Following the Sun (37 page)

At one point riding through the interior, I went for as much as an hour without so much as a passing car, and there were no villages or crofts in sight, only the gray green heather lands, the occasional roll of a black flock of hooded crows, stands of fir and larch, birks and beeches and rowan trees in the hollows, ribbony waterfalls, misty green peaks that revealed themselves briefly through the torn fabric of clouds, and racing, foaming streams tumbling everywhere, with wet mossy rocks o'erspread with liverworts, fern mosses, and clinging lichens. Somehow the great emptiness gave me a strength I didn't know I had and I began assaulting the hills with frenetic energy, stripping off clothes and sweating as I rose higher and higher into the peaks, shouting into the lonely face of the wind at the passes, and then flying ever downward with the catapulting streams, only to begin again the long slog up against the currents of the falling waters.

In spite of the fact that I was now conditioned for this—I was finally in shape—the Highlands were a challenge. I still had to dismount from time to time and heave my old Peugeot forward, leaning over the handlebars as I pushed, resting my upper body and sometimes even leaning my head on the bars and letting my legs do the work. I came to look on the crossing of the Highlands as a meditation. I lost track of where I was. There were only the great green hills, the lochs below the roads, and the rare gray town, where I put in by night to eat and sleep and then, through rain and sun and showers and clouds and fogs, ride on.

In time I drifted down into the lower country around Cawdor and the castle on the blasted heath where Duncan was murdered by the terrible eleventh-century king named Mac Be'ath, also known as Macbeth. From here it was an easy ride down the coast of the Firth of Moray, through the green forests and heaths to Culloden itself. Here, in a misty rain, I visited the infamous battlefield of Culloden Moor, the battle that forever ended the hopes of the Stuarts to regain the throne.

Scotland is a bloody, battle-strewn piece of the world, with the Mackenzies and the MacDonalds and the Campbells forever sallying forth on one vengeance raid after another and leaving behind a landscape of legend and memory, with place names like Well of the Dead, and Well of the Heads, and the Glen of Weeping, and unfortunate sites like Glencarry and Glen Coe, with bonnets and spears and bended bows and plaided warriors, armed for strife.

But of all these raids and counterraids and battles, perhaps the most analyzed and the best remembered is the short fight that took place here on this cold moor outside of Inverness, when the dragoons of the Duke of Cumberland ruthlessly massacred the Scottish forces under Prince Charles and then celebrated their victory by hunting down the wounded in the forests and crofts and killing them too. It is said that the soldiers of the Butcher Cumberland, as he is called locally, even set upon civilians who came out from Inverness to watch the battle. Now the site is a tourist attraction and draws many nationalistic Scots from both Scotland and abroad—some 100,000 people a year visit the place.

As I was leaving, I again heard the skirl of pipes, and the muscular rattle of drums, and a company in full eighteenth-century regalia came straight stepping out from a parking area. It was Saturday and a celebration of the culture of the Highlands was forming up, so I stuck around to watch. It turned out to be a smaller version of the usual Highland Games, organized by some local club, and there were caber throws, and marching pipe bands, and a demonstration of the Highland Fling and other traditional dances, performed by troupes of high-stepping young people clad in traditional plaid skirts and kilts. These Scottish dances, like most folk dances, have ancient origins. In this case, according to scholars, the dance patterns evolved from ritual dances in celebration of the sun. The Romans who fought so diligently against the Highlanders reported that the Caledonian tribes used to execute wild, high-leaping frenzied dances and form weaving chains and circles around swords stuck in the ground.

Not far from the battlefield was a group of three chambered cairns, known as the Stones of Clava, each of which is surrounded by a stone circle. The cairns, which were originally burial chambers, all have an inner room built of large stones that can be entered along a passage. The two entrance passages align with two of the stones outside the central area and align with the position of the midwinter sundown.

That evening I wheeled into the quiet city of Inverness and found a quiet hotel on a quiet street above the River Ness. I was in the mood, after the bad food and hard climbs of the Eastern Highlands, for a little softness and spent a long time in a hot bath, soaking the aches out of my muscles. In the subdued hotel pub I nursed a single malt whiskey and then repaired to the high-ceilinged dining room and ordered a broiled local salmon, boiled potatoes with parsley butter, and green peas cooked with lettuce leaves and butter. It was still light after dinner, with a calm, pearl gray sky hanging over the cityscape, so I walked through a park along the river laid out with a winding path and ancient firs and larches interspersed with emerald green sheered lawns and beds of flowering annuals. Then I sat on a park bench and admired the gray rippling waters of the Ness, and then I strolled some more, and then I sat down again and watched some old men fishing from the banks.

The crossing of the Eastern Highlands had been completely unlike the leisurely ride through the lowlands of western Andalusia, or the gentle roll of the Loire Valley or the Downs and plains of Salisbury, where, as I slowly pedaled along, I always had time to think. But here on a park bench under the dark firs I finally was able to let my mind wander, and quite naturally, since I was in the heart of the Highlands, I began thinking of the old Scottish ballads I used to know—Thomas the Rhymer, who was kidnapped by a fairy queen on a milk white steed, never to be seen on earth again, and the king in Dunfermline town, drinking his blood-red wine, The Twa Corbies, and Lord Randall pleading with his mother to make his bed smooth. And then I thought of my own dear mother across the seas, and then it struck me that actually she was not that far away. She was visiting close at hand, more or less, just across the waters in Denmark. So I went back to the hotel and called her up.

Where have you been and what have you done, she wanted to know.

“I've been to Kintore, and have seen the graves of the family,” I said with balladic cadences. “And before that the Lakes. And before that London. And I've just crossed the Eastern Highlands and lived to tell the tale.”

A good Ma in the old style would have wept bitter tears and bade me come home, but she laughed and wished me a safe journey through the Western Isles, where I told her I was headed. She must have been having a good time herself; normally she would worry. I asked her about her own journey.

“Interesting,” she said, “but we've had to witness the most horrid Bog Men and grave goods and the like.”

She was traveling with two friends, one of whom was interested in antiquities.

I woke up tired the next morning and decided to rest up here in the city for the next onslaught of mountains, the higher, rainier Western Highlands. I had not, however, calculated that this was Sunday in northern Scotland.

The Scots, it has been said, have inherited a great deal from their landscape. The burr of their accent is derived from the whirr sound of the red grouse as it bursts from the moors. The great glens and mountains isolated the crofts and communities and encouraged the formation of clans. The deep valleys and wide moorlands called for a musical instrument, such as the bagpipe, whose sound could travel for miles. And the bitter, intemperate, and unpredictable weather—“God's country and the Devil's weather” as it is said—engendered a taste for a warming dram of whiskey. And all of this, mountains, valleys, granite rocks, deep, cold lochs, chill streams, and cold weathers, begat a cold, pure, unforgiving religion—the United Presbyterian Church. By decree of this church, when Sunday rolls around the world closes down.

I realized that I had made a good decision by staying on. Had I left and, as I had done over this entire trip, taken my chances with finding a place to stay rather than booking something in advance, I might have encountered closed doors. No one works on Sunday.

Since everything was closed in Inverness, I took a ride down the scenic road above Loch Ness, hoping to catch sight of the curvéd neck of the beguiling monster that is
known
to live there. Traffic was light and the banked forests above the steep shores smelled rain washed and sweet and I stopped often to peer down into the mystery of the gray, choppy waters, where I hoped I would see the infamous looped neck and small head. I saw nothing. But at one rest stop and overlook I met up with a young couple who were part of a Loch Ness monster watch team who said that once—they thought—in the gloaming, they saw a long V-shaped ripple in the still waters.

“Was some kind of a head. And it was not a duck. That much we can say.”

The grouse moors about Inverness stand at the head of one of the ancient folds that splits the landscape of this part of Scotland in a vast northeast-southwest chasm known as the Great Glen. The deep rifts in the earth in this place are an extension of the folds of Norway and were shaped during the vast upheavals that marked the second of the two mountain-building ages of Britain. The shifting tectonic plates in this area subjected the earth to great interior tensions and created a long chasm that eventually became the rift valley of the Great Glen. Running toward this glen from all across the hills of the Highlands are smaller, wilder glens, which pour in waters from the eternal rains and fill the rift with deep lochs that run down the length of the break—Glen Urquhart, Glen Roy, Loch Lochy, Loch Leven, and Glen Coe.

All this occurred over the five-billion-year life of the unquiet earth, and is due in part to the hydrologic cycle in which the heat of the sun draws up moisture from the seas and lakes of the world, thus forming clouds, which subsequently condense and fall to earth again as rain.

After gorging on what is known as a “full breakfast” the next morning—a pot of tea, scones, strawberries, oatmeal, scrambled eggs, toast, jams, bacon, and brown bread—I set out northward toward the town of Achnasheen on the west side of the Western Highlands. The meal made me logy and at Beauly I had to stop for coffee to fire myself up for the hard ride, but was forced to settle for more tea. As I rode westward from the Beauly Firth the land began to rise and soon I was falling into the rhythm of pumping or pushing the bicycle up long, sloping hills, resting at the top, and then sailing back down, passing all the while the high shores of lochs, with beech forests and firs and larch, and, farther north, the treeless barrens and windy stretches of moors. Once again, out here on the small roads, under the vast geologic upheavals of earth and the wild stretches of moors, I was alone.

At one point, pedaling along a valley floor, staring up at the immensity of the hills ahead of me, it struck me that my bicycle was too small for this vast country. I had counted on high hills. I had not counted on wilderness.

All across the Western Highlands I encountered mists and fogs, hard showers and drizzle, and then, like a calming sleep, a burst of clear clean rain-washed light. It took me days to cross, partly because whenever I found a sheltered place and a period of bright sun, I would pull over, settle myself on some warming rock, and bask out all the cold and dank, stripping off my sweaters and anorak as the sun blasted down. I watched the sky continuously and learned the meaning of different types of clouds and wind direction in this quarter of the world. I got so I could predict the onset of a blue break, and three or four times I actually deserted my bicycle altogether to hike down shaded mountains, through narrow valleys, and up the other side, so that I could get to a sunny spot to bask for a while.

It was here, during these short excursions away from my excursion, that I came to better appreciate the landscape I was moving through.

Once in a flat valley, a herd of red deer scattered like phantoms across the moors. At stream banks where I stopped to rest I saw wagtails and a ring ouzel, and I surprised leks of red grouse out on the moors. I saw a blackcock, or perhaps the capercaillie, and once I thought I saw a dotterel, a rare nesting bird in these parts, standing on a rock at the edge of a heather-covered hill. Periodically, as I lay on some flat rock in the sun, I would hear an odd cackling and cuckooing, the call or song, I believe, of the blackcock. Back on the road, flights of corbies and hoodies, as the ravens and hooded crows are called here, often sailed down the slopes with me, and once or twice I think I saw golden eagles over the peaks.

All of these birds and mammals are well adapted to the unique harsh habitat of the heather-dominated moorlands. The red grouse feeds on the green shoots that grow on the underside of the heather, even in winter. Their eggs can endure a frost, and in deep snows the grouse treads down the snows under the heather, packing it so that the bird rises with the deepening snows. Red deer browse on the heather in summer, and in winter help maintain the treeless stretches by nipping off the stems of young trees that have made a start in this hard land. Heather is all brown and gray and dull most of the year, but in early summer it goes into bloom and transforms the Highlands into a rich carpet of reddish purple, the source of much song and verse of the balladeers: “The heather was ablooming, the meadows were mawn, our lads gaed a-hunting ae day at the dawn,” as Robbie Burns would have it.

Scottish verse and song seem melded with nature and landscape. Beeches and birches and thistles and harebells and red deer and grouse, ravens, and the blooming of the heather figure as background to all the storm and strife and dying knights and fairy queens that weave in and out of Scottish stories and songs. For all its wildness and emptiness this is actually a very human, if not humane, territory. All the Highlands, with the famous grouse moors and heather, are in fact the product of human activity. This land was once covered with forests of birch and pine and its decline to a treeless state may have begun as early as two or three thousand years ago as Neolithic farming peoples moved northward, clearing trees for crops and sheep. Even now, the forest would return slowly if the moors were not grazed or burned periodically to keep the trees out.