If you drive a few minutes west of Inverness, a city whose name is as lovely as its streets are not, you will find the Bunchrew House hotel, a tree-enshrouded 17th-century mansion on the shores of Beauly Firth, a narrow North Sea inlet whose waters shine like golden oil in the late afternoon sun. With its horsey tweed clientele and proximity to Loch Ness, it’s the kind of place where, not so long ago, one would have expected to be served hearty country fare cooked to the traditional gray. But that was Auld Scotland, whose contribution to world cuisine was haggis and the deep-fried Mars bar. These days, the country is following in the food-mad footsteps of England and Ireland. Even at this small hotel, the restaurant menu bristles with worldly ambition: pink breast of wood pigeon en croûte with Port and black truffle sauce; poached fillet of sea bass with prawn and caper couscous; papillote of seasonal fruit served with homemade jasmine ice cream. I had a tender piece of venison, just in season.
The hotel’s chef is Walter Walker, a tall, russet-bearded man with the self-effacing calm of a good jazz musician who has found freedom playing at a tiny club in a small city. Over a postprandial nip of malt whisky, one of 200 offered by the hotel, he told me he’d come to Bunchrew House about ten years earlier, back before visitors to Loch Ness expected, or even wanted, serious cooking. “They didn’t trust it,” he said sadly. In his first month as chef, they sold exactly three dinners. But all that seems long ago. Now he’s happily settled in and growing his own herbs, smoking his own meat and fish, and, like virtually every-one you meet, boosting the homeland. With the burning eyes of a less manic Billy Connolly, he insisted that Scottish chanterelles are “the best in the world,” waxed eloquent on the rich flavors of Angus beef and local potatoes, raved about the “stunning” venison I’d greedily devoured earlier—killed specially for him in the west Highlands. Still, when I asked about the state of Scottish cooking, he shook his head: “We have the world’s best ingredients,” Walker said. “But we’re still learning what to do with them.”
He might well be talking of Scotland itself. After centuries of being governed by the condescending English—Lord Byron notoriously dubbed Scotland “a land of meanness, sophistry, and mist”—this country of 5 million souls now feels a brand- new sense of freedom. It got its own parliament in 1999, as part of the Blair government’s policy of devolution, and this sudden lurch toward home rule has fueled both a resurgence of national pride and an identity crisis in a country renowned for obsessively pondering what it means to be Scottish.
While Edinburgh may see the true Scotland in its artists, inventors, and thinkers (the Royal Mile boasts a goofy classical statue of David Hume), for many Scots and most foreigners, the “real” Scotland lies in the Highland world of tartans and bagpipes and battle cries and the whole Braveheart thing. This is not a little ironic, for during most of Scottish history, the Highlanders were despised by their Lowland compatriots for being poor, ignorant, dishonest, and rebellious. Indeed, our current concept of Scottishness, known as Highlandism, is based less on reality than on a consciously created myth whose pivotal moment came in 1822, when King George IV became the first English king to visit Scotland in 170 years. To amuse His Majesty, novelist Sir Walter Scott decided to stage a spectacular panorama filled with romanticized Highland rituals and costumes. The king was dazzled, and so was the world: Scott’s glamorized image of Scotland became part of the world’s collective unconscious—including my own. Sir Walter was my mother’s favorite novelist, and ever since I was a boy, she had filled my head with dreams of traveling to the Highlands.
I’d driven to Bunchrew House from the Edinburgh airport, heroically eschewing the distillery-lined Malt Whisky Trail in the interest of the pedestrians and livestock known to saunter alongside the Scottish roads. Although London friends had jovially warned me about the Highlands weather (“It’s really lovely up there. You’re going to love those ten minutes it’s not raining”), the day had been resolutely sunny as my car headed north on the A9 highway, the Monadhliath Mountains to my left, the Cairngorm Mountains to my right, swaths of pine forest glowing with the radiant green you find only in the British Isles. I found myself recalling Robert Burns’s famous old rhyme, “My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here, My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer.”
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.
I knew I was approaching a place far less magical as I headed south to Loch Ness, where every shop, café, hotel, pub, pizzeria, or tourist agency comes bedecked with a rendering of the sea monster Nessie. Although Loch Ness is the U.K.’s largest body of freshwater, it’s nowhere near as pretty as Loch Linnhe, its sparkling blue framed by forests and mountains, or the celebrated Loch Lomond. I drove off just as another tour bus pulled in.
Heading south from Loch Ness, the countryside is bejeweled with emerald vistas and lochs that sparkle like sapphires. Mile after mile feels enchanted, primordial, and I understood perfectly why they’re shooting the new Harry Potter movie near Fort William, at the foot of the famed mountain Ben Nevis. Such a landscape puts you in an ancient mood, just perfect for visiting Kilmartin, a small town on the west coast in Argyll that’s one of the country’s most overlooked great spots (the guidebooks barely mention it). Kilmartin claims to be the very navel of Scottish history—150 prehistoric sites lie within six miles—and there is a museum to prove it.
The real treasure, though, lay outside. Wandering the nearby countryside I came across sites charged with the animist magic of an earlier era and, in the area known as Temple Wood, a standing stone circle that, while smaller, bears a startling resemblance to Stonehenge. In the clean afternoon sunlight (still no rain), I climbed Dunadd Hill, a steep, 175-foot-high outcropping that rises from flatlands of bog and heather known as the Moine Mhor (“Great Moss”). “It is a royal place,” writes Neal Ascherson in Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland. “It is, for most Scots, the place where Scotland began.” Legend has it that, back in the sixth century, Fergus mor mac Erc came across the water from northern Ireland, where he’d ruled the kingdom of Dalriada, and laid claim to the lands around Dunadd. Fergus built a fort atop this hill, although what remains today is very little—most famously, two stone carvings of feet and one of a boar. Still, that’s enough.
For the visitor, Dunadd has an astonishing 360-degree view of the countryside. I stood atop it for a long, long time, taking it all in—the low growl of tractors, the cattle ambling about with bovine lassitude, the River Add flowing doughtily to the sea. The occasional car crawled along a bumpy road, obviously hoping to save its shocks. In the distance, the dark waters of the Sound of Jura occasionally flashed like low-hanging thunderclouds. Fifteen hundred years ago, standing here would have made anyone feel like the king of the world. Even now, I felt as if I could see forever.
Or at least to Edinburgh. I couldn’t, of course. Scotland’s great stone lady of a capital was a winding five-hour drive away, though in some profound sense, it seemed even more distant than that. Entering Edinburgh after days exploring the natural beauty of the Highlands, I almost felt I was seeing Scotland’s history in time-lapse photography. Everything was there—Castle Rock (first occupied in 1000 b.c.); the medieval Old Town; the elegant, Georgian New Town; and the chic new international city with its spruced-up waterfront, bevy of boutique hotels, and shops selling pomo designer kilts made of Chinese silks. This was no longer the gloomy Auld Reekie of Robert Burns fame.
What the city shares with the countryside is an obsession with food, perhaps the truest harbinger of Edinburgh’s embrace of modernity. It has shockingly expensive New Scottish Cuisine, New British Cuisine, New Scottish-French Cuisine, all in love with local ingredients. It has acclaimed restaurateurs like James Thomson, owner of The Witchery by the Castle, which is also a charming hotel, and acclaimed chefs like Michelin-starred Martin Wishart, whose small restaurant politely scoffed when I tried to reserve a table ten days in advance. Although I’d heard that the bolder chefs were working up fancy, foie-gras’d new riffs on the haggis (perhaps hoping to do for this unlovable dish what Daniel Boulud has done for the humble hamburger), I could never find such a thing on any menu.
The day before I flew back to L.A., I had lunch in the luminous café at the back of Valvona & Crolla, an Edinburgh institution since the 1930s, which locals insist is the best Italian delicatessen outside of Italy. It’s certainly the best in the U.K., with a staggering collection of Italian wines, and, thanks to the European Union, fabulous meats and cheeses that even great New York delis can’t import. After days of eating huge meals by Scottish chefs cutting loose after centuries of bad cooking, it was a relief to have the sublime simplicity of cheese panini, a platter of cured meats, and a pizza made to perfection.
When I asked to take away a copy of the menu, my request was greeted with a reflexive resistance that I’m tempted to call archetypally Scottish. My server called for the boss, Mary Contini, a friendly, energetic, opinionated woman—half mamma, half CEO—whose Italian ancestry and Scottish birth make her an advertisement for the new, Europeanized Edinburgh. As I sipped a superb cappuccino, she chatted about the Neapolitan girls in the kitchen, the mozzarella flown in that day from northern Italy, and modernizing the business: After decades of running a thriving but overstuffed, poorly lit delicatessen, her family finally let her convince them to bring Valvona & Crolla into the new millennium. Steeped in Italian food culture, Contini seemed amused by the the pretensions and occasional excesses of the new Scottish food boom. When I asked about one of the city’s best-known chefs, she flashed a sardonic smile:
“He does restaurant food,” she said simply, enunciating the words as a southern belle might say “Yankee.”
I never did get that menu.
edinburgh and the highlands
STAYING AND EATING THERE
Bunchrew House, Inverness (011-44-1463-234917; www.bunchrew-inverness.co.uk; from $284). Home to chef Walter Walker.
Crinan Hotel, Crinan (011-44-1546-830261; crinanhotel.com; from $500, with dinner). Fantastic views from the banks of Loch Crinan in Argyll. Chef Ben Tish serves the freshest (some say tastiest) seafood in Britain.
The Glasshouse, Edinburgh (011-44-131-525-8200; theetoncollection. com; from $240). Behind the limestone façade, this new boutique hotel at the edge of the Georgian New Town is totally mod inside.
Prestonfield House, Edinburgh (011-44-131-225-7800; www.prestonfield.com; from $278). A 17th-century mansion, 10 minutes by taxi from central Edinburgh, with a kilted staff and Highland cattle roaming the grounds—pure Harry Potter. Rhubarb, the hotel’s candlelit restaurant, has a fantastic setting and superb contemporary food.
The Scotsman, Edinburgh (011-44-131-622-2999; www.thescotsmanhotel.co.uk; from $332). A stylish, modern hotel in a landmark building that once housed the head office of The Scotsman newspaper.
The Tongue Hotel, Tongue (011-44-1847-611206; scottish-selection. co.uk/tongue; from $177). The Duke of Sutherland’s former hunting lodge in the remote northern Highlands.
The Witchery by the Castle, Edinburgh (011-44-131-225-5613; www.thewitchery.com; $461). A romantic restaurant and accompanying hotel with seven suites in restored historic buildings.
Amber, Edinburgh (Scotch Whisky Heritage Centre, 354 Castlehill; 0131-477-8477). Worth a visit for the range of 270 whiskies, plus the expert guidance of the staff, who can pair dishes with each.
Forth Floor, Edinburgh (Harvey Nichols, 30-34 St. Andrew Square; 0131-524-8350). The department store’s top-floor deli-brasserie-restaurant has fine views across the rooftops to the River Forth estuary.
I.J. Mellis Cheesemonger, Edinburgh‑(30A Victoria Street; 0131-226-6215). A vast collection of artisanal British cheeses.
Oloroso, Edinburgh (33 Castle Street; 0131-226-7614). One of Edinburgh’s best restaurants, for Highland cattle steaks and modern classics like smoked haddock over chive risotto.
Restaurant Martin Wishart, Edinburgh (54 The Shore; 0131-553-3557). Like London’s Docklands, the port of Leith has been restored to exuberant life, and this tiny restaurant (book weeks in advance) is on the neighborhood’s fanciest street—The Shore.
Valvona & Crolla, Edinburgh (19 Elm Row; 0131-556-6066). Londoners grudgingly concede that this is the best Italian deli in Britain.
PQ:
For many Scots and most foreigners, the “real” Scotland lies in the world of tartans, bagpipes, and battle cries—the whole Braveheart thing.
I’ve been in the Alps, along the hairpin curves of Big Sur, and across the blinding white Salt Flats, but I’ve never found any place quite as haunting.