Then one Sunday afternoon, everything changed. Taking a rare amble to the end of the towpath, I discovered that the old concrete wall had gone. Instead, the water shimmered westwards beneath a newly built bridge. The sensation was not unlike opening a familiar cupboard and finding a corridor or a valley or a pine forest. Suddenly, in this ribbon of mirrored sky, I found a trajectory.
Poring over a map later that afternoon, I experienced a sort of horizontal vertigo. Thanks to the Millennium Link rejoining the old severed waterways, it was now possible to board a boat outside my front door and navigate all the way to Glasgow. But why stop there? Following the Clyde estuary out among the West Coast islands, you could head north, through the Caledonian Canal and the Great Glen, and up into the wild seas around the Northern Isles, before looping down the east coast back to Edinburgh again – one big, leisurely, circular odyssey, possible entirely by boat for the first time in a generation. It was irresistible.
The idea coincided with a significant anniversary. It was a decade since I had driven up from London to begin my first newspaper job. In that time I had married Ali, made some great friends, and criss-crossed the world on reporting assignments; but none of it could quite disguise a lingering restlessness, an existential itch. For all my travels, I still knew shamefully little of Scotland beyond the media vortex of the central belt. I had the sense that I was not so much immersed in my adoptive country as floating on its surface.
Scots, of course, have always had a special relationship with water. Nobody in this salt-scoured nation is ever more than 45 miles from the reach of the tide, with major port cities and traditional industries linked, for better or worse, to the boundless blue. Growing up in England, school history had taught me that the sea was a defensive barrier, policed by the navy to ensure that Britannia continued to rule the waves. To the explorers, traders and emigrants of Scotland, however, it was predominantly a connection to the world – and crucially one which didn’t involve kowtowing to big brother over the land border. Water was freedom and possibility.
The more I thought about it, the more I suspected that a trip around the watery margins of Caledonia might potentially change the way I saw almost anything. It would be a kind of nautical sabbatical, a time to find my place in a sea-fringed land.
All I needed was a boat.
It was a few months later, at five to nine on a morning of brittle May sunshine, when I shouldered my rucksack, kissed Ali goodbye, and headed to the towpath for an unusual rendezvous. Since the shock of possibility, there had been a few details to iron out. It had quickly occurred to my more sceptical friends, for example, that a boat suitable for a five-foot-deep canal would almost by definition not be suitable for traversing the mountainous swells of, say, the Pentland Firth. It was also obvious to anyone who had ever witnessed my woeful stabs at seamanship that I wasn’t yet competent to navigate Scotland’s treacherous coasts alone. Refusing to be put off, I hit on a brilliant idea: I would use other people’s boats. A sort of nautical hitch-hiker. The all-important first lift had proved more elusive than expected. My best hope, the skipper of the Canal Society, had gone off on holiday, and two bohemian-looking narrowboat owners proved disappointingly static. I was just beginning to lose heart when an enigmatic stranger chugged into town.
Craig, a gruff drifter with a dog called Kaos, looked upon my abject begging with due scepticism, but also generosity. “So what’s the master plan then,” he asked as we left Edinburgh on his little white cabin cruiser, to the tinny strains of The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. In truth, the master plan was still little more than a rather crumpled circuit of Scotland. I had deliberately left the itinerary as open-ended as possible in my attempt to embrace a more free-spirited attitude to life. And if anyone resented me scrounging a lift, I explained, I’d willingly scrub the decks, pump the bilges or (more optimistically) shake the cocktails.
“Well, if you fancy making a cuppa, I’ll have one too,” said Craig.
Tea-boy it was, then.
As we chuntered through the lush West Lothian countryside at slightly less than walking pace, something in me loosened and dropped away. “This is the pace humans were meant to travel,” said Craig, as we crossed the Scott Russell Aqueduct, ignoring eight lanes of Glasgow-bound motorway traffic below. “Everything else goes too fast.”
Once begun, the journey seemed to take on its own steady momentum. At Linlithgow, Craig gave me the keys to his dad’s narrowboat, which I piloted as far as Falkirk before the idiosyncrasies of its diesel-belching engine outfoxed me. At the Falkirk Wheel I brazenly engineered an invite aboard a westbound Dutch barge full of friendly Americans, and together we crowbarred ourselves under the low bridges of the Forth and Clyde canal. It wasn’t the smallest of boats, or the smoothest of trips. At Kirkintilloch a team of divers had to be called in to free a submerged mattress from the propeller, before the vast urban plains of Glasgow finally appeared before us. It had taken a week to get there, but I didn’t care. What I was discovering, as I shared stories and sandwiches at the helm, was that friendship is somehow strengthened when you add water.
It means different things to different people, of course, this mythic act of setting forth upon the undulating surface of the deep. To the unemployed men who rowed me across the Clyde in their home-built replica of a Scots Galley, voyaging was already a powerful metaphor. Their dreadlocked leader, the awe-inspiring Colin Macleod of the Galgael Trust (whose untimely death has since rocked Govan), was teaching young Scots to find hope in their Celtic roots, to call upon what he called “the buoyancy of the human soul”.
It sounds an improbable sort of remedy for poverty, but a century ago Glaswegians were at it in their thousands, swarming “doon the watter” on steamers to Dunoon or Helensburgh for a taste of sea air and bigger skies. My own Clyde voyage was remarkable instead for the absence of traffic, as I skimmed past abandoned shipyards in a rib inflatable. But if the maritime community has shrunk, its members seem more passionate than ever about their heritage. I threaded through the Kyles of Bute with the cheery men who change the lightbulbs on navigation buoys, and have never known a happier ship – albeit with all the elegance of a biscuit tin.
In Crinan, charming my way on to Scotland’s last working steam puffer, the Vic32, I was educated in the elusive splendour of gaseous H2O. “Steam has a certain beautiful simplicity,” explained one would-be Para Handy, as we puffed our way out into the Sound of Jura. “It’s not like modern inventions where everything’s hidden away and you’ve no idea why it works. It’s more obvious, and much easier to understand where the energy is coming from when you’ve actually shovelled the coal yourself.”
Coal-shovelling became one of several new skills I offered to potential hosts, along with deck-swabbing, rope-handling, lock-opening, brass-polishing and dish-washing.
Not everyone was persuaded: a couple of yachties in Tarbert looked as horrified as if I’d just invited myself aboard for a swingers’ weekend. In general, though, I found it easier to get a yes from any mariner than from a car driver. Maybe it’s just that sea-faring folk haven’t yet imbibed that individualist illusion that we are each living in hermetically sealed universes. You only have to find yourself adrift with engine problems (off the Moray coast, late August) to know that we all need each other.
On the other hand, the savvy boat-hitcher has to remember a few things that a road-hitcher takes for granted. In open water, no boat will detour off the charted route to pick up someone sticking his thumb out, and the “hard-shoulder” often gets softer with the tide.
Harbours are the closest equivalent of the motorway service station, but manually operated canal locks are the absolute optimum lift-blagging spot. It takes a hard-hearted skipper to grudge a plaintive backpacker a ride when he’s doing all the on-shore donkeywork.
Sometimes you live to regret a successful hitch. In Crinan I inveigled my way aboard an Irish curragh as a rower in a reconstructed journey of St Columba – only to discover, about a mile offshore, that I was also required to sing, pray, eat clams and wear monastic robes. It was a long three days. Barely had I escaped to Oban, when I signed up as a galley slave for a tour of the Outer Hebrides on a square-rigged sailing ship. Among the many things I learned in 10 days aboard the Jean de la Lune was that my brass-polishing, silver service and modest alcohol consumption were laughable, and I was henceforth to be known as “Gobshite”, a moniker bestowed upon me by the 17-year-old Irish bosun, Shane. He didn’t look like the type to complain about lost childhood. He’d had too much fun on the trawlers, gutting and hauling, smoking and drinking, learning to put a good face on bad weather, getting his tattoos and bad habits in early.
“That’s what you southerners don’t understand about us Celtic types,” he explained half way across the Minch. “It’s all banter. Here in Scotland you tell your best friend to piss off, and it’s a term of endearment.”
Banter was something I was determined to master. It seemed an essential skill in a country where my southern English reticence was often misinterpreted as aloofness. Life, I learned from my full-on shipmates, was too short to apologise for ‘bothering’ your fellow humans – wasn’t that just part of living on the same planet? “Absolutely!” grinned the bosun, with an encouraging slap on the back. “You’re a worthless gobshite – but it’s all good!” I returned to Oban with considerably thicker skin.
Other initiations awaited me as I worked my way northwards along Loch Linnhe and the Caledonian Canal in a sea kayak, yellow submarine, herring drifter and plastic cabin cruiser. I made the passing acquaintance of Scotland’s two famous monsters – Nessie and the female Highland Midge – followed by a heady blast of English guilt at Culloden. By the time I reached Findhorn I was craving something bigger-hearted.
Journeys are always both inner and outer, and my own had been growing noticeably more existential. A once-fervent Christian with an increasingly threadbare faith, I had decided to take an indefinite sabbatical from received dogma and open my mind to whatever I encountered – with mixed results. At the new-age Findhorn Foundation, an amiable potter introduced me to elves and wood fairies while a Buddhist nun taught me how to meditate. Further along the Moray coast, the truth got darker. I hitched aboard a fishing boat whose nets had crushed and killed the previous skipper. It’s what the sea never lets you forget – we are only ever moments from death.
My nautical acquaintances adopted various strategies for facing this fact. Some went in for lucky charms, banned words or Gideon Bibles at the helm. Others managed to balance the complex truth of human frailty with a primal joy in the moment. On a northbound cargo boat I met Mike Shipley, a seaman with terminal cancer, who had brought along his watercolours for a final recreational voyage. He inspired me more than any priest. “The one place where barriers don’t matter is at sea,” he explained, grinning from beneath a chemotherapy-concealing headscarf in the mess of the Shetland Trader. “It doesn’t matter what nationality you’re working with, everyone rubs along, you’re part of a team. When you go to bed tonight you’re trusting that someone up there is looking where we’re going.”
Mike reminded me of others I had met, lovers of the sea, often channelling their passion into restoring a neglected boat and sailing her again. I had the impression of dozens of them – almost always men – circling Scotland with the horizon in their eyes. You have to keep moving to recharge your batteries, as the boating manual said. It rang symbolically true, somehow. They were like modern perigrini, the Celtic seafaring monks who once pushed off recklessly in coracles, in search of their “place of resurrection”, where life would finally make sense.
The man who’d come closest to finding it was Stuart Hill. Most will remember him as Captain Calamity, the hapless seafarer of the 2002 tabloid silly season, who tried to circumnavigate Britain in a rowing boat fitted with a windsurfing sail. He was finally winched ashore in Shetland after losing his vessel, his business and his marriage. But Stuart did not believe in failure –only in opportunities to try something different. “What a place,” he said, gazing at the mist-smudged isles, as we dangled fishing lines from his new boat. “I get up every morning and think, I live here! Really, who could ask for more?”
I pondered his optimistic philosophy as I boat-hopped homewards, from Orkney to Aberdeen and on down the East Coast into the Firth of Forth. I had blagged, begged and befriended my way aboard every conceivable sort of boat: barge, yacht, rowing boat, square rigger, speedboat, narrowboat, fishing trawler, submarine, cargo boat, ferry, cabin cruiser, inflatable, steamer, catamaran, trimaran, lifeboat, lightship, kayak, curragh. I totted up 50 of them, tracing the journey back across my now crumpled map: nearly 2500 meandering miles full of chance encounters and impromptu friendships. I had been away for four months – long enough for my wife to finalise our purchase of a house overlooking Newhaven harbour. It seemed about time I went home.
Before I bagged my final lift on a Forth pilot boat, I dropped in on my friend Alastair McIntosh in Kinghorn for some final advice on how to belong. “In the end it’s about being real,” said the Hebridean environmentalist, with his characteristic gingery grin. “Scots don’t give a damn who you are as long as you’re honest about it!”
And that was it. The final link in a lopsided circle. Not quite a full circle, as it turned out, returning to Edinburgh’s sea-facing side. But don’t most worthwhile journeys bring you back to a different place, one way or another?
Adrift in Caledonia: Boat-hitching for the Unenlightened is published by Little, Brown, on March 2 at £12.99. Nick Thorpe (http://www.nick/ thorpe.co.uk) will be reading at Waterstone’s West End, 128 Princes Street, Edinburgh (0131 226 2666) on Thursday, March 9 at 6pm, tickets £3, redeemable against purchase of Adrift In Caledonia
26 February 2006
