‘Have you got the map?” I did not have the map. Why would I have had the map, when I was doing the driving? “It was on the kitchen table.” I knew that the map was on the kitchen table, because over breakfast in the Scottish Lowlands, three Herald contributors had pored over the local Ordnance Survey grids with their contours, trigonometry points and crossed squares and circles denoting churches with a tower or a spire...“You were meant to have the map.”
I continued to deny it as we got out of the car. By then we were in the middle of nearly nowhere – and we did not have a map. We had been enticed into a nearby glen by the promise of a holy well and a ruined chapel – clearly belonging to some venerable hermit who had driven paganism out of this corner of Scotland and whose sacred place must have suffered at the hands of reforming zealots in the mould of John Knox.
