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94 12 R The High Highlands After the experience on the ferry getting to the Outer Hebrides, I was prepared to rock and roll back across the Minch. But the crossing was uneventful under sunny skies and mild breezes coming up from starboard. It was a lovely scene when I arrived back on the northwest Scottish mainland at the town of Ullapool. Several candy-colored homes on a small peninsula jutting into the water with snow-capped mountains in the backdrop made an eye-catching scene as the ferry pulled in. Ullapool has about four thousand residents; it has been a fishing village since its founding in 1788. It’s got some tidy, attractive residential streets, a community center where the Ullapool Junior Pipe and Drum Corps was rehearsing, some delicious fish-and-chips restaurants, not just one but two well-stocked bookstores, and a very comfortable bed and breakfast with a third-floor view of the picture-book-pretty harbor. There was also a handy little book available, A Guide to Ullapool, put together by a group of townsfolk ; it was a very smart little publication and showcased community pride. Before drifting off to sleep, I read in a local newspaper about a man in Fort William arrested for “interfering with himself” in front of a neighbor woman. Odd expression. I got the drift, though. The sun was out again the next morning, and it was a cold, clear, crisp day, just made for a little walking. A word about the sun in Scotland. (Yes, Virginia, there is a sun in Scotland.) The light in the Highlands is very bright and almost piercing, rather like the light that skiers find at high elevations . It can hurt the eyes without dark glasses to tame it. That day, the skies were as blue as anywhere I had seen, and the few clouds stood out in sharp, puffy relief. In the afternoon the sun’s angle gave the landscape a The High Highlands 95 dramatic look; the loch’s reflections intense, the colors richly defined. The harbor waters here changed colors, too, from deep blue to light greenish to dark green depending on the play of the sun across the surface. Today marked the beginning of “British Summer Time”—the equivalent of Daylight Saving Time in the States—so I had an extra hour of daylight, much appreciated as I entered these northerly climes. And now that I thought about it, this was the fourth day with little or no rain; spring in Scotland had gotten off to a wonderful start, and Ullapool had been a delightful place to celebrate it. Before heading north I made a forty-five-mile detour south to one of Scotland’s unusual and unlikely attractions: Inverewe Gardens. Along the way I passed Loch Ewe with its drop-dead gorgeous harbor, so well protected that it was used as a staging point for Russian-bound shipping convoys in World War II. There were gun emplacements still dotting the shore. The harbor currently serves as a refueling port for NATO ships, and there were two warships at anchor when I was there. A few miles farther south were the gardens, a tribute to one man’s remarkable vision, now operated by the National Trust for Scotland. I’m not really a garden person, but my host in Ullapool urged me not to miss these since I was so close, and of course he was right. This twelve-thousand-acre nondescript plot of land was inherited in 1862 by a fellow named Osgood Mackenzie who decided to create a garden because of the area’s surprisingly temperate climate (the result, so the guidebook says, of the Gulf Stream drawing a warm sea current from Mexico to these shores). Mackenzie collected plants from all over the world— China, Tasmania, California, Italy—and planted and nurtured them. By the time he died in 1922 his garden sprawled in most unlikely beauty all over the rocky peninsula. Even in March, when I arrived, dozens of flowers were blooming, and hundreds of visitors were walking about (it’s more like thousands in the summer). The visitor center, alas, was closed, meaning that there was no place for anyone to go to the bathroom. That circumstance no doubt accounted for why people kept suddenly disappearing off the paths into the woods, where perhaps they were providing fertilizer for another generation of blossoms. On television back home in the evening, the BBC offered...

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