No Sleep Till Lallybroch
“It’s s— being Scottish! We’re the lowest of the low. The scum of the f—— Earth!” – Trainspotting
My wife and I arrived in Scotland at the end of May, less than a week after the Manchester Arena bombing and in the run-up to Theresa May’s politically fatal snap election. Needless to say, tensions were strained throughout the United Kingdom and across the globe – yet we quickly realized that there was a particularly Scottish undercurrent of impotent frustration that revealed itself frequently and unexpectedly. “Scottish votes don’t matter” proclaimed some graffiti on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, our first destination. (“I know – it’s shite” was scrawled underneath.)
It was obvious that the vacation we had first conceived of in the fall of 2016 wasn’t going to be the carefree jaunt we’d initially imagined. Hotel televisions lingered salaciously on news footage of Trump from the G7 summit or of the Queen inexplicably interviewing one of the young survivors of the bombing in a painful segment that seemed to stretch on for hours. It was clear we were in uncharted cultural territory – a fact which made our week-long stay one of the most memorable experiences of our life.
Traveling as an American in 2017 is a loaded proposition, one that seems to invite pity and curiosity in equal measure. As we checked into one of our Airbnb bookings (a working croft where the mewling of sheep was audible long into the night), our host offhandedly inquired as to our political affiliation and offered his succinct commentary on the candidates of the 2016 election: “With a country as big as America, they were the best you could come up with?”
It was in moments like these that I felt I started to glimpse the real Scotland. I’ve always understood the appeal of the underdog, and that’s as good an entry as any into what we discovered of the Scottish national identity – but it’s also only the beginning. In a country where majesty is commonplace and where you can become a part of myth (run your fingers over stones first set generations ago, smell the same winds that have buffeted the coastal cliffs for millennia) – well, time and reality start to take new shapes.
One such experience came during our visit to Urquhart Castle, a 13th-century fortress on the shores of Loch Ness that was built on the site of an early medieval fortification. Urquhart has accumulated some pretty heavy psychic errata over the years, having played a pivotal role in the Wars of Scottish Independence as well as standing near where D. Mackenzie of Balnain first glimpsed something “wriggling and churning up the water” in 1872 before disappearing from sight.
In some tangential application of the observer’s paradox, though, the strongest influence on the site’s psychogeography in recent centuries seems to be that of the visitors who are drawn to it. As we made our way in single file up the narrowly winding staircase, we came upon the impeccably chiseled name of “J DEWAR” appearing, not once, but twice on the stone walls, dated 1888 and 1876 respectively. For the rest of the day, I couldn’t shake a sense of kinship with this stranger, who looked out over the same landscape only twelve centuries before and found something worth the return.
In fact, this experience echoed one of the primary motivations for our trip. Some of you (like my wife) may be familiar with Outlander – originally a series of novels by Diana Gabaldon and now a show on the Starz network. Through the power of a set of standing stones, the main character finds herself transplanted from 1940s England to 18th-century Scotland and slowly becomes entangled in various connections within her new reality – romantic, political, and others.
The show is largely filmed on location in Scotland. Although it only appears on-screen in a few episodes, one of the central locations of the series is Lallybroch, the ancestral home of the smoldering Scotsman Jamie Frasier. The stand-in for the estate is Midhope Castle, a 16th-century tower house located on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Unoccupied for years, the castle is now a frequent attraction for fans of the show, and we couldn’t resist a stop of our own.
On the morning we arrived, an overcast sky darkened the horizon as the sole other visitor snapped selfies. There was an eerie quiet in the air as we approached the house. The real-life Midhope Castle appeared regal but well past its prime. Boards covered many of the windows, and excess plywood and pieces of glass were scattered around a modern-looking workman’s shed. But a little presto-digitization by the film crew, and voila! Midhope is transformed on screen into a bustling homestead, one rife with possibility and community. This tension between the remembrance and the recreation of the past was never far away during our travels.
For the most part, we avoided the more populous urban centers such as Glasgow – unsurprisingly one of the biggest hotspots for the country’s alternative music scene. However, it’s easy to imagine why artists the city have gravitated to various forms of punk over the years, a genre which has always been as much about raging at the constrictions of life as it is about forming new lasting identities. I can hear this struggle in the sounds of many of the artists we’ve played from the country, one that is now intensified with current trends in UK as well as global politics.
Just as this only scratches the surface of Scotland, so have I only mentioned a few of the moments that I will remember for as long as I live – I haven’t described what it felt like climbing up scree-covered slopes in the Quirang in the rain while sheep bleated hundreds of feet below, or sitting beside shimmering “fairie pools” filled with some of the clearest water I’ve ever seen. In the end, though, perhaps this is as fitting a summary for our travels in Scotland as any, a trip rich with complexity and untold possibility.
Listen to our selection of Scottish artists in the playlist below.