Well, a strange bit of synchronicity has come about this morning which makes today’s post a no-brainer. Yesterday was a bit of a foul day weather wise so my walking friend and I decided to visit the new tourist attraction that officially opened in our town a couple of months ago. If you look at my banner photo at the top of the page you will see a castle right in the middle, built on a hill on the east side of the River Ness. It’s not an old castle, but was built in Victorian times to house the town’s courthouse and jail. Although the town jail moved to a new building a long time ago, the courtrooms were only recently replaced by a fancy new Justice Centre. It had long been mooted that the castle should be a tourist attraction, situated as it is right in the centre of town, so that is just what happened and we now have the Inverness Castle Experience. As locals, we can buy a special pass for the price of one ticket that allows us to visit as many times as we like between October and March, thus yesterday’s visit before our pass expires until autumn.
The castle lit up at night
Last time we went (I’ve now been three times and four times to the lovely restaurant), we concentrated on the building called the south tower but this time we spent our time in the north tower where there are three rooms dedicated to the band Runrig who hail from the islands off the west coast of Scotland. They were/are loved by the global Scottish diaspora and we in The Highlands also have a soft spot for these lads who took Gaelic Rock to a whole new level in the late 20th century.
Runrig in 1987
It made for really interesting reading, about how they got started – playing for ceilidhs in village halls on the islands – to recording their albums and touring the world. The synchronicity I mentioned at the outset was because on Rol’s Saturday Snapshots this morning there was a photo of Runrig. The puzzle is to find a link between all 15 photos and it turned out to be that the artists had all made songs about “bodies of water” and I immediately thought of their rousing performance of the traditional song Loch Lomond. I had never seen Rol mention Runrig on his blog before so coming straight after my visit, and my plan to write about them today, it felt like a weird coincidence indeed. Here is a clip of them live at Loch Lomond giving the song the full-blown Celtic rock treatment (especially after 3:00).
Here are some of the photos I took of the exhibition but as such behaviour is generally frowned upon, they were limited to just one room. The recording equipment is what they used to record their second album (I had a cassette recorder just like that one).
It was not until I arrived in The Highlands that I really started to appreciate some of the great Celtic rock bands that hail from this neck of the woods. Runrig‘s lead singer at that time was Donnie Munro whom I later found out had taught Mr WIAA art at school in the ’70s. When he’d told the class he was involved with a band, and that they played a kind of Gaelic/Celtic rock, the class were highly sceptical (this was the decade of glam rock, punk and disco after all) but he certainly proved them all wrong. In the period 1987-1997 they were signed to the Chrysalis label and released five very successful studio albums. I remember buying The Cutter and the Clan not long after arriving in The Highlands and I saw them perform three times in a short space of time at various venues, including a large marquee during a memorable homecoming trip to Skye.
The song An Ubhal as Àirde (The Highest Apple) from The Cutter and the Clan album gave Runrig their highest placing to date on the UK Singles Charts, debuting at number eighteen in May 1995, eight years after the release of the album. The song made history when it became the first song to be sung in Scottish Gaelic to chart on the UK Singles Chart. They even performed it on Top of the Pops.
The band has changed its line-up many times since forming in 1973 but the two songwriters Rory Macdonald and Calum Macdonald have been there right since the beginning. Donnie Munro left in 1997 to pursue a career in politics but was replaced by Bruce Guthro, from Nova Scotia, who seemed to be just the right fit. In 2016, the band announced their retirement from recording following the release of The Story, their 14th studio album. Their final tour started the following year and in August 2018 the band performed their final shows, entitled The Last Dance, in Stirling City Park beneath the castle ramparts. An estimated 52,000 fans attended.
I hope I’ve done a good PR job on promoting the new tourist attraction in our town. It’s not full of stuffy artefacts and long passages of writing, but is quite immersive with audio visual displays and plenty of opportunities to design your own tartan or mix a new Runrig track. Funny to look back at photos of the young lads who were brought up on crofts, and films of where their love of music took them. Do come for a visit.
Until next time…
Loch Lomond Lyrics
(Song by Unknown – Traditional)
By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes,
Where the sun shines on Loch Lomond.
Where me and my true love spent many days
On the banks of Loch Lomond.
Too sad we parted in yon shady glen,
On the steep sides of Ben Lomond.
Where the broken heart knows no second spring,
Resigned we must be while we’re parting.
You’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road,
And I’ll be in Scotland before you.
Where me and my true love will never meet again,
On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.
Ho, ho mo leannan
Ho mo leannan bhoidheach
You’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road,
And I’ll be in Scotland before you.
Where me and my true love will never meet again,
On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.
Postsccript
The band got their name from the runrig system of land tenure practised in Scotland, particularly in the Highlands and Islands. It was designed for subsistence farming rather than commercial production. The runrig system was systematically dismantled during the Highland Clearances and the Scottish Agricultural Revolution (18th-19th centuries).
What's It All About? 