From childhood family day trips to Loch Lomond, to her days as TV-am’s roving correspondent, Lorraine Kelly has covered the length and breadth of Scotland. But certain special places tug at her heartstrings and lure her back time and time again. Travelling to the highlands and islands and all her favourite places in between, this is Lorraine’s personal journey around her beautiful and beguiling country.
Each and every stop gives rise to fascinating stories and memories along the way, from her adopted home of Dundee to the wild and remote islands of St Kilda. She revisits childhood haunts in Glasgow, indulges in a spot of whisky-tasting on the island of Islay and reveals what led her to once arrive in Edinburgh pushing a pram and wearing a pair of rollerskates. She rediscovers the joys of the natural wilderness in the Highlands, visits a dramatic Viking fire festival in Shetland and recalls the week she and her family spent hunting the Loch Ness monster . . .
Beautifully illustrated with stunning original photographs, Lorraine Kelly’s Scotland is a celebration of a gloriously diverse country with a deep and rich heritage, told with all Lorraine’s characteristic warmth and humour.
Lorraine Kelly OBE is the longest-serving breakfast TV presenter in the UK. From starting out as a reporter for Scottish and Universal Newspapers, she moved on to BBC Scotland and then TV-am before joining GMTV in 1993. She now presents her own morning show on ITV.
Born in Glasgow in 1959, she lives in Dundee with her husband and daughter, and is proud to be Honorary Colonel of the Black Watch Cadets. She writes weekly columns in the Sun and the Sunday Post, and her autobiography, Between You and Me, was a Sunday Times number one bestseller.
Steve Smith, Lorraine’s husband, is best known as a TV cameraman but his real passion is stills photography. He and Lorraine travelled the length and breadth of their native Scotland over the course of a year to capture the images featured in this book.
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
DUNDEE: city of discovery
ANGUS, PERTHSHIRE and FIFE: the delights on my doorstep
EDINBURGH: Scotland’s elegant yet earthy capital
GLASGOW: the ‘dear green place’ and city of my birth
HIGHLANDS: majestic and magical
WESTERN ISLES: whisky and white beaches
ST KILDA: islands on the edge of the world
ORKNEY: warm and welcoming
SHETLAND: the furthest north
Acknowledgements
Index
About the Author
Copyright
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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A Random House Group Company
www.transworldbooks.co.uk
First published in Great Britain
in 2014 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Lorraine Kelly 2014
Lorraine Kelly has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All photography by Steve Smith, except for: Rector of Dundee University, see here, courtesy of Dave Martin, Fotopress, Dundee; St Kilda Parliament, see here, George Washington Wilson, Getty Images
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448170586
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Photography: Steve Smith
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A ‘heilan coo’ enjoys the sunshine at Loch Creran, Argyll.
OVER THE YEARS I have been lucky enough to travel all around Scotland. As a child my mum and dad took us on day trips from Glasgow to Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, and on holiday ‘doon the watter’ to the Ayrshire coast, and seaside towns like Largs, Saltcoats, Ayr, Prestwick and Troon, during the Glasgow ‘Fair Fortnight’ – the summer holiday in the last two weeks in July when traditionally many of the factories and businesses shut up shop. In the days when the road to the Highlands was a single track, it would take us as long as eight hours to drive up north to Mallaig, with my brother and I fighting in the back seat and constantly demanding ‘Are we there yet?’ while my mother tried to keep us amused with endless games of I-Spy.
My first holiday on my own with friends was in 1977, aged sixteen, on a youth-hostelling trip around Scotland with one of those fantastic cheap railcards that gave you unlimited travel. We started off in Edinburgh, headed to Aberdeen and got as far north as Thurso, as well as exploring all over the west coast and on to Fort William and Ullapool. We had virtually no money, lived off chips and chocolate, and were regularly eaten alive by midges – those nasty wee biting insects that can blight many a trip – but it was a fantastic holiday and made me appreciate just how lucky I am to have all this spectacular scenery and fascinating history and culture virtually on my doorstep.
A wintery Glen Cova.
I was also fortunate to be appointed TV-am’s Scottish correspondent in 1985 and for the next four years I travelled the length and breadth of the country covering news, current affairs and features for breakfast TV. As well as reporting on disasters like the Piper Alpha oil rig explosion and the Lockerbie terrorist bombing, I was also able to film features and travel pieces. And so I managed to see places that I had always dreamed of visiting. Along with my crew, we travelled to Orkney and the far north of Shetland. We jumped on tiny planes to remote northern islands like Fair Isle and Foula. And on one magical visit to the Outer Hebrides we took the plane that lands on the beach on Barra.
Scotland is where I am happiest. I can be myself and enjoy some of the most exciting and vibrant cities in the world, and also unwind amid spectacular scenic splendour. For me it’s all about friends, family, shared experiences and a good sense of humour, and, most important of all, the comfort of being ‘home’.
I had always wanted to return to some of those places that mean the most to me and this book is the result. This isn’t a definitive guide to Scotland, but it is a journey around the parts of my country that I love very dearly and visit time and time again. I hope you will enjoy my personal Scottish highlights.
The sun sets on the harbour in Pittenweem, one of Scotland’s many historic and characterful fishing villages.
DUNDEE HAS BEEN my adopted home since 1986, when Steve took me on our first date to show off his city and also to watch his football team in action. We went to see Dundee United vs Hearts at Tannadice, met his pals in the pub afterwards, and I found myself falling in love with both the man and the team, and, of course, the city itself.
We have two football teams here: Dundee United, who play in tangerine and black, and Dundee FC, ‘the Dark Blues’. There’s obviously a healthy rivalry between the two clubs, but it is generally good-natured and the two sets of supporters are more than likely to buy each other a drink regardless of the final score.
When Steve first took me to see United they were a team with nothing to fear. Managed by the legendary Jim McLean, we could boast about stars like Dave Narey, Paul Hegarty, Maurice Malpas, Paul Sturrock, goalie Hamish McAlpine and my all-time favourite, Eamonn Bannon. My top United moment was during the UEFA cup of 1987 when I saw Kevin Gallacher score at home against the mighty Barcelona just two minutes into the game. That one–nil victory was followed up by a win for United in the second leg at the Nou Camp in Barcelona. I reported on United’s progress for TV-am and followed them all the way to the finals in Gothenburg. There has never been, and will never be, a more biased series of match reports transmitted anywhere in the world.
Living in Dundee means that I can now go to most Dundee United home games and I love those Saturday afternoons with a pie at half-time and a drink in the pub afterwards.
If you get yourself to the top of the Law in the heart of Dundee (which, 400 million years ago, was a volcano and later became an Iron Age hill fort), you’ll really appreciate how close together the city’s two football stadiums are, with Tannadice and Dens Park, home of Dundee FC, diagonally across from each other just yards apart on the same street. You’ll also see some spectacular views of the entire city, the River Tay, the road and rail bridges, and across to Fife. On a clear day you can even see all the way to St Andrews.
The original stumps of the old bridge over the River Tay, still clearly visible beside the existing structure.
Steve and I were married in Dundee on 5 September 1992 at Mains Castle. I organized everything locally: flowers, cake, cars, kilt hire, and the hundred and one other details that crop up to stress out the bride-to-be.
The men gave extra-special thrills when they fell over ‘dead’, revealing themselves as true Scotsmen without a stitch on under their kilts.
It was a brilliant sunny day and a really happy event, and I walked down the aisle to a piper playing ‘Bonnie Dundee’. My friends from ‘The Clan’ – a splendid bunch of Bravehearts who re-enacted ancient Highland battles – provided a guard-of-honour and blood-curdling entertainment. The men gave extra-special thrills when they fell over ‘dead’, revealing themselves as true Scotsmen without a stitch on under their kilts.
Our wedding day in September 1992 at the beautiful Mains Castle, surrounded by members of ‘The Clan’.
The magnificent sixteenth-century Mains Castle.
A bracing boat trip on the River Tay for a close-up view of the bridges.
Dundee has always been known as the city of the three Js: jute, jam and journalism. The jute industry played a major part in the city’s prosperity from the mid-nineteenth century until after the Second World War. Raw jute is a vegetable fibre that can be spun into coarse, strong threads and was used to make sailcloth, sacks, carpet backing and tough covering for the wagons that took waves of pioneers across the American Midwest. At its height, there were sixty jute mills employing more than fifty thousand workers in Dundee. Two thirds of those workers were women, many of them Irish immigrants and poorer working-class Dundonians living in the crowded Lochee area of the city. The mills were so noisy that the women learned to lip-read and had their own form of sign language to communicate. Meanwhile, in the late nineteenth century fat cats grew rich on the jute trade with India. The ‘jute barons’ who owned the mills grew so wealthy that the Dundee suburb of Broughty Ferry, where they built their vast Victorian mansions, once boasted more millionaires per square mile than anywhere else on the planet. The Verdant Works museum, a former jute mill in the Blackness area, gives a real insight into what life was like for the jute workers and how important the trade was to the city.
Cox’s Stack, a huge factory chimney in Lochee, is one of the most iconic landmarks of the jute industry. Standing 282 feet (86 metres) tall, it towered over the Camperdown Works, which in 1864 employed over five thousand workers and was the largest factory in the world at that time.
As for the other two Js, legend has it that around 1790, while using up bitter oranges, Janet Keiller from Dundee developed her own marmalade recipe, which her son James began to market successfully. He went on to found a jam and marmalade factory, and Keiller’s is still famous all over the world.
Cox’s Stack in Lochee is one the few remaining symbols of the old jute trade.
I was lucky enough to be elected rector of Dundee University in 2004. Whenever a new rector is installed they are ‘dragged’ around the city in a coach pulled by the strongest members of the rugby club, and are obliged to stop off at various hostelries to have a small refreshment. This delightful custom dates back to 1967 when the university became independent (it had previously been part of St Andrews) and was brought in when Sir Peter Ustinov was rector and the Queen Mother was chancellor.
As I was the first female rector in the university’s history, the splendid Women’s Rugby Club kindly did the honours for me. I didn’t get to choose any of my tipples in the various bars we visited, which is why I found myself downing a pint of heavy, followed by a massive glass of absinthe and then some rather odd cocktails. I’m surprised I made it through my inauguration speech.
It was a real honour to be rector for three years and I am very proud of my association with a university that has a worldwide reputation in Life Sciences and carries out groundbreaking work in the School of Medicine at Ninewells Hospital, as well as the creativity that bursts from the renowned Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design.
The university is an important part of Dundee and gives the city centre a real buzz. It has interesting shops, clubs, pubs and restaurants for students and locals alike.
The third J is for journalism. In Dundee that means DC Thomson, founded in 1905 and publishers of the Dundee Courier and the Sunday Post amongst many others, as well as being responsible for the Beano, the Dandy and legends like Desperate Dan, Dennis the Menace and the Bash Street Kids.