This is Scotland by Daniel Gray

Author:Daniel Gray [McCredie, Daniel Gray & Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel writing
Publisher: Luath Press Ltd
Published: 2014-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Hebrides

They stop to chat beneath umbrellas. Two old ladies of Skye, discussing supermarket offers. Visitors buzz all about them, frightened of the rain or of missing a photograph. The Portree women are street furniture, everything else is chaos.

What is it like to live in these surroundings? What is it like to buy your bread or open your test results beneath improbable mountains in a brochure landscape? The oblivious old ladies have it right: let Skye surroundings go to your head and you might think yourself the member of a chosen, blessed race. That will not do in the hard world of the Hebrides.

The road spins us towards the ferry terminal at Uig, our eyes numbed and glazed by beauty. Ferrymen in fluorescent jackets knock on windows and wake entranced passengers. They have forms

that need filling, paperwork in triplicate. MV Hebrides, built in another Scotland we will soon see, slides across the water and opens her arms to Uist brothers going home, lorry drivers charged with bevvying up the islands and bemused tourists under the commandments of Lonely Planet guides. There are skilled workmen on jobs seen as jollies back at the plant, and a minibus of soldiers, bound for Benbecula and South Uist, where things that kill have long been tested.

This ragtag community bounces across the waves. All nostrils are filled by canteen scents, all eyes soothed by the ripples then ribbons of bumpy green land that appear in the ship’s fish tank windows. Signs on doors and walls have a larger font for Gaelic than English, a quick word in our shell-likes that here, other words come first. We cut through a fog and North Uist can be seen. The ferry society disbands and spills from the boat, except for a young Spanish couple on a cycling holiday. They pause on the landing ramp, rain coating their faces, and think about what they’ve done.

Big cars pull up and whisk mums off to other parts of these islands. We remain in Lochmaddy. I think of Edwin Muir talking about the Highlands in Scottish Journey: ‘Everything had the look of a Sunday which had lasted for many

years.’

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