‘I’m on a magical mystery tour,’ I explain to my hosts at the latest converted church hostelry. They’ve ambitiously converted it into a bunkhouse and an upscale bistro. A wall of permanently illuminated stain-glass saints watch over the late-breakfasting backpackers. Reclaimed religious artifacts are mixed with a series of renovation photographs only the people who put their blood, sweat, and tears into this building could appreciate. I am proportionately effusive as we chat over the porridge. As this bunkhouse seemed staffed only by men, I’ve determined that this impractically charming project is deeply queer. I look for little clues (the crisp packets are arranged in rainbow order!) Having branded my cluelessness as part of a ‘wherever the road takes me’ life philosophy, I mention being gobsmacked again today by how much driving it takes to connect the backpackers hotels. Yes, my hosts commiserate, tourists are always confused when they end up with a £160 pound fare. I should take the northwest, not southeast loop; there’s a good bakery on the way. Leaving, I bump into a beautiful woman in so obviously expensive a raincoat and boots that she must be the co-owner. ‘Don’t come off the road,’ she warns as I drive off into the rain. No rainbow church.

Thirty minutes of driving along a single-track lane, of letting the ever-present vans by me, and giving space to the men in midge nets clearing trees, and I’m already tired. From the Bistro Church to tonight’s hostel, which will probably also be in some type of converted Victorian civic building no longer required for its original purpose, is just six miles as the crow flies. By google directions, it’s sixty-one fucking miles. The Fiat informs me my average trip speed is 22 miles per hour. You do the math. Compounding things, we had a long-distance family conference last night about where I want be next year: a hard question to answer what with my vacillating long covid and an endless question mark over the Portugal project. I’m in anticipatory mode now and can feel the energy leeching from my body as my brain spins out the countless scenarios. Magical mystery tour, remember?

I stop to have lunch next to a martyr’s mound, the haunt of one of those Irish monks who paddled over to proselytise in the 6th century. The very thing that attracted the early Irish Christians to this part of Scotland is the very same reason I have spent so much time on the road today: the lochs. Today, the Hill of St. Kessog is populated by school children with soggy chips and dutiful dog walkers. Two kinds of seagulls swirl and compete with the ducks for food, the regular kind and the pretty little blackfaced ones with orange beaks that I find, with typical human caprice, more charming. A lone swan takes on all incautious dogs. In the distance, the mountaintops are mist bound. My mother’s trail updates show her wearing both a yellow raincoat and a midge mask. I get up from the bench, a memorial to a man by the name of Swann, my grandmother’s name. A good omen, perhaps.

I have neither the energy nor the fortitude to clamber out of the car in the pouring rain to investigate further roadside distractions, not even the tantalising ‘Famous Shark Bathroom!’ My destination, once sighted, is not another converted church. Moreover, it’s a building ostensibly still used for its original purpose: a public house with the bar and restaurant on the ground floor and rooms above. It’s not been updated. A giant stuffed black bear dressed in a kilt leers out from behind the doorway. A patron has placed a glass on its head. A wall of taxidermy birds are frozen in an unchanged tableau, and, oh my god, is that a baby seal? Who would kill that real life plushy toy and be proud of it? But the hotel is leaning into the creepy vibe. Their Wi-Fi password is Haunted Inn. No spaces.

Inversnaid

This darksome burn, horseback brown, His rollrock highroad roaring down, In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth Turns and twindles over the broth Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning, It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern, And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Inversnaid - Gerard Manley Hopkins

This darksome burn, horseback brown, His rollrock highroad roaring down, In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn froth Turns and twindles over the broth Of a pool so pitchblack, fell frowning, It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew Are the groins of the braes that the brook threads through. Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern, And beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.