Category Archives: Life reflections

Day 6: Fish and Ferry Fouls

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The Burns museum the day before set us up well for the shenanigans of Day 6. One of The Bard’s most famous lines says “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men gang aft agley.”

Before leaving Inverary I dashed to the SPAR shop for some Fishermen’s Friends cough drops, famous the world over. And who did I see coming in as I was going out but a familiar face from the Inverary Pipe Band video?! One of the drummers gave me a smile and nod. But there wasn’t time to converse. The tour was waiting for our day out in Glencoe and the long drive up to Oban so we could take the luxurious Isle of Mull ferry over to, well, the Isle of Mull, and spend the night in the harbor town of Tobermoray.

Glencoe is a world-famous story, but there’s a lot of rubbish added over the generations about Scots and English, Catholics and Protestants, and what a hero/cad Charlie (as in Bonnie Prince) was. It’s complicated; even in the 1600s being late for a meeting and not having your paperwork filled out could result in tragedy—in this case, 38 deaths.

Short version: all the Highland clans were required to sign an oath of allegiance to William of Orange (as in the guy from William and Mary College) by Jan 1, 1692. The MacDonald chief arrived late to the wrong place. He had to go from Fort William to Inverary (where we had spent the night last night) and got there Jan. 6, begging to sign the oath. Told everything was okay once he’d signed, he went back to his clan. A few weeks later, 120 soldiers showed up to be garrisoned in his town. Well okay, Highland hospitality is legendary and the soldiers weren’t causing any harm. The MacDonald chief took some people from the Campbell clan into his house. What he didn’t know was that on Feb. 12, a letter arrived telling the commanding officer to “extirpate” everyone under 70 years of age.

Here’s another thing about Scottish hospitality: it is sacrosanct. Nobody can survive outside on a mountain in the winter in Scotland; people were obligated to take each other in, and when you shared a fire and a meal with people, you were obligated to be at peace with them. Otherwise the world would fall apart.

Which it did, because at 5 a.m. the commanding officer killed the MacDonald clan chief and several of his sons; the wife and youngest son escaped as the garrisoned soldiers set the village on fire.

Many people escaped, although it’s not known how many died running through the snow up a mountain slope to get to Appin. Another group fled into a place called the Lost Valley and hid there.  

The ones that did escape were probably warned by the soldiers billeted in their houses. One story goes that a child heard a soldier telling the family dog quite loudly that he shouldn’t sleep in the house that night, it might be bad for him if it caught fire. Another story says a piper from the visiting regiment went out on a hillside and played a funeral dirge. Who knows, but the fact that 38 people were killed in a village of more than 200 suggests that even official orders couldn’t change the Highland code of ethics for some of those boys.

The aftermath of Glencoe’s Massacre was the destruction of the clan system, which had been the strategic plan all along. If you couldn’t trust Highland hospitality to hold, you may as well barbeque a human and eat flesh. Life as they knew it was over. So the Highland Chiefs did what American parents did during the Civil War: divided up their sons to ensure family survival. Oldest sons went to London to get educations and understanding of the new world order under William. The others stayed on the land, until their brothers’ sons came home Englishmen in thought and deed and told everybody to clear out and make way for sheep farms. The line from the Massacre to the Highland Clearances is a straight one.

The interpretation center tells the tragic story in more detail, but also highlights the Glen as a national historic preserve with unique layers dating back to the ice age. https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/glencoe/highlights/visitor-centre

Everyone was deep in thought as we drove on through scenic mountains to Oban, where we arrived early enough to catch the 3 pm ferry. Alas, the car before us got the last berth so we had to wait until the 5:30 sailing. No matter; that meant we could ransack the delectable chocolatier, plus the only charity shop Oban had. Cassidy and I spent a happy hour in there and returned to a van groaning with chocolate from the rest of the group’s purchases.

Which turned out to be fortuitous. The ferry broke down. Goodbye, Isle of Mull with its luxury bar and restaurant. Hello, small old rusting thing with a coffee vending machine grabbed from somewhere that transported fisher folk and sent to us for 6:30. By the time we got to Tobermoray, we were all a little tired.

So finding the hotel had muffed the room arrangements made me downright cranky. The 20-something behind the counter put on a facial expression that said louder than any words, “I don’t get paid enough to deal with American Karens” and the battle was on. Finally I said, as patiently as I could, “Madam, the bus driver you are trying to put in a double bed with this young lad has known him four days. That’s a little soon for them to be sleeping together, don’t you think?” And the tour members burst into laughter. So did the child behind the counter—and then she fixed the room arrangements.

We meandered Tobermoray for an hour since they couldn’t give us dinner until 8. Sigh… another hazard of the late ferry. But everyone was in good spirits when we sat down to—

–the worst meal in the history of Scottish cuisine. Five of us had ordered the hake. We received bowls of baked beans with a potato halved atop the beans and a whitefish filet on the potato. It was, in a word, vile. So vile, even Gareth wouldn’t finish everyone’s portions. We began to laugh and come up with names for this inventive dish. Sculpt it into shapes. Anything but eat it.

Fortunately, there was sticky toffee pudding for dessert. And everyone still had loads of chocolate from the sweet shop. And the hotel had a lovely bar.

People waddled off to bed a little later that night. Did I mention the hotel had a lovely bar?

And darkness fell about 2 in the morning, because we were farther north now, and we slept.

Day 5: It’s not such a long way to Inveraray….

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Stranraer is a gritty, seedy, fun little port town with three charity shops :] Cassidy and I had a good time ransacking them after escorting Maria to a pharmacy so she could pick up a few missing supplies, and then a suitcase shop so she’d have a place to put them.

We didn’t so much blast out of Stranraer as meander at a leisurely pace. Everyone was still recovering from the early Irish start and the late ceilidh night. Harry was feeling much better but marriage is a special kind of sharing; Andrea was now not feeling 100%.

That didn’t stop her from loving the day, though. Alan-the-singing-bus-driver took us to Alloway to see the Burns Museum, and suggested making an unscheduled additional stop at KelvinHall, a big free museum of history and art in Glasgow. (And yes we did a verse of The Bleacher Lass of KelvinHaugh. We couldn’t help it.)

Jack and I told what is probably Burns’ most famous story, Tam O’Shanter, on the van in preparation for visiting the museum. You can walk between the museum exhibits and Burns’ family cottage through a sculpture garden lined with famous statues from his poems. You mostly have to guess which pertains to what poem, although Tam O’Shanter is set out in eight delightful weather vanes.

For those unfamiliar, you can read this comedic masterpiece of a story poem in full here, but the short version is a guy stays too long at the pub and on the way home interrupts a group of witches dancing in a graveyard. The devil is, of course, playing the bagpipes for the dance. Tam is so impressed with one of the dancers, a young redhead wearing only a short dress (and there’s a very funny bit in the poem about what her grandmother who so lovingly sewed the garment would think if she saw her granddaughter now) that he can’t contain himself and shouts out “Weel Done Cutty Sark!” (translation: Hey, you in the short dress, great dance moves)

And in an instant all was dark…..

Everyone with a lick of common sense knows witches and ghosts can’t cross running water, so Tam leaps onto his horse and they run for the bridge. So does redhead Cutty, and she manages to grab the horse’s tail and pull it off just as Tam and steed reach the bridge’s center stone and safety.

My two favorite lines from the poem are Tam’s wife Kate “waiting at home, nursing her wrath to keep it warm” and his description of some items on the witches’ party table, including “Three priests‘ hearts, rotten, black as muck, Lay stinking, vile in every neuk.”

The bridge about which the poem is written is in the town. Gareth and I were the only ones who walked over through the sculpture garden, taking the requisite silly photos as we went. Since neither of us were desperate to tour the rather crowded cottage, he bought us a pot of tea and we relaxed until the others were ready, chatting amiably about nothing in particular and his life as a farmer-not-all-that-into-farming.

Off to Kelvin Hall, and a very brief hello from one of my favorite people, Alan’s wife Mary. She had her wee granddaughter asleep on her shoulder, so just a swift visit, and then Andrea and I went in search of fine china in the museum. That was Andrea’s first introduction to the story of the Glencoe Massacre. We would be visiting the actual site tomorrow.

The next part of the trip was kind of a Jack indulgence. We drove along an amazing road called the Rest and Be Thankful. The words REST & BE THANKFUL were inscribed on a stone by soldiers who built the original military road in 1753. (This has been updated recently, since the original one finally fell apart.) It’s called the Rest and Be Thankful because after the climb out of nearby Glen Croe (a glen is a valley, and this is Croe not Coe) travellers would stop to rest at the top, thankful for having reached the highest point. The views from that high point are some of the best we’ve ever seen in Scotland—and that’s saying something, given how beautiful Scotland’s abundant mountains are.

The destination of this road for us was Inveraray, a tiny town with a big story. Jack and I both love the World Pipe Band Championships, and our favorite was in 2017, when little Inveraray won against massive multi-champion powerhouses like the Simon Frazier and the Field Marshal Montgomery bands, etc. It’s sort of like if Coeburn had beat Charlottesville for Best Music Festival, for you Virginians reading this. Or if the Ozarks bested NYC for literary capital.

Replete with victory, the band sought a parade permit for a triumphal town entry—and were turned down by the local council. So they paraded anyway, right through the main street, with the police politely looking the other way and parking their cars across traffic. The band marched to the town hall, surrounded it, and played for another hour.

The Inveraray hotel had neither Victorian nor modern elevators, and I knew it was a sign that Andrea wasn’t feeling well when she let me help lug their luggage up two flights of stairs. A restorative dinner helped, as there was sticky toffee pudding on the menu again. Also, I raided the SPAR shop next door for a round of Beecham’s Pills (good for whatever ails you) and began passing them out to the team.

One more fun fact about the Inveraray Inn: it had great artwork on the walls. Including this mysterious portrait that I swear is my friend Lynn Davis. Look for yourself. I texted her and she declined to explain how it came to be hanging there but implied the story was worth a couple of beers when next we were together.

Cassidy was the only one with energy to watch the sunset (which, remember is about 1 am) over the harbor. The rest of us let the seaside air lull us to sleep. And that was the fifth day.