A blog about a hike across Scotland (and possibly other things)

Month: May 2014 (Page 3 of 3)

Day 2, part 1

It was raining when I woke up, which was several hours before I got up. I had breakfast, the cooked-in-the-pouch porridge and coffee, with extra made for the thermos (which just made the cut at send-back time).

But before breakfast: three aspirin.

I managed to eat without spilling, the bottom half of my body in the sleeping bag, and then dress and pack everything inside the tent. Everything but the tent, of course. By the time it was time to pack it, the rain had stopped.

There was a “bothy” at this spot. A bothy is an old building that has been repurposed as accommodation for hikers. It is usually an old stone homestead; sometimes it is a former “beya,” or place for animals.

Most bothies (I am told) have room for six or eight comfortably, but in bad weather hold 16 or 18. I have know idea how many people had stayed in this one. When I arrived at the camping area (which a man named Mark, who I walked the last hour with, described as “about the size of a baseball pitch”) I went by the bothy to take a look. One man was eating and another one was talking to him. Across the pitch 14 tents were pitched.

This was all at the head of a “sea loch,” which is to say a long bay in from the sound. The water was the ocean; sea weed was rafted up on the stony beach. Just before I disappeared into my tent the previous night a man had walked up from the mudflats and paused in front of me. I said good evening and he said something, I forget what.

 

The sea loch

The sea loch

In a wee bit of conversation it emerged that he was out with his son, who worked in one of the Gulf States and was here on his first Challenge. (Whose idea it was is a matter of dispute).

The man’s name was Alan Mitchell and his son was Colin.   Alan was on his fifth crossing, but his wife, who was not in attendance, had done 10. And only one with Alan, which struck me as interesting.   I’m sure I said something about being heavily laden.

He had a pleasant face and blue eyes–a surprising number of blue eyes here–and white hair and a short beard. An outdoorsman he looked (and he is).  We said good night.  As I was heading out in the morning–only three tents were still up–I passed by the bothy.  He was standing in the door.

“You see you’re not the last,” he said.

I headed off up the glen (which is the name for a river valley) and soon enough they caught up with me. That was the beginning of a day and a half with Alan and Colin.

 

“Perhaps we may now to begin.”

After a full Scottish breakfast–that’s bacon and sausage (I passed on the kippers) I headed out to mail a pair of shoes, two books and various outakes to the hotel in Montrose where the celebratory dinner takes place when it’s all over. An hour before the ferry departure people were already streaming to the dock with their stylishly light packs.

With a water bottle filled, mine felt as heavy as ever.  But no matter.

Mallaig is a town of stone buildings, steel boats and 800 people. I couldn’t find much about it in the guide book, but a man on the train said that it was once the center of a herring fishery that was valuable enough to extend the railroad to it. Mallaig is at the top of a peninsula; about 20 miles outside it the train stopped at a building that announced itself, on a sign, as the western-most train station in Britain.

The herring schools disappeared in the 1950s, my informant said. Mallaig has fishing boats in its harbor, but probably as many bed-and-breakfasts too.

Here is Mallaig, day and night.

 

Mallaig Harbor, low tide

Mallaig Harbor, low tide

 

. . . and at night.

. . . and at night.

It was sunny when we departed at 10.15 for the one-hour trip to Inverie, a village on another peninsula, called Knoydart. Roger Hoyle, my hiking mentor, had e-mailed two couples he knew were leaving from Mallaig and asked them to look for me on the ferry. Somehow they guessed right. Was it the size of the pack?

It’s a convivial group, heavily accented.

We all gathered at The Old Forge, the local pub, for an exiting pint. This is apparently part of the tradition. Drinking our ales–it was almost noon–out in the sun, I met Graham and Stephen, two Englishmen, and a man with many earrings whose name I missed. The conversation got around to Knoydart, which is a vast, nearly roadless area with almost no inhabitants. They were driven off in the 18th and 19th centuries in what is known as “the Clearances,” a Scottish trail of tears.

Virtually all the land was owned by aristocrats, many absent, who decided at some point the land was more productive with sheep on it than people. So they were forced to leave, in some cases (according to Graham) with their villages burned and the occupants herded to the coast, where they were put on ships for Canada and other places. There was great mortality. I thought this sort of thing only happened in Ireland, but apparently not.

Graham told the story of the Seven Men of Knoydart who, after returning from war decided to eke out a living in Inverie gathering seaweed. They were stopped by the owner of the estate and arrested. It became a cause celebre.

A few dozen yards down the lane on the village hall is a plaque commemorating the 10-year anniversary of the inhabitants buying the town. A little farther along is a beehive monument in stone to the seven men. In Gaelic and English.

Graham also told the story of an English Duke who signed up all his eligible male tenants for military service in one of the wars. Someone asked whether he went.

“Damn, I don’t think I can. I’ve got all these lobsters in the fridge,” Graham said, imagining the answer.

“And I have all these champagne lunches on the calendar,” said the man with the earrings.

We drained our glasses and headed out.

Soon we were out of town on a ridge, yellowish green and striped with rivulets tumbling down to the River Inverie. There were no trees and the clouds nipped the tops of the highest peaks. Behind us was the ocean, although not the open ocean, just one of many sounds with many islands beyond.

A couple of hours in the two-track trail came around a hill and revealed a huge beehive monument topped with a cross on the top of a hill. It looked to me like it might be a church, possibly the remains of a monastery or something.

The monument

The monument

At the foot of it was Stephen, who was waiting for Graham, who was scrambling up the hill around boulders and outcrops to see what it was.

“He thinks it’s a monument to the people sent off in the Clearances,” Stephen said.

Of course I took off my pack–didn’t need much of an excuse–and scrambled up to see for myself. I met Graham as he was coming down. It wasn’t a monument to the victims of the Clearances. It was the monument to an aristocrat, put up in the 1930s, a little late for that outrage, but probably not others.  Graham seemed to have heard of him.

“It’s worth seeing,” he said. “A son put it up for his father, thanking him and saying how great he was. And he was a perfect bastard.”

Hard to know.  I’ve never heard of the guy.  But you can be sure that his son didn’t carry the stones up the knoll himself.

By the time I got down, taking the less-steep opposite side, Graham and Stephen had gone and the road was empty.

 

A whole lotta stuff

I won’t give you all the bloody details (you see, it’s already sticking) but let’s just say there has been a lot of debate about what to take.

Some of the decisions were made back home.  Two pairs of pants, one tee shirt, no down vest, etc.  No camera except the iPhone’s.  But 4.5 pounds of electronics.  A Jetboil stove.  Etc.

But it adds up.

Last night it looked like this:

 

The stuff.

The stuff.

But that didn’t even include the food:

 

The food.

The food.

(This is a delivery to the hotel in Glasgow.  The proprietor, or I took him as that, through a window saw me taking the picture and asked what I was doing.  I explained the joke.  He thought I was from the health department.)

When I hefted it to go upstairs from my basement room this morning it seemed awfully heavy.  So I took out the binoculars, a symbolic offering to the gods of self-denial.  It seemed a bit lighter.

On the train station there were herds of gray-haired men and women with packs two-thirds my size.

 

On the train.

On the train.

On the train I sat next to a woman named Emma who was doing her fourth crossing.  Her “rucksack” was about 30 pounds.  Mine was that heavy in February.  A few hours into the five-hour trip I heard a man a couple seats ahead say his rucksack was “8.8 kilos.”  That’s less than 20 pounds.

I felt like saying, “Yeah, buddy, and I’m from America and mine’s 40 pounds.  And we don’t need no six weeks off in the summer either.”

It’s clear there’s some serious competitive minimalism going on here.

Is this one of the moral challenges?

Suffice it to say, when I got to Mallaig and picked up my actual food (four day’s worth, freeze-dried, sent from the supplier in London to the B&B) I shed the ceramic water filter (Emma said the water off the hills is good enough to drink), the sunglasses (there won’t be enough sun), and a few other items, one of which is a AAA battery.  I’m mailing them to the  terminus tomorrow morning before I leave.

It’s still heavy, but probably not 40 pounds.  I’ll carry it with pride and shame.  As Marley said, “We drag the chains we forged in life.”

 

 

Back to the future

I have Scottish ancestors.  This is no surprise; so do at least 30 million Americans.

Most are Scots-Irish, descended from people who emigrated from Western Scotland, especially the Lowlands, to Northern Ireland, after the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 when James VI of Scotland became James I of England, ruling both nations.  From Ireland many immigrated to America, especially Pennsylvania and Appalachia as far south as the Carolinas.  My sister Ellen recently spat in a tube and had her genome typed by ancestry.com.  It showed 29 percent of her ancestry, and mine, from Great Britain.  (And 2 percent from the Caucasus!)

As it turns out, I have an ancestor who was a Scots martyr, John Brown of Priesthill, Ayrshire, in the Lowlands.  He was a Covenanter, a Presbyterian who subscribed to two agreements (one drawn up in 1638, the other in 1643) resisting the establishment of the Episcopal church in Scotland.  They were persecuted mightily, as described in a book, “Matthew Brown, Ancestry and Descendants” (Brooklyn, N.Y.:  1900):

“Hunted down like wild beasts, tortured, imprisoned by the hundreds, hanged by the scores, exposed at one time to the license of the English soldiers, abandoned at another time to the mercy of bands of marauders from the highlands, they still stood at bay in a mood so savage that the boldest and mightiest oppressor could not but dread the audacity of their despair.”

” .  .  .  the audacity of their despair.”  This is different from “the audacity of hope.”  Interestingly, however, the sentence means pretty much the same thing with one substituted for the other.

John Brown was a pack-horse carrier who didn’t take part in Covenanter uprisings, according to the book.  Nevertheless, his martyrdom had been foretold.  At his wedding in 1682, the minister took his wife, Isabel, aside and told her:  “You have got a good husband, value him highly; keep linen for a winding sheet beside you .  .  .  He follows his Lord too fully to be passed over by those who drive the chariot of persecution so furiously over the length and breadth of poor, bleeding Scotland.”  (How this affected the honeymoon isn’t recorded).

On May 1, 1685, a band of soldiers led by John Graham of Claverhouse, a Scots nobleman, officer in the English  army and notorious enforcer, came to John Brown’s house.  Brown was asked why he didn’t attend the English church and if he would pray for the king.  His answers did not satisfy.  He knelt, prayed for his soul and then said goodbye to his pregnant wife and two children.  Graham ordered the soldiers to shoot him.  They refused, so he pulled out his pistol and did it himself.

“Turning to the newly-made widow he asked her what she then thought of her husband.  ‘I always thought much of him, but now far more than ever,’ was her brave reply.”

Isabel moved with her children to Ireland and married again.  Some of her descendants came to America.

I am descended from Jean Brown (b. 1770 in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania), Isabel and John’s great-granddaughter.  Curiously, this line of descent is through my mother, not my father.  (Consanguinity?  Does that explain anything?) There’s a monument to Brown’s martyrdom at his grave on a moor outside Priesthill.  A local man took my parents to it years ago when they visited Scotland.

In September, Scots will vote whether to separate from the United Kingdom and become a sovereign nation.  I guess this means I’m in favor of Scottish independence.

 

If weather were a poker hand . . .

I’d have a flush.

 

The town I leave from on Friday.

The town I leave from on Friday.

At the Vodafone store today, where I bought various SIM cards, plug adapters and data plans, the tech guru Callum (who played “American football” in college), told me this:

image

 

“Do you know how to forecast the weather in Scotland?  If it’s raining it’s going to rain harder.  If it’s not raining it’s about to rain.”

 

A slight detour

While out today simultaneously gaining weight for my pack while shedding pounds, I stopped in the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, a couple blocks down the hill toward the River Clyde from my hotel.  As luck would have it, the librarian and archivist, Carol Parry, was at the reception desk when I arrived.  She kindly agreed to give me a tour.

Founded in 1599 by a man who had previously been surgeon to the King of France, it is both a licensing body and a professional society.  Its presidency alternates between surgeons and non-surgeons (which is to say, physicians).  In England there are separate royal societies for the two professions.

Scotland has been a distinguished center of medical research education for centuries.  It is, among other things, the place where many American Jews came when quotas kept them out of American medical schools.  The Royal College is full of history.

Joseph Lister (who went to University College London because as a Quaker he was denied entrance to Oxford or Cambridge) did his studies of the antimicrobial properties of carbolic acid at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary.  This ushered in antiseptic surgery.  There’s a meeting room named for him that includes a fireplace and heavily scarred table scavenged from his ward before it was torn down.  The papers of Ronald Ross, who described the connection between mosquitoes and malaria and won a Nobel Prize, are on display at the moment.  The portraits on the walls include David Livingstone of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume . . . ” fame, and Graham Teasdale, the neurosurgeon who co-designed the Glasgow Coma Scale.

One of the more interesting things, however, has nothing to do with medicine.

It is a volume of the “double elephant” folio of Audubon’s “Birds of America.”  The full set consists of four volumes; the college has two, bought for 40 guineas in 1841.  These books were rare when they were published from 1827 to 1838.  Most of the ones that survived have been cut up to for the sale of their prints.

 

Carol Parry and the double Audubon folio

Carol Parry and the double Audubon folio

Ms. Parry unhooded the display case to reveal an owl and the never-ending final moment of its squirrel prey.  The colors are as saturated as they were when the page was pulled off the plate.  Every few months she turns a page.

image

Off the reception area is a grimmer picture.

“Stretcher Bearers” is a dark painting that depicts helmeted men, many of them medical students. carrying casualties of the German bombing of Clydebank, a town up the river from Glasgow.  In the blitz of March 13 and 14, 1941, 528 people were killed and shipyards, armament plants and a Singer sewing machine factory were destroyed.

"Stretcher Bearers"

“Stretcher Bearers”

 

 

 

 

A few statistics

There are 322 people enrolled in The Great Outdoors  Challenge (hereafter TGOC).  The demographics skews sharply to the retired and near-retired by the look of the list.  There are only eight walkers under 30, but 32 over 70, three over 80 and one 91-year-old man who will be making his 20th “crossing,” as it’s called.

There are 142 solo walkers, one of them me.  I learned of the hike a couple of weeks before the application deadline and couldn’t round up someone else to come along.  But my advisor Roger Hoyle, soon to be an eight-time “Challenger,” assures me I’ll meet lots of people along the way.  I’m sure he’s right.  Forty-six people are starting from Mallaig, where I will, and 86 will end up at St. Cyrus, where I hope I will also.

There are 42 couples, four father/son  teams, one father/daughter team, one mother/father/son team, and a pair of brothers.

Eight countries besides the United Kingdom are represented:  the Netherlands (16), the United States (10),  Austria (2), France (2), Germany (2) , Denmark (1), Oman (1) and Nigeria (1).

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