Following the Sun (36 page)

“Scotland is no place for a sun worshipper,” Rolph said.

I explained that I was not a sun worshipper in the traditional sense of beaches and suntans.

“I'm headed for the stone ring at Callanish,” I said. “I've been stopping at megaliths all the way north. I was just over at Castlerigg yesterday.”

“Did you sacrifice a maiden there?” Rolph asked.

“No, but I was forced to rescue one from the Druid priests who showed up at sundown,” I said, rising to his challenge.

“That's another thing,” Rolph said, “these Scots, they're a pagan lot. Professed Christianity back in the seventh century, but haven't really been converted yet.”

“That's why I'm going there,” I said.

All this time in the Lakes the weather had been warm and summery, with day after day of full sun. Wherever I went I had dawdled along, stopping by pleasant stone bridges, hiding my bicycle and wandering up the slopes to sit on a rock and play old sad melodies on my pennywhistle. But on my way back from my last outing, a cloud rack hove into view and by the time I got to town there was a decided chill in the air. I went into a local pub to warm up.

Here there was a happy crowd of hikers and ramblers, drinking and playing darts. There was an upright fellow with a full sandy beard and a great sweep of hair, a typical Scot. He caught my accent and offered to buy me a whiskey.

“Why not,” I said. “What's a good brand?”

“Och mon. Any whiskey's good whiskey,” he said.

I feared another night of drinking, but he was a stolid sort, also a walker who, like me, was on a long trek. He was walking home to Dumfries, he said.

“It's a long walk from here, isn't it?”

“No, not really, I calculate three or four days. Save for this weather coming in. I might lie low, for while.”

Unlike me he was a careful weather watcher and told me that a huge front had come in and very heavy rains were predicted off and on over the next few days. This information caused me to reconsider—yet again—my itinerary. If I went directly northwest, to Mallaig, as I was planning, he said I would run into the teeth of the storm and have to stay in the warrens of Glasgow. The weather was drier—as it often is—up in the northeast, he said.

“Aberdeen is dry?” I asked.

“For the time being,” he said. “If you're a free man, and so you seem to be if I might say as much, go up there and then ride across the Highlands to Mallaig. Don't be going through Glasgow.”

There is a story in my family about two cousins, one of whom had been the third son of a laird in the town of Kintore, west of Aberdeen. The official version was that, as the third son, he would, under the Scottish system of primogeniture, inherit nothing, and so he and his cousin came to America in 1722 and set up a tobacco trade in Virginia. My theory, the unofficial but perhaps more accurate one, was that this third son, one Hugh Forbes-Mitchell, was either a bastard, or in essence a remittance man who was banished to the Americas for his transgressions. I had always been curious about the town and the manor house where Hugh Forbes-Mitchell had lived, and decided to change my plans drastically, forego my western route, and follow the suggestion of my walking friend.

The next morning, in a heavy downpour, I rode my bicycle to the station at Keswick and boarded a train for Edinburgh.

Fourteen

Chariots of Fire

In Edinburgh in a warm hotel not far from Princes Street I found a friendly clerk who also appeared to be fond of whiskey and was an energetic tour guide. He joined me for a dram as I tried to reconstitute my plans yet again. Unlike so many others I had met on my trip, this man understood completely why I would come to Scotland to better appreciate the sun. He was an excited talker and the more he talked, the more intoxicated he became, not with the whiskey but with the sound of his own words.

“The sun is our god here, lad,” he said in his churly Edinburgh burr. “The sun is god and that you must know. And now, let me ask you this. How often does a man see the face of God? And when you do, when you see his glorious radiance above the castle and St. Margaret's Chapel, when, as he so rarely does here in this dark city, he deigns to show his face, you must stop and pay obeisance. Now don't be going over to the Western Isles, I tell you. Go north to the Orkneys. There's a great ring to the sun there, and the people are Danish in their worship. If you want to understand what it means to love the sun, go there, where it never shines.”

I didn't ask for this speech, but of course I quite agreed with everything he said. His idea was tempting, but since I would have to go north in either case, I left by train the next day after buying a heavy wool sweater. I sat on the left side of the train watching the Scottish landscape pass through rain-streaked windows. Soon I could see beneath the heavy blanket of clouds the gray green sweep of the lower slopes of the Eastern Highlands, the choppy gray mist-shrouded expanses of moors, waterfalls, and rippling salmon runs, with the ruins of deserted crofts, and periodically, through rifts in the clouds, the indications of true wildness. I longed to be outside in the open air, rainswept or no, forging my way through the great glens, fighting hills and headwinds, and by night coming into quaint, well-lit pubs.

I debarked at Aberdeen, switched trains, and eventually made my way to the small, generally unremarkable town of Kintore. After questioning a few people I was told that a certain woman named Mary would take in boarders from time to time. Mary, it turned out, was the town nurse, and I was soon ensconced in her daughter's room among teddy bears and shelves of dolls and little framed pictures of fairies dancing in sunlit glades that did not look at all Scottish. In fact nothing in that room looked Scottish. I wondered how long Mary's daughter would stay in this little corner of the world.

If she left, she would be in keeping with tradition. Scotland has been losing population for over three hundred years and there are fewer people in the Highlands now than there were in the mid-eighteenth century.

In the evening the sky cleared and I went for a long walk in the fields beyond the town. This was lower, rolling country, not the rough-hewn Highlands I had passed on the way here, and all above me in the warming evening clouds the skylarks were singing madly and hovering high over the fields. As I walked along I heard the skirl of pipes, a sound—when heard at a distance, at least—that has always stirred some atavistic charge in my soul. My progenitors had come from this village and by rights I was supposed to be at home in the Highlands and the heather. In fact I had always felt more at ease in sunny Italy, under the blue Mediterranean skies, with hot town squares, the peal of campaniles, and tangy red wine. But then that too is terribly English. No one really likes it in the British Isles in my view, either they stay out of habit, or like my people get up and leave. And those who stay take vacations in the south whenever they can afford to.

The next day I explored the town of Kintore, visited the old manor house that was said to have been in my family until the 1930s, and then, in the churchyard, found some weathered gravestones with my family name inscribed on them. As I was leaving I happened to meet the kindly vicar, a lank, gray-haired man who walked with a cane. He began pointing out the ancient stonework on the church wall bearing, along with the early Christian angels and saints, pagan symbols of the Picts.

In the time of the Romans, all of what is now northern Scotland was under the control of loosely connected tribes of people that the Italians (that is, the Romans) called the “Picti” or painted ones. They were a violent, warlike herd of people who wore tattoos and painted themselves before going into battle and were so vicious that even the warlike Romans gave up on invasion and, in Hadrian's time, simply built a wall all the way across the island from Solway Firth to the Tyne to keep them out of Britain.

The Picts organized themselves into individual tribes and were influenced, at least in the latter period of their obscure history, by people of Celtic origin. The actual origin of the Picts is not known, and not much is known about their culture either, but there is some thought that they may be of Gaulish descent, since there was a group known as the Pictones who lived on the Bay of Biscay south of the Loire.

Contemporary with the Picts, or perhaps even their common ancestors, who lived across the North Sea in Denmark, was an active and better-documented Bronze Age culture that shared many of the characteristics of the Picts. These Danish tribes had evolved, as had the Picts, no doubt, from stone age cultures that hunted in these northern regions 10,000 to 7,000 years ago, after the retreat of the last glacier. During the Neolithic period, agriculture and cattle herding became part of their livelihood in both Denmark and Scotland, and around 1000
B.C.
the Danes began building large mound-graves, which have been the source of rich archeological troves. One of these artifacts was a bronze chariot found at Trundholm Bog in northwest Zealand, dated about 1400
B.C.

The artifact resembles a child's pull toy. It is a wheeled horse that drags behind it a golden sun chariot upon which is mounted a bronzed disk, sheeted with engraved gold. The object is large enough to have been drawn along by priests or acolytes in sacred processions during some long lost solar ritual.

Sun symbols in the form of spirals and circles and even starlike rays surrounding the horse's eyes are engraved on the flat surface of the chariot, and similar images and symbols appear on the lids of circular bronze boxes carried by women from the same time period. Bronze knives and razors, with horse heads bearing solar symbols, also occur among the artifacts found in grave sites, and horse images and horse heads with solar symbols are a common decorative motif in objects of the region. They are found throughout Norway and Sweden, engraved on flat rock surfaces, sometimes in the horse and sun chariot form, sometimes as simple solar emblems.

The archeologist Jacquetta Hawkes, who wrote a book about the relationship of human beings and the sun in prehistory, has theorized that horses were honored among Indo-European peoples not only because of their obvious usefulness, but also because they were viewed as solar beasts, the animal that pulls the sun across the sky each day. In the later engravings and artifacts of the Picts, and also among the early Scottish Christians, the solar emblem evolved, as it did elsewhere, into the wheel and halo symbol that is so often associated with Christ and Christian saints. Even here, in the rain-swept cloudy Highlands and all across cloudy northern Europe, the sun in prehistory maintained as much symbolic power as it did in more southerly climes.

From Kintore, having supplied myself with bread and cheese, a local marmalade and butter, I began the long trek across the Highlands. The journey started as an easy ride through low hills of green fields with the larks and clearing skies, alternating with misty showers, and continued in this way for ten miles or so. Then, slowly, the land began to rise and continued rising, with increasing wildness, all the way to Inverness. By late afternoon I was heaving along narrow roads that wound through some of the highest country I had been in since the Pyrénées. Although no steeper than the hills of the Yorkshire Dales, the ascents here were longer and the land was far wilder with very few crofts, only a few little greystone villages, isolated plantations of conifers, and above them the sweeping, treeless grouse moors, rising up to craggy peaks, some of which were still snow capped.

Periodically, along the shores of some of the smaller lochs, I would come to groves of birks, as the Scots call birch trees, and here I would stop to rest and feed on crackers and cheese. The land was wonderfully ominous, a huge lonely elemental block of space, with one-track roads and little traffic. It's no more than seventy miles or so from Kintore to Inverness, a distance that for a normal rider, with today's high-tech mountain climbing gears, could be covered in a day or two, but it took me four days all told to get to Inverness and the trek was made all the longer because, at Carrbridge, I turned north in a great loop through the mountains to avoid the dread A9, a main trunk road that drives up through the Highlands from Perth. I spent the night in the tiny town of Nethybridge, in a hotel packed with anglers and mounted fish on the walls by way of decoration.

One of the advantages (or perhaps one of the problems) with making a cross-country trek in this part of Scotland is that the region is best known for its whiskey makers, and on my way west I passed a few distilleries offering public tours, which, I am happy to report, I found the strength to pass up. But in the pub at Nethybridge the talk was all of single malts and fish. I was forced by the happy throng of fishermen who gathered there to sample both fish talk and whiskey late into the night. The qualities of the different whiskeys were lost on me. More comprehensible was the talk of midges and flies, and the rippling waters and the pools of the River Spey.

From Nethybridge I worked my way up and down through the mountains of this echoing, lonely country. At one point, on a bend over a steep valley, I dismounted and began shouting out to the gods of nature, daring them to call back. Which they did, in the form of my own empty voice, ringing through the hills again and again. I hadn't been in such lonely country since the deserts of the American West. In fact it was lonelier than the deserts, sad in some ways, partly no doubt because of the change of weathers, the sudden showers, the shredded mists of the peaks, alternating with a wet, clear brilliance that I hadn't experienced anywhere on this journey.

Here too, as in the American West, the native peoples had been cleared from the countryside. After the battle of Culloden in 1746, a system of Clearances effectively removed (sometimes by force) the small, independent farming crofters of the Highlands and once and for all emptied these mountains to make way for the sheep grazing of the rich lowlanders, both British and Scottish alike.