04/06/2026
Well, what can we say.. we often hear the 🧚 music 🎶 at night..
Our guest house is next to this beautiful hill.. and story ❤️
🔥 Fireside Chat ~ Story Time 🔥
Before we begin, I should mention something.
This piece asks something of you, but not in the way you might think. I am not asking you to offer me anything. What I am asking is that you take a little time out of your day for yourself. For your own benefit. That is what I hold as crucial here. It is continuity of care, and it begins with you.
So settle in. Get cosy. Grab a snack, or a bevy of your choosing, pull something warm around your shoulders if you have it, and just… let yourself have a moment.
A moment of childhood goodness.
Do you remember sitting cross-legged, waiting for a proper story? That particular feeling of magic and excitement, of being so completely invested in what was coming that the rest of the world simply fell away? You knew it was going to be good. You could feel it before the first word was spoken. And there was nothing quite like it.
That is what I want to offer you today, in this story.
Because that feeling, that sense of wonder and anticipation and total absorption, is one that so many of us end up missing without even realising that we miss it. Without realising that perhaps we still need it. We grow up and we grow busy and somewhere along the way we quietly stop giving ourselves permission to simply sit and have a story shared with us.
But that wee cross-legged self is still in there. Still waiting. Still hoping someone will say *sit down, get comfortable, I have a story to share.*
I believe that with my whole heart. And I hope this gives your heart a little something.
So. Are you ready?
If we were gathering in person, I’d be handing you a dram of my best and something hardy to put in your belly. There would be a nice roaring fire, and we would settle in and just have some time together. A break from whatever is weighing on your shoulders. A break from whatever you are mindful you still have to do.
Come on in for a cuddle. We all need it every now and again. So come on in, lovey. Your presence is important and awaited here.
Then come close to the fire.
# # The Fiddlers of Tomnahurich
*A note before we begin.*
You may have heard a version of this story before. There are many. Some are gentler than this one, and I want to say clearly that there is nothing wrong with the people who have told it that way. Storytelling has always breathed and shifted with the teller.
But in my work as a biographer, I made a promise to every person whose story I carried: I would not edit it. I would not soften it. I would tell it plainly, as it was given to me, because that plainness was not cruelty. It was respect. And I bring that same promise here.
The old Highland bards did not soften their stories either. The darkness was not an accident of the telling. It was the *point* of the telling. There was a reason a story ended the way it ended, and that reason deserved to be honoured, passed on whole, received as it was always meant to be received.
So that is what I will do.
I will grant it out as best I can. I make no claim to being a bard. That is something earned over time, through consistency, through showing up, through offering one’s best again and again to the tradition and to the people within it. But this is a story I love, and I will tell it with everything I have.
*This is the story as it was told.*
There is a hill in Inverness.
If you have been to the city, if you live there, or have walked its streets, or come in weary from the south on a grey winter’s day, you will know the one I mean. You may have stood upon it. You may have held it in your gaze from across the Canal and felt something you could not quite name, a pull, a weight, a quiet insistence that this particular piece of earth has something to say to you.
Now I am going to ask you to lean into that feeling, and notice what comes up for you.
It is a peculiar hill. Steep-sided and wrapped in dark trees, it rises suddenly from the flat valley floor as though it does not belong to the land around it, as though it arrived from somewhere else entirely and simply decided to stay. Shaped like nothing so much as an upturned boat left by some giant and careless hand on the banks of the River Ness. The Caledonian Canal runs along its western edge now. A Victorian cemetery drapes its slopes and summit in quiet stone and shadow, and the graves there are very old, and the paths between them are steep and winding and on certain evenings, when the light falls a particular way through the yew trees, more than a little unsettling.
But long before any of that. Long before the canal, before the headstones, before the iron gates that close at dusk.
The hill was known by a different name.
*Tom na h-Iùbhraich.* The Hill of the Yew Wood.
And every soul in Inverness knew, without needing to be told twice, what lived inside it.
Now. Let us cast our minds back in time.
Cast it back past your grandparents, past their grandparents, past the reach of any letter or memory or family story you have ever been given. Back through the long dark corridor of centuries to a winter in the Highlands, when the roads were little more than frozen mud and the cold came howling off the mountains like something alive, something hungry, something that meant you no particular kindness.
Two men were walking into Inverness.
Farquhar of Feshie and his companion, two fiddlers out of Strathspey, from that long and beautiful corridor of valley and river that winds through the very heart of Badenoch. Picture them if you will: coats worn thin at the elbows, fiddles wrapped in cloth and pressed close against their bodies for warmth, breath rising in pale clouds before them as they walked. They were not young men with nothing to lose. They were working men, travelling men, men who had long ago learned to carry their livelihood on their backs and their dignity in their playing. They had given music to weddings, to wakes, to harvest feasts and market days. In return, the world had fed them, housed them, kept the worst of the cold at bay.
But luck, as she so often does, had turned her face away.
Town after town. Village after village. Doors that did not open, coins that were not offered, people who paused to listen and then walked on without a backward glance. By the time Farquhar and his companion came into Inverness that Christmas, the bottom of their purses had been scraped bare. Barely enough for bread. Not nearly enough for a bed.
And yet.
They set up in the street and played anyway.
*They always played anyway.*
Reels and laments, strathspeys quick as sparrows, music that on any other day in any other town would have stopped people in their tracks and loosened the strings of purses. But the people of Inverness moved past them with their eyes forward and their collars turned up against the cold.
Now, this is not to say that the people of Inverness were stingy folk. Quite the opposite. But when strangers come into town, you do not always know what walks in behind them. Not everyone who arrived in those days came in good faith, and trust was not a thing given freely or quickly in a close Highland community. It was something demonstrated. Something earned, slowly, through consistency and goodwill, through showing your intentions plain and keeping them plain over time. That was not coldness. That was wisdom. And it had kept many a community whole.
So the fiddlers played on, and the people passed, and the cold pressed in around them from every side.
The light was going. The two men looked at one another over their fiddles with the particular look of people who are trying very hard not to say aloud the thing they are both thinking.
And then.
A man stopped.
He was old, or seemed old, though there was something about him that made the word feel insufficient. Silver-haired, straight-backed, with eyes of a colour that shifted and refused to settle in the fading winter light. He stood at the very edge of their playing and he did not fold his arms. He did not shift his weight or look away or do any of the small restless things that people do when they are only half-listening. He was entirely still. Entirely present. He listened the way that deep water listens, the way that old places listen, taking the music in as though it were something he had been waiting a long while to hear.
When the last note died, he smiled.
And oh, that smile.
He had a proposition, he said. He was looking for musicians. Not merely competent musicians, not the kind of player you might find at any crossroads on a market day. He was looking for *remarkable* musicians. He had a gathering that very evening, a feast, a celebration, and the company attending it were people of discernment who would know the difference between music played for coin and music played from the marrow. He had heard these two, he said, and he believed they were exactly what was needed.
He would pay them well. Generously. More than they would normally ask. He would feed them too, and feed them properly. All they had to do was follow him, at sunset, to Tomnahurich Hill.
Now.
You and I, sitting here together in the warmth with our drams and our snacks and the fire keeping the dark at bay, we might feel something at this moment in the telling. A small cold thing, low in the chest. The particular sensation that arrives when an offer is too perfectly timed, too precisely shaped to fit the hollow of your need.
The two fiddlers of Strathspey felt it too.
They were not fools. They knew that hill. Everyone in Inverness knew that hill.
But they were hungry. And the cold had teeth. And the promise of a warm hall and a hot meal and a purse of coins was standing right there in front of them in the grey and failing light of a Christmas evening, wearing the face of a silver-haired old man with a smile like deep water.
They said yes.
At sunset, they came to Tomnahurich.
The old man was waiting, as though he had always been there, as though the concept of waiting was something that applied to other people entirely. He moved ahead of them without a word, and they followed, their breath rising in great pale clouds before them, frost already beginning its quiet work on their collars and their lashes and the thin wool of their coats. The cold was a living thing that evening. It pressed against the skin like a hand, insistent and deliberate, finding every gap and seam, dancing along the back of the neck, settling into the bones with a patience that felt almost personal.
The yew trees closed around them as they rounded the base of the hill. Ancient trees. Trees that had been old when the stories about this hill were young, their roots like great dark fingers gripping the frozen earth as though they alone were keeping the hill in place, their branches lacing overhead and cutting the last pale bleed of the winter sky into fragments, strips of pewter and ash and the deep bruised violet of a Highland dusk giving up the ghost. The ground beneath their feet was iron hard. Every footstep rang out sharp and clear in the silence, and the silence itself had a quality to it, a thickness, a held-breath watchfulness, that made both men instinctively lower their voices to nothing at all.
The smell of the yew trees was resinous and cold and very old. It was the smell of a place that had been a place long before anyone had thought to name it.
And then the old man stopped.
Before them was an opening in the hillside. Neither man could have sworn it had been there a moment before. And from within it came something that had no business whatsoever being inside a hill on a bitter winter’s night on the outskirts of Inverness.
Warmth. Real warmth, flooding out through that impossible opening and wrapping itself around two frost-bitten, hollow-bellied fiddlers like an embrace. Light the colour of honey and firelight. And sound. The sound of a hundred voices in full celebration, woven through with laughter that seemed to come from people who had never in their lives had cause to be anything other than joyful. The low and golden rumble of a feast already gloriously, magnificently underway.
The frost on their skin began to melt.
The old man gestured them forth.
Down they went.
What was inside that hill.
Listen now, and listen carefully, because this is the part of the story where language begins to strain at its own seams. Those who have carried this tale down through the long chain of generations have done their very best, and what they have preserved for us is this:
The hall was vast.
Not merely large. *Vast.* Vast in a way that made no sense given the hill above it, vast in a way that suggested the ordinary rules of stone and earth and measurement had been quietly set aside for the evening. The ceiling soared away into a golden dark. The walls were hung with colours so deep and warm they seemed to breathe. And the light, that impossible sourceless light, fell across a table that ran the full length of the hall, groaning, *groaning* under the weight of a feast that would have made two cold and hungry men weep if they had not been doing their very best to appear composed.
And then they looked at the people.
*Achingly* beautiful, every one of them. Dressed in colours too vivid for the world above the hill. Moving through the hall with a grace so effortless it unsettled the eye, as though gravity had made an exception for them, as though they had simply declined to be subject to the ordinary heaviness of things. They laughed and they spoke and they turned toward the entrance, and when they saw the two fiddlers standing there with their wrapped instruments and their worn coats and their wide eyes, a sound moved through that magnificent room.
Not quite a cheer. Not quite a sigh. Something older than either. Something that said, without words, in a register felt more in the bones than heard with the ears:
*Yes. You are exactly who we were waiting for.*
Farquhar and his companion sat. They ate until the hollow place inside them was filled for the first time in weeks. They drank wine unlike any wine they had encountered, wine that tasted of something they could not name and warmed them from the inside out in a way that had nothing quite to do with alcohol. And they told themselves quietly, reasonably, with every bit of sense they possessed, that this was simply a generous host and a remarkable company and a very fine evening indeed.
Then the old man rose.
And called for the dancing.
Oh, the dancing.
This, right here, is where the story catches fire.
Because when those two men from Strathspey lifted their bows, when the horsehair met the strings and the first note rang out into that vast and golden hall, something cracked open in them that had never been open before. Something the music had always been reaching for and never quite found.
They played as they had never played.
Not better than their best. *Beyond* their best. The tunes came not from memory or from practice but from somewhere deeper and older, as though the music itself had been waiting inside them all along and had simply been lacking the right room, the right listeners, the right particular quality of air and light and wanting. Their fingers flew. Their bows sang. Reel after reel tumbled into the next, each one more wild and joyful and aching than the last.
And the dancers.
Picture this. A woman in a gown the colour of deep water turning in the candlelight, her hair loose and dark, her eyes closed and her face tilted upward as though the music were something she could feel on her skin, as though it were warmth, as though it were sunlight. A man catching her hand and spinning her outward and back again in one long fluid motion, both of them laughing, both of them so completely given over to the joy of the thing that watching them made your chest ache in a way you could not quite account for. Around them, more dancers, dozens of them, moving like water finding its way downhill, like fire taking hold, like something ancient and inevitable that had been given, at last, full and glorious permission to be entirely itself.
The candles burned low and were somehow always burning. The wine flowed. The laughter rose and swelled and filled every last corner of that impossible hall until the very walls seemed to hum with it.
And the two fiddlers of Strathspey played on.
They lost track of everything. Time. Hunger. Cold. The frost that had been dancing on their skin not an hour before. The frozen streets of Inverness above them. The world in its entirety, with all its weight and worry and want.
There was only the music. There was only this.
They only played.
When the last note finally fell away, the hall was utterly still.
Beautiful, warm, golden still, the way a held breath is still.
The old man came to them.
He placed in each of their hands a purse, heavy with coin, the weight of it solid and real against their palms. He told them they had played magnificently, that his people were deeply grateful, that it was time now to go.
One of the fiddlers, full to the brim with wine and music and a gratitude so large he could barely hold it, turned to the old man and said, from the very bottom of his heart:
*Heaven bless you and your people.*
And in that moment, the old man suddenly vanished.
There and then not there. No sound, no movement, no farewell. Simply gone, the way a candle goes when the wind finds it, the way a word goes when you reach for it and cannot quite remember.
And the two fiddlers stood alone on the sloping side of Tomnahurich in the early light of morning, the yew trees breathing softly around them, the purses solid in their hands, the music still humming faintly in their fingers like something that did not quite know yet that it was over.
They walked back into Inverness.
And here is where the story takes quite the turn indeed.
The bridge was all wrong.
Not the wooden bridge they had crossed the evening before, the one they knew as well as their own names. A stone bridge stood in its place, broad and solid and worn smooth in the way that only years and years of feet will wear stone smooth. The streets had widened. The buildings had changed their faces. And the people moving through the sharp morning air wore clothes of a cut and fashion the two men had never seen on any living soul, and looked at them, at their fiddles, at their worn and particular coats, with an expression that the fiddlers recognised with a growing and terrible unease.
It was the expression of people looking at something that does not belong.
They found their way to a church, because a church is a church. Some things, surely, do not change? They stepped inside, into the smell of cold stone and old wood and candlewax, and the familiarity of it settled around them like a hand on the shoulder.
A minister stood in a pulpit they did not recognise. The words he spoke were words they could follow, but the voice was a stranger’s voice, belonging to no one they had ever known or heard of. Farquhar, clutching his purse against his chest, leaned close to his companion and said, barely above a whisper, just between the two of them, just a small and quiet prayer of gratitude for the evening they had been given:
*God bless this congregation.*
And the moment those words left his mouth.
Both men crumbled.
Where they had stood, there was only a small soft fall of dust, settling slowly, gently, almost tenderly, onto the cold stone floor of the church in the pale light of a morning two hundred years removed from the one they had last seen.
Two hundred years had passed inside that hill.
In what had felt to them like a single night of music.
I want to be honest with you here, because a good story deserves honesty and so do you.
That is the actual ending. The old ending. The one told beside fires in a time when people understood in their very bones that the world of the sìthichean did not negotiate, did not apologise, and did not concern itself overmuch with the feelings of those who stumbled into its orbit. The storytellers who carried this down through the long dark years did not soften it, did not round off its edges or tuck away its teeth. They told it true because the truth of it was the whole point.
And neither will I soften it.
Because there is something in the starkness of this ending that reaches far beyond the tale itself, something that the Highlanders who shaped and kept this story understood and wanted us to understand in turn. They were not warning anyone away from music, or from beauty, or from the warm and reckless courage of saying yes when life offers something you did not expect. They were saying something older and harder and more necessary than that.
They were saying: *some experiences will take you so far outside of ordinary time that there is no simply returning. You will step back out into the world and find that it has moved on without you. You are changed. The world is changed. And the self that emerges is not the self that went in.*
I think we know that feeling.
Perhaps more than we let on.
The hill is still there.
You can stand beside the Caledonian Canal on any morning you choose and look up at it, steep-sided and dark with its yew trees, the graves of Inverness climbing its slopes in quiet rows. They opened it as a cemetery in 1864, and when they did, people with long memories turned to one another and said: do you remember what was foretold?
Coinneach Odhar, the Brahan Seer, had walked these same roads long before, a man who saw things others could not see, and he had said it plainly: *the time will come when Tomnahurich will be under lock and key, and the fairies secured within.*
He had also said that full-rigged ships would one day sail around the back of that hill. Which seemed, at the time of his saying it, like the kind of thing a man says when the world has come a little loose from its moorings.
And then the canal was cut, and the boats began to pass, and people stood on the bank and looked at the hill and looked at the water and were quiet for a long while.
Some say Thomas the Rhymer is buried beneath Tomnahurich. Others say he does not sleep there but *waits* there, patient as the yew trees themselves, with his men and his white horses in the dark beneath the hill, ready to rise when Scotland has need of him.
Maybe he does.
The dead are buried on the fairy hill now. The gates close at dusk.
And the sìthichean are locked in with them.
So if you ever find yourself in Inverness, if you ever stand at the edge of that perplexing, boat-shaped hill as the light fails and the yew trees go very still, and somewhere just beyond the reach of your hearing there is something that might be music, something that might be laughter, something that might be the memory of two Strathspey fiddlers playing the finest music of their lives in a hall that should not have existed inside a hill that was older than the city around it.
*Don’t bless anyone.*
Who knows? You might catch yourself a glimpse of Thomas the Rhymer.
And it leaves me with one question.
Would you go?
*Tom na h-Iùbhraich. The Hill of the Yew Wood. On the south-western edge of Inverness, between the River Ness and the Caledonian Canal. It has been there longer than the city around it. It will, in all likelihood, be there long after.*
And the sìthichean, the fairy folk, have always preferred to keep their own time. 😉
Nic Bhàin 💙
