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The garden was surrounded by trees and still is, which is rather rare in that area. It felt as if you were sheltered from all the mishaps of the world. The place made you welcome, took you in its arms and saved and protected you. And the view was so overwhelmingly beautiful, that still today after all these years I can spend hour after hour and just look out for the changing of the light on the water and on the mountains. We are about 300 metres away from the sea, on a platform overlooking the south shore of Loch Torridon. The highest mountain around the loch is Liathach (over 1.000 m). Against the fierce gales from the north west we are protected by hills, which consist out of the oldest stones found on earth’s surface (2 billion years old).
Views from
the garden Standing there in the wilderness of our future garden, without saying one word to each other (and you remember what I said about mystics before!) it suddenly became extremely serious to both of us. This was the places we dreamt of and from there on we never looked back. And everything went so smoothly that we had no chance to worry about of the big enterprise we were about to undertake. With the help of good friends within two days we had met an architect who gave us an estimate for what we wanted to buy and eventually built the house for us. Two more days and we had an appointment with a solicitor who was handing in our offer. Then it took three nerve-racking months until the former owner eventually decided to sell to us and four more years until the house was finished.
I will not bore you with all the legal details, although we thought it to be rather thrilling to enter into a totally foreign way of dealing with things. As I understood it, part of the legal system has been brought in by the English and part is purely Scottish, and sometimes the English system prevails and sometimes you have to deal with Scottish rules which often have their origins in history and traditions, often to do with the old clan system.
Many years ago on one of my journeys in Scotland a man who gave us a lift scolded us: "You should not have brought a road map with you but a history book!" He was not particularly friendly, but he was dead right, as I have learnt in the meantime. And I advise anybody who wants to travel in Scotland and wishes to understand a bit more about the country to follow that recommendation, and I do this more friendly than the chap whose advice I received.
Two legal factors which we had to take into account were the rights of the crofting community and the existence of the National Trust for Scotland. Crofters is the name for the people who live and work the land in the traditional way, i.e. specially keep sheep. The crofters constitute a community which has certain rights and duties and in which each of the crofters brings in his croft, that is the land, he owns or he is the tenant of. When we bought our site, it had first to be decrofted, that means that the former owner had to compensate the crofter community for the loss of the right to use his land as part of the common crofting system.
The other problem we faced was that the National Trust for Scotland was in a way our feudal overlord. We were not totally free to do and built what we wanted, the NTS had to agree to it. The aim of the NTS is to preserve as much as possible of the countryside and valuable buildings for posterity. They can do this, because one way to avoid heavy tax duties after the death of a beloved one, specially when the beloved deceased was the owner of an estate, a palace or a castles, is to hand the property over to the NTS, keep the right to use the place for the family and open part of it for public use. This is one of the reasons why Scotland is paradise for people like me, who love 1:1 doll’s houses. Just go to the area of Aberdeen! 100 palaces and castles in as many square kilometres! Each with a souvenir shop and a tea room! Delightful!
Why the National Trust for Scotland thought they saved Scottish traditions by preventing us from having a bay-window however will always remain a mystery to me. The only place you could have seen that window is from the other side of the loch, about five kilometres away! You can not even spot the whole house through the trees from this distance. But this is it! Scottish windows, we were told, don’t come out, they go in! Well!
Loch Torridon
When we had to decide for a house name - because there are no streets here and no numbers, of course - we decided on a name we had found on an old map which indicated exactly the spot where our site was. We thought it was Gaelic! Nobody can pronounce it and it is quite troublesome to spell it over the telephone if you want to order something! And later it turned out, that it was not Gaelic at all. It was, what some English cartographer in the last century understood the people called that place! I really wonder what he understood at all, because Gaelic really is a very, very difficult language. Actually you don’t speak Gaelic, you have it or you don’t. I don’t have it! But now the house’s name is Baclenbea and it will be Baclenbea as long as we own it. Everybody is so accustomed to it now. We even get letters with advertisements and tax bills to our address.
