My heart is in the highlands
Warning: Contains highly atypical, nearly miraculous Scottish weather (it didn't rain!)
I’ve wanted to go back to Scotland since I went there for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019. Fringe is one of those crazy international events, like Burning Man or Oktoberfest or Mardi Gras, that appear on many people’s bucket list, and I was overjoyed to go. I was fascinated by Edinburgh and by the sheer over-the-top bonkers-ness of the festival, but, if I’m honest, the weather was unpleasant—one daylong torrent that caused a ceiling collapse and an overcast week of cold and damp—the city was overcrowded in a way that was sometimes exhausting, and I kept looking beyond the spires and Arthur’s Seat at the rolling hills of the highlands and thinking, “I can’t believe I came all this way and I’m not going there.”
Well, you can do only so much with a week. We’re Americans, and we get about as much vacation as Bob Cratchit. (I have more than two weeks every year, but I don’t like to blow more than a week at one time because, you know, that means later on I’ll have to work like six solid months without a vacation and I’ll have a stroke or stuff my laptop in the shredder.) But I promised myself I’d go back and see the highlands. And then COVID hit.
The good news is that the highlands are still there, I’m still here, and I kept my promise. And the best news is that I booked a week in April, steeled myself for ghastly, wet, windy, relentlessly gray, cold and raw weather—and arrived in a sunny wonderland of springtime blooms and lambs. Frolicking lambs.
After landing in Glasgow and taking a night just to recover from airline-inflicted trauma and get adjusted to the time zone, I took a four-hour train journey on the West Highland Lines, which run northward to three major destinations. Whisky tourists will want to take the trains that terminate in Oban or Mallaig; from those towns, you can get ferries out to the various islands where the distilleries are. Mountain climbers get off the Mallaig line in Fort William, shortly after the train turns west but before it glides to the sea. Fort William is the staging area and base camp for hikers mounting an attack on Ben Nevis, at 4,413 feet the highest peak in the British Isles.
After four hours on the train—and that ride from Glasgow up to Fort William, through the rolling, rocky hills, over streams and rivers, past sheep-dotted carpets of green grass often at surprisingly steep angles and long, serene lochs, has got to be one of the most breathtaking train journeys in a kingdom of breathtaking train journeys—I mostly wanted to mount an attack on the Ben Nevis whisky bar. I tried the splendid output of the Ben Nevis distillery and really began to feel at home. My guest house was run by Canadians living their dream.
The photo at top is of the ruins of Old Inverlochy Castle, about a mile’s walk from Fort William. It’s currently fenced off because there are some questions about how stable some of the masonry is—not terribly surprising given that it was built in about 1280. In good weather, the walk there from Fort William, upriver from Loch Linnhe, is just lovely and mostly flat. Just a stone’s throw from the ruins is the visitor’s center location of the Highland Soap Company. They have a shop in Fort William, too, but this one has a café in it called Larder, which is a very pleasant place to sit and have a coffee and a little something to fortify you for the walk back to town—or onward to explore Ben Nevis or the Inverlochy Castle Hotel.
Quite impressive views of Ben Nevis are available from Loch Linnhe, so I took a 10:30 a.m. sailing to Seal Island on Cruise Loch Linnhe. The boat was small and crewed by just two people: the captain and tour narrator, and a young woman named Dee who did literally everything else, from securing and liberating the boat at the dock to hauling out the gangway and manning the concession window. I boarded with coffee in hand from a local coffeeshop in the town, but when I’d finished that, I noticed that the menu board on the boat listed coffee and tea but also both “whisky” and “single malt whisky,” with a price difference of 1 pound. When in Rome … though it was about 11 a.m., I told Dee that I would like a whisky. “Do you want the single malt?” she asked. “No,” I said, “I was thinking more of a breakfast whisky.” This is apparently an extremely humorous concept to a Scot.
The views of Ben Nevis from the loch (with or without whisky) were stunning against the freakishly blue sky. You’ll notice the April snow at the top, and the rather barren slopes below. This was something that had been puzzling me since I left Glasgow; true, April is still early spring, but trees had started to sprout leaves and daffodils were blooming at lower elevations, so I wondered why the highland hills evoked the parched lifelessness of Southern California. I asked Dee if the hills would green up anytime soon. She said no.
“No?” I almost choked on my breakfast beverage. She explained that, back in the day, when English lairds occupied the highlands, they grazed their sheep on the hills. This went on for so long that the grass was eventually stripped, allowing the soil to wash away. Now almost nothing grows up there. “The hills are never green,” Dee told me. “The only colo(u)r they’ll get is purple, when the heather blooms.”
(This is a core concept of Scotland: The English ruin everything.)
The main attraction of the morning’s excursion was Seal Island, which is just what it says on the tin: A tiny island in the loch upon which seals hang out. The captain throttled the engines way back so that we could sneak up close to them, and everyone was obligingly quiet so as not to startle the seals, which appeared to be sleeping in. I have pictures, but honestly they’re not that great. Seals sacked out on a rocky shore are much more impressive in person than in a glossy gray-brown on glossy gray-brown photo.
You can’t really go to Fort William without taking the Mallaig-bound train on to Glenfinnan, about a 30-minute trip west. Because to get to the hamlet of Glenfinnan, nestled above a 200-year-old monument to the clansmen who died fighting for Bonnie Prince Charlie in the 18th century, the train must pass over the Glenfinnan Viaduct. Harry Potter fans will recognize it immediately from the films, and unlike most movie stars it does not seem shorter in person. Built at the turn of the 20th century, it’s over 1,200 feet long and 100 feet tall, gently curving to show off the distant Jacobite monument and Loch Shiel beyond. Harry Potter fans tend to hyperventilate when shown this stunning bit of engineering and architecture, and the Jacobite steam train further indulges the fantasy. But I was satisfied to ride an ordinary train out to Glenfinnan and back. It’s a good day trip from Fort William; if you go out in the morning, you could visit the Jacobite monument and/or climb the walking trail from the station to capture lovely views of the viaduct and valley below. Railroad buffs and those less inclined toward long walks and climbs will enjoy the Glenfinnan Station Museum. The museum has a little cafe in an old dining car, but it was closed when I visited, so after my hike up above the bridge I took a short walk down to the inviting Prince’s House Hotel, where I enjoyed a perfectly delicious drink on the bartender’s recommendation and felt entirely refreshed for my return journey. (“That viaduct really is something,” I said to the conductor. “I see it every day,” he shrugged Scottishly.)
Everywhere I looked during my brief stay in the highlands, I saw more opportunities for things to do and see and more ways to enjoy time there. A couple on the Loch Linnhe boat had just been up Ben Nevis with their dog. I didn’t take a distillery tour but did spend an hour exploring the ruins of Fort William’s eponymous fort, which is right next to a Morrison’s supermarket with a breathtaking selection of good whisky. I had good meals, good coffee, and outstanding booze. Nearly everyone I encountered was friendly, probably because I’m not English.
On the train back to Glasgow, I saw lots of hikers on the West Highland Way, a 96-mile walking trail that flirts with the rail line from just north of Glasgow to Fort William. They would occasionally board at one of the stations, climbing out from under their huge packs with bedrolls and pots and water bottles dangling off, sometimes accompanied by their tired dogs. I know the weather is usually miserable, but I can’t help myself: I want to go back. I haven’t seen the islands, or Inverness, or the heather in bloom. It’s not even about Harry Potter or haggis (no thank you) or “Monarch of the Glen” (a sweet highlands dramedy from the ’aughts with similarly unrealistic weather) or whisky or “Outlander” (oh, my God, I heard so much about “Outlander” fetishists—they have their own tours, for crying out loud, and the merch!)—it’s just the wild, unique beauty of the place, the charm and the lilt and the simple authenticity. I bet even the rain is vaguely magical.
Well, no. Probably not.