A Cottage in the Highlands

Even to me, drawn here repeatedly since the age of 15 by the magic of its lush desolation, the idea was both exotic and comforting. A cottage in the Highlands.

Since I don’t have a driver’s license, my visits to Scotland had always been squeezed to fit the tortured schedules of buses run by multitudes of private companies, the Royal Mail and local schools. There had also been stretches of hitchhiking from point B to C to fill in gaps on the route from A to D. Settling down beyond the conveniences of a village, foraging for meals without ready access to public transport had simply not been options.

So when my friends Bill and Yoko finally gave in to my insistent promptings to visit Scotland and urged me to join them, I couldn’t resist. We would rent a car--which, in itself, would be a welcome luxury--and in place of my solitary wanderings tyrannized by bus schedules, we would move slowly, renting a cottage here, another there.

Guidebooks and local pamphlets in hand, we began making phone calls and learned that summer rentals required minimum one-week stays, always Saturday to Saturday. Plans already fixed meant that we were limited to one week in a single cottage. But the choice of location wasn’t difficult. It had to be the area called Wester Ross, which contains some of the Highland’s most spectacular landscapes.

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An easy afternoon’s drive northwest of Inverness, Loch Maree’s shores are shaded by rare stands of the ancient Caledonian forest that once covered the entire country, and it is frequently acknowledged as one of the most beautiful lochs in Scotland. The adjoining National Trust property of Torridon features monumental (but quite walkable) masses of rock and gleaming expanses of Loch Torridon that reflect the changing sky. In spite of being some of the wildest and most inaccessible terrain in the Highlands, the mountains directly north of Loch Maree offer enough abundant long and short walks--from level strolls along the loch to dizzying scrambles up the summits--to entertain the most dedicated hill walker for weeks.

We didn’t begin looking for a cottage until less than a month before our June trip (many are reserved six or more months in advance).

To find the cottages, we used the book “Scotland: Self-Catering” (Scottish Tourist Board, $11.95), which we bought at the British Travel Bookstore in New York. But we actually found most useful a booklet listing all types of accommodations in the area that I received by contacting the local tourist board (now the Highlands of Scotland Tourist Board in Aviemore) and requesting a listing of accommodations that included B&Bs;, rental cottages and hotels for Wester Ross. The magazine-format booklet included color photographs, locations, amenities and prices of hundreds of rental properties, B&Bs;, hotels and caravan sights in Wester Ross. It was free.

We telephoned our top four picks but by that time we were unable to book a cottage on either Loch Torridon or Loch Maree. So we chose a traditional croft, or small farmhouse ($335 per week), on the River Ewe, with views inland toward Loch Maree. It was so isolated and snugly surrounded by mountains that television reception was impossible. After making a reservation by telephone, we reflected further on the laconic symbols in our listings, deciding that the croft house had no open fireplace--a must in my view for a possible week of cold winds and unrelenting rain--and only one electric stove.

Rethinking our options, we chose a three-bedroom cottage run by Hannah McLeod in the hamlet of Inverasdale, four miles from the village of Poolewe (two old hotels, one post office/general store, one bakery/coffee shop). The $440 per week fee (this year $475 in June; $600 in July and August and $315 during the winter) was more than we had hoped to pay: about the same or a little less than a B&B; for three. Maybe because it was only a month or so before our arrival, McLeod told us not to bother sending a deposit.

Although my friends and I had planned to meet in Inverness, pick up a car and make our way north, we found each other in the same car of the same train from Edinburgh to Inverness: surely a good omen of harmonious thought.

In Inverness, we loaded up the car with essentials because I feared from past experience that we might not be able to find pasta, olive oil, lemons and stone-ground porridge oats (not as common as 18th century English writer Dr. Samuel Johnson might have had us believe) in the Highland village near our cottage. We drove northwest, via Kishorn, through Torridon and along the shore of Loch Maree. Driving rain and thick fog blotted out the mountains we had come so far into this wild country to see.

We stopped to call Hannah McLeod for directions and to have lunch in Gairloch, which seemed to have become a burgeoning tourist colony since my last visit, five years before. On that Saturday afternoon, its single shopping street was a little too thronged with summer visitors for my taste.

But remembering that businesses are closed on Sunday in the Highlands, we stopped at Gairloch’s fine butcher and grocer, Kenneth Morrison, where we picked up half a leg of Scottish lamb (“no, it’s not local,” responded the young butcher to my query. “It comes from about 50 miles away.”) and a small haggis made on the premises. We also bought a few Dutch tomatoes, double cream for the porridge and a small but pricey package of locally smoked wild salmon, resisting the satiny fillets of fresh wild salmon in the window.

Compared with costs in the United States, we found prices to be high in the Highlands. Many items cannot be produced there nor is mass production the norm. Fruits and vegetables purchased in June came from other parts of Europe. But Morrison’s quality was well above supermarket level.

Gairloch also has two supermarkets, one of which bakes baguettes each morning from prepared dough shipped from France. But these markets are so small they might not be recognized as such by an American traveler. There is also a fish market that smokes mackerel, trout, salmon and whiting on the premises. At the Wildcat store, we supplemented our purchases with sharp Orkney Islands Cheddar, Paterson’s rough oat cakes, Australian apples and shortbread. Clearly, cooking--and eating--here was bound to be a big part of the fun.

Passing through Poolewe, 10 miles to the north, we followed a narrow road along the southern side of Loch Ewe toward Inverasdale.

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The bay glinted with a steely light, clouds roiled overhead. Through the rain, we could see this was no tourist colony but a real community of scattered houses, separated by working farms, some sloping down to the gravelly shore of the loch; some, like the McLeods’, rising to the hills behind the road. As we turned off the road into the farm, Hannah McLeod ran out in the rain to meet us; with short-cropped hair, at least a generation younger than my mental image of Highland landladies. She has lived here all her life, in the old house that her husband, the local undertaker, rebuilt himself. Like many people in the Highlands, the McLeods cobble together a living from several sources, raising sheep (for lamb, not wool) along with their other jobs.

She showed us into the parlor of our two-story cottage, Victorian in feeling, where she had lighted a coal fire in the fireplace as a warm welcome. The house itself had been a simple croft house fallen into ruin when the McLeods decided to renovate it in 1977 and add the second story. (In the hallway hangs a series of photos showing the transition from a roofless, stone-built wreck to a neat, white stuccoed house.)

There was one double bedroom downstairs and one double and one twin upstairs, each with a deeply inset window overlooking green fields dotted with white sheep, with Loch Ewe in the near distance, purple mountains behind. The cottage had electric heating in every room, a washer, dryer, microwave and electric stove: far more comforts than home. The electricity goes onto a separate meter, read at the end of the rental period (our bill was $16, which included one night when we left the kitchen radiator on full throttle by mistake). Everything was spotless and worked perfectly, the spartan feeling with Victorian touches the keynote of the whole cottage.

After choosing bedrooms and unpacking the groceries, we made ourselves a simple afternoon tea with shortbread from the supermarket and read in front of the fire as the rain beat on the window. This unexceptional Highland mist was to be followed by one of the longest and hottest summers on record in Britain. In fact, during the rest of our stay, we used the fireplace more as a luxurious comfort than a necessity.

As the summer solstice approached, the seemingly endless afternoon light allowed us to fall into an easy routine. We could stay out in the hills until well after 9 at night, if we chose, or take a languid walk in the golden evening light after dinner. A leisurely breakfast, followed by packing up necessities for the day’s walk--maps, bird, flower and walking guides, oat cakes, cheese and apples for lunch, rain gear and warm sweaters (just in case)--and then a stop at the Wildcat for fresh bread, meringues stuck together with clotted cream and other last-minute items, found us on the path we had chosen for the day not much earlier than lunchtime.

Bog cotton, wild hyacinth and young bracken embroidered the grassy slopes where we often stopped to eat lunch, and the voices of cuckoos and larks blended into the wind. Most of our walks followed old roads along which Highlanders had driven their cattle to market before the wicked English (and not a few local chieftains) blanketed the hills with sheep. These mostly unmarked trails are not maintained, but a practiced reader of ordinance survey maps and descriptive hiking books can get a sound enough idea of the terrain. Having our own cottage, we found, was much less conducive to the discipline of an early start to the day than staying in a bed-and-breakfast with a bustling landlady.

Hiking was not our only entertainment outside the house. One afternoon was spent rambling through Inverewe Gardens (a National Trust for Scotland property), a paradise protected from gales off the Atlantic by stands of sturdy Scots and Corsican pines, planted by Osgood Mackenzie in 1865. His book, “A Hundred Years in the Highlands” (which I saw in many bookstores in Scotland) describes his building of the gardens, one basketful of soil at a time on top of the red Torridonian sandstone. Rhododendrons--some 20 feet high, in every shade from palest ivory, golden orange, black-purple and blood red--were just past their prime. A walled garden held the warmth of the sun on brilliant poppies.

Our last full day at Loch Ewe brought us a little closer to village life. Attracted by signs promising books, music and tea all in one room, we drifted into a crofter’s cottage that has been transformed into a store called the Bookshop in the Strath section of Gairloch, the main shopping area. We parked ourselves at the shop’s round table, where we settled in for what turned out to be an extended session of conversation, traditional music, tea and shortbread.

The final topic of discussion was the possibility of renting a cottage for a month, maybe two, in a future summer. Proprietor Irene Duffy, along with the other lively women who joined us at the round table, made us feel so at home that four hours had passed before we realized we had forgotten to eat lunch.

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GUIDEBOOK: Highlands Fling

Getting there: American, British Air and Delta/Virgin Atlantic fly nonstop from LAX to London. British Air flies from London to Inverness. Advance purchase round-trip fares start at $770.

Where to stay: Hannah McLeod, 3 Braes, Inverasdale, Poolewe, Ross-shire IV22 2LN; telephone 011-44-1445-781434.

Resources: British Travel Bookstore, 551 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10176; tel. (212) 490-6688. (It’s next door to the British Tourist Authority in New York City.)

Highlands of Scotland Tourist Board, Information Centre, Aviemore, Scotland PH22 1PP; tel. 011-44-1479-810-363 or fax 011-44-1479-811063.

For more information: British Tourist Authority, 551 Fifth Ave., Suite 701, New York, NY 10176-0799, (800) 462-2748. fax (212) 986-1188.