Entranced in the Scottish Highlands

I spent last week dealing with the officialdoms needed to transition from resident of the United States to resident of Britain. It was a long list of tasks ranging from the brain-numbing to the furiously frustrating and it left me longing for peace and beauty. The Great Dane arrived in the midst of it all so we took a scenic tour to cool the cognitive coils.

We left Inverness on a main highway that soon narrowed to the modest proportions of a bygone age. We traveled north along the east coast, a green and straw-gold patchwork of farmland to our right and, to the left, red-brown rocks tumbling down to rose-tinted sands. Great flotillas of cloud sailed over the sea as if pushed by the cold breath of some ancient god.

The play of light on hill and headland, curtains of rain, and sudden rainbows—there is a powerful magic in this landscape. I tried to capture it with my camera and, as always, I am disappointed in the results.

The vast beauty of landscapes like these is humbling. For me, it’s more than the difference in scale between land and sea and sky and little old me; it’s the hugeness of my inner response to it all.

Something lives in the plants and minerals—the air even, that I can only describe as spirit. Something in my human spirit can perceive it, but it eludes my clumsy use of intermediaries to make a physical representation of it. Doing that work of art takes someone with much stronger skills than mine, yet I want to share something of it with you.

One good place to start is a new film set in the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland. The Outrun with Saoirse Ronan, is an adaptation of the memoir by Amy Liptrot and tells of a young woman named Rona who returns to her childhood home to deal with alcohol addiction.

As she tries to break the cycle that has all but broken her, Rona does the bloody chores of lambing season on her father’s windswept farm. She walks a shoreline where the stone is stacked in layers like cliffs of misdeeds called to account. She hears the syncopated rhythms of her former life in London and sees her body reflected in the landscape of tide and shifting sands. In self-imposed solitude, Rona battles the noise in her head until, eventually, she finds its harmony in the ocean’s roar.

The story is about the healing power of the natural world and ecotherapy as a reciprocal process. The cinematography is stunning so go to a theater and see it on the big screen.

Another film I love for its Highland scenery is Local Hero. It’s from 1983 and would benefit from remastering, but it’s still beautiful and offers a wonderful sense of place. Plus it has a soundtrack by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits that ditches bagpipe muzak for steel guitar, a little gospel-style organ, and some thumping good bass—listen to Going Home on YouTube with a slideshow.

Another great stop for Scotophiles is Between Two Seas, a Substack by Rebecca Hooper. An evolutionary biologist by training, Rebecca gave up a life in academia and moved to a wee island off the Scottish coast. She writes beautiful essays about marine wildlife and local myths that evoke the timeless nature of life on the margins of land and sea—she makes lovely artwork too.

I have just arrived at my next pet-sitting stopover and I’ll be writing my own stories again soon. I’m back in Scotland’s central belt where I’ve traded the wildness of the north for the eccentric elegance of Edinburgh. It’s one of my favorite cities and I look forward to sharing more about it with you.

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