Love

A Valentine's Day in the life of an Am-Can (Can-Am?) tourist in Scotland

Feb 17, 2026

When you visit Scotland for any length of time beyond two weeks, you find yourself saying things (to yourself) like, “I really wish I hadn’t stepped in that bog” or “I think I’ll head over to the library for a cuppa and a blather.” You also think that the word “concessions” refers to popcorn, soda, and maybe a box of Maltesers, but when you arrive at the mobile movie-on-a-truck theater, you find out “concessions” means a senior discount. My gift this Valentine’s Day was that the ticket-taker said - without me having to show identification - “You cannot get concessions because you are not 60.” To someone who is 58, that’s better than flowers any day.

As I headed over to the library to pick up a requested book that was kindly transferred from the library up in Stornoway down here to Tarbert’s library, I once again reflexively shifted my eyes upward to the hill behind the school where a gate stood beckoning me to climb up there and walk through it. Even though it’s my fourth winter here in Tarbert, it is the first time I have ever noticed that gate. To see what lay beyond it, I would not only have to climb up there but locate the trail head. I have been here for two months and haven’t done any of the things that I normally have done by now - like visiting Luskentyre and Hushinish Beaches, the MacLeod Standing Stone, or taking the ferry over to Skye. I decided today was the day to do something new and climb up to that gate.

Jana, the librarian, had Valentine’s cakes and cupcakes to welcome visitors. I happily accepted a cup of tea and chose some chocolate cake figuring a nice little sugar-high would serve me on my impending climb up the hill and whatever lay beyond it. During that cup of tea and cake, I found out that what lay beyond the gate somewhere amongst the heather and peat is a ruin. The man that lived there in the early 1900s was a hero, saving a drowning boy in the bay below his house. The story goes that his wife died of typhus, leaving him with three children he couldn’t find it in himself to raise, so he sent them to school in Edinburgh. One day he heard a bunch of boys yelling down at the bay, so he ran down the hill and helped fish the boy - who had been dragged out by the tide - back to safety.

When I left the library, I had a new name in my pocket of a genealogy historian in Glasgow, my pre-ordered book, a few lemon cupcakes, and a stoked determination to get up to that gate. It took me a few passes to find the path, which ended up being a narrow switchback that looks like the personal path for the village hotel cat to get up to his home somewhere in the hills. Like all other trail gates throughout Scotland this one was well-maintained - properly clicking closed and holding signage that reminds the walker to leave the livestock the hell alone.

My adventure beyond the gate promptly began with rain. There were boardwalks placed here and there over bogs and streams. The bracken was dense, so I managed to walk right past the ruin within the first 10 minutes due to hypnotically staring at my feet on the slippery boardwalks. Oblivious to passing it already, I headed upward, thinking that the man who lived there must have seen as well as heard the yelling boys in the bay below. A word to the wise for visiting hikers to Scotland: Stay the path. Do not go “up.” There is nothing up there anyway, except for the occasional stag-sighting. What is up there are bogs. Water in your boot + wet sock = not pleasant.

I finally shifted course, but first took this photo of the bay:

Retracing my steps, I found the ruin. After identifying the threshold, I stood upon the rocks inside and looked down the hill now thickened with Montane Scrub, visualizing what the man saw that day in the bay below.