The Isle of Skye

     I thought I was going to Scotland just for the hiking, but as it turned out, I enjoyed touristy things on the Isle of Skye, where Margaret and I spent the second week of our trip, almost as much. 

    Legends were fun—the Holy Pool of St. Fillan (where I swam), the monster of Loch Ness (where I also swam).

The captain of our Loch Ness boat ride told of being on a research boat when a submerged camera came up with a photo of the monster, which he showed us. He let us gasp in disbelief a few minutes before telling us the camera had found a submerged life-size model used for a Hollywood film.

    Connections with my academic past made castles and museums fun. Walking across the moors in the dramatic rain and wind was like stepping into Wuthering Heights. Seeing the stone ruins of Urquart Castle on Loch Ness reminded me of the Old English poem "The Ruin" and that the Anglo-Saxons walked among Roman ruins just as Scots walk among Medieval ruins. At the MacDonalds' Armadale Castle

I not only was in the presence of the Gothic architecture I had studied, but in the museum there I recognized the Anglo-Saxon culture of lords, thanes, and hall life in the Scottish clan culture of the same era. The museums told of Viking raids in Scotland as I had read about them in Old English texts. Everywhere I was reminded of Mary Queen of Scots, beheaded by Queen Elizabeth, and the Jacobite Rebellion after Elizabeth's death, the war between Catholics and Protestants, and the Scots trying to put James I of Scotland on the throne—history of importance to much of the literature I have studied. The nineteenth-century novelist Sir Walter Scott; that great man of eighteenth-century letters, Samuel Johnson; Johnson's excellent biographer James Boswell—these men had stayed at Dunvegan Castle

(of the MacLeod clan and still occupied today); we read their letters of thanks, in their handwriting. We peered down the Dunvegan Castle dungeon, deep and narrow and made of clammy stone, where one clan chief had put his wife for fourteen years. It was in such a dungeon that the Red Crosse Knight had been thrown, personifying Despair, in Edmund Spenser's six-book, seventeenth-century poem, The Faerie Queene. We saw many monuments and tributes to the Scottish Brigade of World War I, who fought so fiercely in their kilts that they were called the "ladies from hell." 

    The language was also an unexpected enjoyment. Gaelic, Welsh, and Scots-Gaelic are their own language family, unconnected to either Germanic or Romance languages. Generally, my knowledge of French, Latin, and English is a basis of familiarity in European countries, but in Scotland, where road signs were in both Gaelic and English, I could comprehend nothing of the Gaelic, even though both languages use the same alphabet. 

    A third surprise was our stop for breakfast at Sligachan Hotel at the base of the Black Cuillin ridge. Lining the walls in all the hallways were photos and placards about famous mountain climbers who had been there. I remembered then that the Scots were great mountain climbers as well as great walkers. Many came to the Black Cuillin mountains to train for ascents of Mt. Everest, among them the famous duo John MacKenzie and Norman Collie.

Statues of MacKenzie and Collie above the Sligachan Hotel

When a Nepali sherpa came to Sligachan, he climbed to the top of Cuillin and back in less than an hour—barefoooted. Being doubted for this achievement, he got up the next morning and did it again, faster, a record that wasn't broken till the fifties. Boswell and Johnson also stayed at the inn. Boswell hiked up the mountain, I learned from the placard, but "the portly Johnson did not."

    There is a legend that anyone who put their face in the Sligachan River for seven seconds would receive eternal beauty. I figured that such a benefit was more difficult for someone of my age, so I made sure to leave my face in the cold water for a count of fourteen.