My Heart’s in the Highlands – Part 2

Assembling at Alltschelach

By James T. Carney

The history summarized in Part 1 was far from my mind and from the minds of my intrepid companions as we assembled for our first trip as a trio on a wet, rainy day in Glasgow. My long-time friend Detmar Straub had accompanied me to Montenegro and the Pyrenees, and my local friend John Shortridge had gone with me to Machu Pichu, the Grand Canyon, and Zion National Park. We would now go on the epic Great Glen Way, which crosses Scotland from the Atlantic to the North Sea through a geological fault that is clearly visible on any map of Scotland running northeast from Fort William to Inverness.

L-R seated: the author & John
Detmar standing

    Our hotel in Glasgow was quite inexpensive; its floor space per person was less than 10 square feet. I’m afraid that in the selection of hotels, my genes had been carried away by the thriftiness of my Scottish ancestors. In all events, we found a good pub and had a good meal, albeit having been half drowned by the rain in walking there.
  We found the Scots tremendously friendly people. There were at least two occasions on the trip, when we were looking around trying to figure out on a map where we wanted to go, and people came up to us and volunteered to give us directions. They were less standoffish than the English, or the Irish for that matter.
    Another thing that I should note is that I saw only one authentic Scottish Terrier (black) on our trip, and only a few West Highland Terriers (white). When I made my trip to Hadrian’s Wall years ago, I swear that every Englishman had a dog.

Our country house at Alltschelach

The next morning we took a bus tour of Glasgow (which is generally a good thing to do to get a feel of a city). Most tours permit you to hop on and off, although we did not have enough time to do this in Glasgow since we had to meet our van in mid-afternoon to travel from Glasgow to Fort William and our country house at Alltschelach. One of the odd things about Glasgow is that there seem to be no building codes. We would, for example, see an 18th century building standing next to a modern building along with various other styles in between. Another disturbing sight were garish junk stores on the bottom floor of distinguished buildings. My conclusion about Glasgow was that Boswell was right [about taking that “high road to England”].

    Detmar, however, had high tea at McIntosh at the Willow Tearooms – a ceremonial occasion indeed. He may have come to a different conclusion about Glasgow.

I myself was happy to catch our van in mid-afternoon and head north. Our trip was delayed by an hour and a half, however, because the travel organization (HF Holidays) screwed up and hadn’t even listed our reservation on the van, although I had signed us up months earlier, and we didn’t pick up one passenger (Dr. Sue, who will come to my aid a couple of times on this outing) at the Glasgow airport but waited on the way to Fort William for a taxi to deliver her.

    We got to the country house at Alltschellach in time for dinner, and a good dinner it was. The best meal I had, however, was the Scottish salmon dinner the next day – it was delicious! We also had good breakfasts and I acquired a taste for the Scottish national food – haggis, which is a kind of sausage. Alltschellach had been a country estate at some point and was converted into a hotel and then purchased by HF Holidays and used as a base camp, not only for our group, but for a number of others who were doing far less strenuous hikes than we were embarking on.

    I much enjoyed talking to members of other groups when we finished each of our first four days of hiking and were picked up by the van and taken back to Alltschelach. I also spent some time talking to the bartender – I was typically the first one to get to the bar when it opened at the end of each day. The bartender was a Spaniard who said he was working for six months each at a number of hotels and other establishments to learn the hotel business. He was highly educated and knew a lot of Spanish history, so we had some good conversations.

The trio posing before a map
of the Great Glen Way

The next day we took the van to Fort William and started our hike. Fort William had been built in King William III’s reign to hold down the clans. (This was King William of William & Mary fame. He chased James II and the Old Pretender out of England and saved the Protestant cause.) Another fort was built for the same purpose at the other end of Scotland, and also Fort Augustus in the middle of the Great Glen Trail. Fort William was built not far from the site of the infamous Massacre of Glencoe, on February 13, 1692. William III’s government, fearing that the MacDonalds who lived in Glencoe were a group of rebels sympathetic to the deposed King James II, had stationed a group of Campbells – hereditary enemies of the MacDonalds – in the MacDonald houses. With the help of British troops stationed at Fort Williams, the Campbells murdered some thirty of their hosts, although most of them escaped.

    We three and the rest of the party went to the start of the Great Glen trail and after an hour of so reached the site of the start of the Caledonian Canal, which was built in the 1820s to enable shipment of goods from Inverness and towns south of Inverness to Ft. William. The Great Glen Way would follow the Caledonian Canal and then the lakes up to Inverness.

Copyright © 2020 by James T. Carney