snippets of scotland
Last month I spent a long weekend in the Highlands, hiking and goldpanning and eating beige foods. These are a collection of memories from my notes app and phone camera roll.
The train from Glasgow Queen Street northwards is a portal into an older, wilder, smogless Scotland. A tunnel of prehistoric green rising up around our carriage; a leaden sky, glimpses of lochs, distant mountains blurred through a grey veil.
Crianlarich bills itself as a crossing place towards more spectacular Highland locations. It exists in a mottled sepia - so grey that every flower is startling, a yellow brick road in a black and white landscape. We drop our bags at our hotel and join the West Highland Way which takes us through expansive views, lakes hiding mythical swords, ruined medieval priories. It also takes us four and a half hours, and by the time we reach Tyndrum we are teetering on a precipice of poorly managed expectations. solved, as most things can be, by fish and chips and patting a nice dog. The bus ride back to where we started takes 9 minutes and costs £5.
The dining room at our hotel feels like The Shining, all low lighting and leather, scattered lone diners, stuffed badger on the mantelpiece and rain pressing in against the windows. Every evening there is a different cheesecake special. No matter what sized glass of wine I order across the weekend, the same waiter brings me the same enormous glass of wine. We are upgraded to a room with a bath.
We convene for our goldpanning expedition at The Green Welly, a third generation business selling everything you might possibly need or want for both your weekend in Scotland and your life as a whole. We note that the other couple who have signed up for goldpanning in rural Scotland are also gay, and if our guide was not led to expect a group of various flavours of queer couples from England he does not show it. He drives us down winding roads and dresses us in huge waders attached to huge wellingtons. He marches us over bog, through forest, up a hill, alongside a river, around long grass, through sucking mud. My boots are so big that every step forward feels like one within the landscape and one within the boot.
By the time we reach a tussocked slope that requires very cautious navigation to avoid a rolled ankle stranding, one group member sits down with an ominous finality. We hurry after our guide down to the river to squint at what looks from one hundred metres away like a tense conversation about expectation management.
Goldpanning is very hard work. The river is cold, and vast quantities of gold are not forthcoming. Our enthusiasm for our microscopic flakes wanes fast, and we eat our packed lunch at 11:30am. Our guide shows no signs of flagging; he strides further upriver to find a more fruitful spot.
It begins to rain. Unrelatedly, we decide that we have had enough. One half of our counterpart couple has also had enough, which is convenient as we have no means of escape on our own. We make our very slow flight along the uneven bank, over tussocks, around long grass, alongside the river, down a hill, through sucking mud and over bog. We have not memorized the route and the prehistoric forest is closing in, petrified lichen dripping from branches and cartoonish red toadstools blistering the moss. The landscape feels as though it could have been this way for millennia. We know it hasn’t; our guide has explained at length how alien this forest would seem to even a 19th century highlander due to Scotland’s systematic deforestation and non-native replanting. Information is the enemy of romance.
We do eventually make it to the car and drive away with a rake over our knees and waders round our ankles. We await our more intrepid companions over extortionate cups of tea and teacakes at The Green Welly, comparing attitudes to children at weddings and the different national dances we’re all failing to learn. I browse camping gear and skull-sized chocolate haggises and silk scarves with sheep on before we are rejoined and enthusiastically shown a vial full of barely visible specks from upriver. Have other groups managed to collect enough gold for their wedding rings doing this? Perhaps the river is kinder to straight couples.
Friends join us in the evening and we play scrabble in the lounge, surrounded by books on church cats, lesbian body horror and 90s politics. The windows frame Glenbruer House over the road in fading grey light, the guesthouse that we had all booked into at very economical prices before unexplained transfers to the main hotel. It hulks beneath a railway bridge, dark and forboding, windows like blank eyes. The one Google review that doesn’t gush about an upgrade describes a persistent and unidentifiable smell.
On our final morning we drive to the picturesque village of Luss at which we have no time to look as we are sprinting through it to catch a ferry of which there are three a day. The loch is vast and still, speckled with private islands and regretful kayakers. In the one pub in Balmaha we eat a very large lunch alongside many children and dogs of various sizes. On our return across the water we watch a bride dragging her huge dress away from Luss’s church; its roof is domed like an upturned boat in tribute to the architect’s father who drowned in the loch on the way back from a hunting trip. As the wind picks up and the rain begins, this feels very believable.
In the hotel bar there’s an American woman with two sleek black labradors, Watson and Hastings. They are accompanying her on a walk up the length of the country over the course of several months. We discuss their unfortunate lack of brains, the variations in house prices she has encountered on her journey northwards, the relative friendliness of different locals. She doesn’t get lonely when she has the dogs. England has a varied yet also narrow range of weather, she remarks. She then describes a moment of blood-curdling fear at dusk on the Yorkshire moors, fog closing in and the dogs disappeared on the scent of a dead sheep, no signal or signage and only an endless, stretching emptiness. She smiles and wishes us a good night’s sleep.
A couple in the room next to us have a very loud argument in the early hours. The next morning we surreptitiously examine all the other guests in the breakfast room to see if we can match raised voices to morose silence. Everyone is eating black pudding to cheerful cèilidh on repeat.