Better Together in Aberfeldy- A Memoir of the '14

Better Together in Aberfeldy

Once a year, in May, a distinguished professor of political theory invites a group of friends (and some friends of those friends), mostly 60 –plus in age, to 2 days’ canoeing down a river. After 3 years of the Wye and the Severn, in 2014 the group gathered by the Tay in Scotland.

Apart from one airport-to-convention hotel-back- to- airport trip, I had not been to Scotland since I was 10 or 11 years old, taken by grandparents to Edinburgh on the sleeper. (I vaguely remember a coach trip to Loch Lomond and being fascinated by the sight of a man in a kilt, not because of the kilt but because of the dirk in his stocking.)

The base for this Third Age in a Boat adventure was Aberfeldy. As well as its charms of a Highland nature (here of the geographically lowish sort), it is notable for its association with two influential English exports- the C18 General Wade and the C21 JK Rowling, whose country residence is hard by; one major denizen of the Scottish pantheon, Robert Burns, who wrote a poem above the town (the Birks of Aberfeldy, celebrating the impressive gorge and waterfall of the tributary Moness river); and one Anglo-Scottish hybrid, the Black Watch.
This was originally an anti-Jacobite instrument of the Union, but grew into a famous regiment of Empire and European wars. The regiment was mustered at Aberfeldy. It is commemorated by a large weatherbeaten (and badly so; once struck by lightning) statue of a fearsome highland soldier standing over an incomplete list of battle honours.

But Wade is perhaps the most interesting figure to a visitor in the referendum year of 2014. He was the man who executed, in a thoroughly practical way, the C18 forerunner of the “Better Together” campaign  (although then it was more “Together with Hanover or Else”). Faced with rebellious Jacobinism, the Hanoverians adopted, as is trite history, a military response. However, Hanoverian armies were faced with the difficulty or indeed impossibility of moving conventional forces through the Highlands. So, like the rather successful Roman military, they built roads; and General Wade was their man for that.

A considerable network of military roads was constructed. This certainly promoted the “togetherness” of static garrisons and mobile troop columns, thereby knitting the sinews of Hanoverian success.

Wade had to build bridges for the roads, and the best is over the Tay at Aberfeldy. It spans the river in 3 stone arches and still carries traffic albeit on a single carriageway. Although not triumphalist in the Roman way, it proclaims its provenance by inscriptions in Latin and English and is the most impressive piece of architecture in the area.

Has Wade left any Unionist imprint on the political psychology of Aberfeldy? An outsider cannot well judge this; certainly I noted only 1 window poster (a “Together” one) and, for what it is worth, a cricket match going on (but there’s also an unsnooty golf course in the Scottish tradition). However maybe so- Rowling donated £1m to the Together cause (she would have to cross Wade’s bridge to drive, or be driven, to Aberfeldy).

Like any hack classical orator, I shall not tell of the Third Age canoeing expedition. I do not dwell on the unfairly fast current, the ferocious rapids and the unhappy moment when one canoe was tipped over and the 2 occupants swept away for 200 metres downstream. I pass over the sorry fact that the “rescuing” instructor paddled, not to pick up one of the wretched survivors, but to secure the waterlogged boat just beyond her. Let these events be forgotten.

But the aforesaid unmentioned instructor told us one story in local currency. When Rowling was first suspected of being the pseudonymous author of a gritty realist novel (as opposed to a gritty magical one), a number of journalists staked out the narrow road outside her country house. Doubtless they were the literary correspondents. A local farmer, acting either out of irritation or solidarity or both, filled his muck spreader with pig excrement. He drove slowly past the pop-up lit crit encampment and turned the machine on. Thus the journalists got precisely what, some would say, they came for. A few days later, the story goes, the farmer found a case of fine whisky on his doorstep, with a note- “Thanks, JK”.

May 2014