25

George's home at Upper Glassburn is a rambling two-storey house with gabled windows in the roof and a porch framed by rustic columns made from pine trunks. The house stands high above a sharp bend in the road between Cannich and Struy overshadowed by trees. Turning into the lane calls for caution since traffic (what there is of it) tends take the corner at speed. There's a bed-and-breakfast sign attached to a tree at the lane end.

At the top of the stairs in this house hangs a small painting, naive in style, of a green-hulled fishing boat (I called it a smack – which George took as a slight) buffeting through white-crested waves. ‘The Janet,’ says George, ‘my first boat.’ George skippered her as a young man fishing off the west coast.

When he came ashore for good, he thought there was money to be made cutting peat – no shortage of peat in the Highlands – and imported a peat harvester from Finland. Unfortunately the enterprise failed. But George is not easily defeated and, when a friend stopped him in the street and asked if he could drive a lorry, he jumped at the chance. Next morning at the crack of dawn, he was at the wheel of a clapped-out truck blasting out exhaust fumes, clanking up the Oban brae with a load of granite kerbstones bound for the outer isles. The business prospered. George declined the offer of a partnership in favour of a percentage of the turnover, a deal which gave him the funds to buy the Cnoc Hotel at Struy plus the inn across the road, where he made a genial host and his wife Ishbel cooked good, plain meals for the guests.

The hotel, a row of converted cottages on a grassy bank just out of Struy, has a cheery look when the lights are lit and the inn has come up in the world since its days as a country howff with an earthen floor. The joke was that, in winter, you had to drink up fast before the beer froze in the glass.

George also sings. There's a pile of CDs for sale on the sideboard at Upper Glassburn featuring him and his son John in an hour's worth of folk song – ‘Ca’ the Yowes’ and ‘Scots Wha’ Hae’ and such – which they recorded at the old ferryman's cottage down the strath at Aigas.

George has sung his songs to guests at Aigas, the baronial tower house on the road to Beauly where the naturalist Sir John Lister-Kaye lives and from where he runs an upmarket field centre. Courses there include heritage tours, which I guess have a special appeal to American visitors. I can imagine George on a festive night charming the Americans with song and story – bearded as he is, dressed for the occasion in the kilt, the very image of a minstrel Scot.