Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster: Traveling through Scotland with Boswell and Johnson

Introduction

1 R Introduction The plane eased through the silver sky toward the sun-swept runway at Edinburgh International Airport. “Looks like we caught a good trade-off this morning,” said the flight attendant as she herded the last group of empty peanut wrappers into her portable depository. “We’re three hours late, but it’s usually pouring rain when we get here. Not bad, huh?” No, not at all. A first-time visitor to Scotland might assume the appearance of the sun to be perfectly ordinary, but then you remember the joke—at least it’s supposed to be a joke—that the Scots offer this greeting to visitors: “Hello; sorry about the weather.” And then there are the words of Edmund Burt, as true today as when they were written in 1720: “In these northern parts, the year is composed of nine months winter and three months bad weather.” Or Edward Topham, who wrote in 1774 that “the winds reign in all their violence , and seem indeed to claim the country as their own.” Of course, anyone who reads a travel guide should know to expect the worst, for this is a country that embraces magnificent climatological legends. All true and all understated. They begin with rain followed by showers, followed by a heavy rain, drenching rain, a bit of rain, light showers, a soft rain, lightening showers, driving rain, a forcing rain, easing showers, a touch of dampness, pouring rain, horizontal rain, sleety rain, rainy sleet. And did I mention the wind? Howling, screeching, relentless, hurricanelike, a hard blow, a light blow, pushing breezes, gusts, gentle gusts, hard gusts, moderate gusts, intense gusts, and, one of my favorites, blowing gusts. Winter gales start in September and can last until the end of April, when they become only intermittent , says one American who has lived for a dozen years in the Outer Hebrides. Wester Ross is the wettest place in all of the United Kingdom and gets more than two hundred inches of rain each year. And everywhere in the Highlands and Islands gets not only rain but that seemingly never-ending wind as well. 2 Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster Everyone writes about it, everyone talks about it, visitor and native alike. “Motor vehicles are regularly pushed off the roads or flipped over by the wind; debris flies through the air as if in some hurricane-hit shanty town,” wrote one observer seventy years ago. And nearly 250 years ago, another Scottish visitor wrote this amazing passage: “Not many days ago an Officer , whom I have the honour of being acquainted with, a man of six feet high, and, one would imagine, by no means calculated to become the sport of winds, was, however, in following another gentleman out of [Edinburgh] Castle, lifted up by their violence from the ground, carried over his companion ’s head, and thrown at some distance on the stones.” Scots find their doors blown open, their homes blown down. One gentleman walking through Edinburgh on one windy eighteenth-century afternoon found a lady’s petticoats blown over her head; as he attempted to “conceal her charms from public view,” another gentleman not so oblivious concentrated so hard on the view that he failed to hold on to his hat and wig, which gustily blew him bald. And no one is spared. In Queen Victoria’s Highland Journals in 1860, she observed it was “a misty, rainy morning” followed by, “It became cold and windy with occasional rain,” and later by “a thoroughly wet day.” There was a photo in the newspaper the other day of Sean Connery carrying an umbrella. “Braveheart” probably had one, too. In Scotland pleasant weather can be as rare as a single malt served on ice. But in fact the sun was shining, quite gloriously, and when I stepped out of the terminal after reclaiming my baggage and passed by a smiling, courteous customs officer, it was time to put on dark glasses and take off the hefty-weight sweater I prudently wore in expectation of the worst Scotland could throw at me. The lovely day was both harbinger and deceiver for what was ahead, for I had no idea I would be traveling through the wildest, most isolated parts of the Highlands and Islands in the spring months in what would turn out to be Scotland’s warmest, sunniest months in nearly a century. But that is getting ahead of myself. I had...