Scotland: The Hebridean Hop

The Weekend Australian

8 July 2017

Following Dr Johnson in ‘the wild pure air’ of the Western Isles.

“I had desired to visit the Hebrides, or Western islands of Scotland, so long, that I can scarcely remember how the wish was originally excited.” With these words the great Samuel Johnson — essayist, wit, lexicographer and literary celebrity — began the tale of his journey to fulfil that long-held desire of half-forgotten origins. The year was 1773.

Johnson’s younger companion was his biographer James Boswell, a highborn and well-travelled Scot who had met Voltaire in France and written a book about Corsica. The 63-year-old Johnson, in contrast, rarely strayed from his urban den. The “bear’’ of Fleet Street famously said, and doubtless sincerely believed, that “a man who is tired of London is tired of life”. Overweight, and dyspeptic at the best of times, he was a moody traveller.

Both published parallel, yet revealingly different, accounts of their ramble around the isles. When I read these short sketches, about a decade ago, they lit up a fierce desire to visit the Hebrides. I contained the compulsion for a time but once unleashed it could not be restrained; on three visits in as many years — most recently last month — I’ve journeyed to this windswept skein of islands in the north Atlantic to breathe the pure wild air.

Boswell and Johnson set out on August 18 from Edinburgh, travelling north to Inverness before cutting across the highlands along the shores of Loch Ness. “In the morning, September second,” writes Johnson, “we found ourselves on the edge of the sea.” They took a ferry to Skye; only one of the boatmen had any English.

I find myself on the edge of the same sea, looking towards the Isle of Skye, as they had done; but it has taken me not two weeks but half a day in black weather that lightens as I approach the Western Isles. There is even a cheering splash of sunlight on the waterway between Skye and its neighbouring isle, Raasay, to welcome me.

The approach to Skye, most poetic of the Western Isles, could scarcely be more prosaic. A modern concrete bridge vaults across the narrow channel and the ribbon of road that has bought me from the capital simply unfurls a little farther. There’s no break between land and sea and scarcely time to register the transition from mainland Scotland to a world that, for hundreds of years, considered itself a realm apart; as, indeed, it was. The Western Isles were ruled by their own lords, who claimed descent from Norse raiders.

Fierce Viking blood flowed — still flows — through the islanders’ veins. Of this Dr Johnson and Boswell were made well aware when, on their very first night at Skye, a bagpipe player entertained them at dinner. An elderly gentlemen told them, writes Johnson, that “in some remote time the Macdonalds of Glengarry, having been injured, or offended, by the inhabitants of Culloden, and resolving to have justice or vengeance, came to Culloden on a Sunday, where finding their enemies at worship, they shut them up in the church, which they set on fire; and this, said he, is the tune that the piper played while they were burning.”

I neither see nor hear anything of the islanders’ legendary ferocity in a few days of driving on narrow roads twisting around Skye’s fantastically sculptural peaks and deeply indented sea lochs. The closest is a chat with a group of locals at a pub, rather unimaginatively called The Old Inn, on the shores of Loch Harport at the village of Carbost.

The attractively whitewashed Talisker whisky distillery stands barely 200 metres from The Old Inn. Prepping for a visit, I quiz local barflies about the national tipple. Could the pungent, somewhat medicinal flavour of the more hairy-chested island whiskies — peat smoke is used to dry the barley before distillation — be tamed by dissolving a sugar cube in the dram, I ask. Might the whisky then have less of an incinerated-house flavour? “Listen to this luv,” shouts one chap to the barmaid. “Bloke here is aiming to add sugar to his Talisker.” She cuts me a murderous look.

Unperturbed by my faux pas I submit, over the coming days, to Skye’s manifold charms. Some say it is the most beautiful of the Hebrides; certainly, it is the most majestic. When the weather is good it is very very good — one fine day is blue from dawn to dusk — and when it is bad it is horrid. It’s midsummer and in the course of one bizarre day the temperature refuses to budge from 13 degrees for 24 hours.

I’ve hired a cottage above Carbost nestled in a sheepfold, with a fine view across the loch. As the sun inclines towards the west it picks out the sawtooth Cuillin mountains in the east, the taller peaks of about 1000m lost in their cowls of cloud. As it sets, towards midnight, the sun melts into the loch’s opening to the sea. And yet it never really allows itself to be claimed by the night sky and a blue-grey half-light lingers defiantly until dawn.

The next morning is grey and squally. I see grim-faced walkers heading for the hills in wet weather gear, but my quest runs in a different direction: I devour a mountain of fresh local oysters, scallops, mussels and halibut with a lovely matching Languedoc white. There’s no effort involved. I simply take a table by a window at a restaurant in the main town of Portree. I watch the wild weather sweep in and, just as suddenly, depart in a huff. Where a midsummer antipodean sun would bleach the colours, in these northern climes the sun allies itself with nature to amp up the bright purple and gold of the wildflowers carpeting the lush green of pasture.

By the time I reach the Isle of Mull, the next stop on my tour, the rain has settled in and waterfalls spout from the green mountains like overflowing gutters. My fantasies of this trip had been sun-filled because that’s how I first experienced the region on a visit in early spring. But I should have been paying closer attention to Dr Johnson, who judged that the Western Isles were “incommoded by very frequent rain”.

In the course of a long drive to Iona, on Mull’s western fringe, the weather seems to change with every bend in the road. By the time I reach the ferry for the short ride out to tiny Iona where the Irish missionary Saint Columba made landfall in the late 6th century, raising the walls of a monastery and bringing Christianity to Scotland, the sky is clear, if a little milky, and it pours through the pointed arches of the 12th century Iona Abbey.

The road to the Iona ferry at Fionnphort winds through muscular mountain scenery before hemming the tawny kelp and seawood-strewn southern shores of Lochs Beg and Scridain. On the far side of the waterway loom tremendous sea cliffs that look to have been freshly chiselled from stone and painted moss green, but here the land just seems to give up. It’s runty and undistinguished, although the stone is a pretty shade of rose.

Iona is, at least geographically, much of the same. A low bluff protects the abbey from the gales that come crashing into these parts along the North Atlantic storm channel — the next landfall west is Newfoundland — but otherwise the islet is pretty exposed. Perhaps that’s how the Benedictine community founded by Saint Columba, seeking privations of the flesh mollified by the anaesthesia of alcohol, wanted it. You don’t have to be a believer — I’m not — to sense the numinous beauty of this outlying cluster of modest religious buildings in bare stone: the abbey, cloisters and nunnery, the standing crosses beside the “street of the dead”.

In this isolated community the ecclesiastical arts flourished for centuries, despite the predations of Viking raiders beginning in the late 8th century. The illuminated Book of Kells, a masterpiece of Western medieval art, was produced by the monks of Iona and taken with them back to a monastery in Kells, Ireland, after Viking raiders killed 68 monks in one fell swoop.

Boswell and Johnson arrived at Iona on a boat “with four stout rowers” late in their journey, on October 19. The older man was a pious believer; the younger an inconstant one. Writes Boswell: “When we had landed upon the sacred place, which, as long as I can remember, I had thought upon with veneration, Dr Johnson and I cordially embraced.”

Their journey, which had been scarred by occasional illness and ill-temper, was nearing its end; and the moment was a sweet one. It also gave Johnson an opportunity to lecture his young groupie on the essence of cultural tourism in the age that invented tourism: “Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings.” The sentiment might be a little elaborately expressed but it still rings true.

After a farewell to Mull in the pretty horseshoe- shaped port town of Tobermory — and another local seafood nosh up — I take the ferry to Islay a little further south. It’s here that I break with Boswell and Johnson, who four days later arrived back on the mainland for the journey home. I have one more island to see: or rather three as the chunky island ferry glides past two of them — Colonsay and bare mountainous Jura, where George Orwell famously wrote1984.

Islay out of peak tourist season is a tranquil place shorn of jaw-dropping natural wonders. Skye, in contrast, boasts a mini-Manhattan of towering peaks. Mull is crowned by Ben More at almost 1000 metres and ringed by a coastline of thrusting sea cliffs. But Islay doesn’t really need the drama of landscape: it produces a style of peaty, marine scented single malt whisky that it sells to the world as a unique expression of, well, itself.

The sexiest Islay distiller has to be Bruichladdich, which terms itself a “progressive” Hebridean brand committed to capturing a “sense of place, of terroir”. Its flagship is Octomore, reputedly “the world’s most heavily peated whisky”. On a visit to the distillery I put aside all sugar-cube-in-the-glass conjecture and brave its finest.

I survive my trial by peat smoke, in part because those astringent notes are held in check by depth of flavour and, dare I say it, sweetness.

I fare less well at Ardbeg distillery with a glass of a whisky named Kelpie which turns out, as its name suggests, to taste of kelp: why? Just down the road from Ardbeg is Lagavulin — the most palatable drop is its mellow 16-year-old single malt — and beyond that Laphroaig, producer of “the most richly flavoured Scotch whisky”.

At the end of my distillery tour I’m forced to admit that the Islay style of whisky, with a few exceptions, is an acquired taste I’m not overly keen to acquire. And yet a visit to these handsome distilleries, most of them founded in the early 19th century and strung out like the beads of a necklace along the tranquil Islay seashore, is as much about the island’s culture as its unique contribution to the world of high-end inebriation. If you follow Dr Johnson’s line of thinking, it’s about the scent of the past caught in the present and the contemplation of time.

That night I head to The Islay Hotel at Port Ellen, and after another dish of mussels (these from the Shetland Islands further north) and local fish, I settle down in the bar over a glass of lightweight whisky from Jura. A three-piece local band runs through a set of Scottish folk tunes before calling for contributions from the audience. Two Irish visitors step up, one at a time, and around their folksy songs the band improvises tunes from a common Celtic culture. “Here on Islay we’re closer to Ireland than Scotland,” my host at the seaside shack I’m renting explains next day. In this splendid remoteness there is a kind of melancholy. And an even greater joy. *