News from Nowhere

Unexpectedly at a loose end while durham_rambler wrangles some urgent Parish Council business, after a day in which I have accomplished nothing but shopping (online) but feel quite brain-dead as a result. So here's a handful of pictures from that long-ago holiday in the Western Isles, of what we did when we moved on from Stornoway.

We visited the Blackhouse, Arnol:



It's a traditional croft house - which I knew because I had read Peter May's The Blackhouse - in the care of Historic Scotland. Fortune has allowed them to display side by side the blackhouse, and the newer 'white house' which replaced it, and not far away a ruined blackhouse too -

( But I'll put the pictures under a cut. )

When the BBC followed Mark Kermode's programme about British film comedy with a screening of Whisky Galore I jumped at the chance to see a classic Ealing comedy I had somehow not already seen. Nor had I read Compton Mackenzie's novel on which the film is based; but (I am pretty sure, although I can find no record of it) I have drunk in the Politician pub on Eriskay.

I knew the story, in outline at least, and I had certain expectations of an Ealing comedy: that I probably wouldn't find it all that funny, but I was unlikely to find it particularly offensive, either. Your mileage may vary, but that pretty much worked out for me. The characterisation was, inevitably, very broad: I was not entirely comfortable with Mrs Campbell, the Calvinist battle-axe of a mother of the schoolmaster (played by a young Gordon Jackson) but Jean Cadell is clearly having a whale of a time, and she does finally get to unbend without anyone giving her a hard time about it, so fair enough.

I braced myself for some national stereotyping, too, but reckoned that if I can handle the Wee Free Men then I could handle this. In fact the most lampooned character in the film is the Englishman, the spoilsport authority figure, Captain Waggett as played by Basil Radford, who apparently built a career on playing 'the Eternal Englishman'. I was delighted, but not entirely convinced, to learn from IMDB that director Alexander Mackendrick (who was raised in Glasgow), later claimed that "I began to realise that the most Scottish character in Whisky Galore! is Waggett the Englishman. He is the only Calvinist, puritan figure - and all the other characters aren't Scots at all: they're Irish!" He isn't, in fact, the island's only puritan (how could you forget Mrs Campbell?) and the Western Isles are surely a staging point between Scotland and Ireland, but it's a welcome rejection of stereotype.

Despite which, it's a surprisingly Scottish film. It was filmed on Barra, about as close to the actual site as you could ask (we drove across a road link to Eriskay, but I don't think it existed in the 1940s). Ernest Irving's score incorporates folk music motifs, which made a pleasant background, but then came the celebration scene:



This was a total surprise (though part of it is long familiar to me from the singing of Robin Hall and Jimmie MacGregor). Later there's an entirely convincing engagement party, too. IMDB talks about the participation of locals alongside cast in these scenes, which may help create the party atmosphere; the sense of community runs all through the film, which makes it a very cheering thing to watch in a bleak January.

Also, it's short (82 minutes).

Inevitably, I thought of sovay when I read this:

The Sound of Shiant is also known as Sruth na Fear Gorm, the Stream of the Blue Men, or more exactly the Blue-Green Men. The adjective in Gaelic describes that dark half-colour which is the colout of deep sea water at the foot of a black cliff. These Blue-Green Men are strange, dripping, semi-human creatures who comr aboard and sit alongside you in the sternsheets, sing a verse or two of a complex song and, if you are unable to continue in the same metre and with the same rhyme, sink your boat and drown your crew.

That's Adam Nicholson, in Sea Room, part of that book-haul I was so triumphant about at the time. It turns out to be a very good sort of book to pick up when you hace a wretched cold that won't go away, and you aren't sleeping well, and you want to take a break in the afternoon but you don't want to get too deep into anything. And if you drift off to sleep among thoughts of islands, there's no harm done.

Wikipedia knows these 'Blue men of the Minch', though its account lacks the charm of Nicolson's: they are kelpies, it says, if not Picts, or possibly Touareg.

If the weather had been more encouraging while we were in the Western Isles, we might have tried to find a cruise to the Shiant Islands: we did consider it, once we had worked out that the islands are the only place in the Hebrides where you see puffins. (See! puffins!) Puffins like it there, it seems, because they return year after year: puffins ringed on the Shiants in 1975 and 1977 were found there again in 2009 (and reported to be Europe's oldest puffins, though an Icelandic puffin site claims that the oldest puffin on record is one ringed in the Westman Islands which was 38 years old when recovered).

Now, the Westman Islands really are on my must-see list...

From Talisker we went to our hotel, the Rosedale in Portree, three fishermen's cottages right on the harbour now converted into a family-run hotel with many stairs: it was friendly and comfortable and, provided you can cope with the stairs, I entirely recommend it.

( Dinner at the Rosedale )

( Dinner at the Bosville )

( Neither of the above )

After which, it was time to go and look at the broch. But that's another story.

* ETA: Now, apparently, the Bog Myrtle café, as seen on TV.

To fill in the gaps between what I posted while we were in Scotland: starting again from the beginning.

I left us at the Glenspean Hotel, with its Durham émigré proprietors, preparing to take the road to the isles. I had haggis for breakfast (with poached eggs on top) after which I felt ready for anything, and we embarked on another spectacular drive, through Glen Shiel, past the Five Sisters (a ridge of five linked summits), along the little rushing stream and its waterfalls. The silver lining of a summer full of rain clouds is that all the waterfalls are at their best.

Road sign of the day: Feral goats for 2 miles - but disappointingly, we didn't see any feral goats.

We stopped for coffee at Eilean Donan. It's a long, long time since we were last there, and the image in my mind was - well, the famous image, the castle reflected in the gleaming water, the one that you know if you know any image of a highland castle at all. I had managed to forget that the water is a sea loch ("where three great sea lochs meet," says the castle's website), and was taken aback at the site of the castle on its rock rising out of the mud and seaweed of low tide. I hadn't forgotten the visitor centre, that simply hadn't been built at the time of our previous visit, but we managed to snag the table by the window, the one with the view:



It was beginning to rain as we left, and was pouring down by the time we reached Kyle of Lochalsh, so we stopped only long enough to pick up a few essentials (cash, throat sweets, a paperback from the charity shelves at the pharmacist's) and then crossed the bridge to Skye. That too hadn't been built at the time of our previous visit: technically it's two bridges, a short hop from the mainland to Eilean Bàn, and then the longer crossing to Skye.

There was rain and sunshine and surprising gusts of wind and more rain. The old joke about forecasting Scottish weather goes: If you can see the hills, it's going to rain; if you can't see the hills, it is raining. We could only guess at the bulk of the Cuillin as we skirted the island, and took refuge from the rain at Talisker.

The distillery tour was - well, it was OK, but it wasn't the best I've done. How could it be? A combination of health and safety legislation and economies of scale means that, as distilleries market themselves more and more as tourist destinations, there is less and less they can actually show the visitor. When I first visited Highland Park, we tiptoed around the malting floor, hoping for a glimpse of Barley and Malt, distillery's the legendary cats; Talisker boast that they malt their own barley, and they do, but at another distillery in the group, not here. Still, every visit has something new to offer: at Talisker for the first time in my life I added a drop of water to my whisky - or rather, on our guide's recommendation I invited her to do so. She delicately released a single drop of water from a glass rod; I could not detect any difference. I might have been tempted to acquire a dropper of my own, as a souvenir and for showing off purposes, but they weren't on offer. I wasn't impressed with the shop, which majored on sweatshirts, and offered the entry level Talisker at only a few pounds more (once you claimed the reduction included in the price of the entry ticket) than I had paid in Tesco's for durham_rambler's birthday present.

We lunched yesterday at the Café Kisimul in Castlebay:



It may not look anything special, and the eclecticism of the menu is disconcerting (" A family run licensed restaurant specialising in Indian and Italian cuisine and local seafood") but the food is terrific: we should have tried to get in the previous evening, instead of eating at the big hotel where we were staying - we might even have had a bottle of Château Musar with the local lamb. For lunch we had scallop pakoras (sweet local scallops in the finest crust of spicy batter), a spinach and chickpea curry to share, thick and warming, and a delicate lemon tart ('mellow yellow' on the menu). If they'd just do away with the accompanying jazz it would be perfect.

At 3.30 (slightly late) we sailed out of Castlebay on the MV Clansman:



(Photo taken through a water-spotted window - please make allowances). It's a long trip back to Oban, especially as we called at Tiree and Coll; we had time for both sunshine and showers, and a double rainbow, and twilight and sunset:



before we came into Oban at 10.30. And today we drove home. There was more rain, and memories of our first visit to Oban, one bright frosty November, and there was the long road alongside Loch Lomond, with the water high in the loch to our left and woods full of bluebells sloping up to out tight. There was a lunch break at Cairn Lodge, the motorway service station by the gates of Castle Douglas, and there was a visit to Waitrose in Hexham to pick up supplies.

And there will be more holiday posts in due course, but right now, we're home.

The short version is that we did not make it to St Kilda on either of the days we might have gone, and that instead we spent two days having fun exploring Harris, and have now moved on to Lewis. Also, thankyou to everyone who has said nice things about wanting pictures: the photographer is willing but the broadband is weak. But I have uploaded the first few, and here they are. ( - under the cut, as usual. )

When our hosts at the Glenspean hotel learned that we came from Durham, they each talked to us about the place, she last night and he this morning. I promise that we did not start it, and that while we may have expressed some reservations about 'isn't it a lovely place to live!', it was they who commented on the domination of the city by students. As we were leaving our host told us about a couple from Durham who visited the hotel regularly: they had lived all their lives in Durham, but were now moving out. They had had enough.

We are now sitting in the bar of the Rosedale Hotel in Portree, reading the documents which have just appeared on Durham County Council's website: it seems that the Council are seeking a judicial review of the Inspector's condemnation of their Plan.

Damn it, we are supposed to be on holiday.

In other news, we are on Skye and it is raining. We are having a lovely time.

Road works on the A1 provided a reason to take the A68 north, riding roller coaster up through Northumberland, between shades of yellow: rape fields in lemony acid full bloom, gorse deep honey golden, verges bristling with cowslips - what's going on? I think of primroses as common, cowslips as rare, yet here they were, and no primroses south of Perthshire.

A late lunch at M&S on the Edinburgh bypass, and by mid-afternoon durham_rambler had to wake me up: "This isn't the time to nod off, we're getting to the pretty bit!" The Highlands were splendid in the sunshine, which picked out the silver birch trunks and the brightest of the spring-green leaves, and the patches of snow on the higher slopes.

We didn't enjoy the scenery as much as we might have, because we'd half-seen warnings of a road closure, signposted far enough ahead to make us fear it was major. There were points where the road being closed would have forced us to detour via Inverness, so we were jumpy until, beyond Dalwhinnie, we turned left and the road to the right was closed: phew!

I don't think it was just relief that made the final stretch, along the valley of the Spean, the loveliest of all: the wooded hillsides came down to a series of lakes, dotted with buildings from the Extremely Silly end of the Scottish Baronial range.

And now we are in the bar of the Glenspean Hotel, and the staff are keen to serve us dinner. I shall allow myself to be persuaded...