Faked fairies, a real massacre, and what the camera leaves out of the most photographed glen in Scotland.
In 1920 the man who invented the most famous sceptic in literature published a magazine article announcing that fairies were real. Arthur Conan Doyle had spent decades writing a detective who solved everything by refusing to believe anything without proof, and then someone sent him two photographs taken by a pair of Yorkshire schoolgirls: small winged figures dancing in a garden. He studied them, had them examined by an expert, and declared them genuine, proof of something the world had been missing. They were paper cut-outs from a children’s book, propped up with hatpins. The girls confessed sixty years later. One of them, asked how so many clever people had been taken in by cardboard, gave the only answer that has ever explained anything about belief. People weren’t fooled, exactly. They wanted to be.
That is the whole problem with a photograph. A sentence asks you to trust it. A photograph seems to hand you the proof directly, the thing itself, stopped and caught and available for checking. We believe what we see inside a frame in a way we never believe what we are merely told, and every faker who ever lived has known it. The camera doesn’t lie. It carries an authority it didn’t earn, lends that authority to whoever is holding it, and the first thing the holder usually wants is for you to believe.
We had a whole day to think about all of this before the glen, a day of unseeable lochs and boarded stories that got its own post, because Glencoe is where the thinking lands. This is the most photographed glen in Scotland. We gave it our last full Highland day, and it began, as these things should, with an alarm that hurt.
The admission fee
We had set a half-past-four alarm the night before, because the Buachaille’s little river lays down a mirror whenever the wind forgets to blow, and standing in it at first light is the only admission fee the mountain charges. The alarm went, and we paid the admission fee, and the mountain kept the view. We stood in the middle of the River Coupall at first light in a fog that had beaten us there, the Buachaille somewhere directly overhead and visible in approximately none of it. It was still, in its quiet grey way, very beautiful. It was not the photograph. The most photographed glen in Scotland had declined, on our one morning, to be photographed, and given everything this post keeps saying about cameras, we’ve decided to find that fitting rather than cruel.
So we abandoned the shot list and did the thing this whole country has been training us to do: we followed the weather instead of the plan. We drove the full length of the Glen Etive road, the single-track dropping away toward the loch, and mostly we just looked, because fog in that glen doesn’t hide the drama so much as redirect it, peaks surfacing and sinking, the road arriving in instalments. Then back to the main glen to find bluffs to climb and play with the fast-moving cloud, the two of us and the drone chasing gaps like the weather was dealing hands. None of it was the picture we came for. All of it was better than a picture.
Then breakfast at the Kingshouse, a nap, and the mobile office, which we would like to formally endorse as a way of life: laptops facing a river, an inbox emptying while a glen does its slow work out the window. We got a lot done. The glen got a lot done. Neither party disturbed the other.
The evening got the day’s second lap, and the stops the fog had swallowed at dawn. Back down Glen Etive to the falls everyone now calls the Skyfall Waterfall, then the full run to the road’s true end at Gualachulain, where a lonely bothy sits at the head of Loch Etive and the single-track simply stops, out of ideas.
As we turned for home, stags stepped out along the water in the fading light, and we noticed what was happening: we’d left Assynt in a whiteout full of them, and here they were again at the last road’s end, seeing us off. The Highlands apparently run their own continuity department.
Further back up the glen, in the genuine middle of nowhere, a lone red telephone box stood beside the road, long retired from calls and reborn as an honesty box selling handmade pottery, which may be the most quietly Scottish object we’ve met all month. Then the main glen’s greatest hits at last: the Three Sisters viewpoint, standing there properly this time, a week or so after the glance across a crowded room, and Loch Achtriochtan lying flat beneath the ridges. An hour and forty-eight minutes of driving, said the map. It took us the whole evening, and it should have. This is a place we could walk every day of our lives and never get tired of. We mean that literally. Daily. Forever.
And somewhere in the middle of it, the phone went, and it was Kai. The Australian squad has landed in Glasgow and set up at their HQ, and he sounded so pumped, and it pumped us even higher. A couple of hours of road between us and that pool now, and one Highland morning left to spend. The glen suddenly had company in the category of things we couldn’t stop thinking about.
By the last night, Kai had a glen’s worth of new supporters, because we’d told everyone we met, which is what aunts are for, and the Kingshouse bar stands ready to stream the Games with, we are assured, special mention of him to all who watch. So we had our last Highland beers under that arrangement, and raised them to the batteries, which were always part of the point of coming this far north. They arrived worn down. They’re leaving more than full. We did wish, briefly, that we were whisky drinkers, this being the country that perfected the argument for it, but we’ll leave the good stuff to Tracey’s dad and admit we’ve been no better than tourists of the dram up here. When in Scotland. It counted.
The camera doesn’t lie. It just has accomplices, and the loudest one is us.
The most filmed glen in the country
You have seen this glen. Everyone has. James Bond drove an old Aston down Glen Etive for the last act of Skyfall, the one moment the franchise let Scotland be Scotland. Hagrid’s hut stood on a hillside above the Clachaig for three Harry Potter films. Monty Python sent a knight to his doom off a bridge at the Meeting of Three Waters, where the questions three are still funnier than they have any right to be. Braveheart bled across these hills. The glen has sat for the camera so many times that arriving in it feels like meeting someone famous in person and finding them taller, quieter, and entirely unbothered by the fuss. It is, by every measure anyone uses, a photographer’s dream.
The wound in the picture
And the picture has a wound in it, and this journal won’t photograph around it.
In February 1692, around a hundred and twenty soldiers came up the glen and asked the MacDonalds for shelter. The chief, Alasdair MacIain, had been late swearing an oath of loyalty to the new king, delayed by snow and sent on a sixty-mile detour to find the right official, and the government had quietly decided his lateness would serve as an excuse. So the soldiers were billeted in the MacDonalds’ own houses under a tax pretext, and for nearly two weeks they ate at their hosts’ tables, played cards at their fires, and slept under their roofs. On the evening of the twelfth their captain received written orders to fall upon the people sheltering him and put everyone under seventy to the sword. At five the next morning, in a blizzard, they did. Around thirty-eight were killed where they lay, MacIain among the first, and many more died in the snow trying to reach the passes. A handful of the officers refused the order and were arrested for refusing, which is the one clean light in the whole account.
Scots law had a name for this, older and heavier than murder: murder under trust, the killing of those whose bread you have eaten. The glen’s name is often translated as the glen of weeping, and whatever the truth of the etymology, the massacre made the translation permanent. There is a wooded knoll near the foot of the glen called Signal Rock, where tradition says the order to begin was given. Historians doubt the detail, and the birch path to it is worth walking anyway, because some stories are kept for the keeping rather than the proving. We took the path down to the gorge below the Lost Valley too, where the MacDonalds once hid their cattle and, the story goes, sheltered during the killing. The scramble beyond it is filed, as ever, under next time. Down the road the Clachaig Inn still has a sign at the door that reads No Campbells, which is not entirely a joke, and which we went and paid our respects to in person. It is a grudge kept warm for three hundred and thirty years. A bias of ours, declared up front: one of us has parents who still live on a MacDonald Street back in Australia, no relation and half a world from any glen, and it has been quite enough to put us both firmly on the clan’s side.
So here is the most photographed glen in Scotland. The camera has been making it beautiful for three centuries, the beauty is real, and underneath the beauty is a floor where people were killed by men they had fed. Both things are true at once. The light at the Three Sisters is famous. The silence beneath it is older than the road, and it is made of something. You can take the photograph without knowing that, and most people do. The mountains photograph just as well either way.
But standing in the Coupall before dawn with the water working over the pink stone, knowing what the silence is made of, the glen stops being scenery and starts being a place that lost people. That is the whole difference, and we have felt it more than once on this trip now: the gap between taking a landscape and being let into one. A camera can do the first from the lay-by. The second one costs you something. You have to know what happened, and then you have to stand there anyway, and let the knowing into the frame even though the frame can’t show it.
The road runs out of mountains
Wednesday hands back the Highlands and the hire car in the same hour. Rannoch Moor at dawn one last time, then Loch Tulla, the Falls of Falloch, the long banks of Loch Lomond, and then the motorway, and then a city. The wild part of the trip is over. What’s left is the part we crossed the world for.
We have spent the best part of a month now making photographs of places. Ice and water and rock and empty roads, light arriving and leaving, the surface of things caught and kept. In a few days the whole trip points at a person instead. A boy in green and gold, on a starting block, in a city full of noise, with every broadcast camera in the Commonwealth on him. We already know it’s the one frame no camera on earth will get quite right, because some things won’t sit still inside a rectangle, and a length of pool is one of them.
The camera doesn’t lie. But there are things it simply cannot hold, and we are about to drive straight toward the largest of them.
Cameras down
In the morning we pack the cameras away, and this time it’s a ceremony rather than a chore. They are not coming back out in Glasgow.
We tell our wedding guests the same thing, at every wedding, gently and as often as it takes: cameras down. Be present. Don’t watch your own moments through a screen. There are professionals in the room whose entire job is to catch everything, precisely so that you can be free to live it. And in a few days, in a pool in Glasgow, we will be the guests for once. That room will hold more cameras than we’ve stood behind all year, broadcast rigs, accredited lenses, professionals doing the job we know from the other side. So we’re driving out of the Highlands with the kit zipped shut and just our phones, for a snap or two, and mostly for nothing at all.
Because if you have ever tried to hold a camera steady while someone you love swims for forty-seven seconds, you will understand. Forty-seven seconds is not long enough to be lived twice. We’re choosing the once. We’ve spent our working lives making that choice possible for other people. This week, somebody else holds the camera, and we finally take our own advice.
The Highlands end tomorrow at the bottom of this glen, and a city that’s filling up with the world begins. We’ll tell you what it sounds like.
Read more Greenland/Scotland travel stories here:
The Night the Fjord Disappeared
Midnight Gold on the Ilulissat Icefjord
