Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster
Elgin Cathedral
Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster
Traveling through Scotland with Boswell and Johnson
William W. Starr
The University of South Carolina Press
© 2011 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2011
Paperback edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2011
Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Starr, William W., 1940–Whisky, kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster : traveling through Scotland with Boswell and Johnson / William W. Starr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57003-948-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Starr, William W., 1940– —Travel—Scotland.
2. Scotland—Description and travel. 3. Starr, William W.,
1940– —Travel—Scotland—Hebrides. 4. Johnson, Samuel,
1709–1784—Travel—Scotland—Hebrides. 5. Boswell, James,
1740–1795—Travel—Scotland—Hebrides. I. Title.
DA867.5.S73 2010
914.1104'73—dc22
2010020165
ISBN 978-1-61117-122-8 (ebook)
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Stirling
2. Loch Lomond
3. Inveraray
4. To Oban
5. Mull
6. Iona
7. Mull to Fort William
8. Skye, Part I
9. Raasay
10. Skye, Part II
11. The Outer Hebrides
12. The High Highlands
13. The Orkneys
14. Inverness and Loch Ness
15. Culloden
16. Northeast Scotland
17. Down the East Coast
18. Arbroath and Beyond
19. Pitlochry
20. To Edinburgh
21. Edinburgh
22. Auchinleck
23. The Last Days
Afterword—Back to the Twenty-first Century
Selected Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Many people contributed in many ways toward making this book a pleasure to research and write. I’m grateful to each, including those few who said they’d prefer not to be mentioned.
Since I’ve been employed full-time—and gratefully so—throughout the time it took to undertake my trip to Scotland and subsequent writing and research, I want to thank my boss, Darro Willey, director of the DeKalb County Public Library. He was a consistent supporter and somehow managed to find the ways to make it possible for me to get the time I desperately needed over a period of several years. My thanks also go to the entire staff at the DeKalb Library, many of whom responded kindly and quickly to my numerous questions. Rob Jenkins and Jack Riggs at the Writers Institute at Georgia Perimeter College generously supplied space and encouragement during the early stages of writing. The friends who helped me secure a cottage in the western North Carolina mountains for an extended period of writing furthered my work more than they could have imagined. Peter, Phil, Terry, Tom (both of you), Jack, George, and Pat all offered cheering words when I needed them.
There were many people in Scotland who enlightened me in so many aspects of Scottish culture and who made my journey a joy and an inspiration. I still miss their company: Kenny, Frances, and Roger in Stirling; Helen in Inverary; John in Fionnphort; Philip and Debra on Skye; David on Raasay; Susan and Ronnie on Lewis; Angus, Alistair, and Anna in Ullapool; Martin in Durness; Paul and Elaine in Thurso; Greg and Lesley on the Orkneys; Liz and Peter at Inverness; Lady Russell at Ballindolloch Castle; Jim in Pitlochry; Loris in Arbroath; Maureen at Auchinleck; and John in Edinburgh. There are others, including some helpful librarians, and I am most appreciative for your assistance. I happily absolve all of the above for any responsibility for my errors.
To the people of Scotland, for whom I have discovered a deep and abiding affection, my thanks for accepting me during the too-brief time I visited. A stranger asking nonstop questions about Boswell and Johnson couldn’t have been high on their welcoming list, but the truth is I never felt anything less than welcome.
And to the staff at the University of South Carolina Press, long my favorites, I thank you for your careful work on my manuscript. I am grateful for your professionalism and friendship.
I am happy and grateful to acknowledge the remarkable generosity shown me by the talented staff at Lenz Marketing in Decatur, Georgia. My special thanks go to Richard Lenz for his unstinting support and to the gifted artist Matt Tinsley, who planned and created the delightful jacket for this book as well as the helpful chapter heading maps. Matt was a pleasure to work with—full of terrific ideas and rich imagination—and he possessed the artistry to make them happen.
Thanks go to my extended family, past and present. Your love, acceptance, or toleration has been valued more than you could possibly imagine.
Finally, my thanks go to Michele, who made the trip work, who guided my work, and who made it all seem much less like work.
The journey of James Boswell and Samuel Johnson through Scotland, August–November 1773
The author’s trip through Scotland, February–May 2007
Introduction
The plane eased through the silver sky toward the sun-swept runway at Edinburgh International Airport. “Looks like we caught a good trade-off this morning,” said the flight attendant as she herded the last group of empty peanut wrappers into her portable depository. “We’re three hours late, but it’s usually pouring rain when we get here. Not bad, huh?” No, not at all. A first-time visitor to Scotland might assume the appearance of the sun to be perfectly ordinary, but then you remember the joke—at least it’s supposed to be a joke—that the Scots offer this greeting to visitors: “Hello; sorry about the weather.” And then there are the words of Edmund Burt, as true today as when they were written in 1720: “In these northern parts, the year is composed of nine months winter and three months bad weather.” Or Edward Topham, who wrote in 1774 that “the winds reign in all their violence, and seem indeed to claim the country as their own.” Of course, anyone who reads a travel guide should know to expect the worst, for this is a country that embraces magnificent climatological legends. All true and all understated.
They begin with rain followed by showers, followed by a heavy rain, drenching rain, a bit of rain, light showers, a soft rain, lightening showers, driving rain, a forcing rain, easing showers, a touch of dampness, pouring rain, horizontal rain, sleety rain, rainy sleet. And did I mention the wind? Howling, screeching, relentless, hurricanelike, a hard blow, a light blow, pushing breezes, gusts, gentle gusts, hard gusts, moderate gusts, intense gusts, and, one of my favorites, blowing gusts. Winter gales start in September and can last until the end of April, when they become only intermittent, says one American who has lived for a dozen years in the Outer Hebrides. Wester Ross is the wettest place in all of the United Kingdom and gets more than two hundred inches of rain each year. And everywhere in the Highlands and Islands gets not only rain but that seemingly never-ending wind as well.
Everyone writes about it, everyone talks about it, visitor and native alike. “Motor vehicles are regularly pushed off the roads or flipped over by the wind; debris flies th
rough the air as if in some hurricane-hit shanty town,” wrote one observer seventy years ago. And nearly 250 years ago, another Scottish visitor wrote this amazing passage: “Not many days ago an Officer, whom I have the honour of being acquainted with, a man of six feet high, and, one would imagine, by no means calculated to become the sport of winds, was, however, in following another gentleman out of [Edinburgh] Castle, lifted up by their violence from the ground, carried over his companion’s head, and thrown at some distance on the stones.” Scots find their doors blown open, their homes blown down. One gentleman walking through Edinburgh on one windy eighteenth-century afternoon found a lady’s petticoats blown over her head; as he attempted to “conceal her charms from public view,” another gentleman not so oblivious concentrated so hard on the view that he failed to hold on to his hat and wig, which gustily blew him bald.
And no one is spared. In Queen Victoria’s Highland Journals in 1860, she observed it was “a misty, rainy morning” followed by, “It became cold and windy with occasional rain,” and later by “a thoroughly wet day.” There was a photo in the newspaper the other day of Sean Connery carrying an umbrella. “Braveheart” probably had one, too. In Scotland pleasant weather can be as rare as a single malt served on ice.
But in fact the sun was shining, quite gloriously, and when I stepped out of the terminal after reclaiming my baggage and passed by a smiling, courteous customs officer, it was time to put on dark glasses and take off the hefty-weight sweater I prudently wore in expectation of the worst Scotland could throw at me. The lovely day was both harbinger and deceiver for what was ahead, for I had no idea I would be traveling through the wildest, most isolated parts of the Highlands and Islands in the spring months in what would turn out to be Scotland’s warmest, sunniest months in nearly a century. But that is getting ahead of myself.
I had come to Scotland 234 years after James Boswell and Samuel Johnson made their celebrated journey through the Highlands in 1773 at the apogee of the Scottish Enlightenment. Theirs was an amazing adventure, a trip almost unimaginable today, through many poorly marked or uncharted landscapes, with only a few servants and friends of Boswell they met occasionally along the way. They encountered travel calamities of the most daunting sort of which those of us in the early twenty-first century could hardly conceive. Boswell was thirty-three, Johnson almost twice his age at sixtythree when he began the journey. Lacking planes, trains, cars, paved roads, and sometimes roads of any type, they made their way by horse, on foot, and by ship through a wild, remote, strange, and rugged landscape known to only a handful of the occupants of the eighteenth-century world.
Their journey occurred well before the age of tourism, certainly long before visitors had any thoughts of a fun trip to Scotland for a taste of castles, tartans, and “Braveheart.” The eighteenth-century novelist Tobias Smollett wrote that “The English knew as little of Scotland as of Japan.” In his 1771 novel Humphrey Clinkr Smollett has one character imagine that “she could not go to Scotland but by sea.” Most travelers who departed England in the eighteenth century never imagined touring Scotland; instead they hotfooted it to the Continent to partake of what was called The Grand Tour. Edinburgh was a destination city at the time, a center of education and commerce. But its natives were openly disbelieving when a traveler showed up in November 1774 solely for the purpose of visiting. It was much as if a modern-day American had ventured to Kabul “just to enjoy a little vacation time.”
Johnson, the preeminent man of letters in eighteenth-century England, and Boswell, a literary figure whose stature would only increase with his books about Johnson, left us two remarkable accounts of their epic adventure: Johnson’s Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, published in 1775, and Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, published in 1785. Johnson’s book focused mostly on his thoughts about the people and places he saw; Boswell wrote mostly about Johnson. Even with their different approaches, both books wound up as monuments of English literature and travel writing. Simply put, they are classics, entertaining readers over the ages and giving them a remarkably vivid portrait of the two men and their times.
And yet—Boswell and Johnson and their accomplishments seem to be little remembered outside the well-kept fields of academe these days. I did a modest, unscientific survey of about two dozen librarians and high school teachers recently, asking them to identify Boswell and Johnson in some way, any way. The results were not encouraging. Only eight got it right, or close; one was sure I meant Ben Jonson, the seventeenth-century English dramatist. Only six could identify the correct century. Only two had read Boswell’s magisterial biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. No one had read Boswell’s Journal or Johnson’s Journey. At least no one was proud of their ignorance. I figured their students would be even worse off. And adults in general, at least the ones who read, probably wouldn’t fare much better in my little quiz, I reasoned.
That was discouraging, to say the least. But it also seemed to open some opportunities for me. Boswell and Johnson, after all, are two of the most intriguing figures in all of the history of England and Scotland, and the books they wrote are among the finest in all of English literature. Their journey to Scotland in 1773 was an extraordinary event by every measure—it received almost celebrity newspaper coverage and comment at the time—that helped awaken and change public attitudes about that nation; even so, it seems to be among the least remembered of their achievements by so many readers today.
But putting aside all the history and literature for a moment, consider that their jaunt through Scotland was packed with amusing scenes, eventful moments, revealing insights into the two travelers and the places they went and the people they met. What they wrote is, more than two centuries after their books appeared in print, still lively fun to read. And reading Boswell and Johnson is not and should not be an academic exercise; with a little background and updating, where they went and what they did should be savored by today’s readers no less deliciously than the writings were devoured by Boswell’s and Johnson’s contemporaries. There were no rock stars or television personalities for public adoration in the eighteenth century, but an educated public lionized literary figures, and Johnson especially and Boswell to a lesser extent were at the top, the equivalent—sort of—of Madonna or Bono today.
And so, I resolved to try to fill the gap, as it were: to bring Boswell and Johnson and their world into ours. Not by writing a biography of the two; there are plenty of good existing biographies to satisfy all tastes. Nor did I want to provide a travel guide for someone headed to Scotland; they also exist in plentiful numbers. My goal was much simpler in design: to find Boswell and Johnson in 1773, to hear again their experiences in their words, and to write about what they saw with a latter-day perspective. There are, I feel confident, too many curious readers who are not familiar with or who may have forgotten the memorable 1773 journey, though the 2009 observance of the tercentenary of Johnson’s birth may have caught their attention with its proliferation of books about Dr. Johnson and his life and world.
Boswell and Johnson were the reason why I flew three thousand miles to Scotland—and would add 2,789 additional miles in the country before my trip ended—in an effort to retrace their journey, as much as possible so many years later. I knew their words would be perfect traveling companions for me, refreshing my mind and my eye. I would miss conversing with those two wonderful conversationalists, of course. They were dead, and nothing’s to be done about that. But their writings about the trip are so informative, so chatty, so opinionated, and so lively that I would be unfailingly entertained on my own journey. And they would be my brilliant companions, my keen guides, my wise and witty inspirations, my mean angels.
I also believed that following Boswell and Johnson was too important and too much fun to be left solely in the hands of scholars. As a longtime newspaper book editor and critic, I came to admire and respect the outstanding historians who could also write. I did come to understand that there were not a lot of
them, at least when it came to producing books accessible to a general readership. In nearly thirty-five years as a critic, I thought I had earned a Ph.D. in reading incomprehensibly written histories. So my approach, I vowed, would be closer to that of a good student rather than a teacher, someone constantly curious, always open to the new or unusual, alert to nuance and detail, and someone who loved a good story. It didn’t have to be absolutely true, either. Scotland, after all, is a nation all about myths, as we will see. I wanted to understand all of Scotland better with the hope of enriching and enlarging my experiences, and not in just the places Boswell and Johnson visited. At the least, I wanted to begin with no agendas or prejudices beyond a shameless affection for Boswell and Johnson. And I hoped my approach would have something less than the sour tone of the English journalist Charles Jennings, who described Scotland as “the dour granitic wedge atop the British Isles.” Without all the baggage an Englishman brings to the subject, I thought I might be able to keep a more open mind.
Having read about the lives of both Boswell and Johnson for well over two decades, I knew I had made some assumptions that not all readers would be aware of or share. So it seems appropriate to offer a little background on the two men and why their journey mattered then, and now, two centuries later.
Johnson was the best-known literary figure in England in the mid- and latter parts of the eighteenth century, largely because of his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), a work he spent nine years completing and which went into five editions just during his lifetime. It is no less breathtaking an achievement now than it was then, even though it wasn’t the first dictionary of the English language, nor the most comprehensive, nor even the most accurate. But it was an amazingly faithful record of the language as it was in his age, and it showed a unifying, incisive intelligence at work on every page. It also was—and is—the only dictionary that remains a great work of literature. Its authority extended well into the nineteenth century when it was basically superseded by the Oxford English Dictionary, which itself lifted more than 1,700 definitions directly from Johnson. Johnson acknowledged that he did his work well, but he also admitted that it was flawed. He wrote, with modesty, “Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.”
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