Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster

by William W. Starr

  18

  Arbroath and Beyond

  Boswell and Johnson were in only the third day of their journey out of Edinburgh when they stopped briefly at Aberbrothock (Boswell) or Aberbrothick (Johnson), now known as Arbroath. They didn’t spend the night—I would stay there for four nights—and their visit was beset with rain and confined to the ruins of the cathedral, once among the finest and most sacred sites in all of Scotland.

  “Its ruins afford ample testimony of its ancient magnificence,” wrote Johnson, who was clearly impressed with what he saw. “I should scarcely have regretted my journey had it afforded nothing more than the sight of Aberbrothick.” He wrote, “The two corner towers particularly attracted our attention. Mr. Boswell, whose inquisitiveness is seconded by great activity, scrambled in at a high window, but then found the stairs within broken, and could not reach the top.” And so, in the gathering dusk, the travelers moved on to Montrose, about which more in a moment.

  Nearly two and a half centuries later, the ruins of the Arbroath Abbey still offer a quiet reflection of a much earlier time. The abbey occupies a special place in Scotland’s national consciousness, one that Boswell and Johnson knew of. The Declaration of Arbroath—the nation’s Declaration of Independence—was written in 1320 and issued from here; it was the document that first spoke to the right of the Scottish people to freedom from English interference. Signed by forty nobles, barons, and freemen, it eloquently and courageously asked Pope John XXII to reverse his excommunication of Robert the Bruce and to recognize him as the king of an independent nation. The words still resonate: “For so long as one hundred of us remain alive, we will never in any degree be subject to the dominion of the English, since it is not for glory, riches, or honour that we do fight, but for freedom alone, which no honest man loses but with his life.” The pope agreed four years later. I’ve been particularly surprised that Boswell did not acknowledge this signal document; he wrote only a few lines about their visit. Perhaps the presence of Johnson inhibited him and he thought better of beginning their trip with a pointed reference to England that might stir Johnson’s voice.

  I walked past the tower Boswell attempted to climb in the rain and paused. I rubbed my hand over the smooth stone, leveled by weather and the years. I could imagine him, full of life, hauling himself up through one of the windows—an impossible task now—and scrambling over the stones before realizing the stairway could not be walked upon. I could imagine his disappointment as he returned to Johnson, prowling through the weedy, roofless nave (the ground is well tended today), probably using his favorite stick. I had another one of my Bozzy moments, telling him out loud that I couldn’t get up the stairs either and asking why didn’t he write me a little more about all of this remarkable site. There was no answer. But it was quiet over the grounds, so maybe he heard me.

  I spent several hours walking around the imposing abbey ruins. King William I (“The Lion”) founded the monastery here in 1178 in memory of his boyhood buddy, Thomas Becket, who had been murdered in Canterbury Cathedral only eight years earlier. The abbey fell into general disuse after the Scottish Reformation of 1560, and an engraving from 1693 shows the abbey church in ruins, not much better off than Boswell and Johnson found it in 1773 and others since them.

  There was a fine visitor center at the abbey with a computer simulation that allowed me to see how it might have looked in the thirteenth century and what happened to the structures over succeeding centuries. The attendant behind the desk assured me that, with Iona, the abbey was one of the two sites of greatest religious importance in Scotland. We fell into conversation about my Boswell and Johnson; he knew their writings well and thought that Boswell was being “circumspect” in not writing more about Arbroath. “I wish he had stayed here a little longer. He had a very good eye, you know, and he would have caught details that others missed.” He wished me well on my book and urged me to contact him with any questions about Arbroath. “I rather like the idea of an American following Dr. Johnson and Boswell; we don’t see very much of that at all.” That was encouraging, to be sure.

  Overnight the temperatures fell, and in Arbroath for the first time in several weeks I faced an overcast, chilly morning. It felt more like Scotland, to tell the truth. My bed and breakfast was a warm and inviting home just off a busy street. My hostess couldn’t have been more agreeable; when she wasn’t serving a delicious breakfast—smoked fish was always an option—she even ironed my shirts! And I did put away a few of the famous Arbroath “smokies,” the dried and smoked haddock that are so well known they are shipped from here to connoisseurs all over the world.

  Arbroath served well as my jumping-off spot for a series of visits through the area, including Montrose, where Boswell and Johnson spent an evening. Their accommodation was awful, and Boswell gleefully pointed out to Johnson that it was run by an Englishman. “We dined on haddock, veal cutlets and fowl, and I myself saw another waiter put a lump of sugar with his fingers into Dr. Johnson’s lemonade, for which he called him: ‘Rascal’!” Johnson was a lover of lemonade, to be sure. A few lines later in his Journal Boswell writes that Johnson became angry when he proposed to carry lemons to Skye so that the good doctor could enjoy his lemonade. “Sir, I do not wish to be thought that feeble man who cannot do without anything,” Johnson said. “Sir, it is very bad manners to carry provisions to any man’s house, as if he could not entertain you. To an inferior it is oppressive; to a superior it is insolent.”

  Most surprising, I think, is Johnson’s equanimity at this scene. As Boswell sees him, we have one of the most famous men in all of England, a man renowned for his sharp wit and temper, recognized wherever he goes and fawned over by many, sitting quietly in a dirty, dingy tavern where no one knows his name, And rather than behaving with outrage, umbrage, and anger as well he might in the face of blatant rudeness, shabby food, and downright unsanitary antics, Johnson merely utters “rascal” and behaves with a quietly gracious manner and surpassing calmness. There is no bellowing of temper. This is a very different side of Johnson, and it adds to the complexity of his character as it shows us again why Boswell is unrivaled as a keen observer of men. This, to me, is one of the most telling of passages on the entire journey. And finally, to no one’s loss, I suppose, the inn where the two men stayed and were so insulted has long since disappeared. No one seems to know exactly where it stood—or care, for that matter.

  This incident led to one of the more curious engagements of the trip. Boswell wrote a short note to Lord Monboddo who lived nearby, suggesting a visit and adding that Johnson “says he would go two miles out of his way” to see Monboddo. That is an odd phrase any way you look at it. Does it mean Johnson is so eager that he is willing to go two miles out of his way? Or is he saying that he cares so little that he would go no more than two miles? It could have been either given the fractious relationship that existed between Johnson and Monboddo. While Johnson wrote in his Journey that “the magnetism of his [Monboddo’s] conversation drew us out of our way,” Boswell reminds us that he was well aware the two men “did not love each other, yet I was unwilling not to visit his lordship, and was also curious to see them together.” Boswell was usually eager to push the envelope a bit.

  Lord Monboddo (James Burnett) was a judge, a landowner, and an early anthropologist who would seem to have been one of Scotland’s premier eccentrics. He was a man of learning, and possessed an “eminent legal mind,” according to the Oxford Companion to Scottish History. His neighbors thought him “peculiar.” His neighbors were right, too. He held some ideas about the evolution of human beings, preceding the more thoughtful Darwin by a century. One of the nuttier ideas, author Frank Delaney neatly summarized, held that “monkeys became men when the practice of sitting down eroded their tails.” There were some other equally bizarre concepts that other scholars and Johnson, too, thought to be … well, without thought. One of them concerned the notion that orangutans could be taught to speak. In Edinburgh a week before this Johnson had dispose
d of that idea quite cleverly: “It is as possible that the orang-outang does not speak as that he speaks. However, I shall not contest the point. I should have thought it not possible to find a Monboddo, yet he exists.” Monboddo would produce a series of volumes in which he dismissed Johnson’s grand accomplishment with his Dictionary, describing it as a compilation of “barbarous language.” That was yet to come, however, and Johnson did not know of his lordship’s disparaging thoughts when they met at Monboddo’s residence.

  Johnson had little to say of this meeting, only that “the entertainment which we received would have been a sufficient recompense for a much greater deviation.” Apparently he might have been willing to go more than two miles. It is Boswell once again who gives us the details. The visit started off badly when Monboddo greeted them and observed that “in such houses … our ancestors lived, who were better than we.” Not so, Johnson said, adding with a mild slap at Monboddo’s evolutionary theories, “We are as strong as they, and a great deal wiser.” Boswell feared an altercation, but Monboddo took no offense. Inside the conversation flowed with Boswell fueling the topics, from emigration to farming, from manners to learning. Monboddo was most hospitable, and Johnson proved agreeable. At one point Boswell found the two “agreeing like brothers,” which satisfied him; he devoted several pages in his Journal to this encounter. After a few hours Johnson and Boswell left in good spirits to continue their journey toward Aberdeen.

  I mentioned that Monboddo was regarded as “peculiar” by many who knew him. Lest anyone think that I made that up, consider the evidence provided by Elizabeth Stucley in A Hebridean Journey, where she wrote that his lordship was a believer in the good health produced from cold baths and fresh air “and his neighbors said that his hardy treatment had killed two of his children.” As for his belief in evolution she said he was certain that “every baby was born with a vestigial tail that was privily snipped off by the midwife” and that Monboddo tried to get into the cottages of his tenants whenever a baby was expected in order to confirm his theories. If so, it’s a wonder someone didn’t whack off his prying lordship’s privates.

  Having surveyed Arbroath and Montrose, polished off more Arbroath smokies than anyone should, and found an fee-agreeable bank (not the one-whose-name-shall-not-be-mentioned) to get much-needed cash, it was time for me to get out of town and head to some of the castles in the vicinity. One of them, regrettably, is associated with the most awful and embarrassing of my memories of Scotland, so I’ll delay my account of that part of the trip as long as possible.

  On a positive note I drove east into the charming twin villages of Dunkeld and Birnam, linked by a two-hundred-year-old arched bridge at the southern end of the Grampian Mountains. Dunkeld, on the east side of the River Tay, featured an array of whitewashed houses and pleasant tourist shops, though graying skies and a chilly wind had sprung up and kept me from lingering outside very long. Instead I stepped into a hotel for a bite and a cup of hot tea. The bar was empty and the windows were open, and the temperature was as chilling inside as out. I asked if the windows could be shut, and the young woman behind the bar couldn’t have looked at me with more surprise had I turned into a grasshopper before her eyes.

  “Yew want the winder shut?” she said in a strange accent I hadn’t heard before.

  “Yes, please,” I said, and she moved gracelessly to comply.

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “Carlyyyyle,” I think she replied.

  “Where is that?” I asked.

  “Do yew know where England is?”

  I asked for a pot of tea and went to the loo. Incredibly the window was open there, too, so I shut it and did my business with much haste. The place never warmed up. But to my amazement the tea was delicious and my sandwich the same. I left a bigger tip than I ever would have thought possible a half hour before.

  Birnam, the sister village, is home to Dunsinane Hill, just a wee bit to the southeast, about where Macbeth confidently declared, “I will not be afraid of death and bane. / Till Birnam Forest come to Dunsinane.” Not too many lines later in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth learns that the woods can and did move. Things go downhill quickly for the king, you may recall. I hate to ruin anyone’s lingering hope to tear a souvenir from one of those movable trees, but the famous forest doesn’t exist any more.

  Birnam was hosting an exhibition of drawings by another well-known author when I happened by. The focus of this show was Beatrix Potter, the creator of the much-loved Peter Rabbit series. The exhibit showcased her watercolors—most enchanting—and a small outdoor garden populated by charming miniature figures of her memorable characters. Potter vacationed in this area as a young woman, and it provided the inspiration for her first stories.

  19

  Pitlochry

  My base for the next few days before rejoining Boswell and Johnson was the tourist town of Pitlochry with the attractive River Tummel winding through it. The town, however, isn’t especially attractive. It is filled with stores catering to visitors, and unless you drive well off the main road into the residential area, you would have no idea that Pitlochry has any permanent population.

  The town advertises itself as the “Gateway to the Highlands” and even if it isn’t quite that it was good enough for my needs. I stayed just off the very busy main road in a large, rambling guest house built in 1881 and hosted by an easy-going, quick-to-laugh Irishman named Jim. Jim’s breakfasts were delightful: fresh juice (I kept looking for the orange trees in the backyard), tasty sausage, well-cooked eggs, and opera. The last was a pleasant surprise: a background of Mozart, Bellini, Rossini, and Verdi, most of which I could identify, to Jim’s surprise. “You Yanks think you know a bit of opera, eh?” he said with a challenge one morning. Moments later Jim walked out of his kitchen, chef’s hat in place, singing at full voice an unfamiliar Irish song. I conceded.

  Before succumbing to yet another castle, I drove three miles into the Grampian Mountains to the Pass of Killiecrankie, another memorable battle site. It is spectacularly situated in a steep, heavily wooded gorge through which runs the fast-moving River Garry. The explorer Thomas Pennant described it as “a scene of horrible grandeur.” It’s part of a natural corridor linking the Scottish Highlands and the Lowlands, therefore a likely place for a battle. The one here took place on July 27, 1689, and if you guessed that it somehow involved the Jacobites you would be correct.

  In fact the first of the Jacobite rebellions occurred at this time, shortly after the Stuart King James VI (of Scotland) and II (of England) was chased off the throne and fled to France. The rebellious clans were led by John Graham of Claverhouse, viscount Dundee, while the government opposition—mostly Lowland Scots—was led by another Scot, the Highlander General Hugh Mackay. His army was making its way through the narrow pass headed to Jacobite-held Blair Castle when Dundee’s soldiers attacked; they charged forward into Mackay’s line. Swords swung, heads rolled, and the blood flowed. Within a matter of minutes the outcome was decided: Mackay’s men could not advance and were pinned down, and they fled in a rout. Mackay joined them, leaving behind nearly two thousand men dead, wounded, or captured—nearly half of his army. Dundee was mortally wounded, however, and the attempts by others to follow up the victory failed, as, ultimately, did the Jacobite cause.

  There is an amazing story about one moment in the battle that has become a part of the lore of Killiecrankie. It has to do with one of the government’s soldiers, one Donald MacBean. During his retreat MacBean found himself on a rocky ledge with his enemy in hot pursuit and seemingly only one avenue of escape: jumping hundreds of feet below into the River Garry. Instead MacBean made a prodigious and still-hard-to-believe eighteen-foot leap across the gorge to the rocks on the other side. MacBean left a colorful memoir in 1728 that detailed his narrow escape. Visitors to Killiecrankie can see the site of this dramatic incident as they walk over the area.

  So much for battles, though; it was time for more castles. First up: Glamis, a castle ass
ociated with royalty since 1034 when King Malcolm II was wounded and brought here to die. Not a good omen, perhaps, but things worked out fine for the king. Work on the castle as it survives today—and it is quite handsome inside—was begun in 1400; it has prospered over the years because of its royal associations. Queen Elizabeth’s mother, the Queen Mum, was born here, and so was Princess Margaret.

  Not too far away is Menzies Castle, built in the sixteenth century and occupied until 1918. Its condition had declined precipitously until Clan Menzies acquired the dilapidated structure in 1972 and began a restoration, which is still under way. The restorers have done a splendid job, leaving the interior mostly empty and using occasional pieces of period furniture to suggest how the rooms might have looked. One of them is known as “Prince Charlie’s Room” because the Young Pretender slept there in February 1746 when he was retreating with his army toward Inverness. There is also a death mask of Charlie on the wall, not at all grisly. The castle seemed truly medieval, and the tour was very instructive and appealing.

  Finally, because I was so close to the town of Kirriemuir I couldn’t resist seeing the home of another well-known Scottish writer: J. M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan. It took a bit of wandering around the small town before I located the unpretentious two-story cottage where he was born in 1860. Barrie recounted in a memoir written in 1896 that “On the day I was born we bought six hair-bottomed chairs, and in our little house it was an event.” Presumably so was his birth, although Barrie was one of ten children, so perhaps it really wasn’t as big a deal as getting the chairs after all. Two of those chairs survive and are still in the house. Outside was a small wash house with a communal pump where the young Barrie and his friends acted out his first play, written when he was seven. There was also an exhibit showcasing costumes and the program from the first production of Peter Pan in London in 1904. Barrie left Kirriemuir at the age of eight to attend Glasgow Academy; he died in 1937 at the age of seventy-seven.