Ardfalloch is not a real place in the geographical sense of the word. There is no metalled road that leads to Ardfalloch—the best road to take is an easy chair before the fire on a wet afternoon. Somewhere in Scotland there is a sea-loch (ringed by purple mountains and dark green forests) where the brown seaweed is buoyed by millions of tiny bladders, and the storms come suddenly from the west and drive the still water into giant waves: but there is no island, with a ruined castle upon it, in the middle of this loch, and no salmon river flows turbulently into its clear depths. Somewhere in Scotland there is a square solid house with high windows and slender pillars at the door: but it boasts no wide domains, and the name of its owner is not MacAslan. So, in one sense, Ardfalloch is not real, and it is the same with the people who live in the glen; but you will find Janets and Donalds galore in the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland, and there are MacAslans, too, who live on their estates, fishing and shooting, trying to improve the conditions of their people, trying to make ends meet and seldom succeeding.
To me Ardfalloch is very real. The place and its people are more real to me than people I see every day. I could find my way about the glen blindfold. I know how green and clear the loch appears when the clouds are high, and how the little fish can be seen playing hide-and-seek in the water amongst the rocks and the undulating seaweed. I know the strange lurid light that bathes the island when the sun sets in the gap between the hills. I know Ballochgorm, the green pass between the mountains, and the little bothy that stands upon the moor just before the path rises steeply amongst the rocks. I know every turn in the path, beside the burn, where Iain and Linda walked, and the little waterfall with the lone oak-tree, whose leaves are always wet with spray. As Morag said of her story—
“It is true for me, but it is not true for you . . . for you it is chust Morag’s story to pass the time away.”
It is the same with the people in the glen—the people who were thrown together, fortuitously, and whose lives became tangled and intertwined. Donald and Morag, Iain and Linda and Margaret, I know them all, they are clearer to me than my friends. I have lived in Ardfalloch amongst these people for months, and now the time has come for me to leave them. Their troubles are over; their coil is unravelled; the path before them is clear. For some of them the future is happy and unclouded, for others it looks somewhat lonely and sad. That is the way of the world; everybody cannot be happy, and Ardfalloch is a little bit of the world: mirroring the world as the quiet loch mirrors the mountains and the trees upon their slopes.
I am sweir to leave Ardfalloch—as Janet said.