One thing I do know: the idea of the rich and powerful being the best stewards of the land would make me feel less queasy if we weren’t looking down the valley towards the ruined remnants of yet another abandoned hamlet. People lived here once. Perhaps they still did, when Johnson and Boswell were riding to the south. It cannot have been easy, but they fished in the river, and worked their land, and drove their cattle, and managed the trees for timber, and then, like so many others, they were dispossessed by bailiffs or troops, poverty and rampaging rents. It is a beautiful place, Glen Affric, and full of wonder and hope, but it makes for an easier time if you keep your mind fixed in the present.
The bothy sits at the head of the valley with a distant backdrop of snow-capped mountains and, closer by, a flourishing thirty-year-old copse of birch and Scots pine. It’s the first ever Trees for Life planting. There’s a generator for electricity and water is drawn from the ice-cold burn. The nights are long this far north and we sit down to eat early, around a small table, with a wood fire burning, and candlelight, and a chill wind drawing us close.
Mick tells us about deer stalking. They employ a stalker on their Dundreggan estate, over the mountain, along with a couple of locals to help out, one of them ex-Army, but it’s not easy. The deer are nervous, and whole days can be lost in the fog. Without any wolves, what is to keep the deer in check? There’s a portrait of a wolf on the wall, following me with feral eyes. Everyone here has seen the short film of what happened in Yellowstone Park when wolves were reintroduced. How the deer were kept on the move. The wildflowers and the trees and the butterflies flared into life, the river changed course and the fish flowed back. Could that happen here? Do we owe the wolf that? And the boar, beaver, lynx and all the other creatures we have driven from this land. What have we lost? Mick is just back from the National Parks of North America, where people crowd the lay-bys and jostle for a view of a grizzly or a wolf pack. The parks are too busy, where once they were not busy enough – or that’s what someone in the US government decided and they launched an advertising campaign and now look: you cannot escape the tailbacks of cars and motorhomes. I hear that to the east of here there are many eastern Europeans working in the supermarkets’ organic carrot fields – and we’ve just picked up a packet in the local shop for only £1. Just think what people were paid, all along the chain, to get that onto our table. Mick says he wants to see what it’s like, working in those fields, being towed in a trailer behind a tractor, leaning over the back, five of you, in a row, weeding the carrots, up and down the fields, all day long – and here they are, £1 per bag. What is the value of things? This is a plate of food. Surely it’s worth more than a few seconds’ worth of bollocky talk from some management consultant? Let them try pulling carrots, or stalking deer. And so back to the wolves. The lynx and the pine marten. Don’t we need them in our lives again? And the raptors – the hen harrier and the golden eagle – they are being poisoned and shot (or so it is said) by the men who work on the grouse moors, and so are the beautiful mountain hares, in their hundreds, just to keep the moors free and the food bountiful for the game birds. It’s subsidized slaughter. But the landowning lobby is strong. I’d be hitting the whisky by now if I’d remembered to bring any. At least my smoking days are behind me. What is wrong with people? And the Forestry Commission, which hosed millions in public funds over these hills, planting trees that no one could ever use (there are no roads to get them out), and no one ever wanted, spending even more getting rid of them. Exasperation, strangely affectionate, settles on the table. We have all been here before. Except for Fitch, who smiles and now tells us he studied fashion design in Guangzhou, and has been working for a year with autistic children in Ireland, and soon he is heading back to China, where his Scottish girlfriend will teach English and he – what? – he doesn’t know. In our little hut in the wilderness we offer up advice by candlelight. The wonder of it. But soon we are back on national parks, Scottish this time, and destructive road schemes which make almost no allowance for wildlife, and housing developers who buy up land in the parks (which surely should be protected) and who never give up on their plans, because even if they don’t get approval the first time, they just poison the land, or plough it up, or let it rot, and then they come back again. They’ll get there in the end. They almost always do. The pressure is all one way. ‘But’, someone says, with pain in their voice, someone who would really like an answer, ‘but’, I say, with surprising naivety, ‘they know what they are doing is wrong, destroying irreplaceable ancient forests and driving rare species to extinction, when they could just as easily be building somewhere else. And still they press on. Why?!’ But there is of course no answer, or no good answer, although we all know that something has to change, and we have to find a way to put a value on things that are currently regarded as worthless, or taken for granted, because value is not a question of money, and what really matters in life (our human community, food, clean air, water, shelter, friendship, love – just say it: the impossible but undeniable interconnectedness of every living thing, and perhaps even more than that, the rocks and rivers and mountains and stars), none of that counts for anything in a company balance sheet. We just don’t care enough about any of the important stuff until we need it. And it’s only at times like this, away, finally away from the daily clatter, that we catch hold of what we are missing (although it is slippery) and that in fact is what someone – Howard? Roy? – is saying right now, that people, the volunteers and the staff, they all come here for the warmth of the community. And isn’t that something? Even troubling? We come here, to the wilderness, far from everything and everyone we know, to find friendship and simple human connection. Why is it so hard to find at home? And I wonder if the people who want to be part of this – all of us, and countless others – will manage to make their way here, or some place just like it, one way or another. Is that what a community is? A nation? It is always and ever the idea that matters. Even if, as Norman MacCaig once said, with his Edinburgh purr, and I hope we can all agree, ‘I hate a man who calls his country his.’
Anyway, I don’t suppose Boswell would have bothered to lift up his pen, but at least I was on hand.
‘I’ll have a large Talisker, please.’ The barman pours, and winks, and whisky slurps merrily over the measure and into the glass. I have found my way to a snug bar in the port of Portree in the east of the Isle of Skye. Johnson and Boswell had been brought here in a large boat, with eight oars, conveyed by Lord Raasay from his own island of Raasay, along with Mr Malcolm McCleod, Mr Donald McQueen, Dr Macleod ‘and some others’. They had ‘a most pleasant sail between Rasay and Skye and passed by a cave’, Boswell tells us, ‘where Martin says fowls were caught by lighting fire to the mouth of it. Malcolm remembers this. But it is not now practised, as few fowls come into it.’ And who can blame them? Johnson talked ‘of death’, of course. ‘There is no rational principle by which a man can die contented, but a trust in the mercy of God, through the merits of Jesus Christ.’ Everyone listened to this Sunday sermon on the calm flat waters of the channel with great satisfaction.
They had travelled up from Fort Augustus on Loch Ness, via Glensheal and the west coast at Glenelg, and so across to Skye, over to Raasay, and back again. There had been a fair bit of bickering and pontificating. Great God! Look at that immense mountain, said Boswell. ‘No: it is no more than a considerable protuberance’, replies Johnson. ‘But look at that mountain, shaped like a cone,’ says Boswell. ‘No, sir … it is indeed pointed at the top, but one side is larger than the other.’ And so on. They were both in clover.
When they arrived at the harbour in Portree, Johnson found that ‘a ship lay waiting to dispeople Sky, by carrying the natives away to America’. It was the Nestor and Johnson refused to go on board, but Boswell had a good look round and found a little library and a cabin for the captain that was ‘commodious, and even elegant’. There is no mention of the sleeping quarters of the emigrants. Boswell was told that only last year most peo
ple had so hated the idea of leaving that ‘they tore the grass with their teeth’, but now ‘there was not a tear shed … This indifference is a mortal sign for the country.’ Johnson rumbled through the reasons (skyrocketing rents, oppression, poverty, the dismantling of the Highlanders’ culture and traditions), but he still thought ‘a man of any intellectual enjoyment will not easily go and immerse himself and his posterity for ages in barbarism’.
Skye and the Highlands weren’t just emptied by emigration: in their turn these colonized peoples provided a turbo-boost to the British Empire. Here’s the historian A. M. Mackenzie: ‘In the forty years after 1797, Skye alone gave the British Army 21 Lieutenant-Generals and Major-Generals, 48 Lieutenant-Colonels, 600 Majors, Captains and Subalterns, and 10,000 private soldiers.’ You would not think there had ever been enough people living on Skye to supply such an extraordinary glut of soldiery, but reading Johnson and Boswell’s accounts you can see that despite their tales of emigration, the islands were full and busy – and so much more so than they are today. Even in 1841 there were almost 50,000 people living on Skye, Islay and Mull. Today Skye has a population of just over 10,000. The migrations that so distressed Boswell and Johnson intensified in the century after their visit.
Population is on my mind as I sip Talisker in the Portree pub. It (or rather the perils of depopulation) obsessed Johnson as much as the absence of trees. Both were signs of a damaged land. Most developed nations have the same worries today. South Korea, Japan, Russia, Italy … their governments agonize over falling birth rates and ageing populations. Johnson would understand, but he came from a time when a nation’s wealth was measured by the number of its people, and the size of its army, and the workers in its fields. I’m just happy to be watching Champions League football in a drowsy bar with a couple of Frenchmen (it’s Lyon against Manchester City tonight), pleased not to be in London (I’m tired of it – whatever Dr Johnson may say), and far away from the self-proclaimed centre of things. By the time my third overpoured Talisker has arrived, I have decided that a falling population is a good thing. Bring on the AI. Wasn’t that the point? To set us free. Let the robots weed the carrots. Give a warm welcome to the migrants (emigrants and immigrants, us and them) fleeing uninhabitable lands. The remaining humans will drink whisky and watch football and – because this is the real point – stop defiling the planet and slaughtering its creatures. We need to take up less room.
By this stage of the night Johnson would have been in full voice (on one occasion with a local lassie bouncing on his knee), joining in with a song or declaiming aphorisms to the bewildered islanders. He wasn’t a drinker, although he had been when younger and he well knew he couldn’t go there again. Boswell, though, liked to drink. Two weeks after landing in Portree he got into ‘a riot’ with some lads and crept into his bed at five. Johnson was in the room the next morning. ‘“Sir,” said I, “they kept me up.” He answered, “No, you kept them up, you drunken dog.”’ Kingsley would be interested to hear that Boswell’s host poured him a tumbler of brandy, ‘which I found an effectual cure for my head-ach’.
From Portree, Boswell and Johnson headed around Skye. Johnson even slept the night in the bed that Bonnie Prince Charlie had used when he was fleeing the English soldiers, although he claimed not to have been impressed. Perhaps he was still hiding his Jacobite sympathies. They met Flora MacDonald, the young woman who had led the prince to safety by dressing him as her maid. They moved into Dunvegan Castle, with Lady Macleod, and Johnson decided the comfort and company was much more to his taste. But after two weeks, he suddenly wanted to get home (‘I want to be on the main land, and go on with existence. This is a waste of life’). But the September, and then the October, weather was against them, and they had to wait for the sea passage to be safe.
Skye can be bleak, it is true. There are still very few trees, even though Trees for Life and Forestry Commission Scotland have both been here, but the island holds an ancient, raw beauty, changing its colour and shape by the hour. The morning after my night in the Portree pub it is brown and waterlogged (perhaps its natural state), with heather feathering the low flat hills. They look like they’ve had their tops removed, conical even, although Johnson would no doubt beg to differ. I am driving down the west coast of the island, tracking my quarry. They stopped in Ullinish, so I follow them there, my car rocking and bucking in a tormented wind, hoping to drink coffee in a place they once loitered, but the small, eighteenth-century Country Lodge seems to have closed for the season, if not for ever.
I decide to walk towards the sea. There is a tiny island here that is accessible only at low tide and I want to stand on its furthest point and look out, all the way to America, but the wind is now so strong that it is almost impossible to make headway. I struggle alone, head down, across a sedgy plain. There’s a wooden sign: ‘Dogs will be shot’. ‘What! Is it you, you dogs?’ roared Johnson out of the window of his home late one night, in his nightclothes, when two of his friends turned up, reeling drunk, unable to let the evening end. ‘I’ll have a frisk with you.’ And out and on they went, long ago, into the dark London night.
A great green sea is piling onto the beaches to my left. I hide behind some gorse bushes and watch the tops of molehills being whipped off and the black earth flung to the west. There is a slather of human detritus – plastic bottles, bags and sheets, buoys, nets, orange ropes – smeared all over the high tide mark, with the heavy waves straining to reach further, beyond, almost airborne in the driving wind. The ground behind the gorse bushes feels like it is losing its shape.
Is this wild enough? To the north and the west there are low islands in a racing, turquoise sea, like the farthest reaches of a fabled land. At the headland, the tide is high, and I cannot walk onto the island. I don’t mind. It is sheltered here, lying on my back in the soft brown grass, out of the wind, looking up to torn clouds, a falling gull, an innocent blue sky. Have I come far enough? It doesn’t matter. The route has turned south and towards home.
Ten
Fog on the Tyne
‘I was not really completing the journey but suddenly abandoning it, giving it up as a bad job. In the original itinerary I sketched for myself – in that first idiotic flush, when you plan things for a self that is not you at all but somebody three times as strong, energetic, conscientious, determined – there were hopeful references to places like Newmarket, Cambridge, Bury St. Edmunds, Ipswich, Colchester …’
J. B. Priestley, English Journey
J. B. Priestley & Beryl Bainbridge,
Tyneside to Lincoln and London, 1933 and 1983
From Skye, Johnson and Boswell made their way back to Edinburgh, via Mull and Iona and Boswell’s father’s house in Auchinleck, where Johnson and the Whiggish old judge managed not to argue for at least three days, until there was an eruption of Krakatoan proportions, which left Boswell shaken and Johnson, I presume, frisky. Johnson left Boswell in Edinburgh and caught a carriage south to London and his beloved Hester Thrale, passing through Newcastle en route.
Almost everyone loves Newcastle. Celia Fiennes was here in the summer of 1698 and gushed: ‘It’s a noble town tho’ in a bottom, it most resembles London of any place in England, its buildings lofty and large of brick mostly or stone.’ She stood on a hill on the outskirts and watched ‘an abundance’ of little carriages, drawn by pairs of horses and oxen, taking coal down to barges on the Tyne. The coal, she said, was ‘black and shineing’, which showed its goodness, and ‘this country all about is full of this Coale the sulpher of it taints the aire and it smells strongly to strangers’. The land was covered with coal pits in every direction, the wealth of the city on show.
Celia lingered in the market in the heat of the day and picked up some bargains. ‘I saw one buy a quarter of lamb for 8 pence and 2 pence a piece good large poultry.’ There were leather, woollen and linen garments for sale, ‘and all sorts of stands for baubles’. But she thought the cheese indifferent (‘black on the outside … soft sower things�
��). She went to the Barber Surgeons’ Hall, where she examined two skeletons. The flesh had been boiled from the bones of one of them, which had then been patched together with what was left of the dried ligaments. She was also able to view the skin of a man that had been stripped from his body (after he was dead, she clarifies) and stuffed, although she doesn’t say with what. ‘It look’d and felt,’ she wrote, ‘like a sort of parchment.’ She lived in days when barbers – of which Newcastle still has a superfluity – doubled up as surgeons. They must have had strong stomachs, our ancestors, with death so present and visible.
Beryl Bainbridge was here, three hundred years later, also enjoying herself. ‘There’s a very festive atmosphere in Newcastle. I’m beginning to think I like it better than Liverpool,’ she wrote. She went shopping in the Eldon Square centre and watched as thousands and thousands of young people loaded up with hats, shoes, trousers, jackets, boots ‘and shiny belts and handbags’. She roamed through the ‘miracle parlours of Top Shop’ (she loved a good Top Shop) and she couldn’t understand why, in 1983, when the region was being mauled by recession and unemployment was brutalizing local families, there was so much money about. People were rushing the shops with wads of fivers in their hands.
Footnotes Page 25