Fifty Years Ago: Sunday, 15 August 1976
(Loch Maree Hotel, Age 14:10)
put our cases in the car, then had breakfast. Dad left a £5 tip for the girl. She had taken breakfast to his room and waited on our table.
It struck me as generous, which he could be to strangers. His way of distributing wealth? I doubt that alone. He liked the impact it would have. A story about saving for a moped, or starting at Edinburgh University in September, would have made Dad feel like a benefactor. If that was the case, he should have gone the full hog and given her £10 or £20.
At this stage, my father was a recently separated—or by now twice-divorced—successful businessman and lawyer. He always had an eye for the girls, so if he hoped this one might pay us a visit at Appleby Castle, I would not have been surprised.
I got everything from my room and then waited for Dad in the car. After waiting some time, we went. I was ready to leave. He could be delayed, not me.
The others who were fishing were going with massive bags of things, but they had been there for two weeks: rods, waders, waterproofs, tackle boxes, fish, drink and everything else accumulated during a fortnight in a hotel.
Donald, our ghillie, got our one fish.
Had we not eaten it? Was it the tradition to give the catch to the ghillie? If the girl got £5, the ghillie surely deserved £20 or more.
The fish meant that fishing as an activity on Loch Maree was dead.
On the car radio, we listened to Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America about the US President. BBC Sounds will have them all.
We drove past Mr and Mrs Salmon. The Salmons went fishing for salmon: like a dairy farmer called Mr and Mrs Milk, a builder called D. I. York, a blacksmith called Mr Smith or a wheelwright called Mr Wright.
Most of the day was spent in the car, but the road trip was discounted as an inconvenience between A, Loch Maree, and B, Appleby Castle.
Bits of the journey are coming back to me fifty years on: single-track roads with passing places, lochs and cretinous slabs of imposing mountains, extensive sultry lochs, river crossings, bridges, woods and tweed factories. Irn-Bru supplanted Coca-Cola in the shops.
Today I can revisit the journey through Google Street View. I will recognise some of it and be able to name it.
We stopped at Culloden.
Revolution was a bloody business.
The museum was closed on a Sunday!
We were hundreds of miles from home and unlikely to pay another visit. I did not get to see the new multiscreen they had put up.
We stopped at the landmark: the memorial cairn. A film does a better job of bringing events to life.
I got a book on Culloden. I no longer have it, but the Jacobite revolt has continued to interest me as a source of storylines, including stories of prisoners on the Bass Rock.
Home.
Stopped for tea.
TV
Leave a Reply