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.
