by Iain Banks
Ken grins. ‘Welcome to the land of heederum-hawderum.’
The first part of the road from Armadale to the main route between Kyle and Portree, Skye’s capital, is either single track or that awkward one-and-a-half-lane size; the 911 is great on these roads mainly because it’s so small. It isn’t furiously fast – the M5 makes it feel slow – but it’s quick enough, and it’s wieldy. Being based on so old a design – the body shell is much as it was when originally designed in 1964 – the 911 is short, and narrow.
It’s the lack of width that pays off on Highland and Island roads; you can squeeze past oncoming vehicles on the one-and-a-half-lane bits without worrying overmuch about scraping or losing bits of bodywork, take blind bends that little bit quicker knowing that even encountering an oncoming truck shouldn’t mean an emergency stop because you’ll have the room to play with, and any manoeuvres within passing places are a lot easier. The four-wheel drive makes putting one or two wheels off-tarmac in a passing place a much less nervy experience too, and sometimes you can get round another car between passing places – it’s almost like the 911 is drawing itself in and holding its breath for you.
The upper reaches of the A851 are newly widened but still curvy; bliss in the 911, especially in this weather. The main road is the A87 and it’s a peach too; not too heavily trafficked and basically a glorious, gratuitous succession of gob-smacking views over hill and sea, huge straights, long, spooling curves, torque-hungry gradients and just enough slow bits through villages to trickle through while allowing one’s passengers a better look at the view.
As we drive, it occurs to me that Skye, bridge or no bridge, still feels like an island. I look at the road, then at the relatively modest speed we’re doing and think that on exactly the same road on the mainland, I’d probably be going faster. I’ve noticed this before; islands slow you down. I think it’s something to do with knowing that, on an island, nowhere’s too far away from where you are now, so what’s the rush? Maybe, also, it’s because by their nature islands are usually your destination on a holiday, and so you’re not in any hurry to get anywhere else.
Having said that, we go straight through Broadford – Skye’s second town after Portree – even though it’s looking fairly groovy these days. Cool-looking craft shops and the like will have to wait for another visit; we are men on a mission and there’s research to be done. At Sligachan we head west for Carbost, and the Talisker distillery. The hills rise rotundly all around, with the great jagged forest of peaks that is the Black Cuillins rearing over everything a few miles to the south. The Cuillins are probably the most intense piece of large-scale verticality in Britain; a dark snaggle-ridged near-circle of rearing fractured geography bursting out of land and sea like a vast staggered series of frozen rock explosions.
Basking, I think, is the only word for Carbost on a day like this. The white of the distillery’s walls reflects the sunlight like a ship’s sail against the blue of sky and loch. We do the tour. Talisker should really be called Carbost because that’s the name of the village; Talisker Bay lies over the hill five miles away. But what the hey. They use Black Isle barley here, malted at Glen Ord. There’s a fair amount of peatiness (25 p.p.m. for those of you who were paying far too much attention back in Chapter 3; five times more than is in Glen Ord itself, though a lot less than the big peaty bruisers of Islay), however the water used is very peaty too, and it’s reckoned this contributes to a marked degree of peatiness in the nose. The use of traditional outdoor worm tubs rather than the more modern column condensers sited inside next to the stills is reckoned to produce a more flavoursome result.
Talisker has produced whisky since 1831, with a break for World War Two and some rebuilding after a fire in 1960 (somebody left the access door on a still open, the low wines overflowed and ignited on the coal fire underneath. But at least nobody was taking flash photos at the same time). In the very old days the local laird wouldn’t allow a pier to be built, so the barrels had to be floated out to boats waiting in the loch – a spirit of selfish, short-sighted obstructionism that many modern Highland landowners seem only too happy to continue.
The weather is the threat to this year’s production. Walking over the bridge in the car park we cross the stream that feeds the distillery, and it’s barely a trickle down a channel obviously designed to take a flood; the dry winter and warm spring mean the hills above the distillery are nearly dry.
Talisker is a prodigious whisky, and one of the few that – I’ve heard it closely argued – never benefits from being watered down. It’s like the Black Cuillin range itself; unique, fiercely intrusive, savagely spectacular, not for the faint-hearted but wildly rewarding for those prepared to tackle it. Representing the Islands in Diageo’s Classic Malts range has given it some of the wider recognition it deserves, though you can imagine that some people, just taking a casual tasting, might find its uncompromising power off-putting. It’s another Drambuie/Jacobite link, as it was Talisker, unsurprisingly, which was used in the original home-made version of the liqueur, available in the Broadford Hotel.
A rich orangey-red colour, Talisker exudes a lazy pungent, smoky peatiness backed up by a sudden landslide of flavours which wouldn’t be out of place in a curry; spicy, peppery, nutty, salty, fruity, sweet and sour. Rolling in some time after this onslaught, the finish is like a blast of smoked seaweed wrapped around crushed peppercorns. Inhaled. A bit of a tube-clearer.
It’s usually watered down to the unusual strength of 45.8 abv (and some caramel colouring is added), however the bottle I buy is a 60 per cent abv and only available at the distillery (it’s hard for me to resist exclusives like this). This is one of the first bottles we open when we start our next round of tasting back in Fife, and it’s the first to be finished. Talisker is the favourite whisky of a quite amazing number of people and I completely understand why; there really are few better.
We head for Portree by the B885, a GWR that leads over the hills from Bracadale, rippling thinly over the peat and diving through the forest before curving round and down into the town.
‘And I’ll have the Cuillin Skink too; never could resist a pun, and you rarely see them on a menu.’
The waiter looks blank. ‘Sorry?’
‘Cullen Skink,’ I say, pointing at the menu. ‘It says “Cuillin Skink” here. Just saying I appreciate the joke.’
‘Umm,’ the guy says, frowning, ‘it’s not a joke, actually, sir. That is how it’s spelled.’
‘No it isn’t. There’s no “I” in Cullen Skink.’
The waiter looks at the menu. ‘No, it’s Cuillin Skink.’
‘I know that’s what it says there,’ I tell him patiently, ‘but the dish is pronounced “Kullin Skink”, not “Coolin Skink”, and there’s no “i” in it. Look, it’s an old East Coast dish and I know how it’s spelled. My aunt Peg makes the best Cullen Skink I’ve ever tasted and I’ve seen it on dozens of different menus always spelled the same way. Trust me; I’m a Fifer.’ (I confess that’s a line I’ve long wanted to use.)
‘Okay, sir,’ the waiter says, but I can tell he’s not convinced. ‘And will you be having any wine with your dinner?’
I just smile. ‘Yes, please …’
We’re in the Cuillin Hills Hotel, Portree. This is a very pleasant hotel with beautifully kept gardens, good food, and – aside from those of the waiting staff on matters of pronunciation – brilliant views. We sit outside at a table on the lawn after dinner, drinking Talisker and soaking up the view of the broad bay and the moored boats, watching the lights of the town coming on while the dark distant mass of the Cuillins stands silhouetted against the golden-blue glow of the southern sky.
The Cuillins are, as we sit here and look at them, for sale. John MacLeod, the MacLeod of MacLeod, the 29th chieftain of the clan and the gent who owns the MacLeod ancestral home of Dunvegan Castle and large tracts of land on the island, including the Cuillins, has put the mountains up for sale. Ten million quid and they’re yours. No takers yet, and
obviously what the vast majority of people locally and with any interest in the island would like would be for the Scottish National Trust or a similar body to buy them. But that’s a hell of a lot of money for something you can’t actually do anything with (you suspect that Westminster would have a hard time forcing Edinburgh to let somebody start, say, a quarry).
We shall see. These are interesting and progressive times in Scottish land ownership. Thanks to the fact we have our own Parliament again, the last feudal country in Europe is finally showing signs of joining, well, the nineteenth century; the people who live on and make their living from the land are finally being given the right to own it. This has to be a good idea. Even if you were undecided about the merits of this sort of change you could tell it’s a good thing just by the sort of people who’re vehemently opposed to it: Peter de Savary, Mohammed al Fayed and most of the big private land owners.
It’s still only late April, and it gets cold after the sun goes down, leaving the Cuillins stark against the glow, and black as their name, but it’s worth staying for the midge-free view and nipping in to get jackets and gloves.
Another belly-banger of a breakfast, then we head north into serious scenery under a glorious blue sky edged with faint streaks of high cloud to the north. We’re heading home today but there’s plenty of time for some fun driving first. The A885 heads up the Trotternish Peninsula, threading the long wavy step of land between the sea cliffs to the east and the chaotically sundered escarpment complex of towers, tilted ridges, pinnacles, cliffs and ravines rising to the west.
Descending fractionally after the first gentle ascent out of Portree, the view opens out to display the great spearhead rock that is the Old Man of Store standing precariously proud of the broken wave of rock behind, all of it poised over a slope of brindled forest and the twinned lochs Fada and Leathan. The sea cliffs to our right are best seen from the air or sea; a monumental fringe of ragged verticals and extreme slopes, riven with boulder-jumbled clefts, dotted with natural arches, pocked with caves and studded with rocks and a very few tiny islands. The best place to see the cliffs from land is at the car park where the short stream from Loch Mealt plunges over the rim rock towards the sea. The only slightly fancifully named Kilt Rock to the north displays its pleats of Middle Jurassic sedimentary rock to the wide expanse of breeze-ruffled sea leading to the hills of Wester Ross.
At Brogaig a perfect prince among GWRs heads due west out of that part of the long, straggled settlement that is Staffin and darts straight towards the cliffs of the Quiraing, curling its way across the rising slope of moor past rock formations with names like The Table, The Needle and The Prison before throwing itself upwards into the chaos of rock like a salmon leaping a torrent, zig-zagging up the broken face of the tumbled cliffs with a briefly tortuous Alpinicity only outshone by the Bealach-na Bo road to Applecross. Even that famous road struggles to match the sheer spectacle at the summit pass here; the view falls away in green folds of grass intagliated with burns and long lightning-path fissures in the peat, punctuated by unkiltered broken castles of rock and blue roundels of lochs before pausing at the dotted houses near the main road and then reaching out to the shining pale void of distant sea and the hazy frame of mainland mountains far beyond.
Blimey, I love this road and this view. The only time I had to use the Skye Bridge was when I was giving Dave a lift to the court in Portree one winter to renew the pub’s license. The ferries don’t run then, so I’d had no choice about using the bridge. It did mean that while McCartney went besuited to renew the Clachan’s licence, I got to drive up here in the Drambuie 911 beneath a fine clear winter’s sky, encountering drifts and streaks of snow towards the summit and a breath-sucking, eye-wateringly cold north-easterly wind when I got out at the top to take in the view. Probably shirt-sleeves wasn’t that sensible either, even for me.
The time I saw the Pass of the Cattle at its best was, oddly enough, when there was a lot of cloud. I’d come to Dornie for a couple of days, arriving in the late evening. I’d persuaded Dave we should head as quickly as possible for Applecross and try to catch the sunset, but then – as we drove out of Ken’s old stamping ground of Lochcarron – the cloud started to thicken to the west above us, and by the time we were swinging up the long loops of the road to the Bealach-na Bo we were inside the cloud, a grey mist everywhere, lights on and visibility down to under a hundred yards. For all its mountains, Scotland is a low country by Alpine standards, and when you hit cloud like this it’s usually an utterly forlorn hope that you’ll ever come out above it again into sunlight, but we reckoned there was just a chance, by the time we got to the long flat summit, that we’d strike lucky.
We cut back into the light on the last hairpin, rising above a sea of cloud that stretched towards the west and the half-set sun. Submerged beneath the horizon-wide expanse of white, almost all of Skye was invisible. Only the Cuillins rose above the ridged ocean of mists like a fabulous serrate island of darkness, stark, severe and serene.
‘Your dad used to walk all this way?’ We were heading south now, having zapped up to the ancient MacLeod stronghold of Dunvegan castle on Skye’s north-west coast. MacLeod country indeed; the two hills known as MacLeod’s tables rose like decapitated miniature Fujis to our left. We were close to Roag, where Ken’s father, Lachlan, had been brought up, looking for the house Ken remembered visiting a couple of times. We’d passed the building where Ken’s dad had gone to school some way back and Ken reckoned there was still a bit to go to the house.
‘Aye,’ Ken said, grinning. ‘In bare feet. And carrying a turnip for his lunch.’
‘Ah,’ I said, laughing. ‘An we used to live in shoebox in’t middle o’ road an eat hot gravel, but tell that to young folk today and do they believe you?’
Ken shook his head. ‘No, seriously.’
‘You’re kidding,’ I said, glancing at Ken to see whether he was or not. ‘He really didn’t have any shoes?’
‘Shoes were for Sunday, for church.’
‘Dear God. What happened in the winter?’
‘It got colder,’ Ken said, straight faced.
‘And a fucking turnip?’ I couldn’t help laughing. ‘For lunch? Come on, that’s got to be a joke, Ken.’
‘It wasn’t his own lunch,’ Ken explained patiently. ‘It was for the pot. All the pupils brought something to make a stew and he usually contributed a turnip.’ He shrugged.
I shook my head. ‘Good grief.’ I thought I’d had it tough because we had slates and chalk for the first year at North Queensferry Primary School, back in 1959 (slates and chalk and a wee sponge, for clearing the slate. If you were good you were allowed a damp sponge because you could be trusted not to throw it at anybody. My sponge, I am ashamed to say, was dry after day one).
We find the house where Ken’s dad lived when he was a boy; Ken takes a photo and we continue south along the A863 – Talisker distillery and Carbost visible across the loch – then retrace our route of yesterday along the grandly scenic coastal road, heading on to the turn-off for the narrow, twisty roller-coaster of a single-track road down to the small but perfectly formed ferry at Kylerhea.
The good ship Glenachulish is a micro car ferry; you could squeeze maybe half a dozen vehicles onto it. If two of them were motor bikes. It used to be the Ballachulish ferry until 1975 when the bridge was opened there. When it glides up to the slipway at Kylerhea the two guys operating it use leg power to turn the whole car deck round to face the right way so the cars can exit ahead; we clatter on along with one other vehicle. There’s a dog that seems to be part of the crew too. It looks a lot like one of those slightly mad black-and-white collies that hides by farm gateways in the outer isles and jumps out to chase unsuspecting tourists and their cars, but proves friendly, before exhausting itself being patted and going for a lie down in the shade of the loading ramp. It barely gets its head down when we bump gently against the slipway on the far side and its time for the hound to resume its duties, carefully watching the
unloading and loading.
The Kyle here is very narrow indeed and the tide can surge through like a broad rushing river. My dad has tales of his old Admiralty boat, the Mandarin, making full speed ahead in the straits but nevertheless – the timing not being quite right and the ship encountering the still increasing force of the tide – finding herself going slowly backwards.
In the old days they swam their cattle over here before setting off on the long journey south via the droving roads to the cattle markets in Falkirk. You imagine they paid close attention to the state of the tide.
As the ferry ties up and nestles closer to the slipway, I watch the mooring rope as it straightens, tightening, quivering briefly with tension that wrings the water from it, drops spotting the ramp’s pale slope of concrete.
From Glen Elg – ignoring the GWR round the coast to Arnisdale and Corran, and the route to the fine broch in Gleann Beag – the road twists and turns energetically up to the Bealach Ratagan – Ratagan Pass – to reveal one of the finest views in Scotland: Loch Duich and the Five Sisters of Kintail. As if hypnotised with the scenery, the road goes a bit mad after this, looping and writhing and swooping through the forest in a series of wild curves and heroically pitched gradients down towards the loch and the main road at Shiel Bridge. It’s a tight, constrained wee drive; fun but a bit slow (it’s more challenging as a hill climb going the opposite direction). The A87 from Shiel Bridge to Invergarry on the other hand is, as mentioned in Chapter 7, just superb.
It’s the usual route after that on the way south to South and then North Queensferry, via Spean Bridge and Dalwhinnie, then the Trinafour cut-off and – appropriately, given that we’ve been to Ken’s nominal ancestral home at Dunvegan this morning – Castle Menzies near Weem, which is mine. That is, if you believe at all in all this clan stuff.
On the A86, passing the Fersit sign, I point out where the P-reg 911 came to grief. No, let’s be honest; where I brought it to grief.
