Tide Lines’ Robert Robertson
Robert is a gold medal winner at the Royal National Mod, Scotland’s premier Gaelic festival and a former member of the band Skippinish.
We chatted on the back of Tide Lines trio of sold-out gigs at Glasgow’s Barrowlands venue, and just before a stripped back tour of Scotland.
“I'm going to either be kind of boring or patriotic or whatever you'd like to describe it.
I'll start off with just a few hundred yards from my house that I was brought up in just outside Fort William.
There's a wee hill up the back of my house, I'm not going to be too specific about where it is because I spoke about this in an interview before and one of my neighbours was giving me a hard time that people might come and visit it and it might become less exclusive to ourselves!
But there's a beautiful wee hill just up the back of my house that if you wander up it, you get, in my opinion, what is probably the greatest view in Scotland, but certainly in Lochaber. One of the most beautiful views.
If you look to your south, you're looking onto the north face of the Ben, Ben Nevis, the biggest mountain in Britain. In fact, that whole mountain range.
If you sweep around, you see the, the pipes from the aluminium smelter kind of sweeping down the hill into the town of Fort William itself, which lies just at the bottom of the Linnhe. And so you see the kind of steeples from the churches of the town, and then Loch Linnhe stretching out beyond it, eventually to the ocean, I suppose.
Then it carries on round looking west up Lochiel, and, you know, what would be described as the road to the isles, I suppose, eventually, for people not from the area, that's where you would eventually get out to the Glenfinnan Viaduct and the Harry Potter bridge, as they say, and then the monument where Bonnie Prince Charlie first landed on mainland Scottish soil.
You keep panning right the way around it. You've just got this most amazing vista.
And so that's a place where I would, I would start any day really, because it just clears the head. And it's somewhere that in any time in life that ever since I was a wee kid, if I've ever got worries or, or concerns, I go up there to the clear air.
I wrote a song about this actually not long ago. We had a song about this, just that being up there.
You feel that you're so far away from the cares and concerns of whatever's going on down in the town. You can look down in the town, I think there's people wandering about down there.
And whatever everyday worries are concerning them, they don't seem to feature up here in the, in the good Highland air. And so, yeah, I would, I would definitely start any day there.”
Robert’s perfect day:
Where: Lochaber, Partick, Ross of Mull
Food and drink: Porridge with salt, freshly caught west coast seafood, Classic Laddie Unpeated Islay Single Malt whisky from Bruichladdich
Music: The Fratellis
