July 22, 2015
Bettyhill, Scotland: Holy spirits
AT THE TOP of a long but gentle climb stands the Crask Inn. It and the house across the road, both for sale, are all there is to the place. Countless cyclists have stopped on their way to John o'Groats, because there's nowhere else. We met some today: British, Dutch and German.
Mike, a tall and shy shepherd, bought the pub because it was on land that he wanted for his sheep. It was a wreck and now, 18 years later, it's a going business and a characterful bar. He's giving up only because his wife's infirm.
"Will you carry on with the sheep?"
"Oh yes
Two black-and-white dogs challenge each other in the bar, growling, running away, meeting back nose to nose.
"Are they the ones you work with?"
"Yes. We were up on the hill yesterday, rounding up sheep. Ten hours we were up there. In the end, the dogs had run out of whoomph and we missed a few. It was a good day's work but we'd have been better to get them all down. We'll be up there again. We've got to know the hill pretty well."
He takes me into another room to show me a grand piano and, nearby in the hall, a foot-pumped organ. It makes a beautiful sound. He plays for a while. Once a month he wheels it into a side room and holds a church service.
"It's non-denominational," he says in his gentle way, as though perpetually apologising. "We get mainly Episcis but some Free Church. We get about 20 here, some from quite a distance. Plus curious people passing by when I leave the door open and they hear the sound."
He plays a few more notes and we walk back into the bar.
He's the second person we've met today. We stopped this morning at a café beside a lake, in Lairg. We wrote a note for Vikki and Russell, convinced they'd stop there too, and left it with a blond waitress with eyes that were neither brown nor green. It made them all the more fascinating.
I asked where she was from.
"Estonia," she said. She was tall and slim, maybe in her mid-20s.
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I tried to interest her in news that our tent had been made in Estonia. Hilleberg is Swedish but the tents are made across the border. I don't think it had ever interested her where tents came from and I made no impression.
She had that slight sadness that so many Scandinavians have. She was also one of those people who hold eye contact longer than usual.
"How long have you been here?"
"Three years. My partner came for the forestry."
He was Latvian, she explained. They have a lot of forestry in Latvia.
"I'm not sure we'll stay, though. Maybe. Maybe not. It's far colder in Estonia, maybe 20 degrees below. But here there's the wind and the dampness and it feels so much colder."
She asked a lot about France, whether it was warm and if, put tactfully, French people were as arrogant as she'd heard. She wasn't quick to end the conversation. It was as if, from a country where hardly anybody lived, and now in the Highlands where there were even fewer, she yearned for human contact, contact with others from abroad.
I left feeling as sad as she had seemed. And I realised I had never asked her name.
That note of sadness ran through the day. The scenery has been stunning, but it's scenery with an unhappy tale. Back in the 1800s, toffs who owned the land decided they could no longer be bothered with tiny but crippling rents from crofters who farmed their land. It'd be more profitable to let sheep munch and grow fat and good for market.
Gentry who prefer sheep to humans are unlikely to go about their business gently. They simply set fire to the crofts.
There are two sides to every story. The Countess of Sutherland said she was kindness itself. But the majority view supported, or was perhaps shaped by, the writing of the time:
"The consternation and confusion were extreme. Little or no time was given for the removal of persons or property; the people striving to remove the sick and the helpless before the fire should reach them; next, struggling to save the most valuable of their effects. The cries of the women and children, the roaring of the affrighted cattle, hunted at the same time by the yelling dogs of the shepherds amid the smoke and fire, altogether presented a scene that completely baffles description, it required to be seen to be believed."
The events were known as the Clearances and there's still bitterness at what happened. Of 15 000 driven away, many emigrated. Some just died.
“A dense cloud of smoke enveloped the whole country by day, and even extended far out to sea. At night an awfully grand but terrific scene presented itself - all the houses in an extensive district in flames at once. I myself ascended a height about eleven o’clock in the evening, and counted 250 blazing houses, many of the owners of which I personally knew, but whose present condition - whether in or out of the flames - I could not tell. The conflagration lasted six days, till the whole of the dwellings were reduced to ashes or smoking ruins.”
The man who wrote of what he saw, Donald Macleod, was hounded out of Scotland and moved to Canada. We passed his memorial. Nobody knows where he died but it seemed appropriate to remember him here.
At the end of a beautiful day, finally the sea and the northern edge of the British mainland. We are on a haphazard campground overlooking a sandy bay. The silver-topped waves are soundless at this distance. It is melodically gorgeous.
Today's ride: 104 km (65 miles)
Total: 2,459 km (1,527 miles)
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