|
|
|
Mallaig, Scotland
Sunday, August 5 2007
setting: Cuildorag House, Onich, Scotland, UK
Breakfast at Cuildorag house could contain as much eggy slime as one wanted (a byproduct of the happy freerange chickens merrily scratching out back), but the sausage was entirely vegetarian. We ate with another American couple, the first we'd encountered on this trip. He was some sort of tech guy for a company that uses Google maps to display weather information. He and his wife had produced two small white children. Traveling in with children pretty much necessitates the rental of car and greatly curtails destination options. I suspect they were a little jealous of our hitchhiking, though they probably also thought we were completely nuts.
The goal for today was to make a day trip to one of the smaller western islands, and this required that we hitchhike to the ferry ports along the west coast, some thirty or forty miles to the northwest. We caught a ride from our hitchhiking spot with a single French woman who had both a French accent and a bit of speech impediment (though she was still much more understandable than some of the Scotts we'd spoken with). She said she'd been living in Scotland for fifteen years and built nature trails for a living, using a mostly Polish labor force. She drove us all the way to the place north of Fort William where the A830 breaks free from the A82 and heads west (56.83766 N, 5.0801 W).
For some reason we had trouble getting a ride at this spot, so, after several contentious attempts at consensus for what to do, Gretchen and I changed location slightly. And after awhile we got a ride from a fast driving Scotsman who works in Glenfinnan for the National Trust. As usual for well-educated Scotsmen, his accent flavored his speech more than it obscured it. The soundtrack for this leg of the journey was a Scottish folk band called Blazin Fiddles.
Glenfinnan is the site of a tower built to honor those who rose up in the Jacobite Rebellion, a series of conflicts culminating in the attempt by Bonnie Prince Charlie, an exiled Catholic member of the Stuart dynasty (with the assistance of sympathetic Scotsmen) to reclaim the English throne from Protestant Hannoverians then enthroned as British monarchs. The rebellion didn't go well and the bonnie prince lived out the end of his days as an alcoholic wife-beating exile in Rome. Bonnie Prince Charlie remains a hero in Scotland, although his bungled invasion resulted in the suppression and dissolution of Highland Scottish culture.
Another notable piece of architecture near Glenfinnan is an arched stone viaduct used as a setting in at least one Harry Potter movie.
We briefly explored a church before resuming our hitchhiking from the edge of a parking lot (56.8737 N, 5.4561 W). A number of people milling around that lot were watching us with interest, wondering if we'd ever get a ride. We got one in less than five minutes. It was in an old Volvo that stank of cigarettes (though its driver never smoked). Somewhere amongst the clutter was a pack of cigarettes bearing a huge message taking up a third of one side, "SMOKING KILLS." Worst of all, though, was the music, a sort of well-scrubbed-but-adult-diapered Alanis Morrisette if you can imagine that. We'd gradually find this to be an popular genre of adult pop music in Britain. The driver claimed to be mostly apolitical, though he was curious what we thought of our president. He dropped us off in Arisaig and vanished before we had a chance to find out that there were no more ferries leaving today. So we found ourselves immediately hitchhiking again (56.911 N, 5.8396 W).
It was during this wait for a ride that I was bitten by my first Highland Midge. We'd been warned about them, but up until now it had been either too rainy or windy for them to come out. Now, though, here on the coast the winds had died down, the sun was peaking out, and the midges were hungry. They were small, between one and two millimeters long, and with grey bodies decorated with faint striations. Their bites weren't as bad as those of mosquitos; instead of leaving welts or bumps they left itchy circles on the skin about five millimeters across.
Eventually we caught a ride up to Mallaig with a German couple driving a newish car.
In Mallaig, we immediately bought two way ferry tickets to the Isle of Skye, as that was the only island we had a hope of getting to and back from this afternoon. As a place to kill time while waiting for a ferry, Mallaig proved to be a big disappointment. Though something of a tourist trap, there was much less going on than we'd seen even in Fort William, hardly the gold standard for a charmingly authentic Highland village. The restaurants were all either pubs or fish & chips places. After some waiting and a little crafty maneuvering, though, we managed to get a seat at the Tea Garden, which was a little more like the sort of restaurant Gretchen prefers. As we sat there and considered the unhelpful scheduling of the ferries, we decided it was best not to try to go to the Isle of Skye today. All we'd be able to do there would be to explore the south end of the island, where there was little of interest. We decided to try coming back this way tomorrow, after our two-night commitment at Cuildorag House had concluded. Happily, we were able to get a refund on our return ferry tickets.
Our goal now was to visit Castle Tioram south along the coast and return before dark. First, though, we'd have to retrace our rides back beyond Arisaig. We didn't stand long at the south end of Mallaig (57.005 N, 5.8311 W) before a young pair of Scottish musicians stopped to pick us up. Gretchen seemed to like them until the guy said he thought Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was "brave." Still, they told us to look them up if we were ever in Stirling, something we wouldn't remember precisely when it would prove most useful.
They dropped us off at the intersection of the A830 and the A861 (N 56.878319, W 5.666456), the latter of which we would try to hitchhike down to the supposed castle. But it after some minutes it was clear that we were going to have trouble getting a ride. There was almost no traffic on the A861, and what little there was was coming up from the south, not going down to it. To top off our misery, a light rain began to fall. But it fell just lightly enough to permit the midges to continue their onslaught. I don't know how long we were there before we gave up and redirected our trajectory back eastward to Fort William. Luckily, it was only minutes later that we caught a ride with a Scottish photographer who claimed he was one of only five successful professional art photographers in the entire Highlands.
In Fort William, we went to the Grog & Gruel, which (from its name and appearance) looked to be a conventional British pub. But it had a number of Mexican food options on its menu and we were intrigued. The enchilada I ordered proved surprisingly good!
Our final ride of the day was in car with three young women from Spain who spoke almost no English. Well, one of the women in the front spoke English, but when Gretchen began speaking in Spanish, they were more than happy to converse that way. Interestingly, though I contributed little to it, I found myself following this conversation better than I had some of our conversations with English-speaking Scotsmen.
A cruciform pattern of midge bites on my hand.
See more photographs from the Scotland trip.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?070805 feedback
previous | next |
