Ten Years of Travel in Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales (200 pages) is not a travel guide, although you might get some ideas of what you would want to see on your own trips--like the grand castles at Edinburgh or Stirling in Scotland, the small English border church at Kilpeck with its Sheela na Gig, or the famous Llanfair PG on the Isle of Anglesey in Wales. You might also find some things you want to avoid, such as the Prince of Wales Hotel in Caernarfon or a particular pugilist’s B&B in Dingle, Ireland.
Ten Years of Travel tells about the Scourge of Highlands, the chocolate demanding fox of East Claire, and a cup of hot chocolate to go to the ends of the earth for. There are heroes, villains, and beasties. Food to die for and food that would kill you. Hints for driving on the other side and hints for the drivers of golf balls.
All this in small vignettes gathered by two retired teachers who began traveling to the British Isles when they retired from teaching. A three week trip to Scotland to celebrate retirement has turned into a love affair with Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and a growing fascination with England. That love affair has generated the stories in this book.
One of the questions I am often asked is, “How hard is it driving on the wrong side of the road?” The answer I give is that driving on the left side is not the wrong side, just the other side. In truth, I haven’t had much difficulty driving a right-hand drive auto on the left side of the road, especially after the first couple of years. I now have driven about 70,000 miles on the left side of narrow, narrow roads with only a couple of minor scrapes to hang around my neck.
It is driving on the other side, the roads, and the cars, that have generated many of our stories--humorous and scary. . .
To get an opportunity to play the challenging links course at Silloth on Solway in Northumberland, we booked in at Wallsend House, a classy B&B at the rural village of Bowness on Solway, England. Wallsend takes it name from being at the west end of Hadrian’s Wall, the Roman fortification meant to keep the savage Scotti and Picts out of Roman Britain.
To get to Wallsend House required turning off the main road near Carlisle onto a series of hedge-lined back roads following signs to Bowness on Solway. We stayed at Wallsend for three nights as we played golf and explored the Lake District. Each day we’d return to the B&B taking what seemed like a different route. We didn’t question our directions much because the hedges lining the roads make them all look the same anyway. We always got back to Wallsend by following the signs.
On the last morning as we were chatting with our host Patsy Knowles we mentioned how easy it was to find our way back to the house by following the good signs. Patsy exclaimed, “What? You followed the signs!” We said that was how we got back and forth so easily each day, although, the route did seem to vary a little. At that point Patsy said, “You must lead charmed lives. The signs you’ve been following turn in the wind and will point a different direction every hour. You could have been driving in circles in the farmland for hours before you found your way out by the signs.”
We had a great laugh, but as we followed signs to get back to the Carlisle highway we were very careful to keep track of our route on our map as well.
There is a myth about poor food in Scotland, and for the most part it is myth. We’ve had some bad meals and our share of fatty fried fare, but we’ve also had some outstanding meals in pubs as well as fine dining restaurants. I have no stories, though, about the national dish of Scotland, haggis. Haggis traditionally is sheep heart, liver, and lungs along with oats and spices boiled inside a sheep’s stomach casing for several hours. In other words, it’s an offal sausage, not necessarily an awful sausage. We’ve had good haggis and bad haggis (read cheap), but in our experience it’s not been fodder for stories any more so than black puddings (blood sausage) in Ireland, Welsh Cawl (a lamb and leek soup) in Wales, or Bangers and Mash in England. Many of our stories do revolve around the restaurants or the serving of the food. You can tell by the number of stories in this chapter that golf helps works up quite an appetite.
Fish and chips is the staple Scottish fast food and chippies (fish & chip shops) are all over the place. Their menu of fried delights isn’t limited to haddock and cod, either. You’d be surprised what you can find on a chippie menu. Sausages of various kinds are prevalent. Deep fried Mars bars are popular--I’ve tried one and it is so rich and sinful, but it is delicious. Not all things, though, are meant to be deep fried, as we found out one evening in Anstruther on Fife’s Firth of Tay coast.
After golf at Crail Balcombie Links Anne and I were looking forward to trying out the Anstruther Fish Bar, reputed to be the best fish and chip shop in Scotland. On this Friday night we had difficulty finding a parking spot along the harbour, but eventually got parked. We could tell the Anstruther Fish Bar by the line of patrons extending out the door and along the store front. The Anstruther Fish Bar has enough space inside for about 20 to sit, and one line serves those eating in and one serves those taking away. We asked and found out that the wait would be about two hours for eating in or over an hour for take away. That was too long for us. We wandered down toward where we’d parked; there was another chippie down there.
There wasn’t much of a line at this chip shop (that should have been a clue). We ordered one order of haddock and chips and one order of an item on the menu that caught my attention, deep fried pizza. In a couple of minutes we had our orders and went out to the harbour-side picnic table in front to eat our meals. There was nothing especially good about the fish and chips, but the deep fried cheese pizza slice we had was spectacularly awful! Imagine a slice of greasy thick crust oily cheese pizza, dipped in heavy batter, and then dropped in the deep fat fryer until it finally floats to the surface. It is then scoped up with tongs, shaken to remove 10% of the clinging fat, slid into a paper box, and served. I have no idea who was the first to try the concoction, or who thought of selling it, but whomever it was deserves to spend eternity in culinary Hades. A bite or two each was more than enough to turn our stomachs.
On another visit we did make it back to Anstruther Fish Bar and it is as good as its wall of awards attest. Oh, by the way, the menu there doesn’t include deep fried pizza.
Of the 350 or so properties managed by Historic Scotland (one of the two national trusts in Scotland) we’ve visited over 200. We’ve seen about the same percentage of attractions under the care of the National Trust for Scotland and Heritage Ireland. In England and Wales we’ve made a much smaller dent in the list of available attractions. Some of the attractions, like Gretna Green’s Blacksmith Wedding Chapel in southern Scotland, are nothing more than tourist traps. While trusts in Scotland, Ireland, England, and Wales control a large percentage of historic properties, many others are still privately run. The properties we’ve visited range from castles, cathedrals, and chapels to ancient standing stones and burial chambers. A few are modern, such as Scotland’s Secret Bunker (a Cold War underground command center) and the Falkirk Wheel, but the majority have some age. Tour buses, especially in Ireland, stop at many of these properties, but far more are off the beaten track (see “The Stones of Arran” article in Chapter Nine). Often the attraction itself is a story, but more often it is something that happens at the attraction that leads to a story, such as the first example.
Our tee time at Wick was one o’clock which gave Anne and I plenty of time to visit the clearance village of Badbea (BAD-bay) on Scotland’s east Caithness coast five miles north of Helmsdale. I’d seen the village listed on our map, but had no idea what we’d find there. In the lay-by on the A9 near Ousdale an informative sign told us a little about the history of the village and gave a few insights into the lives of the families brought here.
The footpath is now more of a sheep trail; for about 100 yards we literally followed a sheep until she bolted off the path. We could be the only visitors this day or this week; the three-quarter mile trail was little used. As we approached the precipitous Berriedale cliffs above the North Sea, the monument, built in 1939 by David Sutherland in memory of his father and the people of Badbea, signaled we had reached the village site.
At first the monument was all we noticed; that and the quiet. Even the gulls seemed to sense the sadness in this site as they slid by in respectful silence. Then we noticed a few drystone walls and the outlines of stone longhouses and byres crofters from the straths of Ousdale, Langwell, Auchencraig, and Kildonan had built when they were evicted from their land and moved to the cliffside Badbea village. Sheep and politics had instigated the Highland Clearances and created places like Badbea, which started in 1792. Landowners like Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster evicted the crofters in preference to more profitable sheep. At its largest the village was home to 35 inhabitants, with the last leaving in 1911.
As we wandered about the site under dramatically darkening skies, we could hear in the wind the stories of families forced onto these windswept cliffs as they were uprooted from ancestral lands--lands cleared and farmed by hand, lands which for generations had given a meager, but adequate life. Stories about men of the land forced to seek livelihood on the herring or salmon boats. Stories of many, who not knowing the ways of the ocean, did not return from the sea. Stories of children and livestock having to be tethered to rocks or posts so they would not be swept over the cliffs to the sea below by the fierce winds. Stories of a people who for more than a hundred years adapted, lived, and at times even flourished, under horrendous conditions. It didn’t take long before we too were hushed like the gulls by the stories that hung heavy on the wind.
It was a quiet walk back to the car and drive on to the Wick golf course. As we played that afternoon on the lovely Wick links, every breeze brought back the stark scene and stories of the Highland Clearance village of Badbea.
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