Fort William was rather gray and gloomy on this rainy afternoon. I didn’t realize that such is pretty much its regular demeanor. The central business district had lots of closed shops, and only a couple of bars and tourist stores seemed to be open. The town is a lure for visitors in the summer, though mostly for its location: it’s only a couple of hours drive to Skye toward the northwest and much less to Loch Ness and Inverness to the northeast.
That puts Fort William within easy reach of Glencoe, perhaps the most renowned of all Scotland’s magnificent glens and one whose name still leaves an unpleasant anti-English taste in the mouths of many Scots. It was the scene of one of the great acts of treachery in a history that reverberates with scheming and plotting. The betrayal occurred in 1692 after King William of Orange, whose policies alternated between coercion and consent, attempted to enforce loyalty from rebellious Highland clans. Most of the clan chiefs agreed, however reluctantly, to pledge their support to the crown. One of them, Alasdair MacIain Macdonald of Glencoe, missed the deadline for doing so by a few days, though he eventually pledged himself. That gave William an opening to make a point about his power. He had his army—mostly the Campbells—ingratiate themselves with the Macdonalds. The two sides enjoyed meals and company together for a couple of weeks until the king gave the order to exterminate the Glencoe Macdonalds.
The king’s soldiers moved first to block off the northern and southern entrances to the glen. Then they began the extermination. Old man Macdonald was shot to death in his bed. The clan members began running, halfnaked, toward the icy hills. Both of Macdonald’s sons and his grandson escaped. Thirty-eight other clan members—men, women, and children—were systematically slaughtered, and uncounted others died in the raging snowstorm that soon hit the area. It could have been worse—hundreds of women and children could have been murdered—if some of the plans hadn’t proved too complicated to pull off.
News of the massacre hardly produced the subservience King William had wanted and expected. The sympathies of the Highland clans would never be with the king in any numbers, and their enmity would be important in the coming wars between Scotland and England in the first half of the eighteenth century. Because of the distastefulness and public revulsion over the Glen Coe massacre, the English government did what governments usually do in a time of crisis: it appointed a commission to look into the matter. To its credit the royal panel found the massacre was an act of murder, and the government was condemned for having “barbarously killed men under trust.” The king’s secretary of state in Scotland became the scapegoat, but of course no one officially blamed the King. As bad as it was, Glencoe was only one of several atrocities committed by the government in the Highlands in the seventeenth century, setting the stage for more bloodshed to come on an even grander scale.
My accommodation for the night in Fort William was a former distillery upgraded into a comfortable, modern hostelry. With a fine dinner of fresh Scottish salmon and some single malts—how could anyone resist when you’re spending the night in a building that smells like good drink?—I was in a most agreeable mood. At the hotel’s quiet bar I found myself in an easy conversation with a couple of local men close to my age, from whom I kept my own counsel about the ragged condition of Fort William. We talked about the weather (too cold), the tourists (I seemed to be accorded a different status for being here in the winter), the cost of whisky and petrol (too high), and the attractive if slightly slutty-looking young woman (too cheap) who passed through the bar with her boyfriend. Having just read about the Glen Coe massacre, I managed to work it into the conversation, wondering if my companions might have any thoughts about that event that occurred so long, long ago—315 years ago, to be exact.
You would have thought that I had just insulted William Wallace.
“You know what those English bastards did, do you?” one of them asked, his tone growing fierce. “Took ’em in for dinner, drank with them, just like us, and then turned around and cut them up, cut the little children and the women, raped them, beat them, the bastards!” he said even more loudly.
The other man was nodding faster and faster, and both had put their drinks down on the bar so they could gesture with their hands. “Cut them like that,” the first one said, swooping his hand down to the bar top with a thud. And then he stopped. “You know,” he said a little more quietly, “they did it before, and they did it again. We were always their favorite chopping ground.”
I raised my glass to them, and we all drank without a sound for a moment. I wasn’t sure what I should say. It seemed another bold reminder that history lays close to the heart in Scotland. As it does in Ireland, Poland, the American South, and many other lands. William Faulkner was, of course, right when he observed that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” We all sat quietly and nursed our drinks for a bit. Then I excused myself and went to bed. Quite sober.
8
Skye, Part I
There were nothing but blue skies above when I climbed behind the wheel the next morning, pointing northward on the A82 and then west on the A87. I was eager to get to Skye; every time I strayed from Boswell and Johnson I quickly began missing them. The journey on this lovely morning proved spectacular: gorgeous mountains topped by fresh snows and framed by those deep blue skies and a few puffy high whites. Scotland’s highest peak, Ben Nevis (4,406 feet), was off to the right, and later the Five Sisters, peaks that range up to 3,000 feet, were glowingly displayed in the sunlight. The glen was breathtaking, the waters of Loch Duich, cold and clean, running along the roadside and offering polished mirror images of the distant peaks. I must have stopped the car a half dozen times. In summer, I was told later, buses with thousands of visitors headed for Skye barrel through here with little opportunity for reflection. None could have a finer weather moment than I was enjoying now; I snapped photo after photo. I’ve never spent two hours in the presence of any more stunning scenery than that before me this morning.
I made the tough decision to pass by another terrific-looking castle as a step in my faltering struggle to overcome castle addiction. It was Eilean Donan Castle, one of Scotland’s most photographed edifices and the one featured in such films as Highlander, The World Is Not Enough, and Rob Roy. The last appeared in 1995, the year of Braveheart, though it drew considerably less attention. Liam Neeson starred as the title character, which the moviemakers pitched in their usual modest way: “Honor made him a man. Courage made him a hero. History made him a legend.” It wasn’t the first film about the man; that would have been the 1911 Rob Roy, the first “major” motion picture produced in Scotland. No prints of it survive, but like the most recent version—the fourth to hit the screen—it was probably all about a kilted Highland hero in a romantic landscape.
There was a real Rob Roy, a MacGregor born in 1671. He became a romanticized figure over the years, thanks largely to Sir Walter Scott’s somewhat fanciful and very popular 1818 novel, Rob Roy. The 1995 film didn’t hurt that romantic portrayal, either. Like Braveheart, it looks great on the screen with numerous lovely shots of the Scottish countryside. The actual story of Rob Roy has a stirring reality about it that connects with some of the deepest strains in Scottish history.
As a teenager Rob Roy joined his father in the uprising against King William of Orange. He was wounded in one battle, and his father was jailed by the English for treason. When the father was released, his wife was dead, their lands taken, his spirit crushed. Having survived that, the son eventually settled into life as a respected cattleman. He wound up defaulting on a loan to increase his herd, and his chief creditor—the powerful duke of Montrose—branded him an outlaw and evicted him from his land. That led to a blood feud between the two men that lasted for five years until he surrendered to the duke and was imprisoned. Rob Roy was eventually pardoned. He died quietly in 1734 and remains a figure celebrated by most Scots.
The original fortified structure on the island of Donan went up in the thirteenth century to protect against Viking in
cursions. The castle expanded over succeeding centuries and witnessed many periods of bloodshed. Eilean Donan played a role in the Jacobite uprisings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which resulted in its near destruction at the hands of the English. Abandoned and neglected for most of the next two hundred years, it was rebuilt between 1912 and 1932 and has been open to the public since. On the day that I was there, there were only a few cars in the visitor lot, but I had decided to push on to meet up with Boswell and Johnson. Within minutes I was driving over the Skye Bridge, which opened in 1995, replacing the old ferry, and which now links the island to the mainland. Mine was a much easier trip than Boswell and Johnson had when they took a slow boat to Skye to launch the Western Isles portion of their journey that would include, as we now know, the islands Skye, Coll, Ulva, InchKenneth, Mull, and Iona.
Skye is the largest of the Hebridean Islands in both land mass and population. In the eighteenth century very little was known about it. The first printed history of the west coast of Scotland had appeared just one year before Boswell and Johnson’s journey when Thomas Pennant published his still readable book A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides. Pennant was a fellow of the Royal Society, a zoologist and, in Johnson’s words, “the best travel writer” of the time. He spent eight weeks sailing around the region and produced a surprisingly thorough survey. He didn’t get to the Outer Hebrides, but his writing on the Inner Islands, including Skye, “goes a long way to explaining why the Hebrides are so different from the rest of Britain in culture, language, and tradition,” according to historian Elizabeth Bray. “He shows the Hebrides have been heirs to a different legacy; separated from the rest of Britain not only by their geographical remoteness but by accidents of history and climate and language that make the Highland line—the division between Gaelic-speaking Highlands and Islands, and the Sassenachs (the ‘Saxon’ or English-speaking Lowlands) and south Britain—a border of as great significance as the border between Scotland and England.”
Boswell and Johnson spent more time on Skye than anywhere else on their trip. It was, most observers feel, the true goal of their immense journey, carrying the romantic thrill of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite Rising of 1745. It was and is a magnificently beautiful island, though neither Boswell nor Johnson devoted themselves much to describing its glories. (By contrast, Sir Walter Scott in 1814 found his imagination elevated by the beauty and grandeur of what he observed.) That said, the trip to Skye prompted some marvelous writing by the two men along with a series of memorable encounters, some historically significant, and at least one divertingly ridiculous. There would be few dull moments on this journey.
There should be no doubting the challenges before Boswell and Johnson at Skye. The island was large and largely mysterious in 1773, exceedingly difficult to traverse in the best of weather (and we know how often that occurs here, don’t we?). Isolated, even potentially dangerous, the scene of warring less than thirty years in the past, it may as well have been the jungles of Borneo in the minds of educated Londoners. But unfamiliarity did not deter either man, for this was the place they had long aimed for, and Skye would prove well worth the excitement they felt on landing at Armadale on the southeast coast of the Sleat peninsula.
It did not take long for matters to get out of hand, however, and as usual Boswell was at the heart of the distress The two men spent their first night on Skye at the home of Sir Alexander Macdonald, ninth chieftain of the Macdonalds and lord of the Isles. He was not a man, as described by Johnson, who had been “tamed into insignificance by an English education.” He was a proud Highlander, and by accounts very much the pedantic, priggish figure Boswell—the exact opposite—found him to be. Worse, Boswell didn’t think much of the accommodations. Dinner was “ill-dressed,” and there was no claret. He and Johnson almost had to share a bed until Boswell complained enough to have them separated. “I was quite hurt with the meanness and unsuitable appearance of everything.” He pumped other guests for stories that reflected unfavorably on his host, finally confronting and belittling Sir Alexander to his face. “Had he been a man of more mind, he and I must have had a quarrel for life.” The next morning, it seemed all had been forgiven, but Boswell this time got Johnson involved: “Sir, we shall make nothing of him,” Johnson said. “He has no more ideas of a chief than an attorney who has twenty houses in a street and considers how much he can make of them. All is wrong.” Johnson went on to insult Lady Macdonald with his celebrated observation recorded by Boswell: “This woman would sink a ninety-gun ship She is so dull—so heavy.” Then Boswell got drunk, and, as hard as it might seem to believe, things slipped even farther downhill. Even after their departure, and throughout the rest of his writings, Boswell never stopped referring to the unpleasantness at Armadale.
Matters did not end there. Boswell and Sir Alexander would get into it a few years later over what Boswell had to say in his Journal. Their relationship apparently had continued—somehow—on a relatively even keel until 1785 when Boswell’s book was published and Sir Alexander read a watered-down version of the stay at Armadale (he didn’t have to read between the lines with too much effort). He sent Boswell a long and insulting letter, and things almost degenerated to a duel before Boswell recanted and took out a few lines. (Modern versions of the Journal include what Boswell originally wrote and the version to which I refer.)
Boswell was genuinely upset by the reaction he stirred, though most of us would have to say that what he wrote was on the rude side and could indeed have made the Lord Macdonald angry. (And what he quoted Johnson as saying would only have added fuel to that fire.) Still, Boswell wasn’t one to pull his punches, and he always felt that if he told the truth, people would understand. When they didn’t, he was surprised, disappointed. That was part of Boswell’s ingenuous character. But enough of this; back to Skye.
I was driving on to Sconser on the northwest coast for the night. I passed Coriechatachan, now a very small community beside the A87, where there is virtually nothing left to suggest the good times the travelers enjoyed here at a farmhouse with their tenant hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Mackinnon. They were well fed, hospitably entertained, and after dinner Bozzy joined with them in singing and drinking (he would suffer an epic bout of drinking when he made a return visit there a few weeks later) before retiring (in a bed by himself) in what was a dormitory sleeping situation. The next night Boswell watched another guest, a minister, come into the dormitory room to prepare for bed; the maid helped him undress, and he turned his naked back away from her to use the chamber pot. “A remarkable instance of the simplicity of manners or want of delicacy among the people in Skye,” Boswell observed.
I spent my night in a private room Boswell would surely have preferred in a picturesque Victorian-era hunting lodge on the wind-lapped waters of the Sound of Raasay. My host Philip and his wife Debra came here three years ago from England to run the inn and have been pleased with their success so far, in spite of quickly rising costs for everything on Skye. Philip maintained a fine library for the use of guests, and we chatted a bit about Johnson and Boswell—he proved well acquainted with their journey—before the subject got around to the weather. “It’s windy here even when it’s not windy,” Philip said, and indeed it was, though rain held off the entire day. I was going to sit up and read, but it was too chilly in the house, so I went up to the bedroom. It was even colder there, and I turned off the light and snuggled under the blankets, feeling a wee bit of communion with B & J.
9
Raasay
The wind was still blowing briskly and a light rain was falling when I boarded a small ferry to Raasay the next morning. My car and one other were aboard, and the number of passengers was only six, including a small child. I was weary; my back was hurting from too-soft beds, a common problem on this trip. The pillows everywhere were worse. The matter of heating was interesting, to put it mildly. It had been cool or cold every night, and my rooms had gotten progressively chillier. Most innkeepers turn off th
e heat from 10 P.M. to 6 A.M. or so, though I can scarcely tell the difference between the heat being on and being off. Climbing into bed at night means pulling up as many covers as can be located. As a champion of fresh air I’ve gone so far as to open windows some evenings, only to turn my lodgings into a meat locker by the time I was up for the bathroom at 3 a.m. By the way, there’s a reason no one puts toilets in meat lockers; the seats are cold enough to inhibit even the most urgent needs. But I digress.
It was only a fifteen-minute ride to Raasay, a place where Boswell especially had a deliciously good time. The four days he and Johnson spent on the island were among the happiest of their journey, maybe as some have suggested, the happiest of Boswell’s entire life. And Boswell’s writing has an undoubted lightness for this part of the trip, suffused with the great pleasure he felt sweeping up his imagination when he arrived on the lovely island. Readers should savor it for themselves in full, but I’ll try to offer enough samples to give a sense of Boswell’s palpable energy and exuberance.
Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster Page 8