Misty Mornings in the Scottish Highlands

The Mist on the Loch

I arrived at Loch Ness in the kind of weather that the Highlands do better than anywhere else — a soft, persistent drizzle that was not quite rain and not quite mist but something in between, a moisture that hung in the air and clung to everything it touched. The loch was invisible. I stood at the shore in Drumnadrochit and looked out at a wall of white nothing, and for the first ten minutes I thought the entire trip had been a mistake.

Then the mist began to lift. Not all at once — in stages, like a theatre curtain rising in slow motion. First the near shore appeared, dark pebbles and still water. Then the water extended, black and flat and impossibly calm, stretching further and further into the whiteness. Then the far shore materialized — a dark line of pine and birch that seemed to hover above the loch, not quite connected to the water, floating in the remaining haze. And finally, in a moment so gradual I could not have named the second it happened, the mountains behind appeared. They rose from the mist like something being remembered — grey and green and ancient, their tops still wrapped in cloud, their lower slopes dark with heather and bracken.

I stood there for twenty minutes watching the landscape assemble itself. It was like watching a photograph develop in a darkroom — the image emerging from blankness, each layer adding depth, each moment revealing something that had been there all along but hidden. The loch, I now understood, was enormous — twenty-three miles long and over seven hundred feet deep, more water than all the lakes of England and Wales combined. And it was silent. Not the silence of a city park, where birdsong and distant traffic fill the gaps, but a Highland silence — a silence with weight, with texture, with the faint sound of water lapping against stone and the occasional cry of a bird I could hear but not see.

Nessie did not appear. I was not disappointed.

The Fairy Pools

The Isle of Skye is reached by a bridge that seems, in the mist, to lead nowhere — the road crosses from the mainland and vanishes into cloud, and you drive on faith for two minutes before the island materializes around you in a series of reveals that would be theatrical if they were not so clearly indifferent to your presence. Skye does not perform for visitors. It simply exists, and if you happen to be there when the light is right, that is your good fortune and none of its concern.

The Fairy Pools are at the foot of the Black Cuillin mountains, in a glen called Glen Brittle that looks like the setting for a story you were told as a child and have half forgotten. A river drops through a series of rock pools, each one a different shade of blue and green — turquoise, teal, aquamarine, jade — the colour so vivid against the dark basalt rock that the pools look dyed, artificial, imported from some tropical island and transplanted into the Scottish winter by mistake.

They are not artificial. The colour comes from the clarity of the water and the mineral content of the rock, and on a clear day — which I did not have, but I am told exists — you can see every pebble on the bottom of pools that are fifteen feet deep. I had a day of broken cloud and intermittent rain, which meant the pools were empty of other visitors and the mountains above were wrapped in shifting veils of mist that parted and closed and parted again, revealing a different composition each time. I sat on a rock by the largest pool and watched the water for an hour. A dipper — a small brown bird — walked along the bottom of the stream, completely submerged, hunting for insects in a way that defied everything I thought I knew about birds. The Black Cuillin appeared and disappeared above me. The rain came and went. Time moved differently here, or perhaps it did not move at all.

Oak, Peat, and Time

The distillery sat at the end of a single-track road in Speyside, a stone building with a pagoda roof and the date 1824 carved above the door. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of malting barley — warm, sweet, with an undertone of peat smoke that caught in the back of the throat and stayed there. Our guide was a man named Alasdair who had worked at the distillery for thirty-one years and who spoke about whisky the way a priest speaks about communion — with reverence, precision, and the absolute certainty that what he was offering was sacred.

We walked through the process: the malting floor where barley was spread and turned by hand, the mash tun where hot water drew the sugars from the grain, the copper stills that rose to the ceiling like enormous teardrop-shaped bells, their surfaces dented and patched from decades of use. "We could replace these stills with identical new ones," Alasdair said, running his hand along a hammered repair on the copper. "But the whisky would taste different. The dents matter. The imperfections matter. Every mark on this copper is part of the flavour."

In the warehouse, we stood between rows of oak casks stacked three high, each one breathing — pulling whisky in during the cold months, pushing it out in the warm, the oak imparting vanilla and caramel and something Alasdair called "the warehouse character" that varied from one end of the building to the other. He drew a sample from a cask with a copper tool called a valinch, holding the glass up to the light from the small window. The whisky was the colour of dark honey. It was sixteen years old. "Sixteen Scottish winters," he said. "Sixteen summers. You can taste every one of them."

He was right. The whisky was peat and smoke and salt and something sweet beneath — dried fruit, perhaps, or heather honey — and it finished with a warmth that started in the chest and spread outward slowly, like sunrise. I bought a bottle. I have not opened it. Some things are better as promises.

The Castle and the Wind

The castle at Ardvreck stands on a peninsula jutting into Loch Assynt in the northwest Highlands, and when I arrived at four in the afternoon I was the only person there. Not the only tourist — the only person. The ruin is small, roofless, three storeys of crumbling stone with empty windows that frame the loch and the mountains beyond like a gallery of landscape paintings hung by someone with an extraordinary eye.

The wind was constant. Not gusty — steady, like a note held on an organ, coming off the loch and through the empty windows and around the broken walls with a sound that was not quite a whistle and not quite a moan but something between the two, a sound that the Gaelic language probably has a word for and English does not. I walked through the ground-floor rooms, which were open to the sky, and stood in what had been the great hall and looked up at the clouds moving fast overhead through the absent roof.

The MacLeods built this castle in the late fifteenth century. It was besieged, captured, burned, abandoned. The last MacLeod of Assynt sold it — and himself — for a debt that would be worth less than a thousand pounds today. The ruin has stood open to the weather since the eighteenth century. Three hundred years of Highland wind and rain and snow have done what sieges could not — reducing the walls to their essence, stripping away everything that was not stone.

I sat on a fallen lintel and ate a sandwich and listened to the wind. A red deer appeared on the far shore of the loch, silhouetted against the hillside, and stood perfectly still for five minutes before walking slowly into the heather and disappearing. The clouds shifted and a column of sunlight fell on the mountains across the water, turning a single slope from grey to vivid green for thirty seconds before the cloud closed again and the green vanished. The Highlands do this constantly — they offer you moments of beauty so brief and so specific that you cannot photograph them, only witness them. And then they take them back, and give you something else — the wind, the mist, the rain — and you learn, slowly, that the taking back is part of the gift.