On our last night on the isle of Arran, Charles and I have what is, without doubt, my best dinner since getting off the Chantilly. It’s at Creelers in Brodick, a well-known seafood restaurant. We start off with a trio of smoked Scottish salmon followed by whole lobsters from the north coast that Sam, the chef, tells us “Came in kickin’ just this morning.”

For dessert, I order a trio of Arran cheeses, including the whisky cheese, along with a dram of 10-year-old single malt Isle of Arran. Sipping my water of life, I feel expansive. I feel emotional. I feel as if I am exactly where I should be at this moment in time, and whether it’s the north coast lobster, the Arran cheese, or, more likely, the warming whisky, I couldn’t tell you. Nor does it matter.

Driving back to the Glenartney, Charles seems to sense my Scottish euphoria. Without saying a word, he ignores the turnoff to our hotel and keeps driving along the coast. It is 9:30 on a late summer eve in Scotland but it is still light out. The gloaming. The most glorious time, in my mind, in all the day. The sky is layers of orange, purple, and pale blue, particularly towards Goat Fell, the barren, stoney hill that is the highest mountain on Arran.

The gloaming on the isle of Arran.

We drive and drive along this Great Wee Road out into the country until suddenly Charles slams on the brakes and we come to a halt in the middle of nowhere. Have we hit something? Has the car broken down?

Without saying a word, Charles gets out of the car. I follow. He is staring off towards the sea. I follow his gaze to a green pasture sloping gently down to the shoreline. There, just on the other side of the fence, are two silent, magnificent hairy coos staring calmly at me, a mother and her calf.

“Oh my god,” I whisper.

A mama hairy coo, top, and child on the isle of Arran. Photos by David Lansing.

Charles smiles but doesn’t say a word. I cross the country road and stand at the fence, close enough to touch the mother hairy coos. She is stoic and serene and wise-looking. Like the Queen Mother herself. Or a bovine Buddha. Standing there before them is as close to a spiritual experience as I think I’ve ever had. I half-wonder if they are going to start talking to me, telling me what to do with the rest of my life.

“Should I stay or should I go?” I ask them.

The hairy coos are elegantly silent.

Back at the Glenartney, I find that I am so contented I can hardly stand it. While Charles goes off to his room, I head off to the lounge, which is little more than a home bar, and ask Robbie to pour me an Arran whisky with just a wee touch of water. I take my whisky out into the garden and sit in an old rickety wooden garden chair facing Goat Fell, sipping on my single malt and thinking about my time in the Hebrides.

There’s a lot that happens emotionally to me when I travel. It’s not really all about finding the perfect dram or listening to the stories of old coots or hoping to spot a hairy coo, though, of course, that’s all part of it. It’s more about what happens inside you. It’s about the thoughts you have and the cinematic dreams that come over you at night when you’re outside your comfort zone.

It’s about life. As Graham, the captain of Chantilly, told me back at Talisker on our last evening together, “To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did.”

Sitting in the gloaming, drinking my whisky, I imagine taking a spiritual retreat at the Buddhist sanctuary on Holy Isle. I contemplate grounding myself for a year in some small village like Port Ellen and maybe buying the pub where, years ago, an Irish artist painted a mural of Islay scenes depicting the locals in exchange for a dram—or two—of whisky. I wonder over the possibility of living in Barnhill, George Orwell’s old stone house on Jura and looking for the Future Stone.

I sip my whisky and I think hard about all the possibilities before me. Here on a small isle on the western coast of Scotland.

And I’m really thinking about it, Graham. All of it.

I’m thinking hard.

The Scots are mad for their walk-abouts. If they spot a stretch of open country or, even better, a hilly moor, they’re off and about before you can say Give me my walking stick. Last night, while I was sitting in a rusty old chair in the garden of the Glenartney Inn, Charles was swapping stories with the owner, Robbie Mallinson. But the light was fading and Robbie needed to take his dog, Zak, out for a walk. Which, of course, suited Charles just fine. So off they went.

Zack the dog getting the hang of things on a walk with Robbie.

I mention this because it seems that during their walk Charles divulged the futility of our search for a hairy coo. Not a problem, said Robbie. There are hairy coos at the Isle of Arran distillery. They use them to keep the grass clipped.

Perfect. So this morning, after tucking into a substantial FSB prepared by Robbie’s wife, Angela, we were off to the distillery. As Robbie suggested, there were in fact livestock roaming the grounds munching at the grass. But they just happened to be sheep, not hairy coos. Seems everyone in Scotland has a problem differentiating livestock.

Sheep--not a hairy coo--at Isle of Arran distillery.

Anyway, since we were here, we thought we might as well peak in at the visitor center where we ran into the manager, Gordon Mitchell, a wee chap who rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet when he talks, lifting up on his toes to emphasize this point or that. He was anxious to give us a tour.

Having gone on a half-dozen tours already, I tell him we can dispense with one more, but he’ll have none of it. He wants to show us everything: his office, the stills, the gift shop, but most importantly, the locked cellars where hundreds of oak casks hold thousands of gallons of whisky.

With the excitement of a child stumbling towards the yuletide tree on Christmas morning, Gordon takes us to a corner of the cask warehouse, standing proudly before three barrels above his head. The first two are single malts from 1997 that are owned by Prince Harry and his brother, Prince William, their names stenciled in white. Next to those is a third cask owned by the actor Ewan McGregor.

The casks are like newborn triplets and Gordon the proud father. And, in fact, this is a whisky nursery of sorts. All around us are other people’s whisky barrels, their signatures and dates scribbled on them like autographs in a baseball program. Each barrel, which holds about 100 bottles of whisky, is owned by an individual. Or a couple. Or a group of friends. It’s the distillery’s unique way of raising funds to finance the enterprise which started up 14 years ago. Own your own barrel of whisky. It costs 1,200 quid for your own cask—about $2,000. And you have to wait three years for it to age (although you can leave it at the distillery to age for as long as 10 years if you like). But at the end, you get 100 bottles, with your own label on it.

I consider the possibility: Lansing Single Malt Whiskey.

I rather like that.

When we leave the distillery, I notice that Charles is unusually quiet. He admits he’s a bit down on himself for not having produced a hairy coo for me, especially since we leave the island tomorrow. Thinking a walk-about might cheer him up, I suggest we stop at Lochranza Castle and go for a hike around the bay. Charles doesn’t seem too enthused but stops anyway.

It’s not much of a castle, Lochranza. Just a big pile of stones, really. Originally a fortified two-story towerhouse, with lodging upstairs and a barn on the ground level, it was probably built early in the 13^th century. When new owners took over a couple of centuries later, they did what all new owners do: remodeled. Which is when it became a castle of sorts.

Charles Hunter at Lochranza Castle. Photos by David Lansing.

Anyway, while I’m sitting outside the castle soaking up some rare sun, Charles is poking around the structure, seeing what he can see. When he finally comes over to me, he’s much more chipper.

“It just came to me, while poking about these ruins, where we’ll find our hairy coos,” he says. “If you’re up for it.”

How can I not be? Even if I no longer believe they really exist.

Desperate to spot a hairy coo, Charles and I are up early this morning and, after the usual Full Scottish Breakfast (with some lovely blood sausages), we head out from our little B&B, The Glenartney, in Brodick, to cruise the emerald green pastures along the west coast of Arran where, Charles assures me, we will most definitely spot a hairy coo, an animal I’m starting to suspect might be as mythical as the unicorn.

Holy Island is owned by Buddhist monks from Samye Ling.

We hike through a damp field that faces Holy Island, a tiny isle that has been a Buddhist retreat since 1995, and end up near caves where, Charles says, Robert the Bruce hid out for three months after being defeated by the bloody English. The story goes that Robert the Bruce was so depressed over his thrashing by the Brits that he considered leaving Scotland and never coming back. But while hanging out in the damp cave, he took to watching a spider build a web across the cave’s entrance. The spider was knocked down from time to time but always went back to working on his web. Which convinced Robert the Bruce to not give up and in 1314, he defeated the British in the Battle of Bannockburn even though his men were outnumbered ten to one.

Nice story and I greatly appreciate Charles telling it to me, but where the hell are the hairy coos?

Later in the morning Charles stops the car suddenly next to a large open field that slopes gently down to the sea. Charles is absolutely certain he’s spotted a hairy coo. So we tramp through the grass, soaking our pants up to our knees, only to find a couple of regular old dairy cows. Charles takes it all in stride.

Pladda lighthouse and Ailsa Craig. But no hairy coos. Photos by David Lansing.

“Glorious morning,” he chirps. Then, as if we weren’t looking for hairy coos at all but only a good view of the sea, he proceeds to go on and on about the two small isles directly in front of us. The first, a very small pear-shaped isle, with a lighthouse on the far end, is Pladda. Beyond that is Ailsa Craig, a thousand-foot tall plug of granite from an extinct volcano that was probably last active some 500 million years ago (or, as fundamentalist Christians prefer to think of it, around 1900).

“Curling,” Charles says mysteriously.

“Curling?” I repeat.

Charles nods in the direction of the island. “It’s where they quarry the granite to make curling stones.” Then, after a pause: “Quite something.”

Indeed. But where are the hairy coos?

Spent all morning driving around the coast of Arran looking for hairy coos but didn’t spot a single one. To console me, Charles took me to a fish & chips shop where, for a quid, I got a Mars bar battered and deep fried (in the same oil used for the fish & chips).

I’ve long heard about deep-fried Mars bars but, having never actually come across one, considered them an urban myth. Not so. They have them here in Arran. Charles tells me the first chippies to fry up Mars bars were in the little fishing villages around Aberdeen where, strangely enough, people rarely eat fish and where, he says, the preference is for deep-fried pizza.

I can’t even imagine that.

But that got us to talking about where you’re likely to find the best fish & chips in Scotland. A lot of folks like the Anstruther Fish Bar, just a few minutes from St. Andrews, and, in fact, this year they won the award for “Best Fish & Chip Shop in the U.K.” That’s got to stick in the craw of some chippies from London.

The Anstruther shop is run by a family of fishermen that can trace their work in the Scottish fishing industry “as far back as the late 1600s,” they say, and prides itself on using the best and freshest ingredients available. That’s the good news. That bad news is that it often takes as long as an hour to get a table (and almost as long for carry-out). And they charge 20p for a little packet of Heinz ketchup to go with your chips. Now that just doesn’t seem right.

George St. Fish & Chips in Oban.

Being a bit of an aficionado when it comes to fish & chips, I’ve tried several places on this trip. I liked the George Street Fish & Chips Shop in Oban (lovely fried mushy peas) and my first driver, Michael, and I stopped at the Real Food Café in Tyndrum, along Loch Lomond, where not only were the fish & chips fabulous but so were their venison sausages with juniper berries.

But my favorite has to be the fish & chip van on the fisherman’s pier in Tobermory on the Isle of Mull. It’s run by a couple of women, Jeanette and Jane, and is as funky as it sounds with outside seating on lobster traps to go along with a sign noting that they’ve won the prestigious “Les Routiers” award. Yes, they do the usual fish & chips (and they’re quite good), but the thing to get are their fresh king scallops which simply melt in your mouth. Only problem is this fish & chips food wagon is only open April to October. I guess in winter, with the cold rain coming down, nobody wants to plop down on lobster pots on the pier to eat their lunch. Except for the seagulls.

I’ve decided we need to go to the Isle of Arran, separated from Islay and Jura by the Kintyre Penninsula, part of the mainland. I want to go there because Charles says it’s the best place to see hairy coos. Officially called Highland cattle, hairy coos have shaggy reddish-brown hair and dopey eyes, mostly hidden behind their bangs, and look like they ought to be characters in a Muppets movie.

All this I’ve gleaned from looking at countless postcards of hairy coos wherever we’ve been. Everyday Charles has said, “Dunno’ worry, we’ll find you a hairy coo today.” But I’ve yet to see one on anything other than a postcard. So yesterday we headed for Arran.

Once off the ferry at Lochranza, we drove a GWR along the western coast, watching gannets divebomb for their Sunday brunch in Catacol Bay, before stopping at a cheese shop near Lamlash.

Photos by David Lansing.

We are the only ones in the shop, except for the clerk, an elderly librarian-type who, from the way she follows me around, seems to think I’m here to make off with as much Hebridean herb cheddar cheese as possible.

There’s a mustard cheese and a garlic cheese and a claret-flavored cheese, called Balmoral, all wrapped in a green or red or black waxy coating, but best of all there’s a whisky cheese called Islander.

Brilliant!

The cheeses are so colorful all stacked up in an open cooler that I decide to take a photo, but when I pull out my camera, the little lady running the shop says, rather snappily, “Here now, what do you think you’re doing?”

I tell her I’m taking a picture…of the cheeses…with, you know, a camera.

She looks at me in disgust.

“Is there a problem?” I ask her.

“I would ‘av thought you’d ask first,” she sniffs, arms crossed over her heaving chest.

“To photograph cheese?”

“Aye.”

In the car, Charles smiles and tells me to take no notice of the old gal. “She’s just an old nippy sweetie,” he says. “Scotland is full of them. They’re the ones who don’t like whisky.”

Aye.

It’s a two-part process getting from Jura to our inn, the West Loch Hotel near Kennacraig. First, we must take the short ferry ride back to Port Ellen on Islay. I notice that as Charles drives off the boat, there is a single sign post with two words on it: ARDBEG, with an arrow pointing right, and BOWMORE, with an arrow pointing left. Islay, then, is a place where directions are defined by which whisky distillery you’re headed towards.

CalMac ferry to Islay with Paps of Jura in the background. Photo by David May.

We then have to wait 30 or 40 minutes in Port Ellen for the Isle of Arran to take us to Kennacraig. I’m feeling a bit washed out for some reason when we arrive back in Port Ellen. Something about the solitude on Jura and my time sitting in a dark, dank farm house drinking tea and listening to the stories of Mike Richardson—thinking of Orwell and the Future Stone and the island faeries has left me feeling reflective.

I’m thinking it might be nice to find a pub near the harbor and Charles tells me there’s one nearby that has several walls covered with excellent murals of island scenes depicting the local people. He says it was painted by an Irish artist, each character being placed in the composition in return for a dram—or two—of whisky.

“They say the chap died of drink shortly after finishing the mural,” Charles says.

Great. If that’s Charles way of suggesting we just sit in the car waiting for the ferry, he’s successful.

The wind has come up and there’s an icy chill in the air as we lumber on to the Isle of Arran, part of the famed Caledonian MacBrayne ferry line—what everyone around here just calls “CalMac.” Without CalMac, it would be almost impossible to get around the west coast of Scotland.

At first I’m thinking maybe I’ll just grab a pint and find a snug corner to read my book, but Charles talks me into getting a bite to eat with him. We both order the curry and chips with tomato sauce. As Charles says, “It the awful sort of curry we used to get in school, with a most unnatural yellow color.”

Just perfect with soggy chips and a bottle of Islay Ale. Afterwards, I do find a quiet corner on the boat where I quickly fall asleep. When I awake, an hour or so later, we are in Kennacraig. It’s a short drive to the West Loch Hotel, a sort of cozy farmhouse, where I find a most inviting fire crackling in the bar and men wearing fishing clothes sitting around quietly enjoying a whisky. I order a drink and stare at the fire. After awhile Charles comes downstairs and suggests we have dinner in the restaurant. I tell him I think I’ll pass.

The bar at the West Loch Hotel near Kennacraig.

“Are you feeling alright?” he asks.

“Yes, fine,” I tell him. “Just a bit tired is all.”

He heads off for the little restaurant overlooking the loch. I finish my whisky, order another one, and think about the Irish artist and his wall mural. I’m wishing now, for some reason, that we’d gone to see it.

On an island where myths abound and the wee people are still thought to be responsible for life’s mishaps and mislaid possessions, I’m not too surprised when our Jura guide, Mike Richardson, a sprightly septuagenarian, tells me as we walk through thick green fields to his croft house about a mile north of Orwell’s Barnhill, that the island is full of fairies.

“I’ve had plenty of dealings with them,” he tells me, and then recounts the time he lost a farm tool and found it, a year and a day later, lying on the very road we’re walking on, just as an islander had predicted.

And then there’s the Future Stone, a huge piece of guartzite on the way to Corryvreckan, that was probably placed in the field we’re crossing some 5,000 years ago. Look at it from a low point towards a cleft in the western hills, Richardson tells me, and it marks the winter solstice.

“But more importantly, they say it could reveal the future.”

Richardson says he doesn’t know about that, but when he was having back troubles recently, he rolled his back on the crystals and “I was as good as new.”

Eventually we make it to an old croft at Kinuachdrachd—truly the end of the road—where Richardson and his wife, Joan, have lived for over 30 years along with a menagerie that includes a herd of goats, two geese, a one-eyed collie, a 40-year-old donkey, and an old ship’s parrot, called Charlie, that’s at least 85 and was given to his mother, he tells me, “by a young sailor heading off to The Great War.”

Over a cup of tea, Richardson points out features of the 250-year-old house, including it’s three-foot-thick stone walls, and the clever way he’s rigged water to flow to the kitchen from an outside well and electricity from a generator.

“When we moved into the house, it hadn’t been lived in for 25 years,” he says. “It was a sad, old house and we had to redo everything.”

While offering us another cup of tea, he tells us stories of the island: of being a stuntman in a BBC movie about Orwell, of his days as a fisherman on the island, and of the great difficulty in raising his three children here. It’s not until Charles clears his throat and purposefully looks at his watch that I realize several hours have gone by and if we don’t hurry, we’ll miss the last ferry off the island. Though Jura is only 30 miles long top to bottom, it will take us a good two hours to get back to Feolin to catch the ferry.

As it turns out, there’s an afternoon wedding going on at the little stone church in Craighouse and we get stuck in the wedding traffic (at least four cars) on our way back. We’re the last ones on the boat.

We drive for almost an hour along the perilous eastern coast of Jura along a gnarly track, known as “The Long Road,” that has even Charles holding his breath from time to time as the car dances on the edge of one precipice after another out over the sea. Finally we come to the end of the paved road and a gate with a sign forbidding vehicles to venture any farther. Waiting for us on the other side of the gate, leaning against a very beat-up and muddy Land Rover, is Mike Richardson.

“I’ve got to put the bloody sign up to keep igits from taking their rental cars up here,” says Richardson, who will turn 74 in September. “There’s no way they can make it on this road and then I end up having to tow them out.”

The road Richardson refers to is really nothing more that a nasty rough track full of gouged holes a foot or more deep and grass knee-high in places. As we bounce along at 5 miles per hour, Richardson says, “This road is exactly the way it was when George drove his Army BSA motorbike over it 60 years ago. In fact, it might have been better back then.”

George Orwell's house, Barnhill, on the east coast of Jura. Photos by David Lansing.

The George he is referring to is George Orwell, who came to Jura in 1946 to write his last novel, a book with the working title The Last Man in Europe (which ended up being published as 1984). According to Richardson, Orwell was looking to get as far away from civilization as possible—which is why he picked the wild and unpopulated stretch along Jura’s eastern coast.

“He was a wounded animal looking for someplace to hide,” says Richardson of the author and war correspondant, one of the first journalists to enter the German concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. “What he saw there made him lose faith in mankind. He couldn’t comprehend the horror. And shortly thereafter he wife, Eileen, died, quite suddenly after a botched operation, and he was quite ill from the tuberculosis that would eventually claim his life at the age of 46 in 1950. So he was a man at the end of his rope, in a way—a bit of the last man in Europe himself as he saw it.”

After about 40 minutes or so we make it the five miles to Barnhill, the old white stone house built in the 1850s, where Orwell lived from May 1946 to January 1949. Richardson takes me upstairs to the bedroom just above the kitchen where Orwell spent most of his time at Barnhill hammering away on his typewriter.

“It was his bedroom,” Richardson says as I look around at the cramped space, “but he didn’t sleep here. He preferred sleeping in an army tent in the garden. Thought the fresh air would do him good. More likely it made things worse.”

Mike Richardson in front of Barnhill where Orwell wrote "1984."

Later we sit on an old wooden bench in front of Orwell’s house looking out at the stone field walls, probably erected during the Bronze Age some 3,000 years ago, and the cherry trees Orwell planted and the bay from which he launched a 14-foot dinghy and tried to circumnavigate the island only to capsize just up the coast at the treacherous Corryvreckan whirlpool where he almost drowned. Or at least that’s the conventional version of the story. Which Richardson says with a wave of his hand is nonsense.

“Bullocks. He wasn’t anywhere near the Corryvreckan,” he says. “He was with his son and they were headed for a small island along the west coast to collect puffin eggs and when they stepped out of the boat, it capsized and they were stuck on the island for three hours until a fisherman picked them up. That’s the real story.”

Then why, I ask him, do people always talk about Orwell almost drowning at the Corryvreckan whirpool?

Richardson says, “Makes for a better story, I suppose.” He gives me a wink. “And you know how the Scots are with their stories.”

I do.

Jura has only one road, but it is the ultimate Great Wee Road. The narrow, twisty lane from the ferry landing to Craighouse, where the Isle of Jura distillery is located, seems absolutely indulgent once you see the road north of here.

You’d think that anyplace that actually had a going concern, like a whisky distillery, couldn’t really be called a village, but there’s no other name for Craighouse. As Michael Heads, the distillery manager says, “We’ve got one pub, one shop, and one wee hotel here. That’s Craighouse.”

The busy main drag in Craighouse, Jura, a village with "one pub, one shop, and one wee hotel." Photos by David Lansing.

The Isle of Jura distillery, like Bruichladdich, is another company that has had a tough time of it over the years. Rebuilt in 1963 after being closed for 60 years, they seem to be doing pretty well these days. Michael says the distillery originally made a heavily peated whisky, “but that kind of went out of fashion so when they reopened they started distilling a much lighter Highland whisky that was used mostly for blending with other whiskies.”

But they haven’t given up on smoky, peaty whiskies completely. Charles and I sit in Michael’s office nosing a new expression called Superstition in which the island peat used to make the whisky has to be cut when it has a certain amount of moisture and oil in it. Usually the peat used is only perfect for a couple of weeks out of the year. If they miss the window, the whisky is off. Which is why it’s called Superstition.

It’s a lovely dram. Maybe my favorite of the three dozen or so whiskies I’ve tasted so far on this trip. The smoke in the whisky is apparent, as is the brine. When I mention this to Michael, he’s pleased as could be.

“Most experts will tell you that it’s impossible to have a briny-tasting whisky,” he says. “But look at where we are? Flush up against the sea. In winter, you walk down the lane and you’re licking salt off your lips so I don’t care what anyone says. I say the whisky can’t help but have a taste of brine to it.”

Before heading to the north end of the island, we stop at the Jura store to get a bit of dark chocolate to go with the bottle of Superstition I’ve bought. A red-faced man is leaning against the counter in the tiny shop complaining to the shopkeeper about being the only one at the dance at the community hall last Saturday to wear a kilt.

“Use to be Fib and Morgan would wear a kilt but I guess they’re just too good for the ol’ tartan now that they’ve gone off to Edinburgh.”

“They’re fine lads,” says the shopkeeper.

“Nay, they’re gone,” says the red-faced man, disgusted. “They’ll not be back. And you can bet they didn’t take their ghillie shirts with ‘em.”

“Never mind,” says the shopkeeper. “You wore your kilt. Fib and Morgan are gone. Now never mind about it.”

Charles and I are at Port Askaig waiting for the ferry to Jura. Since we’ve got about an hour to kill, I suggest we go somewhere for a beer.

The Port Askaig hotel bar; too civilized for us. Photo by David Lansing.

“There are only two pubs around here,” Charles says. “The bar at the Port Askaig Hotel, right next to the ferry landing, is terribly civilized. I’d suggest that.”

“What about the other place?” I ask him.

He shakes his head. “It’s just down the street but I couldn’t recommend it to you. It’s the sort of place where you walk in to the crack of cue balls and the sound of women fighting.”

So that’s where we go.

Unfortunately, there are no women fighting when we show up. Too early in the day, Charles says. While we sip on our drams of 10 year old Bruichladdich (with McEwan backs), Charles tells me a bit about Jura.

The ferry takes only five minutes, he says. In fact, the Sound of Jura is so narrow here that often times deer will try to swim across it, thinking Islay’s hills look greener.

Herd of red deer on Jura.

“Not many make it,” he says, “but you hear stories every once in awhile of a fisherman catching one in a net.”

Charles says there are 170 people on Jura and at least 6,000 red deer. “Even in 1800 there were 2,000 people living on Jura. But not anymore.” There are so many deer on the island that even though they allow hunters to shoot almost a thousand deer a year, it doesn’t make a dent. In fact, says Charles, slugging down the rest of his whisky, there are so many deer on Jura “it’s a wonder they have not yet kicked the islanders off in a revolt.”

And with that we head back to Port Askaig and the ferry.