The remote village in the Scottish Highlands that is a shrine to John Lennon
John Lennon, the famed Liverpool icon, being more Scottish than he was English, isn’t exactly something that goes down very well south of the border.
But there’s no denying the fact that for the Beatle, Scotland came to symbolise his place of solace and retreat, casting him away from the bedlam and mania that became otherwise known as the rest of his life. It was his escape from the world, his reconnection to his original identity, and the environment that just let him exist without any of his strings attached.
Of course, that draw to Scotland was important to many of the Fab Four, but it particularly resonated with Lennon due to his family links, where he had spent many childhood summers with his cousins, either in their hometown of Edinburgh or the Highland retreat of Durness. However, it was this latter rugged landscape that left the greatest impression on his heart.
When musicians talk about taking privacy to extremes, Lennon probably couldn’t have gone any further than Durness since it constitutes one of the most northern points of the entire mainland country. It’s remote, to put it mildly. But despite its sparse population, the people there have never forgotten their stroke of stardom, and have set about making it a shrine to his memory ever since.
If you ever managed to make the trek up there, some 120 miles north of Inverness, that’s the reason you’ll find a memorial garden purely devoted to the legacy of Lennon, fittingly inscribed with the lyric “All these places had their moment/ With lovers and friends” from ‘In My Life’ on the stone centrepiece.
To Lennon’s mind, however, Durness seemed to be the place he would have been happy taking his last breaths, to the point where he almost fatefully did. The year was 1969, and it was clear that the singer wasn’t having the most peaceful of times when the rest of his life was marred by rising tensions and the prospect of a band break-up. As such, with Yoko Ono and the children in tow, they headed to the tip of Scotland to escape.
Yet any illusion of peace and privacy was soon left in ruin when Lennon managed to crash his car into a ditch near Loch Eriboll. Talk about blowing your own cover. It should go without saying that the holiday was cut short after that, with the Beatle requiring 17 stitches and never sitting in the driver’s seat ever again after that.
The whole chaos of the near-miss event probably gave him the idea that a quieter pace of life was for the better, and as such, it was hardly any surprise that it arrived in the midst of the Bed-Ins For Peace, as well as his decision to ultimately fly solo as an artist. Was Durness then responsible for the break-up of The Beatles? They probably don’t want that pressure.
But the point remained that the Scottish Highlands, and particularly Durness, provided Lennon with a sense of much-needed solace and escapism at a time in his life when he needed it most. Sure, he could have probably gone without the memory of the car crash, but so long as it’s up to the people who live there, his brush through the village has forever left a striking impact.
