See the photo album at: http://flickr.com/photos/vancnyc/sets.

The guidebook says that Ardnamurchan, the almost uninhabited Scottish peninsula where we stayed for two lovely days in mid-June, means “the land above the ocean.” Eric, who took us fishing on the second day, scoffs. “Ar, they make that oop in London because it sounds fancy tae them. If ye know Gaelic, ye know ‘murchan’ is the word for ‘seals’. It joost means ‘seal cliff’.” Whate’er, it’s the utter westernmost point of the English Isle, an almost-island on the back end of Scotland. It thrills my geological senses that the knife-straight southeastern coast of Ardnamurchan is the Great Glen Fault, the San Andreas of Europe -- older, and more civilized, of course. Glacial gouging along the fault’s crush zone makes a very prominent diagonal slash from Fort William to Inverness, such that the northern Highlands sit upon the British Isles like a gay bonnet, with the Hebrides its plume and the Great Glen its hatband. The central stretch of the fault is a very deep trench, which is occupied by Loch Ness - may or may not be why there are strange beings in its depths. If you get a decent map, you will see where the glaciers have also scooped out other faults. All of the Highlands are crisscrossed with long linear depressions, which may be glens, lochs, or fiords depending on the drainage. Some have a northeast orientation parallel to the Great Glen, but there is also a second set, nearly horizontal, that intersects the first at about 45 degrees, so that the Highlands from space look like they are paved in diamond-shaped tiles. From our room at Kilcamb Lodge, we look out across a bluebell-tinted meadow to where quiet water, backed by a tall cliff, glows golden in the lingering summer sunset. This is Loch Sunart, a narrow finger of the Atlantic that pokes deep into the Ardnamurchan, along one of these cross-faults.

Not bad, this place. Award-winning menu of exquisite dishes, every single part of which from the fresh baked breads to the smoked herring is made or assembled on the premises, and we have it all to ourselves - the only guests. Service doesn’t get any better. We guess that our privilege may be due to the World Cup, which certainly shut down the traffic in London over the weekend during our visit with Elizabeth and Henrik.

It is also a place of surprising coincidences. The Lodge is at the edge of a tiny village that was originally called Stron an t’Shiean, or “beach of the fairies.” Under the English it became Strontian, tho this may be temporary as the schools are all teaching Gaelic again. “Ye’re a geologist,” said Eric on our first meeting, when he came to arrange our trip into the hills. “Does th’ name Strontian suggest anything tae ye?” Er, no. “Not even if I tell ye that lead was mined on yon ridge above town since medieval times, includin’ the musket balls that defeated Napoleon at Waterloo?” Base metals? Major producer in early 1800s, in the heroic age of chemistry? You don’t mean -- Yes, element 38 on the periodic table. Strontium. Right here. Weel, I’ll be danged.

Next coincidence: Eric is no village layabout but a retired professor of engineering and a former coach of the Scottish national fly fishing team, but most of all an ardent environmentalist and consulting ecologist. He about fell over when conversation swung around to our own story, and I mentioned my time in Kenya. “Louis Leakey? Nay, ye can’t mean -- Bob Leakey’s brother!” Such is fame - but yes, Bob is one of England’s leading marine ecologists, lives over to Yorkshire and has worked for years with Eric on projects like making salmon farming less nasty. I mentioned Louis’ laser-like intensity that would paralyze his listener (especially female listener). “Aye, that’s Bob, all right.”

Next, after our sumptuous dinner, we are having coffee by the big window in the parlor and this jacket-and-tie Brit wanders in and starts a conversation, leaning against the back of the couch by the fire. He has this big Kipling-esque whiskbroom mustache and the most extreme upper class lockjaw accent I have ever heard; his lips never move at all. He was perfectly friendly in a bashful haw-haw sort of way and we sort of think he says that he has recently bought a house on the other side of the village – he nods to the view through the window – and that he is a surgeon, who has recently been to Africa to volunteer in a local hospital. Half of his work there was to repair women who were suffering (sometimes for years) from the effects of genital mutilation. Said he was going back, too. He perked up when we mentioned we both had degrees from Cambridge. “Grew up there,” he drawled happily. “Grandfather. Biochemist.” Oh, said I, he must have been one of the first then. “M’yes. Nobel prize. Hopkins. Founded science. Invented vitamins.” Ahem, well, wow, that must have been interesting, growing up around such people. “M’yes. Aunt married another one. J. B. Priestly. Uncle Jack, y’know.” If we had been Brits we might have collapsed under the weight of this awful importance but as Americans we could handle it. Good thing he wasn’t a movie star, though.

Going north from Glasgow to the western Highlands, guess what? Why, ye tak’ the low road on the bonny banks of Loch Lomond, that’s what. Yes, you really do, and the low road has not changed since Robbie Burns’ day -- a twisty, incredibly narrow, hour-long tunnel under overhanging gnarly holm-oaks, with Loch Lomond never more than a few feet from your right front tire. Stuck behind timorous grannies – never mind the signs warning that “The law requires that you allow overtaking” -- we had plenty of time to estimate that the lanes gave at most 18 inches on either side of the car (little did we know… but that’s later). All along the way, gentians and foxglove and bluebells and butter-yellow Scotch broom were everywhere – but most of all, we gasped at the masses of neon-purple rhododendron, in solid banks 20 feet high, that crowded under the trees for mile after mile. The first thing we did, after arriving in Strontian a couple of hours later, was to grab the camera and rush out to get a picture of the wall of rhodies next to the lodge. There did seem to be a bit of tree work going on within the forest behind – making a path, perhaps? Piles of chips everywhere. Eric the ecologist solved the mystery next morning. “Th’ forestry was clearing oot the rhododendron in there. Nasty job.” Excuse us? “Yes, it’s a hell of a problem. Invasive, ye know. Nothin’ can grow where they are. Almost as bad as the Sitka spruce the eedjits brought in for their tree farms in the 50’s.” Yes, we had seen moutainsides covered solid with same-height evergreens. “Now they can’t give ‘em away, with the pulp from Russia so cheap, and they make the streams so acid the fish are dyin’. And if ye try to burn ‘em out, the peat catches and there ye are, stompin’ on coals for three months after.” He added, “When ye bring in a foreign plant either it dies oot, or it takes over. Nothin’ in between.” I thought of the kudzu and water hyacinth on our side of the water – no kidding.

Ardnamurchan is like seriously underpopulated, with only two exits by road -- one to the north and the other being the ferry that we used to get across the long narrow bay created by the Great Glen fault. Strontian has 600 or so people, including entire Ardnamurchan police force – two bobbies on a 240-mile beat, the longest in the British Isles, and not much to do except to see the drunks safely home. A few years back, there was in fact a burglary. Neighbors saw it and called the cops. As Police Constable Robert was taking down the information, he saw the evildoer’s car go past his window. “So he jist phoned ahead tae the ferry,” Eric grinned, “and told ‘em to let the car on an’ then sit an’ wait till they saw th’ Glencoe police on the ither side. So folks asked, why didn’t he just go doon behind and get ‘em, if he knew they’d be stuck there? An’ he said, he’d rather the chaps at Glencoe got the paper work.”

Another consequence of underpopulation, we found as we set out for the tip of the peninsula the next day in Eric’s landrover, is that ye don’t need tae waste guid money on more road than necessary for a wee few cars. From Strontian westward for 40 miles, the only road is, intentionally, a single lane. Not two single lanes, for going and coming, but one lane. Period. This claustrophobic driveway to nowhere is also very sharply curved – again, nae sense tae go blastin’ an’ diggin’ like ye was in a traffic jam every mornin’. And what happens when two cars meet? Does the stronger rush upon the weaker and batter it aside? Do they simply stop and wait for the road construction crew to arrive and open up an escape route? No, they do it with politeness. There are wide spots built every so often, where two vehicles can get by if one pulls over and stops. “Driving on Scotland’s one lane roads requires that drivers become familiar with the courteous use of the lay-bys,” says the guidebook in our room. “If it should require reversing to let another past -- so be it.” Eric says he once got into a staring match “wi’ a tourist who just would nae go back, though there was a lay-by not twenty feet behind him. So there we sat, an’ finally I got out me paper an’ settled down tae read. Ye know, we don’t have a word in Gaelic for manana. That’s because there’s nothin’ that urgent. He got the idea, finally, but it took him a while. Och, he was unhappy.”

Eric does ecological consulting for a local laird – actually a mere millionaire who bought the auld place a few years back – with 30,000 acres stretching across the end of the land. In return, he is the only person aside from the laird with a key to the gates, which admitted us to the track beyond that winds up onto the high places. After admiring the view across the ocean to Eigg and Mull, and the Hebrides hiding in the clouds beyond, we set off to the first loch, a jewel of reflected sky down in a fold of the smooth green heath. From the first step, when I nearly broke my ankle, I learned that the heath was not, in fact, smooth – it’s all tussocks. Which are clumps of grass that rise up in pedestals around a foot high with the tops all spread to catch the sun. You cannot step on the tussocks because they collapse, and you cannot step between them because you can’t see where to put your foot. We lurched, staggered, flapped arms to keep from falling, and lurched again. Imagine being a knight in armor chasing a grinning clansman across this stuff – no wonder the Scots were unconquerable. Eric carried the fishing rods.

The fishing was wonderful – wild brown trout with jeweled sides to rival the crowns of royalty, lurking in unspoiled little tarns with never a tree or bush to catch your back-cast. The sky was cool and blue with wandering white clouds, and exhilarating little breezes puffed across the water. Some of the lochs had lily pads, an endangered species that had been cleared oot by collectors from waters closer to the road. Each loch had a different trout population, some few and large, some abundant and small, depending on the available spawning grounds. One loch called Golden Pond had a breed with brilliant yellow flanks – but it was too far, and we didn’t lurch over there. I caught eight on a Mepps spinner, after vainly whipping a fly around for a while. Eric kept hauling them in, and Enid flyfished diligently and caught nothing. We all had a marvelous time, and kept only two, which Eric would be giving to an old couple back in Strontian.

All is not ideal in Ardnamurchan, despite the paradisical scenery and the wonderful people. Wealthy outsiders like our surgeon, although few in number, are enough to drive up prices for the few available homes to the point that locals cannot afford them. Eric was grousing about a couple in the village who had been engaged for 3 years but could not marry because they could not find a place to live. But we felt better, a little, about being priced out of a wee vacation cottage in Strontian when we were sat down by the owners of the Lodge, who had just returned that week from their very first visit to the USA. They had been guests of the chancellor of Brooklyn College with full use of his limousine and a former NYPD detective as chauffer, and were simply blown away. How they envied us! How they wished somehow to live in New York! How much better their life might have turned out if they had moved there, instead of buying a hotel in the countryside, when he sold his London advertising agency! M’yes, perhaps. But then, what good is your limo if you can’t take it on a courteous single lane drive along the great loch, past the foxgloves and rhododendrons, to a quiet little trout-filled tarn high up on the green hills?