Castles In The Sky

In an extract from her book My Scotland, crime writer Val McDermid revisits Assynt in Sutherland and the magic of the Hermit’s Castle, perched on rocks above the sea

- Val McDermid

SOMETIMES writers evoke a place so powerfully we have to go and see it for ourselves. People make a living running literary tours, showing readers round the streets and alleys, the pubs and cafés where their literary heroes hang out. For me, the poetry of Norman MacCaig was an irresistible magnet that drew me true north to the Assynt region of Sutherland and its distinctive scenery. Assynt is a labyrinth of freshwater lochans, wild and desolate moorland, ancient rocks, and mountains that rise as singletons, each with a unique profile. And around the fringe, a spectacularly jagged coastline bitten into by strands and coves of pale gold sand. MacCaig wrote deeply moving metaphysical poetry about Assynt that laid claim to my heart in my teens. It still does.

I went there on a kind of pilgrimage the summer before I left Scotland for Oxford. I’d been working as a waitress in the Station Hotel in Kirkcaldy, saving money for my journeys north and south. Silver service waitressing was, I knew, a transferable skill and so it proved. I avoided depleting my savings by doing casual shifts at the Culag Hotel in Lochinver. In the bar there, Duncan, a seventy-two-year-old trawler skipper, proposed marriage on several occasions, some of them when he was sober.

In spite of his occasional gifts of lobsters and turbot, I was more interested in the Assynt landscape and I spent most of my nights at the Youth Hostel in nearby Achmelvich, making temporary alliances with other visitors as eager to get out in the hills as I was. I remember that summer in a golden glow of stories and song, seascapes and summits.