Loch Ness, Culloden & Clava Cairns, Inverness
Fine sunshine appeared in timely fashion for our crossing of Loch Ness, one of those much celebrated British “sunny intervals.” This must be one of the most stunning landscapes in Scotland, a vast body of water, deeper than any point in the North Sea between Scotland and Germany and capable of containing the contents of all the rest of Britain’s fresh-water lakes combined. No wonder that these mysterious depths have given rise to the persistent rumor of a deep-water marine creature, the Loch Ness monster, known affectionately as Nessie by grateful local employees of the thriving tourist trade. The first reference to Nessie was in the Life of Columba written by one of his admiring successors Adumnan, for mediaeval saints’ lives always conformed to a set formula that insisted on such details as the aristocratic birth of the saint concerned and testimony of miracles performed. In the case of Columba, it was the banishment of a monster to the deep that provided the miracle and the first recorded reference to Nessie.
We have been following in the wake of Columba from Iona through the Great Glen. At Urquhart Castle that we viewed up close from the loch, Columba converted a local Pictish chieftain having preached to him with the aid of an interpreter, for this was the linguistic frontier between the Gaelic speakers to the west and the Brythonic Celts to the east, the latter known to the Romans as Picts from their traditional body painting using woad, now known to have antiseptic qualities. At our final moorings in Muirtown we were beside the hill fort where the most powerful of the Pictish chieftains held court. This was King Brude who was converted to Christianity by Columba whose sermon convinced the chieftain when he explained that Christ was his druid.
After lunch, it was back to the Jacobites, with a tour of the Culloden battlefield and the remarkable award-winning visitor centre run by the National Trust for Scotland. Perhaps the most graphic part of the tour was the surround screen recreation of the battle scene, at once alarming and moving. We ended our afternoon back in time with a visit to Clava cairns, a series of late Neolithic/early Bronze Age burial tombs erected by the first farming people some five thousand years ago.
Our final dinner was celebrated in style as Jim, in full Highland attire, gave the traditional address to the haggis, followed by a troupe of Scottish dancers to celebrate the end of an unforgettable week.
