Were the Scottish Highlands ‘more than a beautiful museum’ and a place to observe ‘cabers being tossed, the bagpipes swelling and the lairds in their kilts’? In 1968, the Observer headed north to meet Highlanders living and working beyond the stereotypes.
Glasgow lathe operator Frith Finlayson made £20 in his first season as ‘Scotland’s first native ski instructor’ and now owned 50% of Aviemore’s thriving Ski School d’Ecosse. He fell for skiing in 1951 (‘I’m completely fanatical – it’s worse than the drink’) and would have liked to compete, but was ‘Happy with what I’ve got. My son, Iain, can be the racer.’ (He was, competing in the 1972 winter Olympics.)
Dr Christopher Gregg assumed his PhD in chemistry would help him shake up a ‘backward’ Scotch whisky industry, but quickly discovered that the age-old alchemy of distilling was more art than science. It was all about people: ‘A good stillman makes a good whisky and a bad stillman makes a really bloody awful whisky.’
Orkney’s Westray Airport was a shed with local farmers tasked with unlocking the loos daily, but sole pilot Jim Lee made 20 island take-offs and landings a week. That meant, for £5, ‘A farmer in Westray can feed his cattle in the morning, do his business in Kirkwall over lunch and be back by tea.’
Adventurer Hamish MacInnes had settled in Glencoe after climbing in the Himalayas. He trained rescue dogs, had designed a groundbreaking ice axe and was ‘As happy there as a gourmet at a feast.’
Police mountain rescue expert Sergeant Dominic Smithen enlisted the journalist in a training exercise: ‘It is very unnerving, trussed up like a chicken, dangling helplessly over a 100ft precipice.’ The team had tackled 10 call-outs in the past year: six rescues, two bodies recovered, one who turned up unaided and one still lost on Ben More Assynt. The Highlands might be modernising, but those breathtaking landscapes still held ancient dangers.
