Lady Liza Campbell returns to the Highlands

Robbie Burns wrote, “My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here.”

“Scotland: where the rednecks are titled.” I wrote that.

Although long exiled, a chunk of my heart still lies there – on the banks of the Findhorn, to be precise, where the surrounding moorland dips down to the river’s edge and suddenly the landscape changes from bleak to beautiful. It feels secluded, sheltered, secret. Entering this valley is like stepping into a Victorian watercolour. The Findhorn snakes sleepily over shallow rapids, a deep coffee-bean brown. Slow corners form shady pools where salmon rest on their journey upstream to spawn, yet in spate, the water can double in volume in a matter of hours, and suddenly looks as though seething milk has been added upstream. The force of water can chew up the banks, tear down the hazel trees that fringe the curves, and carry them away to the sea.

While autumn and winter rush in, Scotland’s warm weather is prone to diva-ish delays. Growing up there, the summer season was dominated by three things: athletics, dancing and killing. Nothing has changed.

The arrival of parachutes from a cloudy sky marks the launch of the Highland Games in our local town. Canisters attached to the parachutists’ heels belch red smoke as they spiral down to a canvas target in the main arena, while a regimental pipe band marches around the perimeter playing Scottish standards. The bagpipes make the tunes blurry and subaquatic, but when the snare drum rolls come in, they sharpen up the sound, just as a pair of goggles clears your vision underwater.

Throughout the afternoon there are displays of the Highland fling in which overdressed children in waistcoats, lace jabots and leather pumps prance like nimble but enraged pixies in a complex hopscotch around two swords lying crossed on the floor. Finally, as the audience drifts towards a collective nap, a cup will be awarded to some grandchild of Rumpelstiltskin. Far more exciting are the sweating, topless men – mostly itinerant New Zealanders – competing in shearing races. Huge, docile sheep are held between the men’s legs as they peel away the fleeces to reveal skimpier, balder models.

There are high-jump and pole-vaulting events too, then the sudden appearance on the running track of scrawny men who, unbeknown to the crowds, have been racing towards us in a bobbing filament from some anonymous field on the other side of the county. Burly men in kilts heft cabers into their cupped hands and balance them vertically with the help of a bulging shoulder. A few steps and then, if they can produce sufficient momentum, the pole is flipped onto its opposite end and into a lumbering somersault. Novices are easy to spot: they stagger about like a drunk making off with a keepsake from a sawmill.

Partytime is also steeped in formaldehyde. When the young men come off the moor, they change into their kilts and sporrans to dance with their hands in the air in imitation of the antlers on the stags they’ve just been stalking. Held in chandelier-lit rooms, there are have specially sprung floors so that the whole room bounces gently with the thud of 600 feet stepping in time.

If you gaze around any ballroom, you can see the distinctive livery of each clan and make the connections between brothers and sons and cousins and uncles and fathers by matching up the tartans of their flying kilts, and the women by the sashes tied across their bodies.

For a beginner, highland reeling can look like esoteric prancing, but with a little concentration, you can soon understand the pattern repeats as people weave themselves down the line, like a crochet thread with a brain. When I was a teenager, some of the bigger parties had an unspoken etiquette to follow: no dresses above the ankle; men may not remove their jackets, and while they could clap and leap and holler, a girl doing the same was viewed askance – she must move smoothly and avoid hearty skipping; newcomers who couldn’t do the dances were quietly frowned upon for cocking up the flow. The most old-fashioned of all the old-fashioned aspects was that you had to pick up a numbered dance card. It came with a printed running order of reels and an attached tasselled pencil. When a boy came up, you both noted down the booking and then sought each other out when the programme reached your booking. I lived in terror of having an unmarked card and would scribble – Cornish Pasty, Tooth Cavity, Arc Welder – anything not to look like a wallflower. Writing such nonsense had an advantage when it came to the opposite end of the problem: you couldn’t easily rebuff people you didn’t like unless your card clearly looked full. For a crash course in a reel’s erotic possibilities: the Reel of the 51st is the most flirtatious with full-frontal touch, while Hamilton House gives the least physical contact – good for dealing with the mossy-handed. Speed the Plough is in a category of its own as it’s so difficult it makes a man not only lose the will to flirt, but to live – in Scotland at any rate.

After August 12, we children would be slung into the back of ancient Land Rovers alongside the gundogs to go out shooting. It was usually cold and often drizzling, and my main task was to keep out of sight.

I would crouch in the bottom of a butt, hands clamped over my ears as my father fired overhead and was shushed all afternoon, while he kept up a monologue with his dog. From wellie-boot level there was not much to see other than damp dogs, and nothing to do except collect spent cartridges and sniff deeply on the warm cordite before popping them on my fingers as witch’s gloves.

The highlight of the day would be getting home and clambering out of sodden clothes and into one of the gigantic Victorian baths surrounded by glass decanters etched with grapevines and full of soupy pine essence. There were long copper plungers instead of plugs, and the scalding water was a soft peaty brown. The baths were so long that if I lay down I had to hang on to the sides or float, and when I sat up the water lapped my shoulders. The bath towels were the size of spinnakers.

If it had been a good day on the moor, with a big bag, it meant one thing: grouse for dinner. Our cook liked to make it so rare the meat might as well have been left on a radiator for 10 minutes. But my childhood took place in pre-fussy eating days and we ate what we were given. The only relief from the musky tang of game blood was when my teeth clattered against a pellet. This was very auspicious. On my privately calibrated scale of luck, it was one up from winning “pull a wishbone” and two down from seeing a shooting star.

Even for someone as fey as I was, Scotland still managed to put the heart into hearty.

-Liza Campbell is part-time explorer, full-time writer and tea time siren and blogs on lizaclizaclizac.blogspot.com

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