Talking Location With Alan Gillespie – West Highlands, SCOTLAND

3rd June 2021

#TalkingLocationWith…  Alan Gillespie, author of The Mash House set in the WEST HIGHLANDS

Get the Citylink 914 from Glasgow’s Buchanan Street Bus Station and head for Portree, through the West Highlands. The route is a tightly coiled knot that unravels around the city, across past the mediaeval Cathedral and up Great Western Road, through Anniesland and Clydebank and Dumbarton, moving west and north all the time. The roads getting longer and looser the further you get from the smoke and the stink of the city centre.

You can get the train, which has scenic merit closer up towards Oban – the Glenfinnan viaduct and all that – but it’s a passive way to travel. Only skirting the good bits. Stick to the bus, and you can feel the tyres grip the narrow winding roads around Loch Lomond, the acute angles of the thing warping around the bends, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flirtations of dipping into the loch. The driver crunching down through the gears and the engine gargling petrol uphill, as you come away from the forested roads around Luss, and emerge into the glens and the glory of the Scottish Highlands.

It is on this long, slow drive that you see it and you feel it. Imagine the kilted highlanders and the slaughtered herds of stag and the swirling fog of bagpipes. The sections of mountain that were blasted with dynamite to make space for the road’s surface. The smears of dead fawns and badgers bloodying the ditch. The sky and the horizon merging into one. As Billy Connolly said, these are places that are good for the soul. It is good to come here once in a while.

Get off when the bus stops at Tyndrum. Go into the services for a buttered roll with fried mushrooms. Smell the air. It is different now.

And on the peaceful train’s smooth track, you don’t get to see Glencoe. You must see Glencoe once in your life. The road dropping down into its palm with the ridiculous, vast peaks of it all around you. Where the tourists stop for windy picnics and the hikers go marching off into the unknown dark. Where the Macdonald clan were betrayed and massacred in their beds in 1692 by their own indoctrinated countrymen. What a place to live and what a place to die. There are ghosts in the heather and the fog there.

You cannot spend time in these places and not want to write about them; paint their likenesses on wood in oil; sing songs that evoke their power and beauty. You want to tackle the bus driver in a headlock and pull the thing over so you can all get out and look at it, just look at it. The ancient mountains and hand-piled walls of rock that have been here forever, demarking ancient boundaries, all this that will remain long after we are gone from this world.

You will emerge – too quickly – from Glencoe, looking over your shoulders for a final swatch at it. And on, to the calm postcard villages with their little town halls: Ballachulish, Bridge of Orchy. Water emerging from the left and the right out of nowhere, stretching out and away to distant forests and dark dips. If you get off the bus here, take a bunk in one of the hostels or bed and breakfasts, you will meet warm, good people. Great music and fine, fresh food. Cracking pubs and nips of whisky to take the edge of the cold night and the bitter rains.

And further on, up the road towards Fort William. Passing the Corran Ferry on the left, a good tee-off’s distance to the Ardnamurchan peninsula. An otherworldly place where sheep wander free on the roads, and wild goats scrape their horns together in feral battles up on the hillsides. Where the deer come down in the cold weather to lick the salt from the road’s surface.

Batter straight along the A82, and the bus will take you to Fort William, beside the gorgeous Loch Linnhe, where Ben Nevis looms from the fog and the clouds that seem always to obscure it. A nice town in summer and grim as can be in the wet days of February. But hang around the high street long enough and old men will tell your fortunes in Cobbs Bar; browse the shelves at the Highland Bookshop for something good to read with your whisky; and, if the weather’s good, head up the ski lifts at the Nevis Range Mountain Resort. Get yourself a bird’s eye view of the rest of the world.

Alan Gillespie is principal teacher of English at Fernhill School in Glasgow. His debut novel, The Mash House, is published on 6 May 

Connect with the author via his website and catch him on Twitter

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