Clearances

Dornoch Castle Hotel

Negotiating our way back through Inverness, we head up the east coast of Scotland towards Thurso/Scrabster to make our 7:00 ferry to the Orkney Islands.  We have plenty of time to make stops in between.  Crossing several Firths we come to a town called Dornoch which has a 13th century cathedral and a picturesque restaurant called "The Garden Restaurant" (inside Dornoch Castle Hotel) as you can take your meal in the high stone walled garden which we do.  http://www.dornochcastlehotel.com/dining/



The Garden Restaurant/Dornoch Castle Hotel

An extended family is there celebrating a baby's  christening as well as an elderly couple with their Westies snoozing under the table.  It is  relaxing. We order roast beef sandwhiches on hardy bread with horseradish and salads.  In the garden, children play while the adults relax.  After lunch Will stays behind in the restaurant lobby to sit in a comfy chair to nap while the rest of us explore the town Center. 

Dornoch Cathedral

Dornoch Catheral is directly across the street and I cross to have a look.  What I found was some of the most magnificent stained glass windows yet on the trip.  http://dornoch-cathedral.com/ The windows at St. Giles in Edinburgh were magnificent but I suspect they have not been cleaned in a while.  These windows seem lighter and cleaner.  Some of the windows are contemporary while others date back to the 1800s.  They are so densely packed with symbols they have concocted a childens game of finding the different, objects, animals, and insects.  Snakes, mothes, butterflies, crosses, flowers, trees, swords and birds:  it was all a visual feast. 

A large number of the windows feel more Victorian in nature while the others have a more Charles Rennie McIntosh/Arts and Crafts era feel to them.  There is even a window donated in memory of Andrew Carnegie, the  Industrialist who emigrated from this area to America.  They are stunning and moving and I go across the street to snatch my sleeping son out of his chair to take him across the street.  He was glad I did. 

Loaded back in to the car we continue up the coast on the A9 and it reveals stunning vistas of the North Sea coastline and my nerves kick in as it feels like a roller coaster ride.  My muscles stay tense even as we turn inland towards Scrabster.  We begin to see many abandoned crofts now, evidence of the Highland Clearances - a time when landowners saw more profits in grazing sheep on their lands rather than collecting rents.  What followed was a forced depopulation of the Upper Highlands.  Many of the people headed for America to find their lives there.  http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/scotlandshistory/jacobitesenlightenmentclearances/clearances/ 

The further we head inland the worse it gets.  The land is skinned bald of all trees and a landscape of wind turbines appears ahead on our left.  It feels like we have landed on another planet or have been propelled into a strange future.  When they speak of the Scottish Diaspora the Clearances are one aspect of  what they are referring to. 

Nothing has prepared me for this sight and the way I feel looking at it.  America is a nation of scattered people. Even within the confines of our nations there are conflagrations of all sorts,  mostly economic, that cause people to scatter even further.  I grew up going "home" with my parents to hamlets in Eastern Kentucky several time a year.  I don't know why at the time I never noticed the rotting farmsteads, imploded tobacco barns, and the preponderance of people older than my parents.  I suppose I had nothing else really to compare it to.  This was normal to me.  It was not until I was in graduate school gathering county-level data on population that I realized that some Eastern Kentucky counties had lost nearly half of their population since WWII because of the collapse of the economy. 

And now here I am in the middle of Scotland and suddenly I come face to face with this wounded sense of place -- or rather wounded sense of place lost to generations of people who were forced to leave.  The feeling doesn't ebb as we begin to drive around the edge of Loch Rangag.    A good travel experience, I believe, can sometimes have the same effect as going to the optometrist for prescription lenses.  You don't realize how blurred your vision has been until it undergoes an adjustment. 

The past certainly meets the future here with abandoned crofts and alternative energy being slowly and methodically churned by the wind turbines on the hill. At least The Scots have figured out a way to produce clean energy and I wonder if the Appalachian coalfields will ever undergo this sort of transformation. 

I am afraid Scrabster will have the same lonely desolate feel, though soon trees begin to reappear as well as living, breathing farms.  Gradually all seems well again.  We pull into Scrabster with an hour and 20 minutes to spare before our ferry leaves.  The boys have cabin fever from being in the car far too long. We pull the car into the queue and get out to stretch our legs. 

Wind turbine Sutherland