It was time to leave Glasgow and move on to Loch Lomond. On a whim, Laetitia decided to write a few extra verses about the next several days in non-limerick form. As she had done in Cornwall, she would collect all the verses when she was finished and send them off to Mind’s Eye headquarters to post.
Foreigners who know little else about Scotland have probably heard The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond. Many likely think that it is a romance, but it’s a sad song about the aftermath of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s failed 1745 rebellion to restore the Stuart monarchy. It is sung from the point of view of a captured Jacobite Highlander, likely a MacGregor. In one interpretation, the singer who is sentenced to hang, tells his friend, who has escaped death and will return to Scotland in body, that he will return faster in spirit after passing through the underworld. In another interpretation, the roles are reversed and the singer’s friend will be hanged and will return to Scotland by the high road in a procession with his head on a pike.
After a stop for hiking along the shoreline of Loch Lomond, the Mind’s Eye group stopped for lunch in Luss, a picturesque village on the lakeshore that was the ancestral home of Clan Colquhoun. In the graveyard of the Luss Parish Church, built in 1875, is a Viking grave, but no one seems to know how it came to be there.
Located near Loch Fyne, Inveraray Castle is ancestral home of the Duke of Argyle and the seat of Clan Campbell. Laetitia and her group finished the day with a tour of the castle and grounds. Throughout the history of Scotland, clan fortunes have been made and lost depending on which side they chose to fight on in a given conflict. Clan Campbell seemed to have a knack for picking the winning side. By the time of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rebellion in 1745, clans sometimes hedged their bets by having parts of the clan fight on both sides.
Later at a pub in the nearby village of Newtown, where Laetitia went for a pre-dinner pint of Argyle Scottish Ale, the bartender’s local story provided the limerick of the day.
A stripper, who was billed in Argyle
As Cleopatra, the queen of the Nile
Made her audience gasp
When she showed them her asp
As she strutted the stage in high style.