Scotland in September is a country in the act of changing colour. The heather has bloomed, the stag is in season, and the light on the lochs has the particular pale-gold that the west coast seems to keep for its own use. For many of our Scotland travellers, it is the month we send them.
Harvest in the Highlands is not what an American or continental traveller might imagine. It is quieter than that, and longer. The gardens of the big estates are heavy. The last lambs have gone down from the high pasture. The kitchens are full of game and apples and the last of the raspberries from the walled gardens of the great houses.
A private Highland journey in September centres on the table — which is to say, on the kitchens that matter. We arrange dinners at a handful of houses we have been going to for years: a small inn above the Sound of Mull where the cook will cure her own salmon the morning you arrive; a private estate house west of Aviemore that opens for a single party a night; a restaurant in a former schoolhouse in Sutherland that serves six people at a time and no more.
Between tables, the country does its work. A morning on a private stretch of a river for those who wish. A walk with a shepherd and a dog and no particular direction. A drive through Glen Affric that ends, in some sense, at a stand of the oldest Caledonian pines left in Britain.
We travel in Scotland with a kind of tact the country rewards. The Highlands do not open themselves to hurry, and the old houses we like do not keep traffic. What they keep, for those who are prepared to travel with them, is a week of the kind most of our lives no longer allow for.
September is the month to arrive.
