Our Highland gains

There are just 44 people, of whom seven daily attend the village school, and several thousand sheep who are generally discouraged from doing so. The secondary school is 29 miles away.

There's a railway station, a filling station, a caf, a grand old shooting lodge hotel - where last week the column blissfully laid its head - and a one woman post office serving the second largest distribution area of any mail centre in Britain.

The one woman is Jill Devonport, Stockton lass. Six days a week she rises at 5.30am, sorts the world and its wilderness, goes home for breakfast, shuts up shop at 5.30pm and half an hour later reports for the smiling back shift at the Ledgowan Lodge Hotel.

Nine years ago it was the 16th move of her life. "They'll have to carry me out of here in a box," says Jill, now 50. "They'll have to float me down the river, use me for kindling. It's the only way I'm leaving."

Mind, she adds, every morning she wakes she still hopes that it's Sunday.

For seven years around 1980 she was landlady of The Laurel in Middlesbrough - "they called me The Mrs, half of them didn't even know my first name when I left" - kept other pubs in Norton, Hartlepool and Romanby, Northallerton, before taking the licence to London.

One of her pubs was in Soho. Back home on Teesside, says Jill, her mum swore never to tell the neighbours that her daughter was working in Soho.

The Scottish highlands was her husband's idea - "I came reluctantly, they had to drag me up," she concedes - but it was he who didn't stay. Not with Jill, anyway.

She became post mistress of all surveyed, the awesome emptiness coded IV22 - a woman, if ever, in an IV league of her own.

"It does get pretty cold in winter. Once or twice I've gone home at four o'clock with a message written in the frost on the window saying the postmistress has gone before she freezes to death.

"The locals use me as a sort of weather vane - they can tell how cold it is by the number of layers I'm wearing - but winter up here is really a bit like childbirth. You plough through all the snow and ice but get a lovely February day and the nastiness is very soon forgotten."

We first compared notes at the hotel, reminisced about the Claggy Mat in Middlesbrough - all Middlesbrough tells tales of the Claggy Mat - about the Laurel when bed and breakfast was £3.50 and sausage, egg and chips 65p, about the Fiesta in Stockton when stars like Frankie Vaughan, Frank Ifield and Val Doonican would turn up every week.

"They were the days when you got dressed up to go to a nightclub," said Jill.

We talked, too, of the chap from The Times who stumbled upon Achnasheen, fell to discussing the rural economy and publicly concluded (says Jill) that the lady in the post office knew more about Scotland's problems than Tony Blair ever would.

"Mr Blair doesn't care about Scotland," she insisted. "I don't miss anything about London - it's dirty, the people aren't friendly and it's very hard work - but the Government believes that Britain ends at Watford Gap."

The other negatives, said Jill, were the price of petrol - up to 90p a litre - the myriad midges and the residual resentment that a few Scots still harbour towards the English. They are greatly outweighed by the Highland gains.

At six o'clock next morning she was on duty as usual in the little prefabricated post office, Achnasheen enveloped in mist, thermometer dispirited enough to furnish tightly-fastened fleece.

"It'll be lovely by nine," said Jill.

The delivery from Inverness would be sorted by 7.30am, collected soon afterwards for remote letter boxes up to 60 miles further flung. Not bad for a 27p stamp.

It would be Luscious Linda on that morning's van, said Jill - Luscious Linda as opposed to Marilyn Monroe, so beloved of Scottish social climbers - and Linda had three jobs in order to make ends meet.

"I'm lucky," said Jill, "I only need two. It's the survival of the fittest up here."

The hotel hibernates from October; winter falls long and hard on Achnasheen and on the high mountains which enfold it. By nine o'clock it was as lovely as forecast, however - for the delightful Jill Devonport, a serenely sweet sixteenth.

THE holiday's first morning had found us on the infamous A82, Glasgow to Fort William, in order to pay homage to the Lord of the Isles.

Fort William Chamber of Trade wants the authorities urgently to upgrade the A82, had considered a "slow drive" further to expose its inadequacies, decided against it on the grounds that no one would notice the difference.

Until this summer's ennoble gesture, Lord of the Isles was simply 62005, a class K1 iron workhorse once familiar around Darlington shed and latterly restored on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway.

After 51 years she at last has a name, running steam specials between Fort William and the fishing port of Mallaig and crewed by enthusiastic members of the North East Locomotive Preservation Group like our old friend Roger Barker, shovel-wielding former chairman of Guisborough Cricket Club.

Roger, also much involved with the Sir Nigel Gresley on the NYMR - "in about a million bits just now" - has spent his first 60 years running light engine (as a railwayman might say) but may soon be double heading.

She's an NYMR signalwoman, he says cautiously, and there can be no finer qualification.

The Lord of the Isles, mucky and marvellous, ends its Scottish summer with four days on the Mallaig run from September 30.

LORD of the Isles is also the name of the ferry between Mallaig and Skye, among MacBrayne's most commodious vessels. It wasn't always so.

The Victorian ferry offered first, second and - when available - third class facilities, as indicated by the notice on the door.

"This cabin has accommodation for 50 third class passengers when not occupied by sheep, cattle, cargo or other encumbrances," it said.

THE sun, it should gratefully be recorded, followed us around Scotland as if we were a horseshoe magnet and it a mere sprinkling of iron filings. In Inverness, however, the flash floods were so severe two weekends ago that the much clamoured fire brigade took 200 calls in 12 hours. 199, reports the Inverness Courier, were for help in baling the deluge. The other was to ask if the golf course were still open.

HOMEWARD on the A68, we looked into the parish church of St Philip and St James, Tow Law, to open the annual flower festival - a quite exquisite occasion with the theme of The Great North-East and exhibits on everything from Nissan to The Northern Echo, black and white and red all over.

Nissan, they'd even discovered, is Japanese from "daily output." Not many people know that.

Norman Deacon is the flower power in those parts, smart as a carrot and reckoned to get better every year - "you have to get better at something when you're 70," said Norman, lovely feller.

Others recall that he was a brickie - "you'd never have thowt it, mind," they admitted in the football club afterwards. The opening was thronged, the church stunning. "I belong Billy Row and never even knew it existed," someone said.

Norman had even made the punch - a couple of bottles of gin, half a bottle of vodka and whisky, a few bottles of wine and a drop of lemonade for flavour.

"Punch drunk" may have other derivations, but we knew it had been a good night, nonetheless.

BIRDS and stones, they also asked us officially to launch Paths and Places Around Tow Law, a leaflet with a picture of the new wind turbines on the front.

Pictures by Colin Hayton, it 's intended to promote the sometimes forgotten attractions of that gusty ridge - the Inkerman beehive coke ovens, Colliers Wood picnic site, the butterfly farm and many more.

The leaflet's available from town council chairman Jenny Flynn, Deerness House, Church Lane, Tow Law - further information on www.towlaw. org.uk