The Highlands Part 1: Inverness

On our way to the Highlands, I decided I’d heard enough of the Scottish accent to begin trying to imitate it. As you may well know, accent imitation is something I love to do but rarely do in front of anyone because I get stage fright and my mouth freezes up, the resulting lilt like none found on this planet. A few stops ago, a glass or two of wine made me bold enough to show off my English and Irish accents to Kirsty-the-Irish-lass, but the Scottish burr was uncharted territory.

It’s safe to say my version of it was pretty terrible at the start, but I am getting the hang of it better than I’d thought I would. I like to practice it while I read our travel books.

[Reading aloud to Thayer about William Wallace, about three sentences in…]

Thayer: So it was Edward I who was in power at the time?

Hayl: I have no idea what I just read. I can’t do the accent and process information at the same time.

We soon stopped in Pitlochry (that’s Pit-LOCK-ry) and toured the Edradour (ED-ra-dower) whisky distillery—the smallest distillery in Scotland. Only about three people work it, producing in a year what the larger distilleries produce in a week. They pride themselves on using much of the same equipment as they’ve always used, only upgrading when they absolutely must. To hear our tour guide talk about their whiskies—his voice going soft and his eyes closing gently—you’d think perhaps they were his mistresses. The time, effort, and love put forth, from tapping the spring to bottling the spirit, indeed suggests a loving and giving relationship. Our guide poured us each a small dram and toasted a reverent Slàinte (SLON-juh, the Gaelic “cheers”).

From there we continued north to the general Inverness area and stopped to walk the battlefield of Culloden (Kuh-LAW-din), the site where in 1746 Bonnie Prince Charlie and many Highland clans (the Jacobites) fought against the English government for control of the throne, resulting in a horrific bloody massacre for the Scots and the end of clan life as they knew it. Thayer and I knew about the Battle of Culloden from reading the historical fiction Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon and were thankful to have that background as we walked the paths around the battlefield.

The field has been kept mostly as it was back then: boggy, hummocky, and barren save for long, matted-down yellow and green grasses. Memorial gravestones were erected in the late 1800s for each of the mass clan burial sites, and lines of red and blue flags show where the front lines of the government and the Jacobites stood, respectively. The eerie sadness cuts through, added to by the sinking late-afternoon sun, thick haze, smell of wood fires burning, and white noise of passing cars that can almost be taken for the echoes of battle chaos.

Just down the road are the Clava Cairns, hair-raising ancient burial sites from 3000 and 4000 years ago. Can you even process that? I have a really hard time with it. The cairns are made of stones stacked into a ring standing about six feet tall, with a long hallway-like entrance, also of stones. Once a cairn had been used for a burial, it was closed and surrounded by a circle of tall standing stones. This area, too, felt a bit ghostly, but we lightened the mood by acting out the scene in the Outlander series where the protagonist gets pulled back in time through the stones. If you look at our UK pictures on Facebook, you’ll recognize this part by the photo of my head and torso disappearing between a split stone while my legs splay out the side.

Twilight was falling by the time we headed through Inverness and south along the Loch Ness. Ness is big around here—there’s the city Inverness, or “mouth of the Ness,” the river Ness, and the lake Loch Ness. And of course, there’s Nessie, the fabled Loch Ness monster.

We only saw Nessie in plush huggable form inside the area’s many tourist shops, but I will say this for the Loch Ness. It is creepy. Driving alongside it in the near-dark, everything cast in a grey-blue glow and shrouded in mist, I was so thoroughly spooked that I needed to play some Robyn on the car stereo, hoping my Swedish songstress would soothe my frazzled nerves. A few minutes later…

[Hayley switches from Robyn to ABBA]

Hayl: Even Robyn isn’t doing the trick. I need the cheesiest sh*t imaginable to make me not terrified.

ABBA’s cheerful song stylings indeed made the freaky drive more fun, and we soon arrived at Graineag (GRAIN-aig) Bed and Breakfast in Dundreggan, where the chatty hostess Barbara was kind enough to call the closest restaurant to make sure they were still open for us to get dinner at the late hour of 8 p.m.

We raced to the Glen Moriston Arms in Invermoriston and enjoyed having dinner in the fancy restaurant decorated in clan tartan carpet, curtains, and seat cushions. It was there I enjoyed my first ever Kopparberg Pear Cider, the lightest, freshest, peariest cider I’ve ever tasted. It was Swedish, naturally—the third Swede to rescue me that night.

I continued to practice my Scottish burr and lamented the lame boringness of the American accent, to which Thayer wisely replied, “Sometimes you just have to live with your own mediocrity.” Life is full of hard truths.

The next morning over breakfast, Barbara explained the thin line of liking/loathing between the Scottish and the English. Many of her loved ones were English including—“unfortunately”—her husband, yet the Scottish would never and will never root for the English in any sporting match. No matter who they’re playing, the Scottish will root for the other team.

Barbara: It’s not that we don’t like England, we just never want them to win… anything!

As she went on to talk about the Highland region of Scotland, she interrupted herself to ask, “Have you read the Outlander books by Diana Gabaldon?” We were thrilled to learn that her father had spent his life working at the Fraser estate—the modern-day iteration of the Clan Fraser castle featured prominently in the books. Not only that, but she once went to a book signing and met Diana Gabaldon. Gabaldon was headed to a Clan Fraser gathering, and Barbara said to send her regards. Gabaldon then emailed Barbara—emailed her!—to tell her that her regards were warmly met and the Frasers fondly remembered her and her father. And that was our brush with a brush with fame in the Highlands.

After breakfast we drove to Cannich (KONN-ick) and hiked around Glen Affric, then drove back to Invermoriston and hiked around the falls that tumbled down either side of a giant sheer slab of rock. We tooled around the small town of Beauly before exploring more of Culloden, and then we found a scrumptious dinner at the Gathering Place, a Chinese restaurant in Inverness.

On our drive back to the B&B, I considered how all I’d ever read about Scotland’s landscape had called it “rugged.” Rugged, rugged, rugged until I was blue in the face. Quit with the rugged, I’d thought. Surely there’s another word to describe it. As we drove through England, I even wondered how the landscape of Scotland would be so different from what we were already seeing there. Well, guess what. It is different. And guess why. Because it’s rugged.

The next morning we packed up and had breakfast, this time sharing stories of our travels thus far with a young couple from Essex who were also on holiday. Then we hopped into the car and headed for the sky. The Isle of Skye, that is.

And with that, I leave you with a quote.

[While practicing the Scottish “aye,” said while inhaling sharply, like you’re gasping out a “hi!”]

Thayer: Except we look like we’re convulsing and they don’t.

Until next time!

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