Almost any time that I go to Inverness, which I have to admit, is not very often, I see strings of tourist buses heading towards and away from the Highlands. Their occupants sit up high, so that they can see over the hedges, and they do not have to concentrate on driving, but I am sorry for them, for they can only go where they are taken, hear what they are told and see what is pointed out to them. They cannot stop by the road-side for a rest or a nap, they cannot diverge to an out-of-the-way village pub or tea shop, perhaps to be attracted into a little churchyard by some unusual flower, there to find centuries of history in serried ranks of stonework. Or to enter the church and experience an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity that has been building up since Normans, Plantagenets and Tudors were Johnny-come-latelies. There is more in the countryside and ambience of Britain than can be put in any guide book. Touring is a good way in which to become acquainted with a country, whether it is done by booking a coach-tour or, to me more interestingly, by getting a lot of maps and guide books and working it out for myself, but the only way to get to know a country is as a visitor. A tourist does not stop, he is constantly being urged on, he has to take what he is given either as food, accommodation or local information; he meets only his own kind, which he could do just as well at home. Sad to say, there is also a tendency, not yet widespread, for tourism to engender an attitude that the world owes it a living and the tourist is sometimes made less welcome than he might expect and deserve. The 'visitor', on the other hand, stops, talks, makes friends, uses the village shop, church and post office, and is free to seek out things that interest him; there is an exchange of culture and he will often return to a place, something that is almost unheard of for the tourist.

True, the visitor may suffer from some language difficulty, which the coach-tourist can avoid by carrying his interpreter with him, but this need not be a serious worry. The British people have a reputation for being bad at languages and for being too arrogant to attempt to learn languages other than their own. The truth is that they are to shy to risk a blunder in another language and with all the world queuing up to practise English on them, they cannot get a word in. But those who do suffer some language problem might spare a thought for the natives. Not so long ago, by English time — a mere fifteen hundred years or so — England was divided into numerous little kingdoms of Continental origin, using versions of the languages that the original settlers had brought with them; such local variations have persisted into the common English language that has evolved over the centuries. Particularly distinct among these are Scots, sometimes called 'Lallans', the language of Lowland Scotland, and Doric, peculiar to Aberdeenshire and the East Coast of Scotland. Then we have our truly separate languages, Welsh and Gaelic, which the Scottish Highlanders call 'Gallic' and the Irish 'Gaylic'; the visitor does not, luckily, need to speak these, but a knowledge of them can add a lot of interest to place names.

No, we British do not have it all our own way!

Here is another one, longer than I intended but it rather a long story.  Photos next, I have some to go with this, then I have something on exploring by train; I do not know if that is possible these days but it was a lovely way to see the country.  I plan to do these as long as inspiration last, so as to build up a reserve.
Jamie 2.9.2006 (British way ,Sep 2, 2006)

When my wife and I first came to live at our Mill it was a rather shabby cottage set in an acre of rough pasture overgrown with coarse grass; it was habitable but far from luxurious, with what an estate agent would describe as 'potential for development'. We planned for a degree of self-sufficiency but our plans were flexible. My hope was that by bringing my wife back to her native Highlands her health would benefit and I was urged on by the knowledge that I was merely the latest occupant of a very hot seat on a large building project and that staying there would only do me professional harm.

We viewed the property in September 1976 but there were delays in completing the purchase and in December, returning to Edinburgh with an empty trailer after delivering the new bathroom suite, we crossed the boundary from a county that was treating black ice to one that was not, and ended, fortunately the right way up, at the foot of a thirty-foot embankment. Our main removal was scheduled for the following Tuesday and we managed that with a fairly battered car, returning to Edinburgh to camp out in an almost unfurnished flat for three months while the dents were knocked out.      

We took up residence at the beginning of March, in a springtime that was cold, wet, windy and sleety, erected a greenhouse and started some tomatoes, got on with the internal improvements - re-wiring, fitted cupboards, plumbing and so on _ and, in due time, dug over some ground and put in lots of potatoes and other things. It was the 'other things' that brought our first problem. The site has been occupied for some three thousand years and everybody who has built on it has left foundations; it proved impossible to six spots in a symmetrical rectangle where I could drive in the tubular uprights for a rabbit- proof enclosure. A poly-tunnel might have been the answer, but the first autumn gales blew the greenhouse off its foundation so I was pleased I had not tried it. The potatoes did well, though, in new ground, and we looked forward to some pre-planning for a better year.

More or less as expected, snow came in November, heavy enough to prevent the car from getting out, and lasted a week or more. Christmas was open and our visitors got away just as the first flakes began to fall on the 1st January. This time it was heavy, about ten inches, and very cold but after about ten days it began to thaw and the outlook became quite springlike, with just the occasional snow-shower. We began to look forward to Spring, not yet knowing that we should not get it, or that we were due for a rude awakening. During the night of 27th January, a Friday, we were awakened by a violent gale and the sound of trees breaking in the wood.  Daylight revealed a blizzard. The post came, with snow piled high on the bumper of the Landrover, and that was the last we saw of him for nine weeks. On Sunday the snow had stopped but there were seven foot drifts between the cottage and the steading; the garage doors opened inwards and could not be shut when the car was inside, so that was full of snow too. The snow that year continued well into April and I think it was that winter that edged us in the direction we eventually went. We continued to grow potatoes and kept a few geese, but being self-sufficient was clearly going to be more expensive and more risky than being not self-sufficient; we could use our time more profitably in other ways.

So our little estate developed into a rough parkland, with lots of trees, bushes and daffodils, and was much admired by visitors for its peace and tranquillity. A neighbour, a German PoW who had stayed behind and worked for the Forestry Commission, adopted half of the grassed area and kept it mowed, and I was able to deal with the rest, while my wife did the real gardening.

This happy little haven lasted for twenty-four years, until my wife died; within a month or two my mowing friend was knocked off his scooter and killed. No gardener myself, I would have been unable to cope with the task of maintaining the status quo and I decided to let it revert to the wild and become a sanctuary for any wild life that cares to use it. For a few weeks each year it looks pretty dreadful but my conscience clears when a roe deer appears outside my window, materializing like a reddish-brown ghost. Just in front of my office window is a large willow tree that I have known since it was twig, broken off another tree and stuck in the ground to root. It is a favourite of the roe, who come to nibble the shoots. Willow contains the active ingredient of aspirin, so presumably they get some benefit from it.

Autumn here is not much more than a date on the calendar. The change from summer to winter can be very sudden; one year it happened at four o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon but, usually, we get our first flakes of snow in mid- October, though this is just a reminder and we have to wait until mid- or late- November for a real fall.

 
 
He is long and lean, calm and unexcitable, very much an armchair, slippers and Sunday newspaper sort of fellow. He likes company, sleeps on my bed and, most mornings after breakfast, leads me to the fireside where he has a short rest on my lap before I start work. She is short and plump, impulsive, always busy and prefers her own company; I have not yet been able to persuade her to sleep on my bed and she was five years old before she would allow me to lift her on to my lap. Now, she usually gets up of her own accord to sit on my knee when I am at the computer. They both like being high up and a favourite place is the top of the wardrobe.

My wife died rather suddenly when they were about six months old and I felt very unsuited to being a single parent. I like all animals but am primarily a dog man and was of the opinion that, if a cat does what is asked of it, it is probably because it thought of it first, but I made a start on establishing a routine by setting an alarm clock for seven-thirty a.m. I was gratified to find that, after about a week, an orderly queue would be waiting by the outside door when I came downstairs; this grafted very nicely on to my existing routine of going to the village shop at 9 a.m. on Saturdays and to church at 10 a.m. on Sundays. The kittens (as they still were) organised themselves very happily around that and then a couple of news items on the radio caught my ear and set me thinking. The first of these lamented that there was a scarcity of day- nurseries in which human babies, at the age of ten weeks, could be deposited so that their mothers could go back to work, and the second recorded the discovery that children were arriving at their first schools unable to play or converse with each other. It seemed to me that to treat a baby as left luggage was much the same as putting a kitten on the floor with a bowl of food and another of water and leaving it to find its own way through life. Either kind of upbringing seemed certain to lead to the second result, so I decided to treat my twins like real babies. I began to talk to them, in a gentle conversational way, and found that they very quickly picked up a useful vocabulary of words and simple phrases; they caught on easily to some of the more difficult things I told, them too, too often for me to be able to brush it off as coincidence, and that gave me further cause for thought. They are able to communicate and exchange ideas soundlessly over a considerable distance, which must surely involve some sort of telepathy; I have no personal doubt that, aeons ago, the human race possessed faculties that have since been ‘civilized’ out of it, and wonder if we  can still, inadvertently, send out messages, though we cannot receive the replies. I wonder, also, if those species which allied with Man many ages ago as helpers and companions, cats, dogs, horses, donkeys and perhaps elephants, have acquired dual personalities so that if treated like people they behave more like people.

Small meals at regular times left no dried-up, smelly dishes, plenty of snack material discouraged theft, which was never a problem anyway, and the issue of ‘sweeties’ when they come in at night settled the matter of getting them in at a reasonable time. We have foxes, pine martens and suspected mink, so I did not care to have small kittens out at night; they come in for their sweeties about dusk, later in winter and earlier in high summer, and on a nasty night they will come in early and sit in front of me until I realise why they are there.

A little thought and very little trouble have given me two charming and completely civilized little companions, so well-behaved that obedience does not enter into the equation, affectionate and I would even say considerate, for they make no trouble about fitting in with changes in my arrangements, such as when I make an unusual shopping expedition. I am very fond of them and have a great respect for them. People will say I have gone soft about them; I do not think so, but that probably proves the point.

Though our climate varies in severity – and we have had some pretty severe summers – the weather pattern is remarkably constant and the November snow can confine us to home for a week or so. The next bad spell comes immediately after Christmas, when there is heavier snow and it is very cold until New Year, when signs of spring begin to appear. This is the false dawn for, at the end of January, with remarkable regularity, winter strikes in earnest. This is the time of the Perth Bull Sales, which might be expected to have nothing to do with it, but our first postman here always picked this time for his winter holiday week it and only once in about ten years did I know his forecast fail; that year, he put his holiday off for a week at the last minute and the bad weather was a week late! That first winter, when we were unable to get a vehicle in or out for nine weeks, was a bit daunting but, fortunately, we had come north with a greatly exaggerated idea of the isolation we expected to encounter and were very adequately supplied; when things calmed down, I was able to walk to the end of our track and get a lift into Tomatin by the school bus, which collected the school dinners from the school there and took them to Moy School, and get minor needs, like milk and papers, from the village shop. Village shops in general tend to get a bad Press; I cannot speak for the others, but ours is very good; it cannot compete on price or variety with the supermarkets, but it is only three miles away, not fifteen (and petrol has to be taken into account), and I can buy batteries for my watch there – and avoid the massive charge for putting them in.

Before winter has cleared away, which may be as late as the end of April, the lambs start coming, bringing the landscape to life. My dog, Ghillie, was an almost white Collie/Labrador cross – his proper name was Gille Ban which is Gaelic and means 'white boy' – and understood sheep although he was a bit frightened of them; a young lamb will make a rush for anything white with four legs and Ghillie always took care that I was between him and any lambs that were around.

May is usually a good month for weather and brings the shore birds back; the oyster-catchers seem never to sleep and their excited-sounding calls go on all night. But the farming year in the Highlands is short and the farmers have to go with Nature instead of trying to make Nature go with them. Without necessarily being organic, just a bit old-fashioned, they produce wonderful food but alas, the march of the supermarkets has ensured that there are fewer and fewer of the small specialist shops, butchers, greengrocers, fishmongers and all the others, at which we used to be able to buy local produce.

As they grew up, Twinkle became head of the family, not by competition but, as far as I could see, because he is the male and is responsible for protection and provisions. He is content to leave the providing to me but tried hard to look after his sister; she was a bit of a hooligan and on several occasions I noticed that he seemed to take her aside for a brotherly chat. It was apparent that he got the sort of reaction that brothers usually get when they try to look after their sisters and these têtes-à-tête usually ended in her being chased upstairs. The last of these episodes was several years ago, when Qwerty launched herself from the high back of a rather unstable kitchen chair, aiming for the top of a high cupboard without looking to see if there was anywhere to land; there was not, and she ended up in a heap on the quarry tile floor. He was there instantly and, having seen that there was no serious damage, edged her off in the direction of the parlour; my sister, who was staying at the time, remarked that it looked as if she was being 'spoken to' and it certainly did. She has not tried a trick like that since, so she may have had more breath knocked out of her than she let be known. In the ordinary way, they show normal brother and sisterly affection. They do not quarrel but they have ritual fights; these begin with mutual face-washing, then one will seize the other round its neck, fling it on its back and kick its face vigorously with its back feet. There is much name-calling and bad language, but no residual ill-feeling. If one is in and the other out, that one will tell me when the other wants to be let in; if both are out Twinkle will wait in the porch until I open the inner door and will then go and tell Qwerty, wait for her and stand aside to let her in first and, quite often, give her a whack on the behind as she goes past. The really are just children! By another old-fashioned standard, at formal meal-times, Qwerty does not take hers until Twinkle has had his, an echo of Mother seeing to the family’s needs before her own. 

“Experts” will tell you that animals cannot reason or plan ahead or solve problems or do other mental things that would give them equality with the human race. There are three of us and we have four armchairs; we each have our favourites but the last one in always has a choice. We are really very comfortable, but when we had a sudden very cold spell a couple of winters ago, I thought a little more comfort would be a good thing. So, on a Wednesday afternoon, I went off and bought two cat beds, nice and soft, fleece-lined with a high upstand and partly roofed, the sort of thing I would like myself, only bigger, of course; I unpacked them, put them together and placed one each side of the central armchair. Twinkle was not over-enthusiastic, but experimented and found them acceptable; when I introduced Qwerty to the other, she gave me a growl that would not have disgraced a small tiger, so I left her to it. On the following Sunday evening she got down from her armchair and went to one of the beds. She inspected it carefully, sniffed it, tapped it with a paw, and got in, one foot at a time, testing each footfall for safety. She sat down and looked around, she lay down and snuggled down and stayed there for a few moments. She then went to the other bed, performed exactly the same routine and got back on her chair. Whatever brainwork cats can or cannot perform, this looked to me like some careful planning, serious market research and decision-making; since then she has ignored the beds. I do not know what she said to Twinkle, but he then stopped using his bed and has only recently started to use it again after at least two years.

After watching the film 'Ancient and New Tartans', we are a bit confused. How would you be able to tell whether or not a piece of tartan is ancient? - kaiwanoshima 3.1.2007

Many years ago there was a radio programme called 'The Brains Trust' in which a panel of very learned people answered questions on all sorts of subjects set by members of the audience.  One of the regular members became famous, not for the quality of his answers, which were full, fair and erudite, but because he always began with "It all depends on what you mean by.....". This also has to be the answer to any question about the age of tartan.

Like many words, 'tartan' has changed its meaning several times over the centuries. At first, it was a type of cloth, then a type of cloth with a particular type of pattern. Next, the pattern took on a significance in connection with some person, place or family while the type of cloth ceased to have any relevance; finally, like the grin on the Cheshire Cat, only the pattern was left, and that could be applied to anything from wrapping paper to china- ware.

The word 'tartan' comes from the French Tiretaine, which a little knowledge of the language, and some of weaving, suggests, means a woven cloth. In Lowland Scotland this became Tertane , often Helande Tertane and a reference to the purchase of three ells (an ell is just under a metre) were purchased to make hose for the King in 1538; no pattern is mentioned. Tartan cloth emerges from history as of wool, woven in 'twill' (which gives the cloth its distinctive diagonal ribbing) from a single-ply, smooth-spun yarn; a pattern was unnecessary until at least November 1827, when a merchant in Edinburgh ordered 'Plain Dark Green coloured tartan, no pattern on it' from the weaver. However, there is ample evidence from the fourteenth century on that plain cloth was not the norm. 'Variant', 'variegated', 'striped' and 'chequerwork' are used to describe the clothing of the Highlanders, John Taylor, the self-styled 'King's Water Poet', on his 'Pennylesse Pilgrimage' to the Highlands in 1618, told of a "warm stuffe of divers colours, which they call Tartane", and a woodcut of 1638 shows Highland soldiers in the army of Gustavus Adolphus dressed in a clear tartan pattern. The Highlanders themselves always called the material Breacan (approximately Breh-kan) which signifies variegation of one kind or another. Isolated occasions are recorded, during the late seventeenth-century Jacobite campaigns and for 'hunting matches' (which were clearly intended to cause alarm to the authorities) when organised bodies of men were assembled, clothed in uniform patterns, but it is not until 1725, when the Government's Highland Independent Companies were re-organised that we have a record of organised systematic use of tartan as a uniform pattern.  In that year, General Wade, Commander-in-Chief in Scotland, instructed that 'the plaid of each Company to be........of the same sort and colour'. In the Rising of 1745, the Jacobite Army was organised in Clan Regiments; many of the leaders bought tartan in bulk for their men and so 'Clan' tartans were born. Writers of historical fiction and of fictional history took up the idea and the Lowland tartan industry, growing rapidly in order to supply the Army and all the Scots who had emigrated to the Colonies, embraced it with enthusiasm.  By 1820, there was a fair sprinkling of tartans with 'clan' names and this was given a boost by the visit of King George IV to Edinburgh in 1822. Other boosts followed and brought a secondary industry in their wake; Olympic feats of genealogical gymnastics have been performed in compiling those 'What is my Tartan?' books aimed at enabling as many people as possible to claim the mystical 'right' to wear a tartan. 

Tartan was made in much the same way for centuries; mechanical spinning came fairly early but it was not until the 1820s that an automatic loom capable or weaving tartan was developed. The dyes were obtained mainly from native plants until the Lowland trade mushroomed in the mid-1700s, when native supplies ceased to be sufficient and imported plant-dyes began to be used.  The plants gave bright, but soft, colours but were supplanted in the mid-1800s by the first of the synthetic dyestuffs which gave the strong, vivid colours that came to be known as 'modern'. In the 1920s these, in their turn, gave way to the washed-out pastel shades called 'ancient' or 'old', which were supposed to look like the real old colours, and the end of the Second World War saw the discovery of 'reproduction', or 'muted' colours, derived from a fragment of tartan dug up in the peat on Culloden Moor.  Since then, weird colour ranges have been invented, generally having little resemblance to the real thing.

Early tartans were hard and harsh to the feel but the softer merino yarn was in common use in the first quarter of the nineteenth century and there was a soft variety of cloth called 'rock and wheel' having its warp spun with the spindle (rock) and its weft spun on the wheel.  As spinning techniques improved, we got smoother and denser and more comfortable cloth; modern tartan is fine, close and almost shower-proof, just the thing for wearing in the outdoor life.

Because the manufacturing methods changed so little over a long period it is difficult, sometimes impossible, to say at a glance if a piece of tartan is ancient or modern.  Experience helps for, though it is hard to define, an old piece of tartan does have a look about it.