Loch Ness by morning, the Hogwarts Express by lunch, and a day built entirely out of things Tracey believed in first.
Some days on a long trip are transit. You move the bags, you cover the miles, you arrive. And then, once in a very great while, a transit day quietly assembles itself into the best day of the trip, and you only see the shape of it afterwards: a day made, from its first stag to its last whistle, out of things one of us believed in before she believed in almost anything else.
Leaving in a whiteout
We left Assynt at half past four in the morning in complete whiteout mist, and the Meadow of the Stags chose that exact hour to finally live up to its name: deer and stags everywhere across the field as we loaded the car, standing in the white like the place was staging its own farewell. Then two hours of slow going, rabbits and red squirrels and more deer crossing a road we could see about fifty metres of.
And somewhere behind us in all that white, we left what every visitor leaves and almost nobody counts: a few days of our own story, absorbed into a place that measures time in billions of years. Conversations carried off by that wind. Footprints on a beach the tide had already edited. Laughter in a bar full of strangers, a toast in front of a projector, breath on a cold window. On rock that old it rounds to nothing, less than minuscule, and yet it isn’t nothing, because the place keeps a version of us now, the way we keep a version of it. That’s the real exchange rate of travel, and it’s paid in both directions. Everything else is photographs.
And this is the strange part. Only a day earlier we’d driven this same country in full clearness and been taken apart by it, and now every one of those mountains was still there, entirely real, one veil away, and we could not see a single summit. Had we come north in this, we’d never have known what the mist was hiding. Belief, on that road, was just the memory of a clear day. Hold that thought. The whole day ran on it.
We had Tracey’s mum and dad on the phone for a long stretch of it, retelling Greg’s swim at the volume it deserved, and wishing out loud that they were in the back seat. Travelling with them has been one of the great joys of our lives. Regaling them from the road in real time is the second-best version. We’ll take it.
The lake that says nothing
A declaration of interest before the loch. Tracey has been a connoisseur of conspiracy theories since childhood, seriously enough to have driven her parents to distraction, and Loch Ness has therefore been on the lifetime list forever: the wild, the wacky, the gloriously silly, holding hands with a genuinely beautiful stretch of water. One of us came for the loch. One of us came for the possibility.
Loch Ness was never on the plan as a place to stay. It’s too busy, too merchandised, a long reach of dark water with a gift shop every few hundred metres selling the mystery. But it was too conspiratorial to drive straight past, so we stopped, the way you stop at the scene of a magnificent crime.
The loch fills the deepest part of the Great Glen, a single clean fracture that runs clear across the country where the northern Highlands once slid past the southern ones. Urquhart Castle sits on the one headland that controls the water, a ruin the garrison blew up themselves in 1692 so no one else could hold it, and it has been earning its keep in photographs ever since. We watched it slide past from the road, still earning, and saved our one stop for the far end of the water.
Fort Augustus, where the loch finishes, gave us the viewpoint, and the numbers deserve a moment first, because they’re the honest spine of the mystery. Loch Ness holds more water than every lake in England and Wales combined. It runs to around two hundred and thirty metres deep, and it’s stained so dark with peat that light gives up a few metres down. The famous pictures were mostly hoaxes; the loch itself has still never been fully explored, for the simple reason that it cannot be seen into, and that gap is where the whole legend lives. We put the drone up for the proof-of-visit frames, took the selfies a childhood dream is owed, and got our sighting. As the fog lifted its first corner and the sun came through, a single white swan crossed the viewpoint in front of us. No monsters surfaced. The swan owned it all, and appeared to know it.
Because the monster is a photograph, and the photograph was a toy. In 1933 a new road opened along the northern shore and gave drivers a clear view of the water for the first time, and within months the sightings began. The Daily Mail, scenting circulation, hired a big-game hunter named Marmaduke Wetherell to find the beast. He came back with footprints. The Natural History Museum found they had been made with a dried hippopotamus foot, of the kind then sold as an umbrella stand, and the paper mocked him. His revenge was patient. His stepson built a small head and neck out of plastic wood and fixed them to a toy submarine, the thing was photographed in the shallows, and it was handed to a respectable London surgeon to sell on, because a surgeon would be believed where a hunter no longer was. The Mail ran it on 21 April 1934. The Surgeon’s Photograph, a small dark head on a long neck rising from rippled water, became the most famous monster image ever taken, and it kept its secret for sixty years.
The man who finally sank it is the best part. In 1994 a researcher named Alastair Boyd traced the hoax to its source and got the confession that ended it. Boyd had also, years earlier, seen something in the loch himself, and exposing the fake changed his mind about nothing. He took down the photograph and kept the belief. The evidence sank and the wanting floated. As two people who make a living pointing a camera at a thing and asking you to trust what comes back, we found that equal parts humbling and hilarious. The camera doesn’t lie. It just has accomplices, and the loudest one is us.
Fifteen minutes the other side of Inverness, Clava Cairns waited, a four-thousand-year-old Bronze Age burial ground, ring cairns and standing stones in a quiet stand of birch, older than almost anything you can name. People come now in numbers, and most of them come because the stones are said to have inspired the ones a time-travelling nurse touches in Outlander. The show never filmed there. It built its own. So the pilgrimage is to the real place that inspired the fake place that stood in for the idea, and the stones, four thousand years old and entirely indifferent to television, take the visitors either way. The fog took it off our table: the morning had been too slow, the timetable too real, and we drove past with an apology in the car. The frame we’d promised Tracey’s mum, Jan, who has watched every episode twice, went untaken, and goes into the file with her name on it. Somewhere near Drumnadrochit one of us attempted the word Sassenach as consolation and produced something closer to the name of a cryptid, which felt thematically correct for the road we were on.
One of us came for the loch. One of us came for the possibility.
The train we’d stood under
At Fort William we parked the car at quarter past ten, on a schedule Dee had been quietly protecting for a few days now. She’d confessed it the evening before at the lodge, because a half-past-four alarm demands a reason and trust me has limits even between us, and so Tracey had a whole night to lie awake with it: tickets on the Jacobite, waiting on the platform with steam coming off it. The actual locomotive and carriages that play the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter films, the train a hillside of us had waited for in the mud a week earlier, and this time we had tickets: two hours to Mallaig, two hours in the town, two hours home.
The Harry Potter books that once crossed the sea to us in Tokyo have a train in them, and for four hours we were on it. That’s the whole sentence and it doesn’t need decorating. We sat and stared out the window at country we’d driven and droned and stood in, playing in sequence like someone had edited our week into a title reel, and then the viaduct came, and we crossed it from the inside, and waved out the window at the crowd on the hill. A week ago that crowd was us. The congregation on the slope, hauled up a muddy hillside by a story, and now we were the story going past, waving at ourselves from seven days ago. We can report that both ends of that transaction are wonderful.
Delight is not a competition
And somewhere over the viaduct, we finally found words for something we’ve been trying to phrase all trip. This single day held a conspiracy pilgrimage, a childhood-book steam train, and some of the finest landscape on the planet, and we loved all three at full volume. That isn’t a boast about range. It’s the only way we know how to travel. This trip has put us alongside expedition sailors reading pack ice, grown adults in wizard robes, UFO believers, hikers mid-blister-crisis, photographers standing motionless in freezing dawns for one long exposure, cruise passengers enjoying the gentle version with a handrail and a good lunch, sport lovers who cross the planet because a fixture list finally gave them the reason, which is us in a fortnight, and storytellers of every kind, and we have loved being in every one of those rooms. Because delight is not a competition. Nobody’s way of loving the world is the wrong one: some people want it demanding, some want it easy, some want it in costume, and the only version we’ve never understood is ranking them. Love the world and you end up loving the people out loving it, all of them, whichever door they came through. We’ll try nearly anything. We usually love it. That’s the whole philosophy, and it fits in a train seat.
And the carriage proved it on the spot. The train was full of the world, the way the hillside had been. A couple from Melbourne across the way, and a family travelling together from the States, half of them currently living in Kenya, all of us comparing notes on the strange joy of being out in the world with your people. Mallaig gave us its two hours in full: a working port with fishing boats in the harbour and seagulls at civic volume, a magic shop or two doing brisk trade off the train’s reputation, and lunch at the Crabbin’ Creel, fresh langoustines and a glass of rosé, eaten with the specific incompetence of two people who needed Tracey’s dad there to do the peeling. We had the langoustines. We were very happy. Then the whistle, and two hours of the same country running backwards, well fed and quiet.
The last moor of the day
Then the road climbs out onto Rannoch Moor, fifty square miles of bog and granite and standing water, and a single mountain appears across it like a full stop at the end of the drive. The Buachaille. Buachaille Etive Mòr, the Great Herdsman of Etive, a thousand-metre pyramid of old rock standing exactly where two glens meet, watching the road in like a figure posted at a gate. It is the most photographed mountain in Scotland, and it earns the title honestly. The sun front-lights it at dawn and side-lights it at dusk, and the little river at its foot lays down a mirror whenever the wind forgets to blow. We set a half-past-four alarm to go and stand in that river at first light, which is the only admission fee the mountain charges.
We’d reached the old Kingshouse by then, an inn on this moor in one form or another since the seventeenth century, arriving in the kind of late gold the glen is famous for manufacturing, and did something entirely out of character: we chose the window over the boots. The room looks onto the river with the mountains stacked behind it, so we let the sunset come to us for once, and called it an early night. The glen gets our whole last Highland day tomorrow. It has waited three hundred million years. It could wait one more sleep.
That was the day. A monster that stayed hidden, a swan that didn’t, a missed stone circle with an apology attached, and a train out of a childhood, boarded at last. We fell asleep beside a river with the most photographed mountain in Scotland standing in the dark outside the window, and for once we didn’t need to see it to know it was there. That, after all, had been the whole lesson of the day.
Read more Greenland/Scotland travel stories here:
The Night the Fjord Disappeared
Midnight Gold on the Ilulissat Icefjord
