And chasing the ghost of lost battles. Leaving Bunchrew House the next morning, fortified with Walker’s delicate, house-smoked kippers, I decided to pay homage to one of Scotland’s sacred sites: the battlefield at Culloden Moor, just outside of Inverness. It was here that, on April 16, 1746, the Jacobite leader Bonnie Prince Charlie was defeated by the Duke of Cumberland in a battle that killed 1,200 Highlanders in just under an hour, crushing all hope of local rebellion and firmly establishing English control. It was a deathblow to the old Highlands; clans were broken up and peasants forced off their lands, replaced by sheep owned by the nobility.
The Scots are connoisseurs of defeat, and as I explored the fatal pathways, amid the red Jacobite flags fluttering in the wind and tour bus denizens gently chatting, I felt as if I were on a Civil War battlefield in the Deep South. History is still alive here, inscribed in the very soil. Stones mark the fallen dead of the various clans, and on this ordinary afternoon more than 250 years after the battle, many of these markers were adorned with freshly cut flowers left by descendants who will never forget. As a middle-aged woman placed yellow flowers on her family stone, I wondered whether Americans would still be leaving flowers at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the year 2223.
One of the marvels of northern Scotland is that it never stays the same for very long. Crossing the so-called Black Isle, which is merely a peninsula with delusions of grandeur, I made my way along the coastal highway overlooking the glittering North Sea, a drive that was rather like entering a cosmic game of strip poker: The farther north I drove, the more the things of the world were slowly removed. Houses became rarer, then trees, then cars. Promontories flattened; flowers turned to lichens. From time to time, I passed a ruined tower, just waiting for a Sunday painter, or an abandoned farmhouse whose frame had crumbled, offering a peek of an old bureau or a crumbling fireplace. I’ve never seen more cemeteries overlooking the sea. Mile by mile, I felt the weight of time, the triumph of nature over culture. This northeastern landscape has an aestheticized look, as if it has been worked over for centuries to achieve a minimalist purity in which everything inessential has been banished.
That includes people. Although I admired the storybook charms of Golspie, a one-street town with banners gaily announcing the arrival of the Antiques Roadshow, most of these villages are dinky and depressed, with failing bakeries and fry shops lowering Mars bars into hot oil. Passing through Wick, which even Lonely Planet calls “seemingly dismal,” I was struck by the fact that virtually everyone you saw was either a school-kid or an old-age pensioner pottering along with a terrifying obliviousness to traffic. My heart was in the Highlands, a-honking the horn.
Things began to change when I reached John o’Groats, one of the northernmost points of the British Isles, where you catch the ferry to the Orkney Islands to look at the puffins. Aside from a prizewinning public convenience in the visitor center (complete with a plaque from the British Toilet Association for “Raising Washroom Standards”), the town had little to hold me. But heading west along the coastal highway—past the great surfing beaches of Thurso, the eerie nuclear power plant at Dounreay, the sad old crofting town of Bettyhill, born when the Duchess of Sutherland simply evicted all her tenant farmers—the world slowly took on an otherworldly loveliness. I’ve been up the Amazon and in the Alps, along the hairpin curves of Big Sur and across the blinding white Salt Flats, but I’ve never encountered any place quite so haunting as this landscape of stones painted with lichens in the colors of Monet, acres of heather caressing the ground like a vast purple shawl, and mists tumbling over the hilltops. Turning down a one-lane road that I shared with the occasional flock of dawdling sheep, I saw countless small lochs, some as dark and flat as smoked mirrors amidst the purpling land, others resembling bolts of black satin embroidered with sunlight so pale it was almost silver.
I spent the night at The Tongue Hotel, the one-time hunting lodge of the Duke of Sutherland, above the village it was named for. The room gazed out over the distant ruins of a 14th-century castle on a promontory overlooking an inlet, or kyle; like so much in northern Scotland, it seemed to be posing for a postcard. Tongue is about as far away as one can get from the big cities, so I was startled to learn that the restaurant served Thai crab cakes with red chile sauce (not bad) and that the “Sutherland salmon” came with basil aïoli. The fish had been caught half an hour away, the server solemnly told me, and in this moment, I finally grasped the full reach of the Scottish food boom: Even here, at a far corner of the earth, I was being told the provenance of the ingredients. I don’t want to oversell the food at The Tongue Hotel, but if you came across a restaurant remotely this ambitious in Martensdale, Iowa, my hometown of about 500 people (roughly the same population as Tongue), you would wonder if you’d somehow stumbled into Brigadoon.
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