We drive in convoy to the church. Black Allan in a small maroon van, tilted to one side, and me in an old, almost ready-to-ditch Ford Sierra. We are like kids on bikes – practical vehicles taking us through a magical world. The old church belongs to Black Allan. I didn’t question why he had it. It is just what Black Allan does. He collects neglected and wonderful things, a magpie of the mysterious. This is his hidden jewel and I am about to be stunned.
‘Note,’ he says with a soft Inverness accent. ‘Orignal lime harling. Ornate hand-forged door furnishings, authentic but worn leaded paint and footworn Caithness flagstone.’
He removes the door chain, makes a show of finding the key, and continues his architectural chirpings.
‘You will have noticed the crows, cawing a warning. This is their place. Humans are not welcome, but the sound, it adds to the atmosphere, do you not think?And you will have noticed the fine fenestration, far thinner than modern windows. It allows more light in, as does the angling of the window shelves.’
I can see the beauty of the building. It is built to be the biggest man-made structure in the community, and I can feel why it was built here too. The old waterfall is now dammed and the healing spring forgotten, but I can feel an energy that I am too young to understand. Eventually Black Allan opens the door and I can already smell old pine and dust.
‘Please enter and observe the interior.’
I enter.
The church has already been disused for a generation. Once there was standing room only, every Sunday, and outside, on special ecclesiastical occasions, over a thousand gathered to hear the minister’s sermon at the foot of the waterfall. They walked three miles from the village of Beauly. Now, as I walk in, it lies half-asleep, one eye open like a dolphin.
‘You will have noticed the unexpected interior. Outside – classic Georgian, and inside – Gothic. Mock Gothic. Note the wooden-trefoiled shafts, unusual pink colour, herringbone roof and narrow-planked flooring. Beautifully old, don’t you think? And better with the surprising interior which, indeed, dates to 1835.’
The inside is almost bare. An enormous broom with carefully painted yellow stripes and matching dustpan sit in a corner. There is an assortment of ancient chairs and Black Allan’s ‘magician’s cabinet’: cobweb-thin silk around a six-sided frame that comes to an ornate finial. It is too old to touch, an object of no conceivable modern use, but Black Allan has moved it somehow from place to place for years.
‘I may, should a suitable purchaser be found,’ Black Allan said, ‘be in the position of allowing this fine building to change ownership. I can see that you like beautiful things.’
Beyond the church lie the hills of the west. Here it is all...trees, wide-flowing river and the yellowing Scottish dusk. I am twenty-seven years old and surrounded by beauty. Black Allan is right, I realise. The Damascene awe-shine of beauty. It was beauty that pulled me from the confines of the childhood bedroom outside to the fields, towards the deer I saw in a thunderstorm from my window, and to the secret clearing in the woods. Both are now gone. The field built on and the wood felled. It lured me from university south in Edinburgh to the clear air of Inverness-shire – my body always felt lighter as it headed north in the bus – and today it brings me out to this old church. I am a moth to the light of beauty and now I am being scrutinised for a new role by the enigmatic Black Allan. He is short and bald on top, but his quick-moving eyes and limbs make him difficult to age. He also has the ability to melt away. Rules for Black Allan are a plaything. At least ten different pseudo-names help him avoid various authorities. Rumour has it that he stole slates from a construction site and then sold them back to the panicked owner the next day.
This is the murky underbelly of 1995. There is so much freedom. On a Sunday, rural pubs open in a haze of smoke, beer and pool before the community drives back for dinner. Films have captured this spirit. Braveheart and Rob Roy were released the year before, and there was a call for wild-looking extras. We came to have our teeth blackened and appear on the big screen. You could, if you wanted, exist just below the surface. Black Allan dipped up, down, and around all laws.
‘Maybe we could come to some mutually agreeable solution?’ Black Allan suggests.
‘Aye,’ I say.
But first, Black Allan plans to weigh my worth. He knows I could not afford to pay much. He will reel me in and out, part of the game of a man between surfaces. We agree to meet in his mother’s house the next day.