Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster

by William W. Starr

  I made a detour a few miles from Skara Brae to get over to Skaill House, the finest surviving mansion on the Orkneys and a home with a long history, mostly an unhappy one for the owners. Bishop George Graham is recorded as having lived here with his wife and nine children in 1615. Alas the Bishop was deemed too lenient with the local witches (I’m sure the English could have helped him with a few nasty executions) and way too lax in enforcing the incest laws (he may have loved his family a little too much, if you get my drift). He was forced to resign his position in 1638. The mansion apparently sat on fertile land; the next occupying laird also had nine children. One of the next owners, an eleven-year-old, was accused of stealing gold ducats from a shipwreck. Another child was also accused of theft. More modern generations turned out a little better, and the mansion got improved in the process, too.

  I was so excited by everything Orcadian at this point that I bought a bottle of the soft drink that everyone around here seemed to love: Irn-Bru. It was some sort of concoction of citrus flavor, carbonated water, orange color, and some minerals. It’s been around since 1901 and has assumed something of a cult status, outselling even mighty Coca-Cola here. But, my Lord, the minerals tasted old enough to have come from Skara Brae, and the liquid was so sickly sweet I felt a diabetic alert going off. One swig induced a nauseating, carbon aftertaste. How could the people who created God-approved single malts also manufacture this … well, I’ll be charitable and call it stuff? Throwing out the rest of the bottle was among the best decisions I made in the Orkneys.

  I later asked my landlord to please explain the popularity of the drink. “Can’t tell ya,” said Greg. “Terrible stuff, isn’t it?” Why didn’t I ask him earlier? Greg and his wife Lesley and I talked a bit of politics after we polished off some tea. He spoke quickly with a heavy brogue that made understanding him difficult, and he apologized for that: “Most Americans can’t figure me out at all.” The conversation eventually got around to Boswell and Johnson when he asked about the book I was researching. I related a little of the background to Boswell and Johnson’s journey, and he remembered reading about them in school. “They didn’t get up this way now, did they?” We chatted some more and I told him a few stories about the travelers’ journey, and his face brightened with genuine interest. He rather liked Boswell—“He seems a bit of a real person, ya’ know? A lot of things going on inside him”—and a bit cooler to Dr. Johnson, although he suspected that the doctor “enjoyed flirting with the girls on their trip, didn’t he?” It was fun to talk about B & J here in the Orkneys; I wondered what they would have thought about these islands had they been fortunate enough to get here.

  We talked some about the character of Orcadians—what struck me as their quiet certitude—and in what ways they differ from the mainland Scots. “I think we’re very easy-going, ya’ know,” Greg said. “There’s not a lot of us, and we’ve got a fair lot of room here, and we try to get along. There aren’t many who are trying to push themselves in others’ way.” I described the attentive responses of the Hebrideans on Lewis to my needs, and their surprising (to me) warmth toward a visitor. “I’ve not been there; that’s a way off for us, you know. I’ve heard they were friendly people, too.”

  His words echoed what I had read in Hebridean native Ian Mitchell’s Isles of the North about his sailing trip to the Hebrides and the Orkneys a few years back. He was told that the Orcadians are independent-minded and laid back and that they seem to want to get along: “There’s very little exertion of rules and regulations. It’s very much live and let live. I guess there’s room for everybody.”

  Edwin Muir, who was born in the Orkneys in 1887 and grew up there, wrote with affection of his friends in his classic account Scottish Journey. A visitor, he said, “will find a population of small farmers and crofters, naturally gentle and courteous in manners, but independent too, and almost all of them moderately prosperous…. But he will not come to know much about the place unless he lives here for quite a long time, habituating himself to the rhythm of the life, and training himself to be pleased with bareness and simplicity in all things.”

  Seventy years ago when he wrote, Muir found few extremes in class and poverty. Agriculture dominated; unemployment was uncommon, “and the result is an alive and contented community.” By and large, that still seems true, but now tourism must be added to the mix of a flourishing community.

  The calendar now had turned into April, and I needed to pick up my pace in order to get back to the Scottish mainland to link up again with Boswell and Johnson. I made a special point of visiting the lovely eight-hundred-year-old St. Magnus Cathedral in the heart of Kirkwall. Magnus, “an innocent sufferer and a man of piety” of Orkney, was killed in 1117 and soon proclaimed a martyr. The cathedral holds relics of Magnus, including a skull which shows a head wound that conforms to the story told of the death of Magnus. Curiously, for a church, there is a small area behind the chapel that was used as a dungeon; there are records showing men and women imprisoned there as late as the eighteenth century. (For lack of piety? Failure to attend Sunday school? Failure to deposit into the collection box?) And, curiously, the cathedral is owned not by a church but by the Orkney Islands Council, a secular body that permits its use as a parish church in connection with the Church of England. No matter, the sandstone cathedral is quite a spectacular sight inside and out, and during my visit the organist was producing magnificent music for the choir. The sound reverberating off those stone walls was indeed inspiring; how could anyone hearing this glorious sound have failed to support the collection box?

  On my way out of town I stopped by the 210-year-old Highland Park Distillery for a quick tour and a free wee dram. The twelve-year-old single malt was very good, the twenty-five-year-old sensational, dark, woodsy with an edge of peatiness, and about six times as expensive. It’s a bit amazing that the whisky here is so good when you consider the fact that when the distillery was closed during World War II, soldiers stationed here used the huge vats for communal baths. They must have enjoyed it immensely, but I’m supposing the distillery got some new vats after the war. Regardless, I bought a bottle of the twelve-year-old to remind me of the Orkneys for the next few weeks.

  I’m not a diver, but if I had been, I probably would have made a stop at the great harbor at Scapa Flow my first order of business on arriving in the Orkneys. For the first half of the twentieth century this natural harbor served as the main base for Britain’s Royal Navy, and although it sees little warlike activity these days, it is a fascinating reminder of the prominent role the Orkneys played in the two World Wars. There are many ships sunk in these waters, German and British, and the harbor is a mecca for undersea divers from all over the world.

  Of two British wrecks there the best known is the Royal Oak, which was sunk on October 14, 1939, by a German submarine. The attack was audacious attack, the German skipper bringing his sub into the harbor on the surface, successfully dodging ships sunk by the Brits to block the harbor. The sub was picked up by a car’s headlights and the driver reported the sighting to the authorities. As happened at another harbor—Pearl—two years later, the authorities ignored the report, believing that such a sneak attack would be impossible. Their behavior cost the lives of 833 sailors from the ship’s complement of 1,400. The sub slipped out through the narrow channel to safety.

  The other British ship in the harbor is the HMS Vanguard, which went down on the evening of July 9, 1917, after an internal explosion that killed all but two of the nearly one thousand men on board. The force of the explosion was so powerful that the battleship’s gun-turrets, each weighing several hundred tons, were hurled more than a mile through the air. Even so, the sunken ships are not what brings divers here. They come because of a footnote in history. In Scapa Flow’s most celebrated moment, the entire German High Seas Fleet—seventy-four ships—was interned here awaiting the outcome of the Versailles Peace Conference. Fearing that the treaty would require handing over all of the ships to the Brits, the German
commanding officer ordered the entire fleet scuttled. Within minutes every single one of the ships was beached or sunk. Some of the wrecks were raised between World Wars I and II, but plenty remain, and squadrons of divers go down after them year after year.

  One other thing about Scapa Flow is too amusing to ignore, and it doesn’t involve the folly of German fleet commanders. Because of the presence of the Royal Navy during the two World Wars and the men and matériel necessary to ensure the fleet’s safety, the population of the Orkneys soared. In World War II while the island’s resident population was estimated at about twenty-five thousand, there were close to one hundred thousand servicemen and women stationed here. The islands were unsuited for such an invasion force—even a friendly one—and the soldiers and sailors found themselves in the middle of one huge, colossally boring experience on these remote landscapes. One of those men composed a song, doggerel really, which expressed some pretty universal soldierly feelings:

  This bloody town’s a bloody cuss—

  No bloody trains, no bloody bus,

  And no one cares for bloody us—

  In bloody Orkney.

  Everything’s so bloody dear,

  A bloody bob for bloody beer,

  And is it good?—no bloody fear,

  In bloody Orkney.

  The bloody flicks are bloody old,

  The bloody seats are bloody cold;

  You can’t get in for bloody gold

  In bloody Orkney

  No bloody sport, no bloody games,

  No bloody fun, the bloody dames

  Won’t even give their bloody names

  In bloody Orkney.

  Best bloody place is bloody bed,

  With bloody ice on bloody head;

  You might as well be bloody dead,

  In bloody Orkney.

  There are many more verses, but you get the idea. And more than a few singers were happy to insert the “F”-word in place of bloody just to give the ditty a creative twist.

  The wind was blowing strongly when I arrived at the ferry for my trip back to the Scottish mainland. The sky had grown dark, and a cold rain was falling nearly sideways while I waited to board. I was taking a different ferry line to a different port, Gill’s Bay, which is slightly to the west of John O’Groats. The trip was scheduled to take only some forty minutes, but the ferry was considerably smaller than the Northlink vessel I came over on, and the worsening weather seemed certain to make the trip a nail-biter.

  The seas did turn rough, and swells were running at ten to twelve feet. Waves crashed against the passenger-lounge windows, and several passengers looked a bit queasy before dashing off for the bathrooms. I felt fine, however, and even drank a little tea without spilling any. I chatted with a couple from London who said they travel every year. Last year they went to Cambodia for three weeks, and now they’re returning from a week they spent the Orkneys. They said the Cambodia trip cost less. As for me, I never stopped regretting my departure; I wanted much more time to have savored the Orkneys. I regretted once again that Boswell and Johnson couldn’t have visited here. Bozzy surely would have loved reading those bawdy Viking inscriptions.

  14

  Inverness and Loch Ness

  Back on the Scottish mainland for the first time in a week, I welcomed the sun, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was heading into one of the seasonally warmest and longest rainless periods in recent Scottish meteorological history. It would rain exactly once over the next fifteen days (and that was only a passing shower), and high temperatures would climb into the upper sixties and low seventies for the rest of April. I celebrated by taking off my sweater for the first time since I drove through Mull.

  I was now trekking down the northeast coast of Scotland, a landscape that seemed gentler and more inhabited than the lonely, barren west coast. I drove on the A99 south through Wick, originally a Viking settlement and looking as if it hadn’t been spiffed up much since then. I picked up the A9 heading farther down the peninsula, and I was struck not only by the milder weather off the North Sea, but the increasing signs of civilization as well. Not only was this road the main avenue from the Lowlands to the Orkneys, but it showed evidence of growing settlements along the way. I spent the night in the former coal-mining community of Brora which now boasts a fancy hotel with an indoor swimming pool (rarer than a Royal Bank of Scotland that doesn’t charge fees).

  On the road out of Brora after a fine breakfast, I stopped at a small convenience store to buy a Sunday paper, hoping I could find at least one while so far away from any urban area. To my astonishment I had a choice of eight including several from England. I was so pleased I bought a copy of each, and it was the elderly proprietor’s turn to look astonished.

  “I like to read,” I said.

  “Like the comics, do ya?” he replied.

  “I just like to know what’s going on,” I said.

  “That’s the last place you’ll learn anything,” he said, pointing to my mountainous stack of newsprint.

  As it turns out I never got around to reading all of them because when I was preparing to turn in the rental car at the end of the trip I found two of those papers on the floor in the rear, unopened and never read.

  A few miles down the road, a sign pointed out a major tourist attraction ahead, and I realized I had not nearly begun to exhaust my castle addiction. I pulled into Dunrobin Castle, driving a few yards on a driveway that expanded into a parking lot at the castle entrance. From where I sat, Dunrobin looked like the perfect fairytale castle with turrets and pointed roofs, built to a giant scale with nearly two hundred rooms inside. It was the ancestral home of the dukes of Sutherland, who were extremely wealthy landowners, influential over the centuries and responsible for destroying the lives of thousands of Scots—their dependents—in the nineteenth-century Clearances. The castle proved fascinating: expensive, tasteful furnishings, a sumptuous drawing room (part of the space where Queen Victoria stayed on a visit here), knowledgeable staff, gorgeous views out to sea and overlooking the handsome landscaped gardens. There was a wonderful demonstration of falconry in the gardens featuring a skilled trainer with a falcon and an owl.

  It was all most intriguing. I took a sit-down break to read over the castle’s self-published book about its accouterments and history. The book didn’t exactly dwell on the clearances, and I was finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile the obvious attractiveness and appeal of the castle with the cataclysmic events associated with it. Between 1807 and 1821 thousands of tenants were forcibly removed in a carefully planned capitalist blitzkrieg, their lands turned over to pasture for sheep with the aim of adding wealth to the already substantial coffers of the duke of Sutherland (an Englishman, by the way).

  “The dislocation for the people was great and the psychic wounds inflicted did not heal; a sense of wrong was carried from generation to generation. Hence the Sutherland Clearances were the most dramatic and sensational of all the Clearances,” wrote historian Eric Richards in 2005. The duke’s well-coordinated removals provoked resistance, violence, communal responses, and a deep-seated challenge to authority. Those persist to the current generation, where a one-hundred-foot-high monument to the duke of Sutherland has been the target of protesters for years. The monument has an inscription from 1834, after the duke’s death, that reads, unbelievably, that it was erected “by a mourning and grateful tenantry to a judicious, kind and liberal landlord [who would] open his hands to the distress of the widow, the sick and the traveller.” Right. And Hitler was a saint. Actually that’s not a far-fetched parallel; historians have compared the actions of the Nazis and those of the duke in eliminating “undesirables.” For now the monument remains, in dark, grimly compelling contrast to the lovely castle only a short distance away. I wondered what Boswell and Johnson would have written. Both men, I suspect, would have been angry.

  Speaking of those two gentlemen, I was finally on the verge of reconnecting my journey with theirs as I headed into Inverness
. “We got safely to Inverness, and put up at Mackenzie’s at the Horns,” Boswell wrote in his journal on August 28 at the most northerly point of their trip. “Mr. Keith, the Collector of Excise here, my old acquaintance at Ayr, who had seen us at the Fort, called in the evening and engaged us to dine with him the next day, and promised to breakfast with us and take us to the English Chapel; so that we were at once commodiously arranged.”

  Johnson was, of course, a bit more formal since Boswell had the relationships with people they visited, focusing in his writings especially on their manners. Of Inverness he wrote, “We came late to … the town which may properly be called the capital of the Highlands. Hither the inhabitants of the inland parts come to be supplied with what they cannot make for themselves; hither the young nymphs of the mountains and valleys are sent for education, and as far as my observation has reached, are not sent in vain.”

  They stayed only two nights in Inverness, and Boswell spent some time by himself, presumably visiting acquaintances; he was unaccompanied, and since he didn’t spell out just whom it was he visited, there is speculation he might have dropped in on some of the town’s prostitutes. Regardless, one of the most vivid and bizarre stories of the journey occurred in Inverness, and, strangely, it did not make its way into Boswell’s writing but has been preserved in an account by the travelers’ host.

  At dinner on one of their two nights in the city Johnson regaled those at the table with a story about a remarkable creature just discovered in New South Wales. He suddenly stood up and began to imitate a kangaroo, with his hands held out as paws and his brown coat bunched up in front to pass for a pouch as he began hopping around the room. How could Bozzy not have described this for us? It’s funny enough trying to imagine the corpulent Johnson bouncing up and down all over the room imitating an animal the guests surely would never have been able to imagine. He must have appeared as if he had lost his mind. Along with Boswell’s dance on top of Dun Caan, Johnson as kangaroo provides one of the most memorable images of this memorable journey.