Cliff Hanley's Mirage
The steamer dropped me off, on my first visit to Tighnabruaich, and left me to wander about skeptically for an hour before it came back to drag me up river and home. I still didn’t believe the place was real.
The name was obviously out of some old Gaelic fairy story for a start. From the water, the village was clearly not a real place, but a cunningly planned toy village or a movie set stuck up by MacBraynes to vary the scenery. As soon as the boat was gone, I figured, the studio hands would pop out and fold it up till the next cruise was sighted coming through the Narrows.
After ten years of close acquaintance, I’m still not too sure. It’s there alright, while I’m there. The people are there too, the Smiths and the McLellans and Spearmans and MacNeills and Patersons, and the rest of them, and they’re totally convincing – they chat and make jokes and run shops and sheep and boats and pass the time of day and dance exactly like real people.
Or are they more like real people than real people are? A month in the Kyles is so full of character that I sometimes expect a 70-piece orchestra to start up off screen, and the whole caboodle to burst into song and dance. Maybe it’s all a gigantic Hollywood musical about quaint old Scotland, because that month seems to slip past in an hour.
And once I’m halfway up the Strachur road on the way home, I’m beginning again to doubt whether it was real or a dream in fantastic Technicolor.
The colour is too good to be true. I took an English painter to the Kyles one summer and he sat for three hours raving about the quality of the light. The changing shades of Bute across the water are practically psychedelic.
On closer inspection, the houses seem totally authentic; solid Scotch stone and sound timber; gloriously unplanned in the way they ramble from Tighnabruaich through Auchenlochan down to Kames so that every one can see the water. The food is absolutely real and I eat too much of it. I talk too much there. I think too much, I sing too much, I sit too much, and I do hardly anything useful because there’s always tomorrow.
Maybe it’s because the Kyles are the end of the road. If you drive there, you can’t be on your way to anywhere further, because there is nowhere further. Nobody is hurtling through the place in transit. Everybody has stopped, and it feels as if time has stopped too.
If you come by water, you have left civilization behind before you even reach the Narrows, where the steamer sliding delicately among the islets feels like a tenement building doing a slalom course. Even that is pretty improbable.
And let’s face it, when you get there, what can they offer you? No bingo, no dancing girls, no super-cinema, no supermarket, no skyscrapers, no roundabouts, no sign of the swinging time you’re after.
Nothing but the sea and the boats, the scenery, the colour, the chat, the time to waste, the hills, the odd burst of music, the light and the air; and the positive feeling that you’ve slid into another dimension of time, that it can’t be real.
Or maybe it’s the rest of the world that isn’t real.
Copyright 2025 The Estate of Clifford Hanley