The Lowdown on a Highlands Marriage

He’ll wear a pleated skirt of the Scottish Highlands variety. She may or may not wear the late Princess Grace of Monaco’s tiara--depending whether you believe her official fan club Web site or Cartier. And staffers at the secluded Skibo Castle, where the wedding entourage will celebrate, reportedly are to be sequestered until well after the event.

In that post-vote-count, prerecession lull, here is a little glitter to fill the nightly news void: Madonna’s upcoming nuptials to British film director Guy Ritchie in Scotland.

It may lack the cliffhanger drama of election 2000, but not the press. About 100 members of the world’s media were on hand Monday in Inverness, in northern Scotland, to witness the arrival of the Queen of Pop and husband-to-be.

The singer’s private jet landed at about 1:35 p.m. on a sunny but ice-cold day. Cameras whirled as a news network broadcast the event live, in the spirit of the first moon landing--or at least President Clinton’s maiden voyage to Vietnam.

The aircraft stopped. Doors opened.

“There’s the groom,” Europe’s Sky TV anchor Simon McCoy enthused as Ritchie sauntered down the steps.

“There she is,” co-anchor Emily Maitlis said of his more famous fiancee.

The marrying couple climbed into waiting a Range Rover without so much as a queenly wave and, at 1:37 p.m. they were off to the fairy-tale castle built around the turn of the century by Scots-born U.S. steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.

And that was it--possibly the high point of the wedding coverage as far as the public is concerned. Unlike her marriage to actor Sean Penn in a star-spangled Malibu extravaganza 15 years ago, Madonna’s second wedding on Friday will be a strictly private affair. And a tad classier, more landed gentry than Hollywood rock star.

The world was alerted to the impending wedding earlier this month when the couple’s announcement, or banns, of marriage, was posted at the registrar’s office in Dornoch, Sutherland, in keeping with Scotland’s formal wedding procedure.

Since then, all of the news about them has been a mixture of hard-boiled reporting, speculation and invention.

Here are the facts: Madonna, 42, and Ritchie, 32, the father of her 4-month-old son, Rocco, will be married in a ceremony conducted by the unconventional Rev. Susan Brown, the first woman in the United Kingdom to take charge of a cathedral--the one in Dornoch. The hip cleric known as “Holy Spice” will present the couple with two rolls of toilet paper, a routine part of Brown’s marriage services.

“The toilet roll is long and strong, which is what I hope their marriage will be,” Brown told BBC News.

Certainly it’s a wedding gift no one else would have thought of.

Brown told The Times of London that the couple will be writing their own vows.

“Madonna and Guy are clearly very much in love. They have chosen to make their own vows, and I’m quite happy with that, as long as what they want is within reason,” she said.

What could be unreasonable to a reverend who hands out toilet paper?

The couple, baby, Madonna’s 4-year-old daughter, Lourdes, and their guests will be staying at the exclusive Skibo Castle near Dornoch. A christening ceremony for Rocco is expect to be held Thursday at the 13th century Dornoch Cathedral.

There seems to be little doubt that Ritchie will wear a kilt in the MacIntosh Hunting tartan, a tribute to his grandfather’s clan. Sources at the Scotch House in London confirmed to Britain’s Heat magazine that he ordered a kilt, jacket, shirt, socks and shoes for the day. Ritchie has said he would like to wear the regimental sporran, or kilt pouch, that his grandfather wore in the Seaforth Highlanders before he was killed at Dunkirk, France, in World War II. But Ritchie’s father, John, says it’s a bit “moth-eaten.”

Beyond that, the details are sketchy. Some media have Madonna in a Versace dress; the vast majority have her in a creation by popular designer Stella McCartney, head of the French design house Chloe. McCartney, daughter of ex-Beatle Paul, is reputed to be one of the 100 or so invited guests.

(There has been unsubstantiated talk of Madonna wearing diamond-studded cowboy boots, and questions about whose name she’ll have emblazoned across the front of whatever she’s wearing, presumably not Britney Spears’.)

Also on the guest list are Sting and his producer-wife, Trudie Styler, who introduced Madonna and Ritchie a couple of years ago. Sting is to provide some of the music at the wedding. Gwyneth Paltrow is said to be the maid of honor, and other star guests include Vinnie Jones of Ritchie’s 1998 highly successful British gangster film, “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” and Rupert Everett, Madonna’s longtime friend and co-star in this year’s film “The Next Best Thing.”

There is some doubt as to whether they will be married in the church or, more likely, in the castle, which has hosted other celeb weddings: Actors Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle both married their respective spouses there. Presumably there will be a party.

The castle hosts the members-only golf course called the Carnegie Club, popular with Jack Nicholson, Bill Gates and Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas. (Unlike Douglas and Zeta-Jones, who sold their exclusive wedding pictures for a seven-figure sum and ended up in court, Madonna and Ritchie will be giving one free photo to all of the media. )

The castle offers a gorgeous Highlands view out of rooms with four-poster beds, bathrooms with his-and-her tubs or a pool table. Its kitchens offer home-grown vegetables, wild salmon from the estate’s own river and Aberdeen Angus beef from herds grazing nearby.

Security fitting for an Israeli-Palestinian summit has been employed to keep press and gawkers at bay, pushing the masses of media into the backwaters of Dornoch, which is experiencing an unseasonal bonanza in paying guests.

Madonna and Ritchie, meanwhile, are believed to be planning a quiet honeymoon in the Highlands before heading to Edinburgh to celebrate the new year at a rock concert in the capital’s hilltop castle.

Then it is back to their relatively quiet life--relative to other celebrities’, that is--in London, where Madonna recently bought a house in the fashionable Notting Hill neighborhood and where she has been spotted at the local pub. Some say she is even adopting a new accent to go with her new life.