Lairg, Scotland: The Forgotten Ghost The Heart Will Remember Thirty Years Later

A road trip to the Highlands thirty years in the making

Do you remember Live Aid? If you’re a certain age or older, you probably do, but people who are 43 shouldn’t remember too much about it. I’m the exception to that rule because I know exactly where I was and what I did when Live Aid happened. I was taking my last road trip to the Highlands of Scotland for thirty years, to a tiny village called Lairg. Atmospheric and slightly eerie, Lairg has a population below 900 and is unusual for settlements in the most northern Scottish county of Sutherland because it has been built around Loch Shin rather than on the coast.

My father’s parents and siblings settled there in the early 1980s, while we stayed in the southern part of Scotland. I’ve heard many stories about why: they were escaping drama in their hometown of Kilmarnock; they had dreams of owning a croft in the Highlands and living a self-sufficient life similar to Tom and Barbara in the BBC sitcom, The Good Life; they were retiring somewhere peaceful; and my personal favourite, they were in witness protection. I made that one up as an overly dramatic teenager looking for answers to questions I had that nobody in the family could respond to with certainty.

Unfortunately, my grandfather passed away in March 1985 while they were renovating the croft they planned to live in. The family moved back to Kilmarnock some months later, except for one aunt, who settled permanently. My last trip was the hot, sunny July day that Live Aid happened. We listened to it on the road trip up to Lairg. That’s mostly all I know about that road trip. The summer was hot, happy, and filled with music. We drove through fields with coloured shades of pistachio green and plum purple. The heather and thistles that littered the slightly yellowed greenery made up the bulk of the landscape when we weren’t mountains. Everything smelled fresh until my sister’s hay fever demanded that we fill the car with a eucalyptus scent to clear her irritated sinuses. It was our last summer in the Highlands before I started school, and it would have been wonderful if there wasn’t this grieving undertone. At the age of five, I missed my grandfather’s presence in Lairg and wished he was there. For the grown-ups, the grief was more profound.

I never returned to Lairg when I was growing up because there was nothing there for me. I was busy living life and except for their sporadic visits to see my aunt, nobody else bothered the town with their presence much either. Lairg was spoken of often, but it was a ghost in our lives.

In the spring of 2015, I decided to go back. Seeing my son reach the age I was when I took those four-hour road trips that seemed to last for days when I was fresh out of toddlerhood. It was enough to invoke feelings of nostalgia that I never thought would exist. It was a period of my life when I had time to do this, having just left my regular nine-to-five job to write full-time. I had nowhere else to go and no money to explore further afield. Lairg was calling out to me, and I answered it.

The odd thing about my road trip was that although I have the worst sense of direction of anyone I know, I didn’t need a map. I drove straight there, all the way. It’s the longest distance I’ve ever driven myself, usually leaving road trips to my husband to handle. There was no digital navigation involved, no paper map, and no directions from family members to mentally refer to. I just knew where I was going.

Even stranger was that when we arrived in Lairg, I stopped at a small petrol station and bought some flowers that had seen perkier days for my grandfather’s grave. I also bought an out-of-date magazine nobody had wanted to buy for the evening. After all, the Highlands aren’t renowned for being party central. Lairg feels like a town that has been forgotten by the outside world. Then I drove straight to the cemetery. I walked directly to Papa Sammy’s grave and easily located it as if it was somewhere I went every single day of my life. Of course, it’s a small graveyard, and his headstone had two fishing rods at the top. It was distinctive. I believe it was replaced a few years ago, but on that day, the original stone was there, just as I had never known I remembered it. I could feel a sense of unease from my husband at the way I confidently showed him around, but I ignored it. I was too busy smelling the breeze and gazing at the little house on the island in the middle of Loch Shin. It felt like I was only their last month.

It never occurred to me at the time that this was strange. Only when I was thinking about the day and the events that had preceded, lying in my motel bed that night, I realised I had behaved in a way that raised eyebrows for my husband for a valid reason. He had spent years with a woman who got lost in her hometown regularly and had a blank expression when people quoted street names that should have been familiar. Yet there I was, knowing everything about a small town I hadn’t been to in thirty years. I even knew precisely where the public toilets were when we left the cemetery.

It has made me think about how much we remember about our childhood vacations. Is it quite normal for a town to leave such an imprint on your mind that thirty years later, as a grown adult, you know the town as well as a local? Maybe it had more to do with the family connection and the way that my first experience of grief was connected to that place. Perhaps the excitement of childhood trips to see my beloved grandparents, Lottie and Sammy, made the route and the landscape stay fresh and familiar.

I had never gone back, so I had never needed to access those memories. The one time that I did, they were there. For a few hours, it was 1985 again and as we were leaving the village and I took a last look around. I realised that I had unconsciously chosen a playlist that would not have been out of place in the rented van we used to drive up there that oppressively hot Saturday.

I found that on the way out, as a driver, I lost confidence. I started panicking that I didn’t know where I was going and had to pull over and swap places with my husband. He drove us for the hour-long trip to Inverness, where we spent the night before going home the next day. Perhaps the sadness about leaving my beloved grandparents as a child meant I didn’t care much about the way home. I may have fallen asleep or ignored the route because there was nothing to get excited about.

I haven’t gone back since. That one experience felt magical and honestly, I was a little freaked out by the unlocking of childhood memories and unsettled. I’m afraid that if I try to find my way there again, I won’t be able to.