Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster

by William W. Starr

  The problem, you’d have to think from reading his book, is that everyone in the Outer Hebrides has been having too much fun drinking, dancing, and screwing around. “Morals, in the sexual sense, are extremely lax in the Western Isles,” he writes, proceeding to conjure up enough feverish couplings and dance-inspired fornication to make modern-day readers imagine he’s describing Las Vegas or maybe Amsterdam.

  Not to belabor his points, but he finds parts of the Hebrides—actually most of the Catholic parts to the south—to be rife with promiscuity, resulting either from people dancing with one another or from hanging out too closely together when it rains and there’s nothing else to do (which pretty much covers every day in the year). There was way too much drinking going on, especially among Catholics, and especially at Catholic weddings and funerals, the latter nothing like his Presbyterian-preferred funerals where the deceased were allowed to slip quietly into their graves without everyone hoisting a few. The people of the Western Isles tended to be unclean in other ways as well; that apparently was not a Catholic thing, but rather came about because no one bothered to take baths. And did I mention that they are vindictive? Poor MacGregor gets so riled up in the middle of one chapter that he begins foaming at the prospect of government agencies spending money on the degenerate islanders and insists there can be no rebuttals for his book’s “facts.”

  Far be it from me to cast aspersions on old man MacGregor. I went searching for the pockets of promiscuity he promised, but after an investigation it appeared that I’d have to be a whole lot closer to Glasgow to succeed. There definitely was some drinking going on, but I observed that mostly by checking out the contents of my cottage’s liquor cabinet. And, regrettably, it rained too much for me to get a really accurate sense of how many people might have been dancing or hanging out too closely together, but it was cold, and we all know what happens when it’s cold and rainy outside, don’t we?

  One of the sources for MacGregor’s fury at excessive drinking resulted from an incident that occurred in the Sound of Eriskay in the southern sections of the Hebrides. Back in 1941, a time of rationing everything in the United Kingdom including whisky, a merchant ship, the SS Politician, wrecked in a storm. Its cargo included 264,000 bottles of tax-unpaid whisky destined for sale in the United States to raise money for Britain’s war needs. Word got around the islands quickly, and men from all over descended for nocturnal, quasi-secret sojourns out to the stranded vessel to off-load the precious cargo illegally. What they couldn’t drink right away, they hid for later imbibing.

  Compton Mackenzie, the prolific English-born author, intelligence officer, broadcaster, champion of the gramophone, and president of the Siamese Cat Cub, wrote an enchanting novel about the incident, Whisky Galore, in 1947; it was made into a charming movie two years later. Mackenzie, who died in 1972, lived for many years on Barra in the Outer Hebrides and owned the Shiant Islands in the Minch. He set his story in 1943 on the fictional but recognizable Hebridean islands of Great Todday and Little Todday. His is a very funny book, with a respectful, light-hearted treatment of the islanders, and it serves as a graceful introduction to Gaelic culture as well.

  But it doesn’t tell the truth about this near-mythical incident, which is fascinating and merits a lengthier retelling. The islanders did off-load the whisky illegally, and they drank and hid the bottles all over their landscape. It was, in the words of one author, “the largest happy hour in the history of the Hebrides.” But there were villains in this story: two men who represented His Majesty’s Government as the local and regional customs officers. Their maniacally dedicated efforts to find the stolen whisky and persecute those who took it left a bad taste in the mouths of many islanders. They sought jail sentences for men, women, children, pensioners, and even soldiers recently returned from war. They tragically lacked any sense of perspective or justice, and they remain in sharp contrast to what most of us now perceive as the high jinks of a poor, deserving group of islanders. Read Roger Hutchinson’s splendid Polly: The True Story behind Whisky Galore (1998) for this full and factual fairy tale.

  But to return to Lord Leverhulme. His legacy has been limited. He left Harris with serious employment issues, and those mostly remain intact. There is a small fishing industry and the tweed industry, but apart from those, subsistence is largely scrubbed out on occasional public projects and the small tourism industry. I suppose you could say that the road network on Harris is at least partly attributable to Leverhulme since he started construction on several roads before his death, apparently eager to have people get their nonexistent cars into those twenty empty parking places. In Stornoway there is Lews Castle, built by Sir James Matheson in 1863 after he evicted the crofters who lived on his land. Matheson, who made his mint pushing opium to the Chinese, had purchased the island in 1844 and wanted a monument for himself. When Leverhulme acquired the island, he got the castle, too, but at his death he returned it to the people. It is now in a state of disrepair, and given its history, no one seems terribly enthusiastic about coming up with the money to restore it. The castle grounds, however, have a lovely bunch of trees, a most unlikely sight in the Outer Hebrides, thanks to thousands of tons of soil imported from the mainland decades ago by Matheson, who longed to see greenery every time he looked out his castle window. Money apparently will get you almost everything but someone to mourn for you; Matheson’s name is less remembered now than Leverhulme’s.

  It was soon time to pack the car for my trip to the Stornoway ferry. I was headed back to the mainland and a road trip around the northern edges of the Highlands, more places that Johnson and Boswell never imagined visiting. My goal ultimately would be the Orkney Islands—is the word remote getting to be a little overused?—before resuming the trail of Bozzy and Dr. J in the Highlands near Inverness and Loch Ness.

  12

  The High Highlands

  After the experience on the ferry getting to the Outer Hebrides, I was prepared to rock and roll back across the Minch. But the crossing was uneventful under sunny skies and mild breezes coming up from starboard. It was a lovely scene when I arrived back on the northwest Scottish mainland at the town of Ullapool. Several candy-colored homes on a small peninsula jutting into the water with snow-capped mountains in the backdrop made an eye-catching scene as the ferry pulled in.

  Ullapool has about four thousand residents; it has been a fishing village since its founding in 1788. It’s got some tidy, attractive residential streets, a community center where the Ullapool Junior Pipe and Drum Corps was rehearsing, some delicious fish-and-chips restaurants, not just one but two well-stocked bookstores, and a very comfortable bed and breakfast with a third-floor view of the picture-book-pretty harbor. There was also a handy little book available, A Guide to Ullapool, put together by a group of townsfolk; it was a very smart little publication and showcased community pride. Before drifting off to sleep, I read in a local newspaper about a man in Fort William arrested for “interfering with himself” in front of a neighbor woman. Odd expression. I got the drift, though.

  The sun was out again the next morning, and it was a cold, clear, crisp day, just made for a little walking. A word about the sun in Scotland. (Yes, Virginia, there is a sun in Scotland.) The light in the Highlands is very bright and almost piercing, rather like the light that skiers find at high elevations. It can hurt the eyes without dark glasses to tame it. That day, the skies were as blue as anywhere I had seen, and the few clouds stood out in sharp, puffy relief. In the afternoon the sun’s angle gave the landscape a dramatic look; the loch’s reflections intense, the colors richly defined. The harbor waters here changed colors, too, from deep blue to light greenish to dark green depending on the play of the sun across the surface.

  Today marked the beginning of “British Summer Time”—the equivalent of Daylight Saving Time in the States—so I had an extra hour of daylight, much appreciated as I entered these northerly climes. And now that I thought about it, this was the fourth day with little or no rain; spring in
Scotland had gotten off to a wonderful start, and Ullapool had been a delightful place to celebrate it.

  Before heading north I made a forty-five-mile detour south to one of Scotland’s unusual and unlikely attractions: Inverewe Gardens. Along the way I passed Loch Ewe with its drop-dead gorgeous harbor, so well protected that it was used as a staging point for Russian-bound shipping convoys in World War II. There were gun emplacements still dotting the shore. The harbor currently serves as a refueling port for NATO ships, and there were two warships at anchor when I was there. A few miles farther south were the gardens, a tribute to one man’s remarkable vision, now operated by the National Trust for Scotland. I’m not really a garden person, but my host in Ullapool urged me not to miss these since I was so close, and of course he was right.

  This twelve-thousand-acre nondescript plot of land was inherited in 1862 by a fellow named Osgood Mackenzie who decided to create a garden because of the area’s surprisingly temperate climate (the result, so the guidebook says, of the Gulf Stream drawing a warm sea current from Mexico to these shores). Mackenzie collected plants from all over the world—China, Tasmania, California, Italy—and planted and nurtured them. By the time he died in 1922 his garden sprawled in most unlikely beauty all over the rocky peninsula. Even in March, when I arrived, dozens of flowers were blooming, and hundreds of visitors were walking about (it’s more like thousands in the summer). The visitor center, alas, was closed, meaning that there was no place for anyone to go to the bathroom. That circumstance no doubt accounted for why people kept suddenly disappearing off the paths into the woods, where perhaps they were providing fertilizer for another generation of blossoms. On television back home in the evening, the BBC offered a sterling production of Jane Austen’s Northhanger Abbey followed by a put-me-sound-asleep show on the care of hedges. I did say I wasn’t a garden person, didn’t I?

  At breakfast I chatted with the new arrivals, a talkative couple from Glasgow on their way to visit friends on Lewis. They made a short visit to the States several years ago and found Bostonians “rude.” Their daughters made a Greyhound bus tour of the eastern United States which they found fun and their parents thought to be “a crazy idea.” We fell into a discussion of politics, and they wanted to know how Americans could elect a “lunatic” like George Bush. I dodged the talk about politics. The man has worked on a North Sea oil rig for twenty-five years; he flies to the Shetland Islands and is helicoptered to the rig for two weeks work at a time. Then he’s off for about ten days. The pay is good, and he likes the schedule. We parted, and I was briefly struck that I’d been in Scotland for close to a month and this was the first conversation about politics—unless, of course, you count the chat about the Jacobites.

  A jacket felt good as I drove out of Ullapool, but the skies were sunny once again. A succession of motorways beginning with the A835 guided me to the northwesterly tip of Scotland and the town of Durness. Along the way the roads, the A894 and A838, changed from dual carriage to single track, and the landscape became ever more barren. There were no trees; small farmhouses became more infrequent; towns were farther and farther apart and became smaller in size. There were few cars or lorries; I seemed to have wandered into a very different place from the comparative bustle of Ullapool and its neighbors.

  The bare mountains and dark glens were not so much forbidding as tranquil or tranquilizing. I stopped beside the rushing waters of a small creek tumbling down a mountain, got out of the car, and walked up the top of the hill. The steepness was surprising, the absence of any sound once I passed the creek was stunning, as it had been on Mull. Once again I could detect no sign of human presence. In the cloudless sky I could see off in the distance to the coast, blue-green Atlantic waters splashing against the shore. A timeless landscape. I walked on further, stepping across a tiny creek bed, weaving my way through medium-sized boulders. I must have walked for forty-five minutes before I realized I wasn’t certain how to get back; the landscape looked the same no matter where I turned. And it seemed endless. I took note of the sun and began walking back in the direction of the car. In the high, dry altitude I got very thirsty and finished off the bottle of water I had brought with me. It took almost an hour to get back, and I was exhausted. And in all that time I never saw another vehicle or another person or an animal of any sort.

  I drove on to Durness, arriving in the late afternoon. This is a part of Scotland not many visit; there is occasional bus service from the lower lands, but those who come here mostly come by car, and few do, given its isolation at the top of the country. It would never have been a consideration for Boswell and Johnson; no roads existed in the eighteenth century, a trip by boat would have been too dangerous, and there would have been virtually no likelihood of locating a knowledgeable guide. There was no place to stay and there were no welcoming faces, no services needed to sustain travelers. The landscape was all but deserted.

  Oddly Durness had a small tourist information office. Not so oddly, it was closed at this time of year. There was only one place for dinner—a small pub—and I wasn’t optimistic. The crowd inside looked mostly young and faintly hostile to strangers; I couldn’t find a table and so stood around uncomfortably hoping someone would offer me a place. Finally someone did. The menu looked so ancient that I feared Bonnie Prince Charlie might have used it to place his order. But to my wonder the beer was warm and delicious and so was the fresh cheese and curried chicken dish I ordered. I even ate dessert, though I’ve now forgotten what it was. I remembered the many warnings of lousy food and low expectations for culinary experiences in Scotland; there’s some real history behind that.

  Cookery books from eighteenth-century Scotland contain some pretty bizarre tales, including suggestions, for whatever bizarre reason, on how to fool diners. For instance, “To make a tame duck pass for a wild one,” one author suggests, “knock it on its head with a stick.” Yum. One traveler in Scotland in 1679 wrote that he was most often served carrion, but only after it had been kept for a fortnight and “perfumed with the aromatick air, pass thro’ the clammy trunks of flesh flies” and then heated and served with butter. Well, you certainly wouldn’t want to eat your fly-strained carrion without butter, would you?

  Boiled sheep’s head was considered something of a delicacy. Most important in the preparation was holding the head over the fire to singe off all the wool; some chefs sent the head to the local smithy to be certain it was fully singed. Makes you hungry, doesn’t it? And, of course, there’s the national dish, the celebrated haggis, the soul and glory of Scotland, a compilation of oats and offal usually boiled in a sheep’s stomach. It prompted Robert Burns’s admiring description (“Great Chieftain o’ the puddin’ race,” an ode that is quoted when Scottish societies gather to celebrate Burns’s birthday) and the disparagement of others, to quote here one example citing haggis as “a dish not more remarkable or more disgusting to the palate, than in appearance.” I had sampled haggis for myself in a visit to Scotland years before, and didn’t find a need to repeat the experience now. I found it edible then, but it took more than a few drams of whisky to get me to that point.

  Fresh vegetables—or even any vegetables—were seldom found on Scottish menus. The only vegetable mentioned in most cookery book recipes, according to historian Marjorie Plant, is pickles. Martha Bradley, writing in The British Housewife, does mention the various vegetables in season, but appends a warning that “in all these articles the Housekeeper is to remember, no Stress is to be laid upon them in the Entertainment, but coming as slight inconsiderable Dishes, they give Variety and always please.”

  My experiences, however, proved quite different. I encountered an abundance of fresh, well-prepared vegetables even in the late winter / early spring months. Fruits were imported and easily available. Meats were cooked with imagination, and servings were completed with style, even in the most ordinary of dining establishments. Pub grub, much maligned, was of a high order on my trip, often outstanding. Even simple soups tasted delicious, made fre
sh with local ingredients. Nothing tasted canned. Overall I found better, more consistent food in Scotland than back home. In early 2008 the food critic for the New York Times reported himself pleasantly surprised by what he found when he visited several Highland restaurants, and he visited more acclaimed establishments than I.

  Drinking was another matter. The pubs where I drank seldom ventured beyond the expected, and that included modest varieties of Scotch blends and single malts along with a few bottles of other whiskies, and a slim selection of beer, usually just one or two brands. The barkeeps weren’t going to be eager to whip up a Mimosa for you, or a Cuba Libre. It appeared to me that you might not get your Scotch if you asked for some ginger ale dumped in it. The pubs were almost always full, and the drinkers were usually drinking beer. I didn’t see many people getting drunk, which is another case where history didn’t seem to match up to the present.