robin gillanders
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Strathpeffer The next morning I drove a few mile west to Ffordes, which is a massive online photographic store that used to be in the south of England but is now located quite near to Beauly. I needed a replacement flash cable and I also wanted a cheap rucksacktype camera bag for the 5 × 4 kit. I was pleased to find that an ex-student of mine was working there and he sold me a second-hand bag at a good price. Then, retracing my route, I headed north from Beauly and made a conscious decision to divert from Muir’s route at Contin. Instead of heading west towards Ullapool as he did, I diverted to the east driving through benign and pastoral farmland and pleasant small villages. In a short time I found myself in Strathpeffer. If Inverness seems to sit uneasily within its surrounding countryside, so in a different way does Strathpeffer. It’s an incongruous architectural curiosity which seemed totally at odds with the surrounding Highland countryside. Strathpeffer developed along with the burgeoning tourism industry in the nineteenth century following Queen Victoria’s long-standing love affair with the Highlands. This and romantic notions of Highland culture and history, promoted principally through the novels of Sir Walter Scott, put the Highlands very much on the map as a tourist destination. The coming of the railway greatly facilitated this, arriving in Dingwall in the 1860s and then in Strathpeffer in the 1880s, bringing wealthy Victorian visitors from as far as the south of England to this spa town. The railway station closed in 1951 but the town continues to be a tourist destination hosting busloads of them in huge hotels. After making a picture of a particularly grand, privately owned Victorian mansion, I sat on the steps outside the Pavilion and watched an enormous coach from Yorkshire disgorge dozens of elderly sightseers. I didn’t stop long in Strathpeffer and headed on up the east coast.
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