; and it was at just about the same spot next morning that I talked to the village postman, who was a Stewart from Appin, and who had relatives at Kiwi River.

He was an original. Everyone else in Scotland seemed to have relatives at Dunedin. And the Scottish people, for that reason, are very interested in Nevz Zealand, in welcome contrast to the English, who are interested in only themselves and the weather Both rather chilly. From Little Gruinard, on the west coast, we wound inland to Tongue, leaving the craggy coast and the hills with their plaid of heather for a lovely and desolate country of yellow moors and lonely silver lochs. For miles we saw no sign of life, and only the occasional stony ruins of a cottage told us that crofters had once sought a living there. We were in the territory of the “Sutherland clearances” of 1810-20, when the tenants of the interior were removed to the coast and their arable holdings converted into sheep farms—a disaster that was only one step in the Highland clearances of 1750-1850, whereby thousands of peasant cultivators were driven from their homes and forced to emigrate. Ullapool, a little squadron of whitewashed cottages drawn up stiffly to attention on the shores of Loch Broom, brought us to a shopman who tried his hardest in surly monosyllables to prevent us buying any of the tweeds he had imported from the Outer Isles. We left him to his grimy hermithood, and watched the porpoises in the loch. Further on were the cottages of the crofters again, sometimes of red granite, but usually of grey, with a roof of slate. Piled accurately at the side of each was the black mound of peat for the winter.

It was a narrow road, and not long after we had stopped to look at the exquisite Ardessie Falls, a lorry that tried to pass us sank deep into the soft earth at the roadside. At a quarry a mile further on, I asked men working for an opposition firm to go to his rescue. They laughed with that fiendish glee we take in each other’s misfortunes, and agreed to go.

“And he’s well stuck, he’s right in the ditch, is he!” they kept saying, rubbing their hands in hobgoblin delight.

I asked them if we should see any deer, for the country looked lonely enough, and we had seen high fences around the fields to keep the delicate beasts from the crops. “No,” they said, “it’s the opening of the stag-shooting season today, and

(To be continued.)

they’ll all be away in the hills. Nature tells them when it’s time to hide.”

Then they said, “if you’d been here an hour ago you’d have seen some shooters coming back from the hills. They were bringing down a dead stag in a cart.”

I remembered John Buchan’s lovely book, “John Macnab,” and wished I had seen the stag. But a little later on I saw something infinitely better; an old cart piled highwith the black brick-like cubes of peat; an old bony chestnut mare! and leading her down a steep road, a tall Scot whose face was dark, and his young wifej whose shawled loveliness beside Ker man’s black pride was as sweet as a spring among the heather.

I wanted to photograph their cart, but the man said, “No, I don’t think ye’d better; no, I don’t think we’d like it.”

His eyes were as black as peat, and he was a fine man. I wish the Maoris at Rotorua would stand up against the tourist like that. Maori boys shouldn’t dive for pennies, lions shouldn’t jump through hoops, picturesque old salts in Cornwall shouldn’t be taking old ladies for a row round the bay, nothing that is romantic should let itself be romanticized.

I made a good resolution then and there not to tempt anyone from his pride again. Next day I broke it, of course, but Mrs McLeod of Kinbrace was charming, and it was rather different. I called to ask her if I could photograph her cottage. In Cornwall they’d have said, “Yes, the fee’s a shilling.” Mrs McLeod said, “Ah, but how much would ye be charging us?” I said that it was she who could be charging me, and offered to send her a copy of the photograph. Mrs McLeod said, “And what would that cost us?”

It was almost unbelievable. Here’s caution if you like (what else would you expect in Scotland?), but here was a smile of welcome instead of a palm outstretched for a tip; here was kindliness and simplicity instead of cunning and avarice; here was something to show how utterly unspoilt by the tourist are the Highlands. I thanked her. I said it was a lovely cottage. “I think it’s us should be thanking you,” called Mrs McLeqd as we drove away. ON TO JOHN-O’-GROATS Soon after that we saw on a yellow moor a little herd of Highland cattle, shaggy and red and wild; and then there were grouse flying up; and a remote anglers’ hotel, where they had a stuffed otter, and a snowy mountain hare, and a great steel-blue monster of a 30-pound salmon which was killed by one Donald Fraser about 30 years ago, and which I would not believe was real if I caught it myself. And then there were sheepfolds of grey stone, and grey stone cottages, and remote graveyards walled with grey stone exactly like the sheepfolds, so that one had a strange and sweet feeling of the dead being gathered in in safety for the night. Then there was settlement and cultivation. There were fences made of slabs of crude red sandstone, and tiny thatched cottages shaped exactly like the huts of the Stone Age still to be seen in Cornwall. There were villages like Thurso (whose meaning is Thor’s Town), that are Norse, not Scottish. There was a butcher who called himself a “flesher,” and whose shop had two windows, in one of which reposed sheepskins dyed a brilliant orange, while in the other swung a solitary very dead black hen like a mournful pendulum reminding all the birds of the air that time or the flesher would devour them.

But in the fields the birds were merry enough, and the rooks and the seagulls fought a black-and-white battle with each other for roosts on the yellow stooks of the wheat.

We had reached John-o’-Groats, the northernmost point of Scotland. We watched a little steamer struggling through a blue turmoil of cross-cur-rents to th: Orkneys on the horizon, and we found it hard to set off again on the roundabout trail that was to lead us to Appin and the Burns country.