Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster

by William W. Starr

  The Scots enjoy—literally—a reputation for heavy drinking; Boswell was hardly alone. Breakfast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was often served quite late in the morning, so everyone, men and women, hoisted a drink of ale or spirits after they arose to keep them going until time to eat. “The Scots as a whole were noted for being immoderate drinkers,” Plant writes, “although not so intemperate as the Germans.” Then again, the Scots never had the idea of invading Poland.

  The Scots used their drink for medicinal purposes as well. A glass of whisky laced with linseed oil was supposed to cure a variety of ills (but probably not the taste of linseed oil). And brandy was recommended as the favored treatment for scarlet fever. And here’s the good part: if the patient was an infant, it was urged that “the nurse should drink it for the child.” Good news for nanny dear.

  Highlanders could put away three or four quarts of whisky at a sitting (they must have sat for a long time afterwards), but drunkenness, in fact, was not common. Plant records one gentleman whose bottle was so large that it had to be brought into his room in a wheelbarrow. Now that’s drinking. Reports of such excesses did begin to decline a bit after tea became the preferred drink around the middle of the eighteenth century. Still, it was reported that when Flora MacDonald, the heroine of Skye and savior of Bonnie Prince Charlie, was buried in 1790, the funeral procession, on its sixteen-mile journey to the graveyard, put away three hundred gallons of whisky.

  My host at the small B&B at Durness, Martin, was a sheep farmer on a working croft. He had a large flock of cheviots and a fleet of Border Collies who were skillful and well trained when they brought in the sheep as darkness fell. Martin clearly was a hard worker, up well before dawn to begin preparing breakfast and with little spare time for conversation. He said the grass that grows around Durness is not rich enough to raise his sheep up to market size. So he gets them only to a certain size, then sells them to another farmer further south who rears them on richer lands until they can be sold for the highest price.

  It was another sunny morning, and a chilly one, and my room, which didn’t have any heat overnight, didn’t seem to have any when the sun came up either. But Martin’s breakfast was delicious: choices of smoked fish, sausage, eggs, bacon, and fresh fruits. Wonderful hospitality from a taciturn host whose wife appeared only occasionally in the background. She seldom spoke and seemed to have no obvious role in the care and feeding of visitors.

  On my way out of town a few minutes after breakfast, I saw a sign pointing to a bookstore. In this remote, tiny corner of extreme northwest Scotland, could there really be an operating, profit-making bookstore? Yes there might be, but unfortunately it was on the verge of opening and wasn’t yet ready for business. I have no idea how anyone could make a go of it in this economic climate (not to mention geographic climate), but I silently wished the owners well. I read a year later that the Loch Croispol Bookshop and Restaurant is now open, advertising itself as “the most north-westerly bookshop/restaurant on the mainland” (can’t be much competition for that, I’m guessing). It has a lot of books on Scottish history and literature, apparently, and an “extensive wine list.” Clearly Durness is now an uptown place. I hope the booksellers are succeeding. I had another surprise departing Durness when I stopped for a moment at a small roadside memorial; it was a stone tribute to the late Beatle John Lennon. Lennon and his family used to vacation in the Durness area when he was a youngster, and the community wished to recognize his presence. I took a photo for my son and son-in-law, both big Beatles’ fans.

  Forty or so miles away was the crofting township of Tongue where I had decided to spend the next night. There was a small Royal Bank of Scotland branch there, and I couldn’t resist walking in to inquire about cashing a travelers check, even though I didn’t need the cash at the moment. Certainly, sir, the teller told me. Fee? No sir, none at all. Couldn’t have been nicer and quicker. Now I wondered if I should have said those ugly things earlier. In the spirit of impartiality, I decided to wait and see what the rest of the trip brought.

  So close to the sea, Tongue enjoyed a surprisingly temperate climate and boasted Scotland’s most northerly palm tree, the sort of claim that should warm the heart of any chamber of commerce representative. I find myself at a loss for anything to say about a palm tree, however.

  From Tongue to Thurso the next morning—sunny again?—I passed a nuclear technology plant quite out of place with sheep grazing in the near pasturelands. In the distance a herd of wind turbines whirred strongly in the breeze off the North Atlantic. The nuclear plant has meant jobs for hundreds of people in a relatively jobless area of Scotland, and many think that the wind turbines are the future here. Getting close to Thurso, my sense of isolation faded as I pulled into what seemed a real city near the tip of northeastern Scotland. I had driven across the least- traveled section of the country. Inland just a few miles from me was empty land, no homes, no people. Well, hardly any. The area surrounding Thurso is an extremely remote piece of land within a landscape that is itself extremely remote. Things seemed a little more expensive in Thurso: food, lodging, petrol. Everything had to be trucked in, and it’s a long trip. I realized I was closer to the Arctic Circle than to London. I ate dinner at an Indian restaurant and noticed that outside people parked their bicycles loaded with packages without using locks. I checked the local paper later for news of thefts; there weren’t any, but there were two separate columns about bird-watching activities.

  After a ragged night’s sleep on a bed that sagged practically to the floor—yes, I know the only person who cares about my whining one whit is me, but it’s what travelers do—I took a short jaunt over to the extreme northeastern edge of the county at John O’Groats, a curiously named collection of buildings that constitutes a tourist slag heap of cheap souvenirs, expensive food, and pay toilets. It’s a port for travelers headed to and from the Orkney Islands, and that is the only reason anyone comes here. The weather was beautiful, albeit cold and windy, and I drove a couple of miles further to what is actually the most northeasterly point in the United Kingdom, Duncansby Head. It has an odd square lighthouse designed by Robert Lewis Stevenson’s father and is situated on a two-hundred-foot high cliff overlooking the dangerous intersection where the North Atlantic crashes into the North Sea. The wind blew fiercely, but the view out toward the Orkneys was gorgeous. No one was around, and I suddenly had the urge to dance, to make up for what I missed on Dun Caan’s peak on Raasay. I wanted to shake my booty for Bozzy. And so I did, twirling, bebopping, ending in a modified twist, arms and legs in quick motion. I had finally made my tribute to Boswell, and I was really happy—especially since neither he nor Dr. Johnson nor anyone else was around to see me. On the way back I passed through East Merkle, then Merkle, and finally West Merkle in the space of maybe half a mile. Was this geographical division really necessary? There can’t be more than sixty residents in all three communities together. Couldn’t we all just get along, people?

  I was going to the Orkneys, but I had decided to leave from the much closer ferry port of Scrabster near Thurso. It was a longer ferry ride, but it was another pretty, bright day, and I didn’t want to ruin it by heading back to John O’Groats.

  13

  The Orkneys

  I had left behind my friends at CalMac because Northlink provided ferry service between Scrabster and the Orkneys and Shetland Islands. Northlink’s ship was large and very comfortable, and I crossed in a quick ninety minutes. I had now traveled from one vast, sparsely populated area to the sparsely populated archipelago of seventy or so islands that comprise the Orkneys. It was time to reorient myself.

  The Orkneys are as close as ten miles from the Scottish mainland and are a part of Scotland, at least to most people living on the Scottish mainland. There are dissenters: “The place is no more Scottish than Wimbledon,” wrote the Englishman Charles Jennings. Gordon Donaldson, the late “historiographer royal” (an absolutely impeccable-sounding title), pointed out a few years ago th
at while the Northern Isles were clearly de facto parts of Scotland, “de jure there is less certainty.” Jennings, somewhat the cynic, added: “Orkney passed into Scottish hands at the end of the fifteenth century in compensation for the non-payment of the dowry of Margaret of Denmark. And before that it was all Norsemen and Danes…. The place is just too far north.”

  If you live in the Orkneys, however, you are an Orcadian, and a reference to the mainland is a reference to the largest island in this group and not to the Scottish mainland. It’s not a secessionist sort of thing, though, but as much as a fact of geography and history. The Orkneys are a long way from Edinburgh and Glasgow, although the islands are just over the horizon when you’re standing at John O’Groats (and wishing you weren’t).

  Those populous centers of Scottish influence really don’t exert a lot of influence here because they are so far away, and because the history and geography have long pointed to other places, notably Scandinavia. There were Stone Age people here at 4000 B.C. and later some Christian settlements. It was a Pictish kingdom for a while, and then came the Vikings, warriors who arrived about the ninth century and created a formidable outpost that lasted for more than three hundred years. Norway then took over until 1468, when Christian I, the king of Norway and Denmark, mortgaged the islands to Scotland on the occasion of his daughter’s marriage to King James III of Scotland. One of history’s earliest recorded cheapskates, Christian never paid off his debt, so there’s always been a little legal argument about who owns what, although it’s been generally quickly and fairly resolved over a beverage of some sort. No matter, the Orkneys have been mostly a Scottish preserve since, but the Norse and Danish influence remains much in evidence and helps impart a unique flavor to these islands.

  So much for history. The reality is that when you look at a map the Orkneys—and the Shetlands even farther to the north—are a long way away from most everywhere else. The explorer Martin Martin described them in 1695, but his words didn’t exactly prompt a tourist stampede to the islands. Boswell and Johnson never mentioned them, understandably. The construction of oil rigs in the North Sea brought important new commercial interests (albeit more to the Shetlands than to the Orkneys), but the rise of tourism as a major industry in these beautiful, sneakily seductive, fertile islands has been a relatively recent phenomenon, only a few decades old. “It’s a place you have to want to come to, not somewhere you come by accident,” an Orcadian native told me one sunny afternoon as we sat outside St. Magnus Cathedral in the city of Kirkwall.

  I had really wanted to come here. That old quest for the unusual was certainly part of the reason, but mostly it was the music that got me to these islands. Specifically it was Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, one of the current generation’s finest classical composers, who was born in England but has lived in the Orkneys since 1971. Much of his music has been written here and written about places here. I had listened to his operas, symphonic and chamber scores for nearly thirty years, finding in them a deep satisfaction and refreshment that evoked an intense curiosity about the land that so inspired him. I know it sounds a tad daft to insist that music got me all the way here, but it’s the truth. Alas, I was not here at the right time of year for the St. Magnus Festival, a musical event that draws thousands, and for which he is responsible. For anyone needing an introduction to Maxwell Davies, I’d suggest his gently evocative piano piece “Farewell to Stromness” and his witty, rambunctious orchestral work with bagpipes, “An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise.” Be careful, though; these could provoke a sudden desire to go to the Orkneys.

  Of course the music I heard on the islands mostly was either some vague European rock or American pop music from the 1960s, as if Glenn Campbell and the Byrds had never gone away. I wondered if the Wichita Lineman was hanging over my shoulder as I drove off the ferry at the lovely little Victorian-era port of Stromness. The port has one-and-a-half lane streets and two-way traffic, posing some interesting challenges if you don’t know your way around. Finding a parking place—a task roughly on par with locating a one-dollar gallon of petrol—consumed about forty-five minutes. I parked on a hill and hoped the brakes would hold. I walked the steep, tiny alleys connecting the upper and lower city, finding bookstores, neat little restaurants, almost everything charming, except for the poorly stocked grocery. But I made a great discovery there: the ice cream. Who knew Orcadian ice cream is the stuff of gods? So rich, so pure tasting, so chocolately. Was I in Italy? It was the single best treat I ate on the entire trip, and I ate it every day, sometimes more than once.

  Back in the car, I headed out of town and across the mainland into Kirkwall. With picturesquely narrow streets and medieval-looking architecture in its central market area, Kirkwall is the largest city in the Orkneys, home to about nine thousand people. Fewer than sixteen thousand live elsewhere on the islands, so here was the metropolis, complete with a good grocery, bookstores, clothing shops, and teens on bicycles. I bought my groceries without comment—no one remarked on my “Americanness,” and I didn’t need help locating the pickles—and headed into the country, past attractively kept green, small farms, toward my rental cottage.

  No stone walls here; the modern-style, single-story rental house—the walls were nonetheless pretty thick—doesn’t get hit with the same kind of wind blasts I encountered on Lewis, I was told. And yes, that was true, as it turned out, but not by much. The wind never stopped on the Orkneys. It blew lightly some times and hard at other times, but it was always an accompaniment to whatever else the weather was doing. Cold, fine. Rain, okay. Warm, maybe. Wind, oh my yes, how did you want it served today? There is some good news, however; the wind kept the midges at bay most of the time.

  The weather on the Orkneys proved much milder than on Lewis. Thanks to the Gulf Stream, I was told, there’s little snow here, mostly rain when precipitation falls. I confess I can’t figure out how the Gulf Stream gets up here, but more than one person insisted that that was the case. In spring and summer days are long this far north, and the weather can be very pleasant (and windy). From late fall to early spring it can be pretty cold (with extra windy winds). It was partly mild, partly cold, and always windy during my week’s stay.

  That’s probably a lot more than anyone who isn’t a meteorologist wants to know, but it’s not fair to avoid the topic since it affects everything else, including how much time you spend outdoors, whether you’re walking, shopping, or sightseeing. The weather never compromised my experiences, except that on several occasions I got so cold standing in the wind at an outdoor monument that I ducked inside early.

  The interior of the mainland offered surprising scenery: gently rolling hills, rich, efficiently cultivated, green pasturelands, a calming, sculpted beauty, and few trees. Blame the lack of trees on the incessant winds. One cloudless night I looked out from my house over the Wide Firth, reflecting the moon’s light and in the background the lights of Kirkwall. The scene appeared like a brightly colored circus illumination. The next night, the clouds were full of dramatic contrasts in the partial moonlight, and the wind-driven sea water was a foamy wash of whitecaps. Both nights the sun set after 10 P.M.

  Historic and prehistoric sites abound on the Orkneys, so it was hard to be there more than a few days without discovering my inner archaeologist. At Maeshowe, a five-thousand-year-old site on the mainland, a breathtaking neolithic (Stone Age) village bumps up against spectacular ritual and burial monuments, and visitors easily slip back in time. Maeshowe is a large grassy mound with a chambered tomb inside. I entered it by squatting and duck-walking through a narrow, tight stone tunnel for about twenty-five feet. I was sweating from acute claustrophobia the whole time. I could then stand up in a small, high-ceilinged and watertight stone chamber with side cells. This was for hundreds of years a burial site, apparently, and the effort to create it without machinery thousands of years ago was extraordinary to imagine. The passageway to the tomb was aligned by its builders so that at three weeks before and after the shortest day of the year (De
cember 21), the light of the setting sun perfectly illuminated the back of the chamber.

  But that’s not the best part of the site. The Vikings came through here in the mid–twelfth century and stopped at Maeshowe for a time. They left something of a calling card—a series of runic inscriptions carved by knife on the inner chamber walls that are visible and easily interpreted today. These were not the mighty, sacred words of kings and lords and leaders; these were the words of the grunts who did the fighting, the rowing, and most of the complaining. What they said—hilarious, bawdy, light-hearted, precursors to “Kilroy was here,”—tells us a lot about how people really haven’t changed over the centuries.

  “Otarr carved these runes,” reads one. Another bears these words: “Ingigero is the sweetest woman there is.” Yet another appears to say that “Thorni bedded Helgi.” Someone else carved his name and apparently mentioned Helgi, too, suggesting she might have been something of a twelfth-century Viking tart, but I admit that’s just conjecture. Maeshowe is absolutely fascinating, a burial place the Vikings made their own. I have to admit, though, that I couldn’t get back out of the claustrophobic tomb fast enough.

  Not many miles away was the village of Skara Brae, like Maeshowe a site inhabited some five thousand years ago, well before the Egyptian pyramids were built and centuries before Stonehenge was constructed. And what is most remarkable about Skara Brae is not its age but the degree of its preservation. A number of structures of the semisubterranean village have survived, but how? I found out that the answer is midden, right after I found out what midden is. It’s a durable material formed from the decomposition of organic matter, sort of like a gardener’s compost heap. And that, with the sand that filled up and buried the village after its abandonment in approximately 2500 B.C., accounts for the splendid state of preservation. Skara Brae was uncovered accidentally because of a storm in 1850 that revealed the midden heap; archaeologists now call it one of the most important Stone Age sites in Europe. Another amazing site to explore.