Paul Theroux - The Kingdom by the Sea - A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

We drove up the narrow track to Rhiconich. This was actually the coast, a muddled maze of islands and lochs. We went to Kinlochbervie, which was a busy fishing port on a sea loch, dealing in whitefish and lobsters.

We stopped twenty more times. Mr. Mathers did this twice a day on this small windy corner of Scotland. When he stopped and parked, the wind shook the bus and rattled the cottage gates and moaned against the telegraph wires. A pint of milk, a Scotsman, and a printed postcard saying This is to acknowledge your communication of the 13th inst. to Mrs. Massey at Drumbeg.

"Cape Wrath doesn't mean 'angry,'" Mr. Mathers said. "It's from a Norse word that means 'turning point.' This is where the ships turned south. Sutherland is another Norse name — it was south for them."

Then he smiled. "Don't be disillusioned," he said. "The weather can be hellish here. In 1952, when I was still at school, we had a January storm. The winds were a hundred and twenty miles an hour — roofs were torn off houses. The Irish ferry was lost that night. It's often bad weather — horrible weather. I pity the lads in those wee fishing boats."

We came to Durness. He said, "This is it. There aren't more than three hundred people here. It's the work problem, you see. There's no employment."

The village was empty, but the wind was a presence — wild gusts flew in from the direction of the Faeroes.

I walked back through the sandy cliffs, among the rabbit holes, to Keoldale and the Cape Wrath Hotel, and had my first good meal for days. There were a number of English anglers at the hotel. They blustered when the national news came on. They were all Tories. They called the Prime Minister "Maggie." Her nonsense suited their nonsense. One said he wanted to shoot the man being interviewed, who claimed he had known all along that the Falklands were going to be invaded. "Too many bloody people giving advice!" Another said that half the Labour Party should be shot for treason. One thing about anglers, though. They went to bed early.

The next day I crossed the Kyle of Durness and walked seven miles to Kearvaig, which was like the end of the earth. But this was Cape Wrath proper and had peaty soil — it was crumbling cliffs and sand at Durness.

I saw a seal take a salmon. People told me that seals did not really eat them — that they just took bites of a fish's shoulders and threw the rest away. But this seal lay on his back with the eight-pound salmon in his mouth, and he tossed his head and snapped his jaws and ate the whole thing.

Then on my way back I saw a flock of sheep crossing a sandbar in the Kyle of Durness. The tide was coming in. The sheep started moving. Soon they were swimming, the big horned sheep in front, the lambs behind, with their noses out of the water. They were North Highland Cheviots. They moved very slowly, for the tide was still rising and they were still far from the bank. Fifteen minutes later the Kyle was filled, there were fewer sheep visible, and then there were none. They had all drowned, about nine of them, under the gray torn sky.

***

Some fantasies prepare us for reality. The sharp steep Cuillins were like mountains from a storybook — they had a dramatic, fairy-tale strangeness. But Cape Wrath was unimaginable. It was one of those places where, I guessed, every traveler felt like a discoverer who was seeing it for the first time. There are not many such places in the world. I felt I had penetrated a fastness of mountains and moors, after two months of searching, and I had found something new. So even this old, overscrutinized kingdom had a secret patch of coast! I was very happy at Cape Wrath. I even liked its ambiguous name. I did not want to leave.

There were other people in the area: a hard-pressed settlement of sheep farmers and fishermen, and a community of drop-outs making pots and jewelry and quilts at the edge of Balnakeil. There were anglers and campers, too, and every so often a brown plane flew overhead and dropped bombs on one of the Cape Wrath beaches, where the army had a firing range. But the size of the place easily absorbed these people. They were lost in it, and as with all people in a special place, they were secretive and a little suspicious of strangers.

Only the real natives were friendly. They were the toughest Highlanders and they did not match any Scottish stereotype I knew. They did not even have a recognizably Scottish accent. They were like white crows. They were courteous, hospitable, hard-working, and funny. They epitomized what was best in Scotland, the strong cultural pride that was separate from political nationalism. That took confidence. They were independent, too—"thrawn" was the Lowlands word for their stubborn character. I admired their sense of equality, their disregard for class, and the gentle way they treated their children and animals. They were tolerant and reliable, and none of this was related to the flummery of bagpipes and sporrans and tribalistic blood-and-thunder that Sir Walter Scott had turned into the Highland cult. What I liked most about them was that they were self-sufficient. They were the only people I had seen on the whole coast who were looking after themselves.

It was a shire full of mountains, with spaces between — some valleys and some moors — and each mountain was separate. To describe the landscape it was necessary to describe each mountain, because each one was unique. But the soil was not very good, the sheep were small, the grass thin, and I never walked very far without finding a corpse — loose wool blowing around bones, and the bared teeth of a skull.

"Look," a shepherd named Stephen said to me on one of these hillsides.

A buzzard-sized bird was circling.

"It's a hooded crow," Stephen said. "They're desperate creatures. In a place like this — no shelter, no one around for miles — they find a lamb and peck its eyes out. It's lost, it can't get to its mother, it gets weak. Then the hooded crows — so patient up there — dive down and peck it to pieces. They're a terrible bird."

He said that it was the predatory crows, not the weather, that killed the lambs. It was a cold place, but not excessively so. In winter there was little snow, though the winds were strong and the easterlies were usually freezing gales. There were always birds in the wind — crows and hawks and comic squawking oystercatchers with long orange bills and singing larks and long-necked shags and stuttering stonechats.

It could be an eerie landscape, especially on a wet day, with all the scattered bones gleaming against the dun-colored cliffs and the wind scraping against the heather. It surprised me that I was happy in a place where there were so few trees — there were none at all here. It was not picturesque and it was practically unphotographable. It was stunningly empty. It looked like a corner of another planet, and at times it seemed diabolical. But I liked it for all these reasons. And more important than these, my chief reason for being happy was that I felt safe here. The landscape was like a fierce-looking monster that offered me protection; being in Cape Wrath was like having a pet dragon.

On one of my walks I met a veterinarian, Doctor Pike, who was making the rounds of the Cape Wrath farms, trying to persuade the farmers to dip their sheep. An ailment called sheep scab had been brought over from Ireland and had endangered some of the flocks.

Doctor Pike was a fluent Gaelic speaker. He was self-assured and well read, and though he did not boast, he did imply a moral superiority in the Highlander — and in the Scots in general — and he suggested that there was something lamentable and decadent in the English.

"Take the colonies," he said. "The Scots who went out were very hard-working and idealistic. But for a lot of the English families the colonies were the last resort. They sent the black sheep of the family — the rubbish, the drunkards, the layabouts."