Scottishness

Here at the coast, the air comes briny and cool off the ocean, the wind makes a dance with the trees in the garden, and the sky when it’s clear of rain is as blue as kindness.

As I’ve traveled throughout the United Kingdom, as people have asked me where I’ll go next, invariably they say, “The further north you go the nicer the people are.”

Each time, I think, But the people here are nice.

Still, as I venture north and norther I am finding the people to be, if not nicer, at least equally as nice as the people I’ve met so far along the way.

My Italian housemate says, “When people ask me what my favorite part of Scotland is, I always tell them, ‘The people.’” And this, because the people are warm, generous, neighborly, and kind.

She goes on to speak of L, the Italian man who manages the boatyard where she works and who is also her friend, “If he and I were back at home we might be friends but only on Facebook or something. I think in the years he’s been here he’s absorbed some of the Scottishness.”

I think my housemate has too. For she keeps inviting me along to do things with her and her friends.

First, down to the pier to watch them shift an old fishing boat built in 1926, inch by slow inch, from its dryland supports onto a trailer. She, the boat’s owner S, and M, another boatyard volunteer, do the work over a four-hour period. It’s a tedious and precarious job when done with jacks and wooden supports. I sit in the sun and watch, and this because if I tried to help I’d only be in the way.

Then secondly, when later that day she invites me along to the pub for a dinner out with the three of them. After dinner, with everyone still up for company, we go to S’s house and sit around drinking cider and listening to the LPs he puts on, one after the other. He lights a fire in the fireplace and we talk of our lives.

While we’re sitting around like a good joke (an Australian, an Italian, a Brit, and an American walk out of a pub) someone brings up the Ceilidh planned for Friday night in a neighboring village. A Ceilidh (pronounced Kaylee) is a traditional Scottish event with dancing and live music. My host in Eckford had said I should go to one if I could. “It’s a very Scottish thing to do,” she’d said. G says she’d want to go if S went, S says he might be talked into going, M says she’d need a babysitter and asks me if I’d want to go.

“I’ll go if everyone else does,” I say.

As if that tips the balance, M texts her babysitter. S fills our glasses and goes to change the album on the record player. M adds another log to the fire. We talk about family, books, and how one might go from a degree in math to a job restoring old boats (as S has done). 

“I’ve got a babysitter,” M says looking up from her phone after a few more records have played, “I guess we’re all going.”

That night, when it’s time to go on home, G and I walk back to our shared house. Friday is still nearly a week away.

Soon enough, Friday arrives.

In the evening, G, L, and I walk to M’s house as she’s volunteered to drive us all to the Ceilidh.

The Ceilidh is held at the Cambo Stables Visitor Centre. It’s a charming venue, cozy and warm with outdoor firepits already lit and the day’s light still strong. Inside, the band is set up at one end of the room and people, some in kilts and some not, are filling up the space.

For the first dances, I stand and watch. Then at some point, M motions me over and partners me with a man in a kilt (who it turns out is the co-owner of the café with his wife and has organized the event).

“I’ll say I’m sorry now in case I step on your toes,” I say.

“I will too,” he says. But I have a feeling he knows what he’s doing.

As we stand in place behind another couple, we’re given a brief instructional by the Ceilidh band leader and then the music begins and we’re off. We start out with our arms around each other’s backs. Kick with one leg, kick with the other, separate and step to the side, clap, come back to the center. There, we join hand to hand and shuffle step to the right, shuffle step to the left, add in a few miscellaneous steps in the middle which I’ve forgotten, and then there we are at the starting step again. The dance goes on forever. We make a circuit of the room, once, then twice, then I lose count. It’s fun even if I feel clunky and heavy in my walking shoes, jeans, and body.

My dance partner tells me, “You’ve gotten the hang of it.”

It’s a very rough hang of it, but it’s nice of him to say so.

When the dance is done, I thank my partner, go to stand back in the corner, out of breath, sweaty, and happy having danced a traditional Scottish dance to Scottish music with a Scottish kilt-wearing man in Scotland. As my Eckford host had said, “It’s a very Scottish thing to do.”

Normally, at a Ceilidh there is a caller—much the same as a square dance event would have—who calls out the steps as they’re to be made. But this night we only get a pre-dance explanation and demonstration and then we’re all left on our own to the chaotic and fun mess of steps and movement.

“No one really knows what they’re doing,” the café co-owner tells me at a later point, over the sound of the music as we stand back to watch the dancers dance. But it doesn’t seem to matter, everyone looks to be having a good time.

Much later, when I join hands with my group of four for the Runaway Train, our partnering group of four standing opposite us, as I duck under their raised arms, weaving like a wild, curving, snakelike train through the tight space left between person and person, I don’t know when I’ve laughed so hard. When the dance is done (a laughing lifetime later) G says, “Let’s do that one again!”

The band moves on to another song. The last dance is danced. The final note is played. We make our goodbyes as M collects us all, “These are my kids and I’m the mum,” she’d told one of her friends when we’d all arrived, and then she drives us home again.

“Thanks for driving,” I tell her at the bottom of the hill where she’s dropped me and G.

“That’s all right,” she says, which is English for “You’re welcome.”

“What do you have planned for the weekend?” G asks me as we let ourselves into the house.

I mention a few minor things and then ask, “Why? What are your plans?”

“I heard about this rock,” she says. “I thought we could go Saturday or Sunday.”

“By bus?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Okay.” I like rocks.

The next morning, G checks the bus timetables and we discover that if we want to go see this rock – the Bunnet Stane – then we’ll have to leave straightaway as the buses don’t run that way on Sunday and if we don’t hurry today we won’t have the time to visit the stone and get back in time for the last bus home.

Ready for adventure, we throw together some snacks, fill up our water bottles, pack up our cameras, and go catch the bus.

As we climb aboard, I ask the driver if he’ll tell us when we’re at the stop for the Bunnet Stane.

“If I remember,” he says, with a twinkle in his eye.

When we get near the stop I think is the right one, I go ask him, “Is this the stop that’s closest to the Bunnet Stane?”

“It’s as close as the bus can get you,” he says. “It’s still a ways from here.”

I know it’s a mile and a half walking and I’m not put off by that. Then, as if he has all the time in the world, the driver points down the road and gives me detailed directions on how to get to where we’re going.

I thank him, and G and I head off for our walk. As we make our way down the road and turn where we’d been instructed to turn, a few cars pass us by, then no cars, then the road becomes a gravel lane, then the gravel lane becomes a foot path with tall grass on either side. We pass fields of baaing sheep. And then, there before us is the Bunnet Stane.

The Bonnet Stone is a rock formation at the foot of the Lomond Hills. A charming and strange little formation in the middle of a green field, with the impressive West Lomond Hill behind it. 

We skirt the rock, checking out the cave called the Maiden’s Bower which is where legend says a heartbroken lass lived after her beloved lad was killed by her father and his men because he was from a rival village (a far cry from the Scottishness that G and I have experienced). It’s cold and dim inside the stone room and I turn to tell G, “I wouldn’t want to live in here,” before making my way out into the sunshine again.

From there, we go to sit atop the stone. The land, hill, grass, field, distant hills, and sky calm me in a way the coast never does. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the coast, but I feel more at peace in the mountains, in the hills. I wish I could stay here forever to think and to be. Soon enough though, having gazed out at the far away hills, having listened to the bleating sheep, we talk through our options: have our snack lunch here and now, walk up the hill behind us (which we’ve seen people going both up and down), or head back the way we came?

We decide to go check out the view from the hill.

“We’ll just go to that point,” we say each time we make it to the point we’d previously agreed upon. We find ourselves higher and higher, looking down at all the world. I want to know what’s on the other side of this hill (I don’t find out we’re climbing up West Lomond until later), I want to know what’s just beyond that rise.

“At some point we have to say this really is the last one,” G tells me. But she also wants to go just a bit further.

“That point,” I say, pointing. “That’s the very last one.” She verifies that we’re looking at the same place and then, agreed, we go.

And we’re both happy. For from there is the view we’ve been after. There’s the sea. There’s East Lomond, the twin hill to the one we’ve nearly (but not quite) summited. The sand colored path we’re now on is like a proper road with twin ruts and it goes down before us ever ever on, as the saying goes.

“I wonder where that would take us,” I say.

“Maybe to Falkland,” G says.

A woman walks by as we’re standing, staring off into the distance.

“I wonder if we could ask,” G says.

At this point, the woman’s walking partner starts to pass us by.

“Do you know where this road would lead us,” I ask, “if we kept on it?”

“It’ll take you to the car park near Falkland,” he says. “Why do you ask?”

“We were just wondering where it went.” I explain that we’ve come from the opposite direction and still have to get back by bus to our home base, that we didn’t know if we needed to go back the way we’d come or if we could venture on this new path to make some sort of full circle.

“My wife and I have our car at the car park. You could follow me and if you wanted we could drop you off in Falkland for the bus.” He says it’s about a mile and a half to the car park. G and I look at each other. Why not?

Seeing no reason not to, we join up with our new friend and when we catch up to his wife I say, “Your husband has adopted us.”

She doesn’t seem too alarmed by this and we all carry on walking together, chatting about who we are and where we’re from. To stretch their legs, they’ve stopped off for a nice walk to the summit of West Lomond (which G and I just missed by turning left for our final point instead of right and ever ever upward) on their way to Dundee to see their daughter and her family.

With the sea to our right and the winding path before us, we make it to the parking lot and they assure us it’s no problem to take us into Falkland.

Once there, when we see a bus stop sign, the husband and I jump out to look at the times and before I can tell him that this place is okay, he decides they’ll take us all the way back to Anstruther. Despite our protests that in this town or the next one we could catch a bus, they do.

They go about 25 miles out of their way to take us home. “We haven’t been to Anstruther in years and years,” they say. “It’ll be nice to see it again.”

When we arrive, we try to talk them into letting us treat them to an ice cream, tea, coffee, or fish and chips, something. But they say they must carry on. However, before they go, G shows them some of the old fishing boats in the harbor and they seem to really enjoy the impromptu tour. They’re reminded of the working fishing boats of the village where the wife grew up.

Saying our final goodbyes, G and I thank them again for their kindness. The wife says, “One day you’ll do the same for someone else.”

As G and I head back up the hill to the house, we’re both thinking of that absorbed Scottishness, of what it is to be kind, and of all the good things that people do. At one point, G says, “She was right. We will do something for someone else one day.”

And, I think, you already have. You’ve absorbed Scottishness yourself. At the top of the hill as we turn down the gravel lane, I think on that as it turns out, no matter where I am the people are nice. No matter where they are from, the farther north I go or not, people are kind.