An Teallach, Stac Pollaidh Scottish Highlands; Mixed media painting by Rob Miller RSA

Stac Pollaidh
Pen and wash
25.5cmx15.5cm

Heavy Rain aproaching An Teallach
Pen and Wash
25.5cmx15.5cm

I'm never sure why but everytime I see a painting or drawing of a Highland Hill top I like to pict over it with a drink in my hand.*(maybe a hang up from my old school trips)  Anyhow, here is the poem Heather Ale by the beloved Scot Robert Loius Stevenson,

From the bonny bells of heather
They brewed a drink long-syne,
Was sweeter far than honey,
Was stronger far than wine.
They brewed it and they drank it,
And lay in a blessed swound
For days and days together
In their dwellings underground.

There rose a King in Scotland,

A fell man to his foes,

He smote the Picts in battle,

He hunted them like roes.

Over miles of the red mountain

He hunted as they fled,

And strewed the dwarfish bodies

Of the dying and the dead.

Summer came in the country,

Red was the heather bell,

But the manner of the brewing,

Was none alive to tell.

In graves that were like children's

On many a mountain's head,

The Brewsters of the Heather

Lay numbered with the dead.

The king in the red moorland
Rode on a summer's day;
And the bees hummed, and the curlews
Cried beside the way.
The king rode, and was angry,
Black was his brow and pale,
To rule in a land of heather
And lack the Heather Ale.

R.L.Stevenson's Heather Ale