Note: I toyed with the idea of making this a “How We Got Here” post, but there was too much impressionistic and personal material to really separate from the strictly historical paragraphs on the Highland Clearances. Nevertheless, tagging it as #History, at least.

Also, I’d like to reassure those who’ve never been that not all of Scotland looks like a greener version of Mars, as the header might suggest. I just liked the picture.

I’ve described elsewhere how my dad finally got all the ducks in a row to visit Scotland (after an extended weekend in London) to see the putative “Old Country” and do a little genealogical research (we’re McKays, hence Mackays, so this meant a visit to “Mackay Country,” or Duthaich Mhic Aoidh, the far northwest of the Highlands). We had to postpone for a couple of years due to the birth of my niece, whose presence added, I suspect, some urgency to my dad’s purpose, as he finally had another generation to carry on some semblance of the family name. Though his siblings have plenty of children, I’ve always gotten the impression that he’s the keeper of family lore, some of which I hope he’s writing down because he’s not getting any younger (I really ought to press him on this the next time I see him). I think a keener awareness of time’s passage might have been another reason he wanted to make this trip (which couldn’t have been further emphasized by the news we got halfway through the trip that our grandmother, who had been borderline catatonic for years, had finally passed away; he and the rest of the family seemed to be more relieved than anything else that she wasn’t suffering anymore).

As with London, I had initially mixed feelings which would have been unthinkable two decades ago. I used to be crazy about my (alleged) Scottish heritage but had mellowed considerably on reading a lot more world history and realizing how privileged I was to have the prospect of tracing my own ancestry that far (while at the same time realizing how much more likely it was—you don’t get family names like “Laidlaw” and “Watson” from, say, Alsace or Silesia). My feelings mixed even further on learning of my mom’s own genealogical discoveries (the scion of a long line of cartoonishly “Scotch-Irish” immigrants—the kind of people exemplified by Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun and slobbered over by James Webb), hooking up to a rogue’s gallery of whitebread notables who grew more consanguineous (if not outright incestuous) the farther back one went (particularly amusing was the recent discovery that my dad’s Irish ancestors had lived just upriver from Derry across the Foyle from my mom’s Scots-Irish forbears—while they were a couple of centuries apart, it was a retrospectively unsurprising twist that the Protestants were in Donegal and the Catholics in Tyrone). Knowing of how easily an innocent interest in one’s northern or western European ancestry can be turned to something dark and foul, an unbidden wariness entered my own vacation prospects, even if I was increasingly aware that my father’s likely descent was the direct product of quasi-colonial exploitation.

Thomas Faed’s The Last of the Clan (1865), probably the most iconic image made of the Highland Clearances (after Strathnaver, before the Hebrides).

Mackay Country was mostly emptied in the early nineteenth century by the Strathnaver Clearance (1814-19), probably the most notorious and well-publicized of the Highland Clearances, in which the largely absentee clan chiefs (“mine” included) and landed aristocrats compressed the centuries-long enclosure movement—that had transformed the English and Lowland Scots countryside and helped enable the Industrial Revolution—into barely fifty years for the remote Scottish Highlands. Debt-ridden and encouraged by their speculator underlings, most notoriously Patrick Sellar (not to mention their own twistedly paternal attitudes towards their tenants and clansmen), the high and mighty (in this case Lord Reay, the dissolute Chief of Clan Mackay, and the Countess of Sutherland, the former society beauty Elizabeth Leveson-Gower—I can almost hear a cut-glass British equivalent of “bless your heart” just by seeing her name) carried out a devastating series of evictions of the tenantry (both tacksmen, who supervised the smallholdings in the landlord’s name, and cottars, near the lowest rung of the Highland social structure) at a time of already tremendous economic hardship in the wake of the famines and shortages that accompanied both the frosts at the tail-end of the Little Ice Age and the manmade travails brought about by Napoleon’s “Continental System,” which attempted to economically isolate Britain until the Emperor’s disastrous invasion of Russia a few years earlier.

The human cost, though maybe small in number compared to other historical atrocities, fatal or otherwise (and certainly dwarfed in a specifically Celtic context by the potato famines to follow so horribly several decades later across the Irish Sea—and, to a lesser extent, in Scotland itself), was immense. Families who, even accounting for the exploitative and often brutal depredations of the old clan system (often forgotten or ignored in traditional Scottish histories), had lived on small plots for centuries, were literally turfed out overnight with no real warning (official notices were issued, including a famous 1814 decree courtesy of the Rev. David Mackenzie in Farr Church, now the Strathnaver Museum, but many tenants couldn’t believe something like this would be countenanced by Lord Reay, if not the Earl and Countess). Militia and occasionally regulars were called out—ironically enough, given that many of the evicted were veterans of or had family in the 93^rd (Sutherland) Highlanders, having taken part in the British capture of the Cape of Good Hope (1806) and even then marshaling across the Atlantic for the Battle of New Orleans, in which they were largely mown down at Chalmette by Andrew Jackson’s U.S. militiamen (they’d achieve their greatest fame as the “thin red line tipped with steel” at Balaklava during the Crimean War several decades later, though with few Strathnaver locals in their ranks, the latter understandably resentful and suspicious of serving a government that had done jack-shit to protect them). In one of the most notorious incidents, a centenarian dowager was unable to leave a cottage about to be torched by the evicting militia, and Patrick Sellar, the Sutherlands’ notorious factor, ordered that she be left inside. While the old woman was eventually rescued, she died a few days later (while unsurprising at such an advanced age in 1814, it’s hard not to conclude that, well, being trapped for some time in a burning building might have had something to do with it).

While the Sutherlands have their own family vault… in England, and Sellar is buried in Elgin Cathedral, other monuments dot the country here and there, including this one I found online that apparently resides in a West Glasgow pub.

The evicted Highlanders (while mostly Mackays, there were plenty of “septs” or subsidiary families that came with them) were mostly relocated to the coast, with the idea of “retraining” them (sound familiar?) to be fisherfolk instead of small farmers. While some were able to eke out a living and one or two even managed to prosper under the new system, the vast majority hung on at the edges or (far more often) emigrated to the growing industrial towns and cities of the Lowlands (Glasgow in particular) or the United States, where many joined existing communities of Highlander immigrants, especially in south-central North Carolina, where, I suspect, my own great-great-great-great-grandfather wound up after his own displacement (though we’re still rooting around, it’s my working suspicion that he was done out in one of the Strathnaver Clearances and either married in Scotland or in North Carolina, where my great-great-great-grandfather was born in 1820). On the one hand, one could argue that the changes that were coming to the Highlands were inevitable given the development of global capitalism, even taking into consideration the whippet-thin veneer of paternalistic responsibility so many well-meaning people still believe feudalism or its variants conferred. That said, as mentioned earlier, compressing the changes that had uprooted rural society in England and the Lowlands and powered urban growth and development therein into a few short decades was a surefire recipe for disaster. The land was largely denuded of people and could now be flooded with the new, high-grade Cheviot sheep, whose environmental hardiness and follicular fecundity made them an ideal candidate for a new region-wide industry, promising considerable profits for new-made men like Patrick Sellar.

Patrick Sellar (1780-1851), the face of obloquy at a much later date.

Sellar’s the great villain of the Highland (or at least Strathnaver) Clearances; while the Countess of Sutherland comes in for substantial obloquy (the Earl—later Duke—had less of an identifiable hand in matters; while he was English and had little direct interest in or contact with the Clearances—Elizabeth brought the title; he was merely Marquess of Stafford before—all was done in his name and with little effort if at all on his part to mitigate the situation), there’s a kind of easy, Walter Scott historical narrative in the new, “improving” Lowlander-in-spirit (though he was born in Moray) clearing the Highlands tooth-and-nail with the grim, consuming fire of modernity. The Highland Clearances were a massive human, economic, and historical tragedy, not least because their vaunted benefits were little realized; wool went through boom and bust only to be succeeded by the discovery of oil further east later in the next century. And yet… the Strathnaver Museum sells copies of Tales from the North Coast, a remarkable collection put together by the Farr School’s English teacher Alan Temperley in the late sixties and early seventies, an engaging miscellany of historical snippets, folk tales, and ghost stories. Towards the end is a collection of material on the Strathnaver Clearances, gathered from sundry witnesses and authors ranging from the actual evicted (and the despised Sellar) to the Scots-Canadian author John Prebble, whose 1963 book on the Clearances, though substantially challenged since in its conclusions by numerous historians, put the subject back on the map in terms of both Scottish and historical consciousness (Prebble’s previous book on the Battle of Culloden, which put an end to the Jacobite Rebellions of the eighteenth century—and was commemorated in popular culture from Doctor Who to Rocky and Bullwinkle to Outlander—would form the basis of Peter Watkins’ superb, eponymous 1964 TV film for the BBC, thereby launching one of the most remarkable and inspiring careers in late twentieth-century cinema). Temperley himself has this to say about Sellar:

It would be wrong, however, simply to write him off as the villain of the piece. In many ways Sellar exemplified the new thinking of the age, that was only now arriving in the Highlands. Perhaps, had he travelled overseas instead of to the north of Scotland, he would be remembered as a bold pioneer instead of a tyrant, have become lauded instead of vilified. For he was just the sort of man who was at the same time taming the colonies, laying solid economic foundations, creating the greatness of the British Empire. His mistake was to do it so near to home, for his actions have been placed under a microscope. (Temperley, Tales of the North Coast, 219-220; 1977)

I bought Tales in Scotland and didn’t get around to reading it until this weekend, and only hit that passage… now, and I’m not really sure Temperley could have done a better job at crystallizing my own mixed feelings and unease regarding our quasi-genealogical expedition. I’ve gone on before in the London thread about my growing awareness that “finding your roots” is, in the United States at least, a deeply privileged endeavor, as there are a great many of my fellow Americans (not just of African descent) who have obvious issues in tracing their ancestry past these shores. Having personally confronted the ways in which European ancestry and “heritage” can be weaponized as psychic or cultural defenses against diversity, change or complexity, I’d grown automatically suspicious of this kind of thing, and even the incontrovertibly horrible facts surrounding the Highland Clearances left me with a certain degree of wariness. The tacksmen’s relative privilege didn’t help (and could my 5g pop have been one?); I remembered one historian—Devine, I think—observing that their issue was largely with the loss of their own status and not the actions themselves; “I’m all right, Jack” and “fuck you, I’ve got mine” have long histories in so many different societies. So, while I was looking forward to the trip, I was quietly apprehensive about what we might find, in terms of past and present environment. That said, we’d have a guide to take us through who was apparently Mackay (mother’s side) himself.

The North Coast, near Durness (probably Smoo Cave).

The Highlands are beautiful, no doubt about it, and Mackay Country might offer some of the most diverse scenery therein, descending from the uplands dividing the North Sea coast from the Great Glen (centered on Loch Ness) to the craggy, thinly wooded bays and inlets of old Sudreyjar, the “South Land” (later “Sutherland” in Scots) loosely controlled by the Picts in the seventh and eighth centuries and effectively colonized thereafter by the Vikings . The likeliest origin story for the Mackays, in fact, is that they sprang from a Viking-Pictish alliance in the wake of Gaelic centralization and the foundation of the Scottish monarchy; the famous Orkneyinga Saga carries more than a few echoes of the process, even if it deals largely with Orkney and Caithness to the east and is kinda depressing as just about every character is a giant asshole even by contemporary standards. We passed through leafy, genteel Dornoch and got an eyeful of some of the region’s prolific sandstone architecture (the most famous example, perhaps, St. Magnus’ Cathedral in Orkney), including Dornoch Cathedral, founded in the thirteenth century and added to ever since, partly due to my forbears occasionally showing up to burn it down every century or so (the Sutherland animus ran deep). We made an obligatory stop at Dunrobin Castle, a tedious Gothic folly (and apparent falconry center) largely funded by the financial harvest from the Strathnaver Clearances. Looking back, we probably could have saved a few hours, but I’m guessing a day trip to Orkney wasn’t in the cards, so it panned out. That said, once we turned inland along the Helmsdale River, the tenor of the journey started to change.

Gorse and slowly budding heather in Strathnaver.

I had ideas of what the place would look like from childhood, even if, as I grew older and learned more, my imagined version of Sutherland changed from a thickly forested Celtic idyll to a bleak, windswept ocean of heath (Dad’s apparently never did, which surprised me a little). This wasn’t far from the truth, though the Sutherlands and other local landowners had imported trees from Europe and North America (eerily much in the style of the “four digits” of Michigan’s “mitten,” famously praised by Reagan because “all the trees are the right size”) in great clumps that stood awkwardly against the wind and sky. They may have been frightened by the gorse, with which I fell instantly in love. Bright, buttery yellow flowers against thistly green stems shading to brown, crowding defiantly along peat streams and bogs, they were disturbingly photogenic, and it was hard not to try and get a shot every time I saw some. Peat was another surprise; I’d never expected to grow so fascinated with it, but seeing the land festooned with what looked like iced fudge and then learning how springy it felt when you walked on it was oddly endearing; once I was reminded how important it was to life as a fuel and a building material in such a relatively woodless environment, the fascination was total. Every now and again, though, we’d pass a cairn or a ruined wall that marked the former location of a Clearance village which served as grim reminders that neither nature nor history ever stand still.

A farm hut in back of Farr Bay Inn that looked like the Incas might have put it together (fittingly enough, as neither they nor the Highlanders used mortar therein).

We’d be up in the Highlands for three or four days, staying one night in Farr, near Bettyhill (one of the epicenters of the Clearances) and then two in Durness, which succeeded the former as a center of Mackay Country and turns out to be the most northwesterly village in mainland Britain. It was striking to note that tourist business seemed to follow this path; Farr Bay Inn was small and quaint (and much more to my own taste), while Mackay’s Guesthouse in Durness was medium-sized and quaint in a way that reflected the cutting-edge in bed-and-breakfasts (eco-lodges, local connections with various businesses and sights, young foreign staff, etc.). Both were located along the northern coast, which turned out to be a much thicker-populated prospect than I anticipated. In terms of flora, the mass clearing and replanting that we saw further inland was deemed unnecessary on the coast, and so the wild, gorgeous native trees (of which I wish I knew a lot more) still thronged the peat streams trickling down to the coast (of which the River Naver—of the eponymous Strath—was the biggest). In terms of humanity, Durness is a major stop along the storied “North Coast 500,” opened by the Scottish government in a few years ago to increase tourism, mainly for bikers and camping enthusiasts (while it’s done so, it’s also brought unsurprising problems, including largely increased pedestrian dangers and probable environmental threats, and I often wondered how the locals saw even relatively unassuming coach parties on a genealogical rabbit hunt), with the Sango Sands Oasis the sole independent watering hole for probably a good ten or twenty miles around if not more.

Balnakeil–House and Church, with Beach between them.

While I had plenty of time to roam, drink, and sketch, every day was understandably taken up with family trips to notable locales. At Farr, we toured the Strathnaver Museum (including the fateful pulpit from which David Mackenzie delivered the eviction notices in 1814) and got an eyeful of the Farr Stone in back, an eighth century Pictish monument that likely indicates the older-than-Christianity presence of some kind of religious community. Just down the road from Durness, too, was Smoo Cave, a glacial inlet extending well underground and offering spectacular views to the ocean (as well as weird plants and ferns that found a place among the minimal light available from the cave’s “blowholes”). The ruins of Balnakeil Church, set against the beach and house of the same name (and down the road from a quasi-hippie “craft village” set up in a disused army training barracks), contain not just the grave of the eighteenth-century Gaelic poet Rob Donn Mackay (1714-78) but also that of Elizabeth Parkes, aunt of John Lennon, who came to Durness on childhood holidays and wrote “In My Life” based on his memories of the area (our guide made great hay of that, taking us by the “John Lennon Memorial Garden” set up next to the village hall and incessantly whistling the song throughout our visit; I can go a damn long while before I need to hear it again). A big moment for my dad was visiting the putative “family seat” of Castle Varrich (or Caisteal Bharraich in Gaelic, a formulation I prefer), set atop a forbidding, sea-girt hill in sight of its larger, more imposing, neighbors, Ben Loyal and Ben Hope, to the south. It took about an hour to walk up and back in the midst of a stunning rush of gorse, peat, and those still unidentifiable trees. The (ruined) castle itself was more of a glorified bolthole, probably established on the former sight of a Pictish broch (the Mackays’ relative poverty was probably a frequent flashpoint for their conflicts with the Sutherlands), but impressive regardless.

Caisteal Bharraich from Tongue Village.

A little further down from Durness were the ruins of Ceannebeinne, a Clearance village from later in the period (c. 1841), when the landlords realized that the fishing thing wasn’t working out and that they’d get rid of some of the coastal villages, too. This round of Clearances actually managed to land a little more in the public consciousness, not least as there were actual riots and some of the resisters were acquitted after one wave of militia was actually driven back. More and more public attention—perhaps driven in part by Walter Scott’s romanticization of Highland society (Waverley kick-started the trend, appearing in the first year of the Strathnaver evictions)—started to fasten on the crofters and their plight in the ensuing decades (as the clearances moved to the west coast and the more heavily Gaelic Hebrides). The Duchess of Sutherland (daughter-in-law of the aforementioned Countess) mounted a bizarre rearguard publicity campaign in response, enlisting the help of none other than Harriet Beecher Stowe. In a twisted inversion of Patrick Sellar’s historical ambiguity—and in a familiar pattern for the British upper classes; Dickens’ Mrs. Jellyby struck home for a reason—the Duchess was an enthusiastic patron of worthy causes so long as they didn’t land too close to home, and her interest in American abolitionism drew Stowe into her orbit during one of the famous author’s tours of Europe in the wake of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Despite being warned of the Duchess’s true intentions and interests, Stowe wrote a number of essays in her defense (countered by, among others, Karl Marx, who sussed out the ethical conflicts in a trice) and earned an unsurprising amount of opprobrium from those in the British public who were starting to wake to the problem. The campaign for some kind of justice would culminate in the Crofters’ Commissions of the 1880s, which gathered testimony from contemporary residents and survivors of the Clearances and led to legislation that started to guarantee some kind of land tenure and security for the local people (well after, of course, most of them had already emigrated in the wake of their eviction). Between then and the North Coast 500, the Strathnaver scene’s basically alternated between small-scale sheep farming and scenic or wildlife tourism (with the odd sprinkle of Mackays finding their roots, as we were).

Or combinations thereof, as with this ringed plover stalking the ruins of Ceannebeinne.

Three days up there, though spectacularly beautiful, were more than enough to convince me that I’m wired for life in cities (even if it’s unlikely at this point if I’ll ever get to live in a big one). I had a great time, don’t get me wrong, and worries that my jaded historical consciousness would override the thrill of seeing the Old Country proved happily unfounded, even if I regarded our guide’s tweedy, well-groomed John Buchan approach with more than a little suspicion (I actually went ahead and wrote out a pretty bitchy paragraph thereon, but decided to leave it out). I was able to do some impressionistic sketching, fraternize a bit with the locals (including the surprisingly Cockney proprietor of the Farr Bay Inn), catch the farcical Europa League final (which unjustly consoled me for missing the Champions’ League final a couple of days later) in the aftermath of a local wake at the Sango Sands Oasis (in which it really looked like the entire town had turned out), and in the midst of all this actually do some genuine relaxing and faffing about, something I hadn’t expected. Unfortunately, my last trick was to catch an obnoxious cold that slowly took hold during the rest of the weekend and followed me back to the States. It could have been anything; even taking off my hat for a minute.

The beginning of the end. I think.

Leaving Mackay Country, we drove south through Assynt and Wester Ross, stopping at Ardvreck Castle (another ruin, fought over throughout the early modern era by the Macleods and Mackenzies) and the small fishing center of Ullapool (where there’s another good local museum on Highland life) before turning inland to head back to Inverness (with a stop at the jaw-dropping Corrieshalloch Gorge). Inverness has a reputation as a mere staging-post for Highland-related activities (Culloden and Loch Ness are within a few miles and there are ferries to John O’Groats and Orkney, as well as our own little jaunt); its wholesale destruction by sack and fire during the Jacobite Rebellions, and sandstone Victorian reconstruction (with a few survivors scattered here and there, including a couple of old churches whose yards saw the execution of Jacobite prisoners after Culloden), doesn’t help. An hour or so at the Caledonian downtown, however (where I went to find some soup and maybe a Guinness in place of actual medicine), convinced me that there was a definite youth culture struggling to make itself heard (probably a result of the local University of the Highlands, judging from a number of overheard jokes from the bar staff). The latter, in fact, enlisted me as a consultant for their trivia team once it became clear that the questions that night had a largely American provenance. Even given my condition, I was still able to make it out the next morning to the lovely Ness Islands a little ways upriver to take pictures of birds (including a grey heron stalking around in the rushes).

Grey heron in the Ness Islands.

One side note: Inverness was covered with rain for much of my last evening there; as it really got going once I got back to the hotel from the Caledonian, I was able to indulge a minor if lifelong wish and actually watch British TV in the UK. There had understandably been little to none of this beforehand given my urge to see and do as much as possible, but the downtime was (perhaps inevitably) welcome. We had a taste of this during one of the most potentially cringeworthy moments of our trip, a visit to a local Mackay family between Tongue and Durness (their land still bracketed on several sides by the “Sutherland Estates,” whose official website proves an ominously blank wall except for “enquiries”). It actually proved quite enjoyable (and whatever the potential shadows, we paid for ’em when some of the first words out of Mr. Mackay’s mouth were “so, what d’ye think of Mr. Trump?”), and, as we were leaving, I could hear the unmistakable strains of the Coronation Street theme song from the next room. I saw Corrie in Inverness, too; I’d been addicted on Sunday mornings when I lived at my old place in Ann Arbor (southeast Michigan then received CBC 2 out of Windsor, Ontario) but had drifted away over the years. It was interesting to catch up: Audrey still can’t catch a break and David seems to have lost his edge a little, though it somehow always felt right that he’d wind up as a barber (and “Trim Up North” is a great name for a barbershop). The rest of the haul: The In-Betweeners (which I’d somehow missed first time around; catching up Stateside on YouTube, it’s a lot of fun, but Jay gets old fast), the entertainingly relevant Soft Border Patrol (a Scots-Irish hybrid I can get behind!), Heartbeat (ehhhhh), and a couple of interesting historical documentaries in Gaelic on BBC Alba concerning Scots’ participation in the British Empire (preceded by the delightful Leugh le Linda, in which Gaelic singer Linda Macleod teaches the language to toddlers by reading kids’ books). I caught a bit of Countryfile later in Edinburgh for a peek at a truly alien lifestyle, but Inverness was the real introduction.

Old Church Kirkyard in Inverness, site of the post-Culloden executions.

We drove to Edinburgh the next day, which technically lies outside the Highlands, but as so much of the energy and drive that powered the Clearances centered thereon, I’m including it anyway. The route south took us through the kind of scenery dramatized in movies and books for well over a century (Outlander obviously the most recent culprit)—miles on miles of dull green, thickly forested game parks and estates (Blair Castle, among others, visible from the motorway)—until we made a stop in Dunkeld, which is touristy, biscuit-tin Scotland near its height: historic, partly reconstructed cathedral with a sprinkling of locally famous graves—including Earl Alexander of Buchan from the fourteenth century, the so-called “Wolf of Badenoch”—cute little tea shops, etc. Some nice moments aided by the mist that hovered about twenty feet above the entire time (as well as a solid bridge across the Tay designed by Thomas Telford), but I was happy to get back on the road.

I enjoyed Edinburgh a lot more than I expected. Part of it was regaining a degree of independence after finally ditching our guide at the hotel, part of it the return to a solid urban environment, but more than a little had to do with the city itself. It was instantly familiar in a way, perhaps because, unlike London, there was a specific character one could intuit a little on the streets—aristocratic veneer with a funky urban and youthful underside that surfaced more and more even during my not-quite-two-days stay. As with London, I heard a lot of familiar accents on the streets, and this may have subconsciously influenced my wrong turn on the way to Leith (turning down London Road instead of Leith Walk), sending me to Lochend Park instead of the actual port. Even Lochend Park had some kind of historical presence, as it had been the former site of Lochend Castle—seat of the Logan lairds, some of whose constructions still survive. Now a prominent haunt for waterfowl, it would have been a great place to relax for a bit had it not started raining. That said, I managed to swing a bus back to New Town and have a couple of pints, one in the Abbotsford (in which a guy who I still think was coming on to me—either that or he was using every available card in an attempt to subtly harass me out of my barstool— tried to enlist me in a surprising political argument; this is what I get for going into a pub honoring Walter Scott) and then a couple in the Grosvenor, a welcoming spot on Shandwick Place where, among other things, I watched Aston Villa ascend once more into the Premier League (and the English barman ingratiatingly complimented my sketches with an endearing but unnecessary “buddy”).

Lochend Park just as the rain started to fall.

The next day I did the Royal Mile with time to spare, showing up early for the Castle, doing it in just over an hour, and then drifting slowly down towards Holyrood as the crowds started to form above me. The Castle itself was worth the trip, maybe because I skipped some of the more popular exhibits (the “Honours of Scotland” in particular). St. Margaret’s Chapel, dating from the early twelfth century, is the oldest building in Edinburgh, and a nice contemplative Romanesque interior. Mons Meg, the fearsome fifteenth-century Flemish cannon made for James II (who was famously killed in 1460 by farting around with one of his other cannons) comes across as oddly endearing and feels much like the castle mascot. The most enjoyable surprise was the National War Museum, which takes its role as a war and not an army museum seriously (my dad thought it “Disneyfied,” probably for the same reasons I liked it), including an exhibit on Scots conscientious objectors during the World Wars. Other than that, it was fun to just wander around and get shots of the forbidding architecture and rampart views.

Half-Moon Battery from the lower levels.

The Royal Mile itself was touristy as hell, but there were a few worthy stops. The High Kirk of St. Giles was ground zero of the Scottish Reformation, the place from where John Knox founded Presbyterianism and (apocryphally) the rejection of the Anglican prayer book in 1638 started the snowball rolling on the Three Kingdoms’ War. Gorgeous interior, festooned with monuments along the walls (it’s probably not too much of an exaggeration to call it Scotland’s answer to Westminster Abbey) and featuring a live choir performance at the time of my visit. Nearby, “John Knox’s House” is really just a place where the great reformer stayed for a few months, but it’s a pretty typical slice of early modern Scottish urban life and attached to the engaging Scottish Storytelling Centre, which might be nice to check out on a future visit. Holyrood, the Royal Mile’s terminus, is strikingly marked by two buildings whose existence underlines Scotland’s relationship and kinship with Europe (something more important now, I guess, than ever): Holyroodhouse Palace and the Scottish Parliament Building.

John Knox’s House; one could almost feel the withered, purse-lipped misogyny.

Holyroodhouse is maybe most famous for its association with Mary, Queen of Scots. She’s an old obsession of my mom’s, and the only reason I initially went was to get a picture or two for her, but had to content myself with a souvenir guide as photos weren’t allowed. The building itself was actually pretty cool, two homages to French architecture laid atop each other: James V’s Loire-inspired Scots chateau mostly burned down in the midst of several battles here and there, and Charles II attempted to mildly ape Versailles a century and a half later with the buildings you see now. The interior was fun to drift through, but the exhibits were overwhelmingly fodder for royal-fluffers and the like (though Balmoral’s probably more famous in this regard, Holyrood’s still the Queen’s official Scots residence). That said, the adjoining Holyrood Abbey dates from the twelfth century, even if it was ruined at around the same time as the earlier palace, and the gardens might have made a nice walk if I’d had more time.

Holyrood Abbey.

The Parliament Building, on the other hand, is a charming distillation of twentieth-century art and architecture whose controversial Catalan builder, Enric Miralles, had to have taken at least some inspiration from Gaudi, as the organic shapes and quirky decorations within and without certainly remind me of pictures I’ve seen of the twentieth-century giant’s work in Barcelona. Though public complaint regarding the cost overruns was understandable, I love the result: fresh, accessible, and an evocative neighbor not just for Holyroodhouse but also the local colossus of Arthur’s Seat to the south (another future target, as it sounds like a great climb). Taking an alternate route back, I ran up the gritty Cowgate (literally overshadowed by the huge bridges put in during the nineteenth century and now a slightly “disreputable” haunt for students and the like) to the National Museum of Scotland, where, as with the British Museum, I concentrated on the relatively unique material (i.e. early Scottish history), coming dangerously close to wearying of Pictish stones. Having made a solid dent in the Royal Mile with plenty of time to go, I swung by the National Gallery of Scotland, having planned to skip it. Glad I didn’t; more than a few interesting works and surprises, including Gainsborough’s iconic portrait of Mrs. Graham, which I’d always thought was in London for some reason.

Scottish Parliament Building, eastern facade.

The rest of the evening was a bit of a blur, as I mentally wound up my impressions and got ready for the trip back to the States the next day. The family had dinner at Howie’s on Victoria Terrace in Old Town (highly recommended), I got a few last shots of the Castle, and was able to connect with my old grad school quasi-colleague and his wife at the Stockbridge Tap on Leith Water (I’d forgotten to get an international SIM card before leaving, and so missed a couple of connections I’d hoped to make with old online chums). It’s all still a whirl, but I’d like to revisit Edinburgh almost as much as London, even if there isn’t technically as much to see there. The Highlands? Maybe once more in my life, but the passion isn’t there. I’m a Mackay, but there’s been a lot of water under that bridge, and for now my photos and memories’ll have to content me. Hope you enjoyed them.