I have realized that there are many memories of my childhood and adulthood in my hometown of Aberfeldy in Scotland that stand precariously close to passing from accurate memory into vague recollection - or worse. In an attempt to stop this - and in trying to figure out the best way to commit these memories to fact - I have decided to open a series of posts here on Open Door which deal with my fond recollections of my lifestyle during childhood, adolescence and adulthood spent in Aberfeldy, deep in the heart of Perthshire, Scotland. These “memoirs”, for want of a less grandiose word, will not come in any strict chronological order or be too stuffy or fact-perfect. Instead - they are to be treated as (what I would like to think would be) enjoyable and fascinating reading for you, and as a memory fail-safe for me. Rather than be grammatically perfect or have forced-fiction-passion, I'll probably just try and let the posts ebb and flow by themselves, capturing more of the feeling of the color and emotions of what I recount rather than strictly how it was.
This second installment is entitled “Trainrides”…
—————————————————————————————-
During the years of 1999-2001, my father and late Stepmother, Rosy, lived away from my hometown of Aberfeldy. My dad got stationed at Royal Brackla Distillery as Manager, which is in Nairnshire on the northern coast of Scotland near Inverness. Royal Brackla Distillery is a subsidiary of John Dewar & Sons, the same whisky-making company that owned and operated Aberfeldy Distillery, where my dad has worked since before I was born. Dad and Rosy hated the thought of moving so far away, but they didn't have a whole lot of choice in the matter with their employers.
Royal Brackla was the first distillery to be awarded the royal warrant, and was established in 1812 by Captain William Fraser. There are a lot of facts about Royal Brackla Distillery on THIS webpage, and here is a small picture of the place:
My dad's stay at Royal Brackla commenced a period of travelling up to visit at every opportunity possible. It was quite exciting for me to have a new area of the country to visit and become acquainted with, but also a little daunting to travel on my own. I drove the distance a few times, got up with my aunts and uncles at least a couple of times, and for the rest of the time I happily stuck myself on a train and let it take me to Inverness, where dad would meet me at the train station and take me out to Brackla with him. One of the times when I got up with my aunt Vanda and uncle Bob it was snowing very heavily towards blizzard proportions - and the A9 northbound is NOT a place you want to be stranded in a snowstorm with the infamous Drumochter Pass at elevation making for a daunting journey in all but the best of weather conditions. Nevertheless we made it up to Inverness, albeit with some frayed-nerves.
I arranged one trip for a long-weekend up at Brackla with Dad and Rosy, and my stepbrother Stuart (Rosy's oldest son). Stuart lived in Dundee at the time, east-northeast of Perth which was to the southeast of Aberfeldy, and we had a grand time planning our weekend trip on email and organizing the train rides. I'm a planning and organizing type of person, and many of my memories of a particular event or point in time are cemented by the organizing that I do for it.
Scotrail, Scotland's National Rail Carrier, have a wonderful network of train transportation options throughout Scotland, and can pretty much get you to any approximate area you want to go to (with the exception of Aberfeldy - but that's another story). A huge and gigantic map of Scotrail's services in Scotland can be found HERE. Please note that this map is not geographically sound - it only illustrates Scotland's rail network. For a good, geographically sound map of Scotland, try Google or go HERE for a start. Note the cities of Dundee, Perth and Inverness, the trainstop of Pitlochry on the way, and my hometown of Aberfeldy which is a little ways to the southwest of Pitlochry.
Based on the above map, my stepbrother Stuart had to board one train in Dundee and take it to Perth. He then changed trains in Perth to board the "Highland Main Line" train to Inverness, stopping at Dunkeld and Birnam, Pitlochry, Blair Atholl, Dalwhinnie, Newtonmore, Kingussie, Aviemore and Carrbridge on it's way to Inverness. I think this train's number may have been 27, but I can't be certain of that.
The particular weekend of recount I remember packing, filled with anticipation like it was Christmas Eve and I was five again. I stuffed as much as I could into a rucksack, along with my walkman for company along the way (usually stocked with cassettes of whatever took my fancy at the time......at this point in time it was probably Alanis Morrisette), and a trusty bottle of Chateauneuf Du Pape as a gift for dad and Rosy. Around 8AM, my uncle Alistair arrived for me to drive me to Pitlochry early on the foggy, crisp Friday morning. I believe it may have been autumn. It was most likely a Bank Holiday, giving us a nice, leisurely long weekend with which to make our trip to visit our parents. I had always had tremendous respect for my big stepbrother Stuart - he was a sterling guy, very sensitive, caring, and a little bit mystic like myself......so it stood to reason that we got on very well.
Uncle Alistair got me to the train station in Pitlochry with plenty of time to spare. Amazingly, there is some kind of Wikipedia page on my beloved train station, located HERE. Pitlochry train station is a characteristically small Highland Perthshire railway station. Here is a picture of it:
The trains usually ran pretty much on time - and I'm not too sure which one it was that I caught at Pitlochry normally. I believe we got into Inverness station around noon or 12.30pm, so it would figure, then, that the train must have departed from Pitlochry around 9AM. I remember telling Alistair as he helped me with my bags to the trackside that I had secreted a bottle of Chianti in the car as a thank-you for taking me over to Pitlochry - to which he was gravely insistent upon the fact that I shouldn't have. But - Uncle Alistair was always gravely insistent upon something - so I didn't take it too much to heart. The train pulled up a few minutes behind schedule and we waited on the opposite side of the tracks (reached by the wrought-iron bridge over the line in the picture above) for the travellers to come meandering out and for the new lot - as northbound as we were - to clamber aboard. We finally spotted Stuart with his curly, longish, prematurely greying hair emerging from one of the doors, and I'll always remember he and Alistair exchanging a solemn shake of the hand as Alistair handed my bag (and me) to Stuart. It struck me as very antiquated, very formal, and very......comforting.
And so we were on our way! Off for another weekend of unknown revelry and late-night philosophy by the fireside with daddy-o and Rosy. Off to visit Brackla House, the distillery, and all of the other strangely unfamiliar placenames to us Perthshire-ites. Pitlochry began to fall away from our windows as I followed Stuart to the car in which he was riding with his own dufflebag. The cars smelled of public transport: old cigarettes long-since banned, musty cloth sofa-chairs, public fingerprints and discarded packets of crisps. And I loved it! The windows would rattle as we rumbled over rough parts of the track, and I settled down to chat with Stuart during the long trainride to Inverness. I think it was at some point during the actual trainride itself that Stuart and I discovered that we had both actually packed a bottle of Chateauneuf Du Pape for dad and Rosy......we laughed at that for quite a while.
The train would stop at Blair Atholl briefly - an even smaller train station than Pitlochry - and then head north and up in elevation to climb out of the valley and onto the barren, stark moors that make up this more northerly stretch of Scottish landscape. The low-clinging heather that clads the treeless hillsides up in these parts had long since turned brown for the winter. It was quite soothing to listen to the rhythm of the traintracks beneath us as we flew through the countryside towards our next stop of Dalwhinnie.
Dalwhinnie is a tiny outpost of civilization amidst areas such as the Drumochter Pass - and is an important stopping point for not only the train but also the motorists on the A9, the road which flanks the railroad all the way from Pitlochry to Inverness and beyond. The town came into being around an inn that from the early 1700s served the needs of Highland cattle drovers en route to the market at Crieff. On a single day in August 1723 over 1200 head of cattle passed through Dalwhinnie, in eight different droves. In 1729, Dalwhinnie was the point at which military road construction teams working south from Inverness via Ruthven Barracks and north from Dunkeld met, completing the predecessor to today's A9. Another road was built to the northwest crossing the high level Corrieyairack pass from Laggan to Fort Augustus, a route abandoned as a road in the 1820s. Dalwhinnie is also home to Scotland's highest distillery. This distillery produces a quite famous Single Malt that has the town's namesake.
The train slides into the tiny station at Dalwhinnie behind some ancient, whitewashed cottages with run-down wooden fences that are probably a half century old (the fences, that is - the cottages I am sure measure their age in centuries). There is a wonderful page on the Dalwhinnie/A9 area on Undiscovered Scotland's website which you really should at least glance at. It is to be found HERE.
Onwards from Dalwhinnie, and not much further along and we begin to see the peaks of the Cairngorms to our east and northeast. I seem to remember, on this particular trip, that they were already dusted with snow despite the early time in the season. The communities of Newtonmore and Kingussie fly past (I can't remember if we stopped here or not), and our next definite stop was Aviemore. Aviemore is the only sizeable settlement to be found between Pitlochry and Inverness - and in it's present form it exists largely because of the tourism industry related to the Cairngorms National Park, which lie on Aviemore's doorstep. A new funicular railway into the Cairngorms was built not too long ago - and this has definitely encouraged the growth of this town.
I know I am digressing about the small and large towns that we find along the way......but they're all part of the memory.
So, I guess eventually we thundered into Inverness train station around noon or sometime in the early afternoon. The bustling platforms were a stark reminder that we were in Pitlochry no more - and Stuart and I worked our way towards the exit doors where we found dad waiting for us - dressed as he usually was in his work clothes. I guess being the manager of a facility has it's advantages - you can take off whenever you need to to go and meet your daughter and stepson at the train station! :razz: We hurried with dad through the high-rise-bordered streets of the old city of Inverness to where he was parked, piled our bags into the car and sped off away from the big city on the main A96 road towards Nairn. The built-up city soon gave way to familiar coastal rolling dunes, the scrubby, brown grass so characteristic of seaside locations, and the big smoke stack from the cement factory loomed just to our north. Culloden Battlefield was somewhere to our southwest, but we didn't pass directly by it this time round. After about twenty minutes of travel on this road, we took the B9090 exit which heads south of the main A96 and parallels it along the coastline. Soon we began to see the patchwork of farmland and the fields of pigs and pigshelters that told us we were getting close to dad and Rosy's home. The small village of Clephanton flew by in the bat of an eyelid, and, later, the larger town of Cawdor (of Shakespearean fame) with it's impressive castle.
A mile or two beyond Cawdor, past some more hedgerows and around a few more corners we uncovered Brackla House, at the entrance of the Royal Brackla Distillery. We were home. It's familiar white-washed walls and the big central-heating oil tank sitting in the paved backyard were comforting after our long journey, and dad left Stuart and I to get unpacked as he returned along the small lane to the distillery to conclude his business for the weekend. Occasionally, dad would take me (his "little girl") around the distillery to meet "the boys" in the facility when I came to visit - but not this time......there was too much unpacking to do, and anyhow - Brackla was no Aberfeldy Distillery. There was no Fast Ed or Stookie or Colin to laugh around with and no jogger ghosts to keep an eye out for. So - Stuart and I contented ourselves with unpacking for the weekend. Once dad and Rosy returned home from work to make dinner, we all congregated in the kitchen and helped set the table. With many chuckles, dad saw both Stuart and I arrive from downstairs - both brandishing a bottle of his favorite Chateauneuf Du Pape for him.
Weekends at Brackla were timeless for want of a better word. We got up late, had a healthy breakfast that usually involved fresh bakery bread and Alpen Swiss Muesli, and found countless other numerous ways to spend time together. Frequently, Rosy would spend time with her son Stuart, and dad and I......well, neither of us would feel much guilt in admitting that we usually ended up either surfing the net, watching tv, or zooming into Nairn (the closest town with supermarkets and facilities) to sift through the local farmer's market and snatch a fresh-off-the-conveyor-belt doughnut! :wink: After morning it was usually time for a spot of lunch - thick, doorstop cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and dark chocolate digestives dipped in hot tea being a good example.
One weekend, I remember distinctly that Rosy and I decided to take a walk on the beach at Nairn. I hadn't taken any of my own flat shoes (being about 19 years old at the time - I guess I didn't have much of a mind for packing flat shoes when going on a weekend away!), and so I borrowed a pair of walking boots from dad. It was a beautiful, warm early afternoon, and to this day walking along that beach with Rosy remains one of my fondest, most insulated memories. There was energetic convection across the whole sky with a few Cbs here and there - and while walking in the strong sunshine I recall us watching lightning from afar. Later that day, we would hear about a house in Nairn that had caught fire from lightning. On our return along the shore, I had a moment of fancy and removed my boots to paddle along the shoreline in the icy waters of the Moray Firth. What a worriless, innocent afternoon!
On other visits, while trying to work up an appetite worthy of the Cawdor Tavern, Rosy, Stuart and I would take a walk directly outside Brackla House and do a small circuit around some of the nearby communities. The drab Blairmore, Broomhill and Piperhill, with their local-authority housing complexes provided a square-shaped walk for us to try and "get hungry". After the hour or so it took us to walk this circuit, we would return home and change, adorn makeup, jewelry, dresses and skirts and head out to The Cawdor Tavern - the nearest good quality restaurant that dad and Rosy frequented. This is a traditional country pub housed in a building that began life as the joiner's workshop for Cawdor Castle. During autumn and winter there were always fires roaring upon entry, and dad had a good friendship with the local landlord who had - as luck would have it - just purchased a juvenile "shmoopoo". Needless to say - dad and I went in to that place drooling......and it wasn't because we were hungry! Although......it has to be said that the Cawdor Tavern's fayre of steaks, game birds, stews, steak pies, sticky toffee puddings and lashings of decadent chocolate desserts ensured that we were hungry!
Frequently, dad would hire us a taxi for the mile-or-so stretch of road home around midnight after we had drunk our wine, sniffed our brandy, downed our Baileys and warmed our toes with some Drambuie. As the evening set into a thick, merry black night, we trundled home and fell into the sofas at Brackla House as dad stirred up the fire and piled on some coal. Frequently - scarily - Stuart and I would be up until 3 or 4AM drinking, talking, philosophizing and, later in the night or earlier in the morning - occasionally falling to studying the finer details in dad and Rosy's wooden carved coasters on the coffee table. Needless to say, hangovers would follow later that morning when we all surfaced!
All too soon, weekends like this would draw to a close. Our return-tickets on the train would begin to burn holes in our pockets, and either one or both of Stuart and I would head home on the Sunday or the Monday following. It was always sad watching Stuart leave, or - of course - leaving dad and Rosy myself from the train station in Inverness. We never quite knew when we would see each other again - and when you are such a close-knit family, that hurts......a lot more deeply than I think a lot of people realize.
------------------------------------------------------------------
This article and these memories are all deciated to my late stepmother Rosy. To have provided so many people with so many priceless memories is to have lived more fully than you could ever imagine.
No comments:
Post a Comment