Occupying the Isle of Skye

Note to self:  Next time you travel on one of the world’s top ten scenic train trips remember:

(i)                  do not do so on a day that includes severe  weather warnings,

(ii)                especially as you must stand at the open platform train station in Dalmuir for an hour or so,

(iii)               with horizontal rain, and severe wind gusts, no coffee shop nor newspapers and

(iv)              every few minutes news of more train delays and cancellations.

(v)                Also, choose to travel past the most picturesque scenes of the Scottish coast during daylight.  You may see something.

Well that is all a bit embarrassing then, but goes on to prove the point about local knowledge.  The train trip to Mallaig was great all the same.  There is no Occupy Mallaig though, that I can report on, although I searched far and wide.  The only occupying was being done at the pubs, because outside you could only travel in the one direction, and that was with the wind.

The ferries to Isle of Skye were cancelled of course.

However, when they were running again, it was a wonderful if rolling trip to Armadale.  Now ponder this, that trip cost GBP3.15.  After arriving in Armadale I was planning to stay until late afternoon and have a look around, before catching the bus to Portree. The latter being the capital of the Isle of Skye.

On this glorious ferry, (who doesn’t love a good swell), was one other passenger.  With a little local knowledge, which proved correct, she said take the bus straight to Portree, it will be at the ferry terminal.  And as soon as we arrived I knew why…..there was nothing at Armadale.  Certainly no Occupy Armadale. 

And what a trip, in a small bus, winding road up hill and down dale, horizontal rain, and heavily gusting wind, and a driver hell bent on arriving on time in the face of apparently overwhelming natural forces massed against him.  Aghh, that wonderful highland spirit, and it doesn’t take a lot to look around at the incredibly inhospitable environment to learn what makes the highlanders incredibly fierce and tenacious.

For the record there is also no Occupy Portree, either.  But there are more of those happy happy happy Scottish people first met in Glasgow.  This last summer season has been a bit slower for them however, and although many tourist service destinations close for winter anyway, there are more so this winter, apparently, and earlier.  Yes they are feeling the economic downturn. 

But not the buses.  One driver, one bus ride cost GBP6 compared to one ferry ride with at least 10 people, from the captain to the deckie, and a cost of slightly more than GBP3.  What does that tell you about economies in small communities? 

I searched in severe weather for any hint of Occupy.  But there was none.  However, the economic woes against which Occupy Everything is standing up, are here to.  Even here on the wild and immensely beautiful coast of Scotland, and the tenacity of the highlanders is going to be tested.

Then I recalled the books I read in my youth about this region, and I realised that the highlanders were the first Occupiers.  From Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Kidnapped”, where the lowlander David Balfour of the Shaws, was kidnapped and then fought and crawled his way through this desolate highland landscape to reclaim his landed birthright. 

But more prosaically, Katherine Stewart’s book, “A Croft in the Hills” is seemingly about Occupying Everything Everywhere.  “When you have lived for a few years in the bare uplands, where life has been precarious from the start, you learn, first, not to panic. Then you learn to love wholeheartedly what need no longer be feared.  You become so deeply involved in the true drama of cherishing life itself that mere attitudes and the pursuit of possessions are discarded as absurd.”  Where people no longer “fall under the spell of the shopwindow”.   Now that is true Occupying!