Over The Sea to Skye: Elusive Solitude

So this year's choice of holiday destination was Scotland, and, more specifically, the Isle of Skye. There were numerous reasons for this choice and some of them were practical. With the ongoing shenanigans in the Middle East, where, rather bizarrely, belligerent powers seem to declare ceasefires and carry on shooting and bombing people regardless, oil prices are up and down like the Assyrian Empire (to borrow an old Monty Python line) making holidays abroad less than economically appealing. Even without the additional cost of aviation fuel there was always the possibility that an escalating series of attacks might make whole routes unsafe and leave us stuck in foreign climes for an indefinite period. Better perhaps to play safe on this occasion and holiday closer to home, as large numbers of my fellow Brits appear to be doing.

That was the stick, as it were, but there is a carrot too. I have always loved Scotland not only as a place but as an idea. The half-wild Northern neighbour of a staid, arrogant former superpower, irreverant, defiant, often overshadowed and bullied but never quite dominated by its much larger neighbour no matter how discouraging the odds. And the romantic, ill-fitting maverick in me has always admired the Scottish knack for battling gamely on the losing side of history. For this reason I have always been fascinated by the Jacobite rebellions.

This fascination started way back in the late 1970s when my older brother, aware of my obsession with military history, bought me as a present a slender little volume called 'Inglorious Rebellion' by Christopher Sinclair-Stephenson. The book, which still sits on my shelves now some fifty years later, covers three Jacobite risings that are - or, at least, were - not very comprehensively treated elsewhere, those of 1708, 1715 and 1719. I always wondered why men who had been bludgeoned into submission repeatedly by government troops would continue to turn out to support a would-be king who, when each successive rising failed, would scarper off back to France to live a life of relative luxury at the expense of the French King while his Highland supporters were hunted down and executed by the vengeful government in Edinburgh and London. I also wondered how it would ever be possible for the claimants to prevail. Seating a king on the throne of Edinburgh, let alone London, in the face of government opposition would be hard enough; keeping him there after his Highland supporters had dispersed to their glens to bring the crop in or take their beasts to their winter pastures would surely be impossible. It seemed a perverse attraction to a hopeless cause for its own sake, and this is something I was always able to appreciate (perhaps now more than ever now that I steadfastly bear the standard of retrospection in the face of a determinedly forward-looking world).

The book that started it all.

But anyway, with this in mind, looking at the route to the Sky Bridge on the map made my pulse quicken. Our gateway to the highlands would be through the pass at Glencoe. Having read John Prebble's evocative account of the tragic massacroe of the MacDonald clan by government soldiers in 1692, I was looking forward to seeing the vast bleak glen that had been home to the clan and their flocks and through which the survivors scattered to wander in the days following the killing. Thence up the south-western corner of the Great Glen to Fort William, the highland base founded and named after the new Protestant king and built to impose his authority on this part of the highlands, then over Spean Bridge and across to Glen Shiel, site of the climactic battle of the 1719 rising, and on to the Kyle of Lochalsh via the lonely castle at Eilean Donan, picturesquely placed on a little island where three sea lochs (Loch Duich, Loch Long and Loch Alsh) come together. It was a journey to capture the imagination, and those highland names, when one could attempt to pronounce them at all, trip so sweetly off the tongue that you could be reading them out of an ode by Taliesin or one of the old bards of the north.

When I was reading Sinclair-Stephenson's work I was struck, dreamer that I was, by the remoteness of some of the places he describes. Glen Shiel sounded like a terribly remote place. The book recounted the fate of the Spanish regulars who fought on the Jacobite side (happy to relate they survived the battle and a brief period of incarceration before being returned home) and I always wondered how those poor Spaniards felt on the day of the battle, ordered forth from their home in the sun to fight and perhaps die in a cold damp misty valley on the northern edge of the world. Glen Shiel and the castle at Eilean Donan felt so far away that it seemed unlikely I would ever see them save in a dream.

Fast forward fifty years and the reality is of course somewhat different. I should have known this of course. We are several decades now into the age of mass tourism and if even Antarctica is on the tourist trail you can bet your life that the Scottish Highlands are. Still, there was I think a part of me that thought there might still be some whiff of undiscovered enchantment about these places mentioned in books I read as a child in our scruffy little terraced house in Liverpool.

The illusion was dispelled at Glencoe. It is without doubt an awe-inspiring place, the vast sweep of the glen and the high brooding crags to the side if anything more breathtaking than anything I had been able to imagine. I could well understand the words that Charles Dickens used when he described his journey through the pass:

“The pass is an awful place. It is shut in on each side by enormous rocks from which great torrents come rushing down in all directions. In amongst these rocks on one side of the pass (the left as we came) there are scores of glens, high up, which form such haunts as you might imagine yourself wandering in, in the very height and madness of a fever. They will live in my dreams for years – I was going to say as long as I live, and I seriously think so. The very recollection of them makes me shudder.”

Like Dickens I found myself imagining being somehow stranded alone in those high places with only the rushing water for company, and wondering how I might ever be able to find my way back down to human society.

But what breaks the spell now, as it does so often, is the presence of the main road running right through the glen. The glen still looms overhead dwarfing the cars and the buildings and the people, but that's not really the point. It feels like it has been reduced to mere human spectacle. The tourists pull into the little viewpoint carparks at the side of the road, if they can find a space, jump out of the car long enough to take a few selfies where they are the star and the huge glen just the background, and are then back inside to continue the journey to Fort William or Tyndrum depending on which way they are heading. The site, given its nature and its history, demands more than most of us can be bothered to give it. Still worse, as on any road, you find that despite the gravity of the site, there will at some point appear an impatient driver in your rear view mirror intent on completing their journey as quickly as possible and wanting nothing more than to bully you into going faster or pulling to one side so they can get past. The glen, with all that it means and contains, is not enough to make them change their daily habits for even a moment, and I find this deeply saddening. The MacDonalds I feel would not have been able to understand such an attitude to the harsh but lovely fastness that was their home.

And so on. Glenshiel, perhaps refreshingly, was no more than a layby at the side of the road with an information board, so it was at least possible to stand and imagine what it must have been like for those soldiers exchanging musket volleys across the misty hillsides to both sides - as long as you were careful to avoid speeding traffic on the main road. Eilean Donan provided the biggest disconnect. My castle at the end of the world was just off the main road and when we pulled in we found that the car park was heaving with cars and coaches. What were we to do? We visited the castle for a reasonable price, had a bit of a walk then had a very decent beef stew and ice cream in the cafe and browsed tourist tat in the gift shop.

Other writers better than me have bemoaned the seemingly unstoppable spread of mass tourism, the 'End of Elsewhere' to quote the title from a 2003 travel book by Taras Grescoe, and the transformation of history, culture and geography to posts on social media. This isn't a rant about that, although the experience of Castle Donan in particular seems in some way a betrayal of those boyhood visions I had while reading the book. I enjoyed the holiday very much and I am very glad to have finally got to see all those things, touristy or not.

Skye itself is stunningly beautiful if predictably busy, at least in the summer months, and I find that my imagination is just not as keen as I would wish. When I stand outside a pub in Portree and read that inside is where Flora MacDonald is supposed to have met Bonnie Prince Charlie before she assisted his daring escape, I am unable to envisage the place as it must have appeared then - a huddle of mostly humble buildings on a stretch of green overlooking the sea, with maybe a rough track running through it, long before there was a road worthy of the name. But I find the act of attempting to make the imaginative leap in itself a comfort. Standing there and feeling the roar of the traffic a few feet away fall away to be replaced by a relative quiet, broken only by the voices of humans at work and rest, perhaps the hammering of workmen at the small harbour behind me, and the rush of the waves on the shingle. I begin to destress, if only slightly.

For the experience of the holiday did make me think, not for the first time, about the increasing rarity of solitude and of silence. Neither of those things seem to be of any great value in the contemporary world, and yet they are both things I find myself valuing more and more as I get older.

For many years now, if anyone asked me where I would live if I could live anywhere I wanted, my answer would be the same. To live somewhere right by the sea in the far north, far enough from my nearest neighbours that no house would be visible from my window, far enough from any road that I would no longer be able to hear that ubiquitous background roar. To watch the breakers endlessly roll in, quiet and blue and cheery perhaps on calm summer days but, just as good, grey and moody and threatening when storms were brewing out at sea. It's an environment I only know from books I read or stories I heard as a child, from Tove Jansson's Moominpappa At Sea perhaps or from my Dad's tales of his years at sea. But I never doubted that there were places so isolated that one could almost live outside of the world of men.

I think one result of the Skye holiday, much as I enjoyed it, was the final realisation that there is no longer any such place and that, truly, no man is an island, for all kinds of practical reasons. And in fact I am no different from most people in that, presented with a silent refuge far away from the the stress and noise of contemporary society, I am likely to complain if the internet speed is too slow or there are potholes in the track leading to my little bothy. I am condemned to carry on bearing my silent refuge in my head, the serener skies of the blog's title.