The Road to Little Dribbling (49 page)

—

I had a commendably early night and arose at five the next morning for the two-hour drive to Cape Wrath. The air was clear and promised a splendid day. I was beyond excited. The whole world was still abed as I headed north on the little A835. The rising sun set the mountaintops aglow, like the bars of an electric fire. The landscape was pure grandeur—mile upon mile of hills, lochs, open sea, tumbling rills, and massive glens, all continually reshuffled into new combinations of unsurpassable majesty. It wasn’t nearly as remote in feeling as I had expected. All along the way there were crofters’ cottages and rambling lochside hotels, even occasional small communities. At the village of Scourie, I passed a sign that said “Scourie Beach and Burial Ground,” which seemed an enchanting combination. (“We’re burying Grannie tomorrow. Don’t forget to bring your swimsuits.”) I was very happy.

I arrived at the ferry landing just after 7:30, the only person there, and staked my place at the water’s edge. The setting was sensational—a backdrop of monumental hills overlooking the fjord-like Kyle of Durness. The Cape Wrath peninsula, bleak but beckoning, stood half a mile away at the far side of the strait. Birds swooped low over the water. On a distant sandbar, a log stirred to life—a seal!—and rippled across the beach to the water.

At about 8:20, someone across the loch maneuvered two minibuses, one at a time, into positions at a landing stage, and then a whole bunch of people arrived all at once on my side. A minute later a man with an air of authority arrived also and everyone crowded around him at the top of the slipway, about twenty feet from me. People handed the man money and he issued them with tickets. No one paid any attention to me. I waddled up to the top of the ramp.

“Excuse me, I was here first,” I protested to the man in charge.

“These people booked,” he replied.

Now we need to pause just for a minute. I had risen at 5 a.m. and driven two hours to get here. I had been standing on this spot for an hour. Also, I was about three large cups of coffee short of total mental stability and on the brink of a dangerous medical condition known as caffeine tingle. This was not a good time to trifle with my equanimity.

“But I tried to book,” I said. “My wife called and she was told you don’t take bookings.”

“You should have booked,” he said again, and turned to transact business with another customer.

I looked hard at the back of his head. “I tried to book, you Pictish oaf!” I wailed in a little padded room in my brain that I keep for conversations like this. Outwardly and more calmly I said: “But I tried to book. The man told us you don’t take bookings.”

“Ah, you must have talked to Angus,” he said. I don’t remember what name he actually used, but he seemed to think that that was an adequate explanation for why I had just traveled all the way from Hampshire to remote Scotland to no purpose. I watched in dismay as he led his charges down the boat ramp and began loading them onto an open boat.

“I’ve come seven hundred miles,” I said plaintively.

“
I’ve
come from Calgary,” piped up a plumpish woman in a yellow rain slicker, pleased to outdo me.

“Oh, fuck off,” I urged her from my padded room.

“There’s a seat spare,” the ferryman said to me.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You can have that seat if you want it.”

He nodded at an empty seat.

Bewildered but overjoyed, I clambered aboard, lightly but intentionally hitting the Calgary woman in the back of the head with my pack, and took a seat. I paid the ferryman £6.50 for a ticket and we departed.

The journey across the loch took only about five minutes. At the other end, I climbed aboard a waiting minibus, paid the driver an additional £12 and a few minutes later, the bus loaded, we departed up a steep, bumpy track. Cape Wrath lay eleven miles away across a barren peninsula. I was going to get there after all. I was very happy again.

—

Cape Wrath isn’t actually named for its violent nature. “Wrath” is an old Norse word for turning-place apparently—where Viking ships turned the corner to head for home—but it is plenty wild anyway. Winds in the winter can reach 140 miles an hour, we were told. The seas around northern Scotland, where the North Sea and Atlantic crash together, are said to be the liveliest in the world. In one nineteenth-century storm, a little farther east along the coast, a wave struck the top of a lighthouse almost two hundred feet above the sea and tore a door off its hinges. That is pretty assertive weather.

Our driver was a cheery soul named Reg who kept up a line of patter as he hauled the vehicle around and through potholes. The road to Cape Wrath is technically a public highway, the U70, but it was last paved in 1956 and has more holes than asphalt. It crosses a great empty moorland, lightly scattered with old military trucks and half-tracks, put there as targets.

It took about an hour to traverse the eleven miles to the cape, where we were greeted by a big black-and-white lighthouse standing on a cliff high above a blowy sea. The lighthouse was built in 1828 by Robert Stevenson, grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson. Today it is automated and doesn’t need anyone to operate it. The site has a caretaker, named John Ure, who runs a café for visitors in one of the outbuildings. He is the peninsula’s sole full-time inhabitant and must spend most of his life as just about the most isolated person in Britain.

There is nothing much to do at Cape Wrath. The lighthouse is closed to visitors, so all you can do is wander around and enjoy the views or go in the café. I stood on a grassy knoll and gazed for some time along the rugged, very beautiful sea cliffs stretching off toward faraway Dunnet Head. In the eastern distance, just offshore, was a large mass of land, which could only be Hoy, southernmost of the Orkney Islands. I looked later and found that it was eighty miles away. Is it actually possible to see that far?

I did a circuit of the lighthouse, then went and stood on the rocky precipice in front of it, and cautiously peered over the edge. It’s a three-hundred-foot drop to sharp rocks and crashing waves. This really is the end of Britain. Ahead of me there was nothing but dancing seas all the way to the polar ice cap, to the left an equal emptiness to Newfoundland. I stood for a few minutes, reflecting with secret pride that I was the most northwesterly person in Great Britain. How often does anyone get to say that?

Now that I had reached the cape, I rather expected some feeling of finality and accomplishment to settle upon me. I was, of course, aware that I hadn’t exactly pushed myself to my physical limits to get here, and that indeed most of my time traveling through Scotland so far had been spent fast asleep. Even so, this was a milestone moment. I might not be the first person in history to touch both ends of the Bryson Line, but I was certainly the first to do it and know he had done it.

So I stood, hands clasped at my back, staring into the wind, patiently waiting, but no special feeling came. At length, I abandoned that idea, and instead walked around the cliff top a little more, then went into the café in the hope that Mr. Ure could do something about my very serious need for caffeine. Happily, he could.

II

I spent a few more days touring around the Highlands. I went to Inverness and visited the battlefield at Culloden, where two thousand men lost their lives fighting the English, and then to Glencoe, where still more died when Campbells notoriously massacred Macdonalds, and I somberly reflected that the history of the Highlands is five hundred years of cruelty and bloodshed followed by two hundred years of way too much bagpipe music. I took a day ferry from Port Appin to the island of Lismore in the middle of Loch Linnhe and walked around there, too. It was splendid, though it rained a lot. My favorite experience was at Glenelg, on a little bay enjoying fine views across to the Isle of Skye. Just outside Glenelg, in a tranquil clearing that feels rarely visited, stand two of the most extraordinary structures you will find anywhere. They are called brochs and they are unique to Scotland.

Brochs are prehistoric stone towers, typically about thirty feet high and sixty feet or so around at the base, shaped roughly like the cooling towers of nuclear power stations, and made from carefully stacked stones in a complicated design involving two walls and a cavity between. There is no mortar in any of them, yet they were so well built that even after twenty-five hundred years many of them are still largely intact. The two at Glenelg are said to be the finest in mainland Scotland and they are simply, quietly, elegantly awesome. But what I particularly like about them is that they are completely mysterious. No one has any idea what they were for.

They would have been useless as dwellings or gathering places of any type because they were windowless and more or less completely dark inside. There is no sign that anyone was ever interred in them. It has been suggested that they might have been defensive bastions, but any people that crowded into them would effectively have been imprisoning themselves in a darkened space while leaving the invaders to help themselves to their crops and livestock. Doesn’t seem entirely plausible. They might have been lookout towers, but many are in places where there was nothing in particular to look out upon. Usually they stand in isolation, but occasionally, as at Glenelg, they come in pairs. Their construction indicates that they were designed to be divided into multiple stories, but nearly all were built in places where there was too little wood to make floors. Every single thing about them, in short, is a bewilderment.

It occurred to me as I stood there that this was one of the things that I really, really like about Britain: it is unknowable. There is so much to it—more than any person can ever see or figure out or begin to know. There is so much stuff that no one can definitively say how much there actually is. Isn’t that splendid? I had just by chance read an article in the journal
Current Archaeology
about a man named Olaf Swarbrick, a veterinarian by profession, who spent a good portion of his life tracking down all the ancient standing stones in Britain. It seems no one had done this before. Swarbrick found 1,502 stones at 1,068 locations. That is a much larger number than it sounds. If you decided to visit one standing stone a week, it would take you twenty years to see them all.

It is like that with every historic thing in Britain. If you tried to visit all the medieval churches in England—just England—at the rate of one a week, it would take you 308 years. You would need additional vastly daunting lengths of time to visit all the historic cemeteries, stately homes, castles, Bronze Age hill forts, giant figures carved in hillsides, and every other category of built structure. Brochs would take a decade to see. All the known archaeological sites in Britain would require no less than 11,500 years of your time.

You see what I am saying. Britain is infinite. There isn’t anywhere in the world with more to look at in a smaller space—nowhere that has a greater record of interesting and worthwhile productivity over a longer period at a higher level. No wonder my trip didn’t feel complete. I could never see it all.

—

I took that thought home with me and then on to America, where I had to go again for work. One day, not long after my Cape Wrath visit, I was in a very quiet department store in Indianapolis, just killing time, when a saleslady decided to be my new best friend and mentor. She followed me all around the menswear section and helpfully identified each type of clothing I touched.

“Those are our neckties,” she would say. “We have more neckties over on this side of the table, too.”

I would say thank you and she would say, “Uh-huh.” She was about ninety-eight. Eventually she became interested in my accent. I told her that I had grown up in Iowa but had lived in England for years.

“England?” she said with unreserved amazement. “Why do you live in
England
?”

“Because it is nothing like Indianapolis” was my first and frankest thought, but of course I didn’t say that. I just said something vague about marrying an English girl and liking it there.

“Uh-huh,” she said. “And these are our shoes.”

It occurred to me afterward, as I relaxed in a nearby food court (for I was living life to the full in Indianapolis), that her question was a reasonable one. Why would I choose to leave the most successful country in the world, where my taxes would always be lower, my house warmer, my portions of food larger, my gratifications more immediate and abundant, and decide instead to live on a rainy island adrift in a cold, gray sea?

As with most things in life that we take for granted, I didn’t really have an answer to that. Not a considered one anyway. If someone said to me, “What are the five things you most like about the UK?” I would have to request time to think about it. I determined to make a list of my five reasons for choosing to live there. (Apart from family and friends, I should say for the record.) I already had my first reason thanks to my visit to the brochs of Glenelg: that Britain is delightfully and inexhaustibly distracting. But I wasn’t at all sure what the other four ought to be.

I pulled out a notebook in the food court and began to list all the pleasing Britannic things I could think of, randomly, as they occurred to me:

Boxing Day

Country pubs

Saying “you’re the dog’s bollocks” as an expression of endearment or admiration

Jam roly-poly with custard

Ordnance Survey maps

I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue
(a popular and hilarious radio program)

Cream teas

The 20p piece

June evenings, about 8 p.m.

Smelling the sea before you see it

Villages with ridiculous names like Shellow Bowels and Nether Wallop

When I paused to review the list, I realized that it consisted entirely of things I would never have encountered if I hadn’t come to England. That is the great thing about being a foreigner—that you get to spend your life with a whole new set of cultural attachments in addition to the ones you inherited at birth. Anybody who has a second country is greatly favored, in my view, but if the second country is especially interesting and lively and diverse—if it has cream teas, a noble history, and an extra day off at Christmas—well, that’s just the dog’s bollocks, if you ask me. Anyway, that became my second point: that Britain gave me a million good things that I wouldn’t otherwise have had.