Critics reflect on the numerous differences between the ways in which James Boswell recorded his experience of the long-anticipated journey to the Hebrides and Samuel Johnson’s account of the same travels. We thought it would be fun to write together after a day of travel and to compare our responses to the same location, which Boswell and Johnson also visited: Loch Ness.
Boswell records poems that Johnson composed along the way, and one of our group, Bowie, himself a poet, responded to Loch Ness through poetry.
Ra’Niqua Lee:
The town of Loch Ness is small and lovely. I counted three, maybe four restaurants, and a single shop. The town’s main attraction is a short walk away from the moderate bustle of excited tourists, clamoring for a look at the lake. Although a dock extends along the water, the bet vantage point was a trail on the opposite side. The dirt trail rose above the lake, snaking around to the little lighthouse that seemed out of use. Gold spray paint covered the door, the words in another language. Beyond the light house, an old Abbey sat behind shrubbery and fencing. My initial impulse was to keep away, a fear stemming from my American understanding of trespassing laws, but I along with friends, walked the pathways leading up to a grand stone building. The stained glass in the windows looked dull from age but otherwise well preserved. Enclosed in more shrubbery were white crosses that revealed that the building before us was an old monastery. The grave stones marked where several dozen Monks had been laid to rest. Standing at the mouth of the graveyard, afraid to encroach on what I thought better left alone, I began to realize that the value of this place, Loch Ness, extended beyond the draw of myth and legend. What remains with me as I write this paragraph is a sense of the historical.
Bowie Hagan:
Loch Lomond
Stepped sun in dark water
Clouds low over lake
Sun over deep shadow,
high mountains
snow covered;
bird flying over lake
cloud rising over clouds
in the still water
blue and gray
Mountains near Loch Ness
the black rock rose
straight skyward
yellow green grasses
water of the creek below
running over black rock
“kind” means child
and also similar…
wide the wide world
the electric currents of the air
being free and constrained
to learn again what we know
giving up to God
as an exercise of choice
Loch Ness, we knocked about
I was freed to meet new people
sitting with bus-mates, Singaporeans
all kindness and humility;
if we come to a new place
it’s the way we can know it—
the ducks,
Tanya Stuhr talking Minnesota and Nessy;
It was a country lane
looking back on places we’ve been—
abandoning a map;
saying “map” and knowing you mean breath,
whisky;
a sense of the mountains around you—
how the mountains surrounded snowy—
to say “map” and know you mean earth,
ground.
A Day Trip to Loch Ness
by Ben Leake:
Beside Loch Ness there’s an abbey that is now a hotel. A small graveyard is out front near the lake with about 20 plots in the brushy grass. Many of the graves are from the 19th century and were dug up from another location and reinterred at the abbey in the 1980s. The graveyard caught my attention when I saw a group of wild rabbits eating on small weeds and fallen debris from trees. When I was a kid, my mom told me that if you get a quick unexpected chill it’s because a rabbit hopped across your grave. I thought about how strange that is, that in some future time somewhere I was already dead. I remember reading about Loch Ness and the myth of Nessie in a large hardbound book in the library at school. It read like a magazine, with the story beneath the grainy, black and white photograph of the monster’s head sticking out above the surface of the water. Today, on this trip, none of us saw the Loch Ness monster, and the lake wasn’t as mysterious or overwhelming as I had imagined. But it was nice to spend some time with these thoughts, digging them up once again before placing them back. I’m not sure why we tell these stories of future rabbits and monsters floating in lakes, but they exist alongside us, like memories and our thoughts of what it will be like when.
Maria:
“Scotland sells itself,” Stewart said. But, actually, Stewart does a bonny job of selling his beloved country. His national pride was genuine, palpable, and admirable. From his unabashed love of Scotland’s natural wonders to his frank discussion of the referendum, Stewart represented his homeland disarmingly. As Dr. Caldwell said, he was a fine Boswell. I will always remember him with his fist raised in the air after the Braveheart excerpt he played us. Why did my eyes fill with tears when he played Scotland’s unofficial national anthem? Not because of the poignancy of the music, but because of what it represented to Stewart and his countrymen. What’s not to love about a country with the unicorn as its national animal? And a man who proudly shares that fact? Long live Scotland – and Stewart.
Deedee:
Travel to Loch Ness prompted further recognition of elements of duality along this trip. Of course, the loch itself is ancient, vast, and relatively free from man’s intervention. At twenty-one miles in length and one of the deepest lakes in the UK, its smooth, quiet surface gives nothing away about what may be happening beneath. Loch Ness keeps her secrets. I wish I had paid more attention to the flora surrounding the banks, but I was captivated by the loch herself, and I felt at one with an ancient past. Soon, however, my modern eye drifted to a more particular time in history by a stone abbey on the loch bank. When was it built? What stories were born there? How is it justifiable to now claim it as a private club? Members Only. No Trespassing. Neon rubber sports courts and expensive cars in the drive. Again, the wealthy are compelled to own history. What was updated and destroyed for the comfort of these members? What is lost at Loch Ness? New and old, rich and poor: battling dualities.
Kristen:
As we made out way to Loch Ness, we saw the landscape transform—grand mountains with snowy caps and jagged rocks against the rolling valleys with soft, neutral colors of purple brush. We passed the spot where the MacDonald clan was betrayed and murdered. The Rabbie’s tour guide spoke briefly about the emotions that this historical land draws forth from its spectators. Why do memories emerge from this landscape in shadowy figures conjured from times’ past? The mind follows the rolling hills—the glens, bens, lochs—looking for something: a heritage, a clan, a belonging. We arrived in Loch Ness midday to witness one of the deepest lochs in the UK; and there, our depths reach into the peat-filled waters of Loch Ness to locate the unknown—the mystical and uncanny. Scotland’s landscape is a canvas for our imagination: to find something from the past and draw the unknown into the present moment. In Johnson’s words, “Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings” (141).
Stolen Time at Loch Ness
Kathryn Dean
It wasn’t until our tour bus got a flat tire that I was really able to enjoy Loch Ness. Because we had to wait for a repair, I had some time to wander around the touristy village we’d stopped in. Time, often so limited by the restricted paths that tourism affords, stretched out like a rubber band.
Temporarily liberated from a schedule, I walked to the end of the small dock where I could get close to the water—closer than I’m used to, as an American, where places like this are usually roped off or forbidden to the public for safety reasons. If I had wanted to, I could have jumped right into the water from where I was standing.
I thought of another place, similar in geography, where I felt the same strange apprehension. Six years ago, walking along cliffs on the Antrim coast in Northern Ireland, surrounded by free-roaming sheep and cattle, I’d noted that there was no barrier between me and the sharp drop-off to the sea. It had made me feel giddy, and strange, and solemn. Who was I to have unrestricted access to this place?
At Loch Ness, the stakes were not as high. The water was shallow, the weather was holding, and I was nowhere near the edge of a cliff. But I felt a strange draw to the water, a bubbling curiosity about what it felt like to be so close to a wilderness.
Later, walking through the yard of an abbey next to the Loch, I could have run my hands along monks’ graves of varying ages. But something held me back from too much interaction with the place. I walked softly through the tall grass, trying to catch a glimpse of the rabbits who obviously make their home there. The freedom made me feel reverent, careful, quiet. The tension buzzed under my skin.
When we headed back to the tour bus, its tire now repaired, time snapped back into place. It was as if someone had released us from this freedom, but also this responsibility, of stretched time, and this tension between freedom and responsibility.
Sheila T. Cavanagh:
One of the most striking aspects of the trip to Loch Ness was the disparity between the varied people involved with the tourist trade and their response to those they served. Our driver, Stewart, was gracious, warm, funny, and informative. He had an easy familiarity with the group and had thought hard (or been trained well) to balance commentary with music etc. The drivers from several companies all knew each other and interacted companionably. It was a fellow driver, for instance, who spotted our flat tire. All was comfortable and we were well looked after.
The town of Loch Ness was less welcoming. The shops were full of cheap souvenirs and the shopkeepers did not greet visitors. In one shop, the man behind the counter spent the entire time I was there conferring on the phone about his dog’s upcoming toenail cutting appointment and the trauma he feared his dog would face.
At lunch, although the food was very good, the hostess was quite abrupt with us, demanding to know immediately how the group would divide itself up to fit the configuration of the tables. Her manner suggested that we would be tossed out if we didn’t comply instantly and correctly.
I had a similar experience during our last stop of the day. Most of the shops were closed, so I wandered over to a pub to get some soup. There was a large sign on the door announcing that coaches were not welcome. When I walked in, the woman behind the bar snapped at me, demanding to know what I wanted. I think she feared that I wanted to use the bathroom, which was strictly prohibited to non-customers. She thawed slightly when I ordered the soup, but never warmed up much.
This is the off season, when crowds are fairly sparce; many of the hotels, B+Bs etc say “no vacancy,” when they clearly mean “closed for the season.” Many of those present acted as though they wished to be permanently closed for the season, while others openly admitted that this time of year required additional efforts to ensure ongoing cash flow. Scotland is depended on its tourist economy, but our experiences suggested a significant tension between those who welcome these opportunities and those who resent them.
Loch Ness Bound
by Julie Fowkes
In the early hours of Tuesday morning our coach, bound for Loch Ness, was buzzing with excitement over stories about Nessie, the legendary monster who is believed to inhabit the Scottish Loch. Pitched as the highlight of the trip, Loch Ness was certain to impress and I looked forward with anxious anticipation to stand on its banks and look upon the same sight that Johnson and Boswell had done some two hundred and fifty plus years ago. Since my experience at Loch Ness was influenced to a large degree by the experience I had leading up to the climatic moment, I must pause here to offer some explanation.
After relating the history of the Jacobite rebellions and the details of British suppression—which I learned resulted in the barring of the many expressions of Scottish culture—our tour guide played a song that was influenced by the fate of the captured Scottish soldiers from the last Highlands’ Army stand in 1746. The words to the song “The Bonnie Banks O’ Loch Lomond” were still playing in my head as our coach pulled into a carpark on the west side of Loch Lomond. At the Loch’s edge I drew a deep breath as my eyes fell on a most tranquil, wide open sight, which appeared to me to be warmly inviting in everything about it. Its still, glass-like surface appeared to lovingly absorb the sky, and the mist that hung over the water added a transcendent quality to the scene. In this moment, I recalled the lyrics of the Scottish Loch Lomond song and the story related by our driver of the Jacobite prisoner who volunteered to die so that his brother would live. I found myself hoping that the soul of the Scot who gave his life did indeed, as the song suggests, make its way back home. As I walked away, towards the bus that would take us to the most famous lake in Scotland, I wondered how Loch Ness could possibly make more of an impression on me than Loch Lomond did at this time.
Our tour guide drove on, up into Clan MacGregor country, and continued his account of various clan stories. He interspersed his oral accounts with a mix of Scottish tunes, and this allowed me some time to reflect on a familiar history that was being told to me from an unfamiliar Scottish perspective. After what seemed like a very short distance from Loch Lomond, even accounting for one more stop along the route, we arrived at Fort Augustus, the small Scottish village at the south west end of Loch Ness. As we drove along the narrow canal made up of a series of locks, I stretched my neck for the much anticipated view of Loch Ness and forgot for a moment the strange feelings that were stirring inside me as a result of hearing a history retold.
I knew about the Loch Ness monster from the stories I had read as a child, and I had always planned on visiting the Loch some time. I was excited. I walked over a bridge and along the canal until I came to the view I had waited a lifetime to see. Samuel Johnson described Loch Ness as filling “a large hollow between two ridges of high rocks … the water [being] remarkably clear and pleasant” (Johnson 53). I don’t know for sure if I stood in the exact spot that Johnson stood in, but his description matched more or less the image I had before me. I would add, though, that the two ridges of high rocks appeared to me a little oppressive, and the longer I stared at them, the more subdued I began to feel. The clouds moving over the landscape affording breaks in the dark shadows where bright greens, murky browns and varying hues of purple revealed themselves, had the effect of altering my mood to a more cheerful aspect, but this more lively mood was surprisingly short-lived. I knelt down to feel with my hands that body of water born around 10,000 years ago and noticed that while my hand sunk easily into the gentle ebb of ripples coming towards me, the dark expanse resisted reflecting and absorbing its surrounding landscape. Most surprising to me was that it even resisted displaying the sky. Our tour guide had told us that the Loch has a peat base, so this clearly accounted for the blackness of the water. The impenetrable view, which provokes a mixture of the pleasant and the earie, is the perfect landscape for fantastical stories and may explain to some degree Johnson’s use of the term pleasant in his description of the Loch in the 1860s.
I indicated in the beginning that my view of Loch Ness was influenced by the experience I had leading up to seeing the Loch. It wasn’t until the journey back to our hotel in Glasgow, listening to more oral accounts of Scottish history, that I realized why Loch Ness didn’t make as big of an impression on me as Loch Lomond did. It was the stories associated with each Loch. I saw Loch Lomond as associated with history and Loch Ness with fantasy, and I was more impressed with the history because I heard my history told from a different perspective for the very first time in my life. I was impressed with Loch Ness, but I was moved by the stories associated with Loch Lomond—it takes a good story to impress, but an even better one to move!
Jacob:
A travel narrative should be easy, you simply write what happened while traveling. But the stillness at the edge of Loch Ness resists this inclination. I stood out in the water, where the mountains crouched far into the deep, low into the dark. The wind rippled the water and, in its ebbs, I no longer counted the seconds. I no longer minded the minutes. Without a narrative the Loch exists, supporting lush mosses and lichens. Without its monster, it continues its song, singing to the animals that fly to its waters. It resists its lock, its cage of civilization. So close to houses, to people, but its waters, dark and deep, still climb and fall as it chooses. Its ebbs still call to those animals that listen for it. Resisting its narrative. The siren’s call was broken as a small hand operated drone whizzed by. Its mechanical hiss darkening the silence. Again, I counted my seconds. Again, I minded my minutes. I left the water.
Dionne:
Driving through the Highlands provides a natural, aesthetic precursor to Scotland’s beloved Loch Ness. The Highlands have steep, snow-capped mountains with grassy lowlands. The mountains cover the sky with pieces of blue peaking from behind. The winding roads lead you in and out of tree-lined roads until you reach what the travelers and Scotts, alike, talk about—Loch Ness.
Once you reach the Loch, you’re almost forced into a duality of culture and landscape. The Highlands are barren with people, outside of its gazers and awe-stricken travelers. However, Loch Ness reveals a concentrated small town reliant on the profit and commerce of its natural landscape. Small houses, shops, and restaurants line the immediate inland of the Loch. The inlands bustle with tourists and workers. As you embark upon the shore, you see the mountains of the Highlands in the distance. You wonder how the peace and tranquility you recently emerged from halted its presence at the Loch where you now stand. The still waters extend into the vast Loch with its banks bordering it down the horizon. The banks are adorned with trees; conversely, visitors adorn the shore trying to capture the present moment. In the Highlands, nature reigns supreme; in the Loch, humanity has overtaken the natural landscape. Loch Ness belongs to the people.
TMC:
“We came too late,” Dr. Johnson said, “ to see what we came for.” As our tour bus pulled up with others, I felt frustrated that our experience of the great Boswell-Johnson tour to the Western Islands of Scotland, already truncated and abbreviated, had devolved into just another tourist bus expedition. I had a harder time imagining away the gift shops and the tourist-targeted restaurants than I do imagining away the 21st century transformation of the former slave markets on the quay front in Savannah in order to carry myself back to the horrors of the 18th century. Maybe I was just annoyed that we had been so limited in this trip by time of the year, time frame, and practical considerations.
Then I considered that Johnson didn’t always get it right and neither had I. It is always too late. The Nessie myth, which had made the loch such a mecca for tourists, meant that we couldn’t enjoy it in the isolation that Boswell and Johnson did, and the guide’s insistence on photo stops and limitations about where he could stop the van meant we didn’t get to experience Fort Augustus. All the same, the passion of the Scottish bus driver was in the spirit of the host-guest hospitality that Johnson talks continually about (in hopes of getting a meal or place to sleep at night) and the stories he told the entire ride underscore as well both the history and the men and manners that Johnson went looking for. The Nessie myth might well dictate visitors now see the loch but we need to remember that as Johnson looked around (often wet and uncomfortable, which we never were) his perspective was colored by his vision of himself as an Odysseus, his stance as author in his own Rasselas, and all the other travel narratives he has written. We are never free of the chunks of text that roll around our brains.
Boswell’s early journals helped when our plans to go further north were derailed (or de-vanned) by a flat tire. My first response was “Oh this is ridiculous. I changed a tire in 90 degrees in a parking lot in Brookhaven. Let me do it. He must have a spare.” My second thought went to Boswell setting out to London in 1762, flamboyantly bowing goodbye to Arthur’s Seat and monuments in Edinburgh—and then having his heroic bubble burst as the wheel of his carriage broke in wretched weather outside Berwick-on-Tweed and he was forced to wait for a repair. The van’s flat tire prevented us from going to Inverness, thereby pushing us further from the actual route of Boswell and Johnson, but in terms of the spirit of the journey and inconvenience, perhaps it drew us closer.
In the Footsteps of Boswell & Johnson: Experiencing Literary Scotland 