A Highlands Fling

As the twilight closed in around us, the single-track road we followed in this faraway corner of northwest Scotland showed no signs of ending, no city, no farmhouse, no hospitable life within miles, and I began to wonder if I’d so wisely planned this leg of our trip. My wife, Margie, and I had spent the day driving some of the most beautiful roads we’d ever seen, watching the counterpane farmlands in the south give way to the moonscapes of bracken and heather in the north.

We turned off A835, 20 minutes out of Ullapool, a small quayside town overlooking Loch Broom and the Highlands to the south. Beside us, two saw-toothed, scree-covered mountains, Cul Beag and Stac Pollaidh, each rising a precipitous 2,000 feet from the roadway, shimmered in the peaty dark waters of Loch Lurgainn. A gust roiled its surface. Slate-gray clouds poured in from the north. What had seemed romantic and delightfully odd--two nights in the unpronounceable town of Achiltibuie, the promise of a comfortable place to stay and long walks amid craggy rivers, mirror-like lakes (or lochs) and purple moors--had become far more desolate. Perhaps I should have aimed more carefully when I threw the dart at the map.

Since I’d planned this trip nearly five months earlier, Achiltibuie had been just a name to struggle with each time I tried to say it (it is pronounced Ach-il-tee-boo-ee, with the emphasis on the first syllable, as if something were stuck in your throat). A village on the Coigach peninsula, it was described in one magazine as a “straggly coastal settlement where even the sheep need company.” It overlooks, we had read, the Summer Isles, a group of islands a stone’s throw from the mainland.

We had three days left in a three-week vacation to England and Scotland, and having had our fill of London, Edinburgh and Inverness, we wanted simply to get out into the wilds, where we could taste some good Scotch and step out at night beneath a million stars and, if we were lucky, stand beneath the northern lights. We’d seen the 1983 Burt Lancaster movie “Local Hero,” the story of an American’s growing affection for a small Scottish town and its unusual residents, and felt well prepared for the quirky and the picturesque. This was my second trip to Scotland; having toured the Highlands once, mostly in and around Loch Ness, I was ready to see the less visited northwestern coast.

As a coming storm hastened nightfall, we thought we had come to the edge of the world, the place where map makers simply gave up drawing the coastline and wrote “terra incognita.” We eyed the road, a ribbon of asphalt disappearing over the next hill. We came to a scattering of stone cottages, properties marked by toppled-down walls and errant sheep. We slowed down, wondering what had possessed us to book a room from 5,000 miles away.

By the time we reached Achiltibuie, it was nearly 7 o’clock. We pulled up a short driveway into a parking area hemmed by bushes rustling in the wind and felt suddenly at ease. Our shelter from the storm could not have been more inviting, a two-story farmhouse whose chimneys and gables, set against the graying sky, were a hospitable prospect. Small lamps glowed like candles in the windows.

We grabbed our bags, climbed the steps to the mud room and were greeted by Geraldine Irvine, the blond, blue-eyed owner (with her husband, Mark) of the Summer Isles Hotel. She greeted us by name and showed us our room, up a flight of stairs in the back. Its bathtub was as large as the white-framed, quilted bed. She brought us a whiskey and a glass of Chardonnay, and within an hour we were sitting in the hotel’s dining room at a candle-lighted table by the window, watching the September sky empty of light.

Our meal was a far cry from the haggis-and-mutton fare offered elsewhere. It started with seared scallops. Then there was a warm lemon sole mousse, followed by roasted grouse with red wine sauce served on a puree of parsnips, dessert and a selection of cheeses. Rain pelted the window as we finished. We had coffee back in our room, and the storm whistled around us.

Perhaps our fears were unfounded, but picking a place to stay in Scotland can be a gamble. The Scots may be big on lodges, but we’re not. Friends had recommended the Ledgowan Lodge Hotel at the crossroads halfway between Inverness and the Isle of Skye. It was a bit out of the way, but we were curious and we stopped in for afternoon tea.

Built as a private shooting lodge in 1904 and recently reopened after 15 years, it was a place where time had stopped, haunted like Daphne du Maurier’s Manderley, its ghosts waltzing on faded green carpets, sitting in the rose-colored wingback chairs and boasting of the eight-point buck taken in the morning. We waited beneath one mounted head, were shown to the lounge and listened nervously for the clatter of our approaching tea service. We didn’t stay long.

The Summer Isles Hotel, on the other hand, was purchased and improved in the 1960s by Geraldine’s father-in-law, Robert Irvine, as a getaway for the laid-back and well-heeled, clientele that Geraldine and Mark still cater to after 15 years. It didn’t take us long to discover its charms.

Geraldine, who appears to be in her 30s, is the perfect hosteler and booster for this wild stretch of land. She believes it’s the open space that visitors find so appealing about Achiltibuie. The best guests, she says, are self-sufficient because once they arrive, there’s nothing to do except marvel at the scenery. The Summer Isles Hotel is open from Easter to early October. September, we were told, is the best time to visit, when the crowds, such as they are, have left.

“You see guests when they first arrive, and they’re a little bit twitchy from city life,” she says. “I just watch them melt and come back to themselves.”

In the morning, we took our melting slowly. On the way to breakfast (porridge, eggs, Highland sausage, black pudding, bacon, kippers, smoked haddock, scones--of course--and surprisingly, fresh strawberries), we opened a log in which the visiting anglers boasted about their exploits. (Fishing is big here.) The first entry, dated 1955, says, “Clear and calm.”

W e didn’t have such luck ourselves. Across the white-capped Badentarbat Bay and Horse Sound, Tanera Mor, the largest of the Summer Isles, drifted in and out of wintry sheets of rain. A small boat, illuminated by a single light, struggled southward against the waves. We headed north in our car, windshield wipers thumping, heater blasting, and visited the small harbor where the fishing fleet winters in the lee of Isle Ristol, then drove to Reiff where the Minch, the body of water between us and the Outer Hebrides, slams against the shoreline, and later walked on the beach at Achnahaird, a perfect crescent of sand and calm, lapping waves.

They say the weather’s good in Scotland when it’s not raining, but when it is, you’ll never find a land as covered with rainbows, and when it isn’t, all is burnished with silver--the edges of clouds, the leaves on trees, the blades of grass, the broad blue rivers. When the sun shone for us, the offshore islands turned emerald green, the beaches khaki brown, the water aquamarine.

And yes, we found ourselves marveling at the scenery, as Geraldine said we would, the wide-open nothingness of it all, the sheep, the empty roads and, late in the day, most strange of all, the Hydroponicum, just down the road from the hotel. We had seen it from a distance the day we arrived, a rambling two-story building that resembles something NASA might have built if it were building greenhouses in gale-force winds. We’d even read about it, and by its name alone, we expected something out of Monty Python, daft in that Forever English sort of way.

Only a nation that loves gardening as much as Britain would go to such an extreme. Growing plants in water back home may appeal to scientists headed for Antarctica or cannabis growers, but here on a wind-swept, coastal bluff, it is an everyday celebration. Once billed as “Robert and His Amazing Hydroponicum,” this enterprise is a part of local legend.

When Robert Irvine opened the Summer Isles Hotel, he dreamed of bringing fresh produce to the table each day, not easy for a place that had a hard time growing potatoes and rhubarb. What this area didn’t have in soil, it made up for in light. Reflecting off the western sea, the light here--rain or shine--is piercingly bright. Irvine’s dream never completely materialized, and today the Hydroponicum is more a curiosity for tourists than a real garden, but when it’s windy and raining, its glass-roofed, cavernous interior is a tropical holiday.

We took a tour and, amid banana palms, lettuce, orchids, strawberries and lemons, listened to Nick Clooney, the manager, extol the virtues of hydroponics. We had a coffee at the cafe, where a small pond with lily pads supports a hanging garden of daisies and geraniums, more lush than anything we can grow back home.

That night, we ate at the Irvines’ pub, the Summer Isles Bar, next to the hotel. It’s less expensive and less formal than the dining room. We enjoyed a light dinner of cheese, bread, fruit and quiche, and we sat at a small table beside four men drinking whiskey and lagers, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and talking seriously about tomorrow’s weather, the local fishery and the rising price of diesel.

When we stepped outside for the short walk back to our room, we were bathed in a beautiful light, a light so special that the Scots have their own word for it. More than a description of the time of day, “gloaming” takes in the Earth and the sky and everything in between. We were told that the glow comes from all the water--the ocean, the lochs, the rivers and streams--catching the light and reflecting it back to the sky. Whether it’s clear or overcast, it makes no difference; standing beneath it, we felt somehow at home.

In the morning, we drove north through the Inverpolly Nature Reserve, 20,000 acres of mountain, heath, bogs, lochs and shoreline. We had hoped for a chance to stretch our legs before heading back to Inverness.

Passing from the Coigach peninsula into Inverpolly, we found ourselves in a geological wonderland. White stone-turned rivers tumbled down steep glens. Lichen-encrusted walls snaked into dark deciduous and pine forests, bedded with ferns and heather. This was a strangely tortured terrain whose hills and hillocks, glens and braes are dwarfed by Cul Mor, a 2,700-foot haystack of a mountain that kept coming and going in the fog as we headed north, finally coming to the ocean at Enard Bay.

Later, we learned that this region was the birthplace of modern geology, where two Victorian scientists, Ben Peach and John Horne, with Sherlock Holmes-like instincts for puzzles, first posited the Theory of Superposition, of thrust faults and something called imbrication, the overlapping of tectonic plates. It is home to some of the oldest rock formations on the Earth. Regrettably we’d left our picks and hammers at home and contented ourselves with an hour instead in Achins Book Shop in Inverkirkaig, perhaps the most remote bookshop in the British Isles. We enjoyed a lunch of leek and potato soup at the shop and talked to the owner, Alex Dickson, who read to us from the works of the beloved Scottish poet Norman MacCaig.

At Dickson’s recommendation, we headed off on foot toward Fionn Loch at the base of Mt. Suilven, a 90-minute walk that climbs up through a birch and hazel grove beside the Kirkaig River to an open moor that overlooks the ocean. It was late in the season, he told us, so the midges wouldn’t be out; these gnat-like insects, a cross between a mosquito and a piranha, are the bane of the Scottish outdoors. We were grateful he was right.

From Fionn Loch, a sky-blue bowl of water, we were surrounded by the summits of the region, Mt. Suilven, Cul Mor, Cul Beag and Stac Pollaidh. In the distance we could see the Minch and the north, north Atlantic and there, lying on the silver crest of the horizon, an island bathed in light, a mere silhouette without a name, joined by hundreds of other silhouettes of silver around it, gleaming and shimmering landfalls across the sea.

It was a perfect moment: This is what continents are supposed to look like, we suddenly realized, both desolate and as beautiful as they are, dissolving from massive land forms to barren peaks, to archipelagoes and scattered islands, to the open and wild sea where the tumult of the sky matches the tumult of the Earth.

We then raced the dying light back to Inverness and, with all our film gone, we resorted to our throwaway landscape camera to photograph Loch Assynt, the mountains Quinag and Ben More Assynt, the Ardvreck Castle (built in 1597, a stronghold for the MacLeods, stormed by the Mackenzies, burned in 1737) and Inchnadamph Lodge, where Peach and Horne set up their geological camp.

Much, much later, as we walked toward our car after dinner, 10 o’clock in Inverness, we paused by the Ness River, a black rushing darkness, and in the west we saw the sky, a faint midnight blue, glowing still above the western hills.

We had read that in Celtic legend there is a place that lies out in the western seas, a land bathed in eternal light and without darkness, where no one grows old. The sun, we thought, so in love with this land, is reluctant to give up its place.

As were we.

*

Thomas Curwen is deputy editor of the Times Book Review.

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GUIDEBOOK

Weathering the Wilds of Scotland

Getting there: The nearest airport to Achiltibuie is Inverness. Connecting service to Inverness is available through London on British Airways, requiring a change of airplanes and airports (from Heathrow to Gatwick); restricted round-trip fares begin at $1,011.

We flew into Heathrow, then took the train. From LAX, nonstop service is available on British Airways, American, United, Virgin Atlantic and Air New Zealand. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $898.

From London’s Kings Cross Station, we took the Great Northeastern Railway, telephone 011-44-8457-225-225, Internet https://www.gner.co.uk, to Edinburgh, where we stayed briefly. Round-trip fares begin at about $53. We then went to Inverness on ScotRail, tel. 011-44- 8457-550-033, Internet https://www.scotrail.co.uk/travelp.htm; round-trip fares from Edinburgh begin at $32.

In Inverness, we rented a car through Hertz, tel. (800) 654-3001, Internet https://www.hertz.com, which has a desk at the train station.

Where to stay: The only hotel in Achiltibuie is the Summer Isles Hotel, Achiltibuie, Ross-shire IV26 2YG; tel. 011-44-1854- 622-282, fax 011-44-1854-622- 251, e-mail summerisleshotel@aol.com. It has 10 rooms, some with shared bath, some with private bath. There are also three suites apart from the hotel. Doubles begin about $145.

When the Summer Isles Hotel is full, the owners recommend the Culross B&B;, tel. 011-44-1854-622-426, also in Achiltibuie. Doubles are $44 for a room with a shared bath and $50 for a room with private bath.

Where to eat: We enjoyed a superb five-course meal at the hotel (phone above). The cost is about $55 a person.

The Lilypond Cafe at the Hydroponicum, local tel. 1854-622- 202, is good for snacks or lunch--soups and salads made from produce grown there. In summer, also open for dinner Thursdays through Sundays in summer; three-course meals start about $15.

For more information: The British Tourist Authority, 551 Fifth Ave., Suite 701, New York, NY 10176-0799; tel. (800) GO-2-BRITAIN (462-2748), Internet https://www.btausa.com.