After a few trips we ran out of enthusiasm for doing Bed & Breakfast accommodation and decided to try the self-catering cottages thing. So September 2001 found us up in Scotland, exploring the Western Highlands, and our first self-cater was in the small “fiord” town of Ullapool, way up past Skye on Loch Broom. We hadn't booked ahead (a lesson quickly learnt!) and being in the "off-shoulder" period we couldn't find anything in the town, and with a touch of desperation grabbed a cancellation that was offered - "Croft Cottage" - a way up the loch.
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Sat 1st September 2001
It’s overcast and spitty for what is officially the first day of Autumn, although we haven't seen much in the way of autumnal leaves yet, considering that our general background plan is to follow the change of season down from north to south. We saw a few touches of yellow and red in Ireland, and faint scuffles of dry leaves underfoot, but not much more. Maybe everything will change quickly in the next few days. Or not.
Ullapool is an easy town to like, has a “frontier” feel to it, and in a setting to die for, on an endless deep-water sea loch, ancient mountains of Wester Ross behind. And they’re undoubtedly God-fearing folk as there's more churches than pubs! — Presbyterian, Methodist, Church of Scotland, Catholic, Free This, Free That, but not sure how big their congregations could possibly get.
Killing time till we can get our key to the cottage, we have a ramble around the docks area for a while, bump into a couple from Hampshire, about early-mid 70s, setting up to get each other's photo with the picture-perfect mountains and the lumpy sky and the loch and the big cruise liner behind. We offer to take their photo together, and it’s the usual reaction for half a second, size us up — have you ever actually known someone who had their camera stolen by a professional tourist predator that stands about all day waiting for a situation like this? — and they hand over their Canon. They’ll bless us in the fullness of time as it’s an excellent shot of them together, but hard not to be with all this as a backdrop.
As a soft drizzle sets in we take it easy over a slow coffee or two in a cafe on the edge of the massive expanse of wharf-front, while we watch the Stornaway Ferry load for its regular run across the Minch to Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, then find some pub lunch and a pint, and finally two o’clock and we’re more than ready to try our first ever self-cater.
It’s about three miles out of Ullapool on Ardmair Bay, and owned by an American artist lady who uses it as a painting retreat from time to time. And it LOOKS like that too, sitting at the base of some rough heather-covered hills, on rising ground overlooking the sea and Isle Martin, and away out there in the hazy distance the vague shapes of The Summer Isles. Very evocative. Very artist retreat-y.
The cottage – actually called ‘Croft Cottage’ in the country manner of having no address other than the house name - is about a quarter mile in off the road at the end of a pair of wheel tracks thick with chassis-cleaning grass, and up close it looks like one of the traditional ‘later generation’ places that came after the old style of true ‘croft’ cottages, which were originally only single-storey, three-rooms-in-a-row log shapes, always white, door in the middle of the lee side, a window either side of that, chimney one end.
These subsequent types are generally two-storey, the upper floor having the very high-pitched, snow-shedding roofline, with dormer windows each side above the porched door, and a chimney at both ends, and often with the bones of the earlier generation’s cabin around in the fields behind. And this one is exactly like that, with several ruins dotted about on the hill behind. But there’s also a more modern bungalow nearby on the other side of a line of trees along a creek that runs by the house.
But on closer inspection we can see that this IS actually one of those very old single storey croft cottages, but has had a whole extra floor added at some time, and a large section built onto one end, but you only notice it from the fact that the front door porch isn't in the middle any more.
And the property still has crofter-type stuff up the back — chooks, sheep, a vegie garden – and there's a car in the drive. The manager lady back in town said there might be another car or two coming in and out, and could we make sure to park well against the front fence to let them by. She also told us that the cleaning lady ‘may still be finishing’, and sure enough as we pull in I see a woman at one of the four upstairs windows, rearranging the curtains.
But Herself just happens to be going a tiny bit weird right at this moment, as her primitive Hibernian ‘sixth sense’ lights up, and she says...
‘Sarge, there’s a ‘presence’ here!’
Now, I’m a pretty normal Aussie bloke and, at best, officially classified as a Moderately Open-minded Sceptic regarding things where I can't see the cogs and the levers actually working for myself. But after fifty-odd years THIS is an instinct of hers I’ve learnt to treat with some balance. Up to a point.
We do a quick check of the ground floor – there’s only a bedroom off the porch on one side, and a large open-space kitchen-lounge off the other – and yep, all clear. See, no spooks down here. Only the cleaning lady upstairs to say hullo to. So, up the stairs, check out the whole floor from end to end, being three bedrooms and a bathroom - and all totally empty! Whooo, back up a bit here!! I KNOW the back door off the kitchen is locked from the inside, WITH the key still in it, AND the front door hasn't been out of our sight! She would’ve had to come down the stairs or jump out a window.
I start tossing all sorts of very logical explanations over my shoulder as we’re coming back down the staircase, and damn me I go through this cold spot near the bottom step where every — and I mean EVERY — hair on my body stands up like someone is playing God Save the Queen! Goosebumps like termite mounds!
I’m thinking this is getting just a fraction weird, but I’m still intellectualising madly, just as my eyes compulsively go straight to an old sepia photo on the lounge wall, which I suddenly realise is totally out of context with all the other very abstract-y French-y art-y print stuff around it. It looks about turn of the century, a formal studio shot of a woman in her mid 40s standing behind a chair or maybe the end of a sofa, and buggerme she looks JUST like the woman I saw at the window! Or thought I saw!
By this stage Herself is absolutely convinced there's a benign spirit in the place, but I'M still frantically backpedalling into some rational explanation about what I might or might not have seen at the upstairs window and why all my hair ... and all that, and damn me suddenly we can’t find the front door keys, which seem to have gone from the place we agreed we'd keep them, on an old chair near the front door. I KNOW I put them there, and no more than ten minutes ago, but we do a quick check around, and lordy lordy, we find them on a shelf — UPSTAIRS! Now THIS one I have some difficulty in logic-ing away. So to take the pressure off my tiny mind, I get on with humping in the suitcases.
At this point I must stress that Herself is normally the most respectful person you’ll ever meet when it comes to other people's stuff, but SHE gets this absolutely irresistible urge to not only take down the photo of the woman, but then turn it around, ease open the backing, and peer in. This is a totally out-of-character compulsion I really can't explain — I mean, why WOULD it even occur to anyone normal to do this? And there, tucked in between the very old cardboard lining and the back of the photo itself, is a sort of knitted loop of coloured wool, about the size of someone’s wrist, the sort of little gift that a child would make, one of those cotton-reel-y tomboy-stitch-y things we all used to do at school, its two ends held together with a rusty and very old-fashioned safety pin.
She grabs me in passing and hauls me over and shows it to me, and I’m saying — WHAT?! Why are you peeking into the back of this photo, and she’s saying I don’t know, I just HAD to. Geez, this is the stone end! I don’t even try to rationalise it. I’m feeling just a touch undone! But I’ve paid for the whole week already! I’M not leaving!
We gently put it back and step away, to speculate a while on what it may all mean, as the woman — Herself has dubbed her ‘Jean’ — goes on studying us enigmatically from the wall. Weighing us up. Deciding whether or not to suddenly materialise and scare the bejabbers out of us. Was her cottage a precious refuge she is loathe to leave? Does she have unfinished business here? A lost love she is waiting for? Was there a child involved? Geez, this is getting to me. All you know is that there is a story in this house. It’s that sort of place. And in this Lord Of The Rings setting — mountains, the loch, mists swirling on the rugged hilltops, light chop on the water, the soft grey drizzle — it’s just so HIGHLANDS. Here anything seems possible. Even to Moderately Open-minded Sceptics.
The footnote to this is that Herself (so she tells me later) has a quiet ‘talk’ with Jean, tells her we love her home, and will look after it while we’re here. And from then on we all seem to get on just fine, and no unaccounted-for ladies peer out of windows, the back door keys stay put, and I don’t walk through any more hair-raising spots at the bottom of the stairs. Or anywhere else. But for the whole week it’s still a little hard not to be conscious of ‘Jean’, her eyes following us, constantly watching from that photo.
Extracted from “Toad In The Hole”
© T. R. Edmonds 2001
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