A FADING DREAM

Kinloch Rannoch, and find a place of great beauty that fears for its

survival.

THERE are many roads to Rannoch, but each has mystery at its end. So

wrote backpacking minister Ratcliffe Barnett, whose traveller's tales

from all over Scotland appeared in the Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman

during the 1920s. Today, this ''tiny metropolis'', as Ratcliffe Barnett

called the area around the shores of Loch Rannoch, seems just as

reluctant to give up its mysteries. It's a quality that has become both

its charm and its curse.

Sitting on a lonely cul-de-sac at the very heart of Scotland, the most

central dot on the map, Kinloch Rannoch almost defies you to find it.

(The tourist board is in cahoots, as one of its motoring maps has erased

all road connections to the village.) Apart from the West Highland

railway at the far end of the loch where the road ends, the great wastes

of Rannoch Moor isolate it to the west and north. To the east and south

hairpin, humpy-hilled drives, best for the strong-stomached, are the

only connections to a main road artery leading to the outside world.

On an echoful Friday afternoon autumn blazes all around, silently,

over the hillsides and from their reflections on the still surface of

the loch. I walk through the square and over the bridge that has

recently borne Dana in a bout of hymn-singing, and Jimmie Macgregor en

route to the West Highland Way (both TV productions inadvertently

enraged the local business community by not angling their cameras beyond

scenes of still and rushing waters, thereby complementing tourist board

mis-marketing of Kinloch Rannoch as a figment of its own imagination).

On either side of the river, a grocery store, a church and a hotel sit

in mirror-opposition. The emptiness of the place begins to wrap around

me, its sense of unmindfulness of the world beyond the serene blue cone

of Schiehallion, the fairy mountain. An hour later I've yet to glimpse

another soul, although there are tantalising signs of life: the police

car vanishes from outside the cottage police station, and every second

chimney puffs peat smoke. Its tangy, earthy reek is comforting in the

absence of human contact. I can see a marketing line here, along the

lines of a modern Brigadoon.

Chance as much as design brings tourists to the village: a wrong

turning or a scenic detour from Pitlochry or Kenmore at Loch Tay. (Of

course, some have found it courtesy of Barratt International Timeshare

Resorts, but more of that later.) Yet whether by the wind-sucked silence

on the edge of the moor at pink-pebbled Rannoch Station, or by a

single-track road in a bald, extra-terrestrial landscape that breaks

into birch haze over the shoulder of Schiehallion, the ways to Rannoch

hold an element of enchantment. Actress Elizabeth Taylor used to fly in

by helicopter for quiet retreats to Rannoch Lodge until, the story goes,

its two alcoholic caretakers accidentally torched it to a shell while on

a binge, burning themselves to death.

I first found the loch as a hot sun fell into it and a pale pink moon

peeped round Schiehallion. The sound of an accordion was on the water

and we tracked it to Talladh a Bheithe, a turreted lodge hidden from the

road by a barricade of pines. A ceilidh was in progress on the front

lawn. We had been driving all day and needed food. During a meal of

sturdy German home-cooking, we were surrounded by German accents, which

included the radio voice in the background. Mein host, I realised, as he

served us German beers, was also German. Mystified by the

other-worldliness of it all, we discovered that Mr and Mrs Ludwig had

bought over the lodge after falling in love with the Scottish Highlands.

They now imported bus parties from home to share the experience. This

group of elderly Germans was a branch of the German Friends of Scotland

Society on an annual visit.

''Many of us are widowed and this is the highlight of our year --

getting together with other friends who love Scotland, drinking whisky

and singing Burns songs in a real Scottish lodge. The only thing that

disappoints is that you Scots don't know your own folk history. We know

more than you,'' admonished 72-year-old Heinrich, who proceeded to prove

his point. ''Tell me, who was Robbie Burns' wife? And give me all the

verses of Ae Fond Kiss.'' No problem with the first, but we were put to

shame at the latter by the performance of the rest of the dining-room.

Much later, we fell asleep to the strains of Burns' ballads being sung

in strong German accents on the terrace below our room.

This seasonal German community is given the same shrug of the

shoulders by the villagers as other self-contained settlements around

the loch. Rannoch School (a boarding school which attracts the sons and

daughters of sheiks and overseas royalty) and the Barratt Timeshare

complex tend to exist as microcosms, importing their material needs and

food supplies in bulk from outside, using the village as a stop-gap for

emergencies or odds and ends. It's both a relief and a source of

discontent to the locals who don't want to see their lifestyle

submerged, yet would like to milk some benefits from the situation. As

it is, villagers claim their economy is hardly touched by the incoming

communities which, depending on the time of year, can outnumber locals

five to one. Rannoch has 400 permanent residents; Rannoch School has

250, and the Barrett complex can add up to another 300.

What has been affected, according to Rannoch's policeman Iain Deuchar,

is the crime rate. He refers specifically to the Barratt complex where

drink, occasional drugs, disputes and theft have kept him busy. ''It's

like a wee town on its own, and it has imported city problems. There was

very little crime before Barratt.''

His other concern is Barratt's policy of importing employees, apart

from those needed to fill a few seasonal, menial jobs. ''There are no

management openings for locals. You get young, single people from the

cities who can't cope with a place like this, which is why there's such

a high turnover of staff. There is very little employment in the area,

and we were given the impression that the complex would provide some.

But it hasn't worked out that way.'' Born in Rannoch, he says that out

of his primary school class of 20, only two of his contemporaries have

remained, to marry and bring up a family in the area, as he has.

Housing is also a problem, with potential homes advertised in Country

Life at prices no local could afford, and bought up by the Home Counties

as holiday cottages. The big estates all have English owners too. In the

two grocery stores and two hotels, the accents span England. The signs

are of a lost community. Yet back in the Bunrannoch bar, as owner Cliff

Matthews bullies the fire into life for my benefit, I read Ratcliffe

Barnett complaining in 1924 that if you stand in the little square at

Kinloch Rannoch, you will hear nothing but the clatter of English

tongues.

''The village is dying,'' says Cliff, a Yorkshireman. Business is 50%

down on last year, and he deals out equal blame to the intransigence of

landowners, the tourist board's blind spot and the recession. ''The same

people who say what can and can't be done with the land sit on the

community council -- the local gentry, who have no interest in democracy

or in marketing the area.'' His hotel has just been sold, to another

English owner.

Nevertheless, pockets of enterprise are flourishing. On the shores of

the loch, where the village suddenly breaks into wind and wide waves

with a sense of the open sea, I picnic on smoked venison pate made at

Innerhadden Farm. That, and other smoked venison produce, are now sold

in Safeway and Harrod's.

Further along the shore is Annat House, where artist and sculptor Ray

Will lives with his wife Shirley and their mob of cherubic,

tree-climbing urchins. Sixteen years ago a serious accident left Ray

with a broken back and he had to reinvent his career. Nowadays, instead

of painting sea-swept oil rigs for company directors to hang in their

board rooms, he markets a range of landscape art and Highland kitsch,

softening up prospective buyers with a dram or a martini from his

cottage cocktail bar. He makes a substantial spin-off from the nearby

Barratt complex, has a pottery there, and provides art tuition to

Barratt clientele.

The dying village theory doesn't square with his experience. ''The

reverse is true. Those publicans from south of the Border don't welcome

people, offer nothing that is Scottish to visitors. Scottish people

coming in, marketing the area properly, would clean up.''

Change would be true to Rannoch's nature. For it has always been a

place of enterprise and incomers, of lost and vanished races. Six

thousand years ago the earliest settlers used the rivers and lochs as

routeways. They built up a defensive crannog -- the loch's tiny,

artificial island. Much later, in the seventeenth century, Rannoch's

many smelters burned the ancient Black Wood in their iron

''bloomeries''. Here, they made claymores for the clans -- who used them

to fight the English and each other, creating graveyards around the

shores where once there were villages.

AND THE Victorians had few qualms about preserving the loch's

tranquillity when they launched the SS Gitana for tourist sailings in

1881. Landowners refused to provide an anchorage and the vessel sunk in

a storm the following year. With great expense and effort, it was raised

and refitted exactly a hundred years later, only to be battered to

pieces by gales in 1983.

Much as I would like to see Rannoch kept as a wilderness haven to

soothe my city nerves, this is as much a romantic illusion as the

legends Ratcliffe Barnett attaches to Eilean nan Faoileag, the loch's

tiny Isle of Storms. Or the Isle of Seagulls, as local historian Duncan

Sinclair calls it, in a more accurate and prosaic translation in his

book By Tummel and Loch Rannoch. He debunks the mysteries surrounding

the island's little tower: not, after all, a prison for clan captives or

the unwanted wives of chieftains, with a labyrinth leading to it under

the loch, but built by a baron early last century as a romantic ruin for

the tourists.