The Seer
I didn't really want to believe
There’s something about the Highlands of Scotland that seems to produce visionaries that seem to see beyond time and space
Setting the Scene
I wasn’t supposed to be in the seat at all.
I was just the driver that night and all I had to do was wait in the waiting room and then drive home again.
I’d driven deep into the wilds of the Scottish highlands to a remote house with an otherworldly reputation but I wasn’t really a believer.
This was the house of the person known at the time as the highland seer.
A boy came into the waiting room and said to me that there had been a cancellation and that if I wanted to I could have a “sitting”. In other words a personal reading.
All I had to do was come through to the room …
An Invisible Wind
I was shown into a small square room and directed towards the visitor’s seat.
There were no windows.
The lighting was dim and smoky and there was a faint smell of incense.
The coal fire wasn’t lit.
The walls were lined with a jumble of darkly framed images.
One stood out to me, a proud faced old man with a nose shaped like an eagle’s beak wearing a long, feathered headdress.
I sat down, my eyes still drawn towards the picture.
For a moment I was sure that the image had moved, the feathers stirring gently in an invisible wind.
A tingle ran down my back and I wondered what I was doing there.
The door handle revolved slowly and the seer drifted silently into the room …
Backstory and a Question
What is a seer?
A person of supposed supernatural insight who sees visions of the future.
The Scottish Highlands has a tradition of seers, those who seem to possess the second-sight, a facility which allows them to predict future events.
The most well known was the 17th century Brahan Seer, also known as Coinneach Odhar (Dark Kenneth).
Our Ken gained clairvoyance after napping on a fairy hill (never a great idea).
He woke up to to find he had a small stone with a hole carved through its centre in his pocket.
The temptation was too much and on peeking through the hole two things happened, first, he gained the ‘second sight’ and second, he couldn’t see through his other eye any more.
Seeing into the future might sound like an amazing gift but despite the centuries of notoriety there were downsides too.
The visions were seldom light and airy.
Battles and war seemed to feature heavily.
I’m imagining that looking through the stone with his good eye was a bit like putting on a virtual reality headset and finding yourself in a hyper realistic war game rather than lying on a virtual beach sipping a Scotch on the rocks or racing cartoon cars.
100 years before it happened Coinneach was already in the thick of the carnage of the Battle of Culloden.
And then there was the Second World War, he saw that coming. Long before anyone else.
There were many other predictions including the construction of the Caledonian Canal and an unusual one involving a calf being born in the upper chamber of a castle tower.
Unfortunately Kenneth sometimes saw too much and he just couldn’t tell a lie and so when he told Lady Seaforth of her husband’s extra-marital pursuits in Paris she decided to take out her anger on the first man she saw, him.
Poor Kenneth came to a sticky end but he did get the last laugh as he revealed the Seaforth’s forthcoming curse.
As for his stone, its said to be somewhere in the depths of Loch Ussie, perhaps lying there in wait for a Gollum like figure to discover it, kick starting a whole new set of predictions.
Meanwhile, back in the room
The room was set up with two chairs facing each other with nothing in between.
The Seer’s chair was more elaborate than my one.
It was heavily upholstered with a high wide back.
There was something about that chair that I sensed was important.
He didn’t say anything at first.
He sunk back into the upholstery with eyes closed, taking slow deep breaths.
He had a long grey beard and a round face with flushed cheeks and was wearing a thick grey fisherman’s arran jumper.
I wondered for a moment if he’d fallen asleep.
He seemed to have drifted off and I momentarily was reminded of Santa napping next to a roaring fire.
In the silence my mind began to wander.
I thought about the yellow field notebook at work and the calculations that had proved to be wrong and the extra work that had caused everyone.
I had been 117mm out on the first roadpin. The engineer had checked it later, spotted the error and written 117 in red ink and circled it angrily before tossing me the book and saying the words “You tell them and you fix it!”
The Seer opened his eyes and fixed me with an unwavering stare.
I was back in the room.
The first thing he said to me will stay with me forever,
“You’re troubled. You’ve written it down, haven’t you?”
I didn’t answer, my voice seemed to be switched to off.
He continued,
“It’s numbers isn’t it, is it money? No, something else, it’s important, you’ve drawn a fence around it. I can see it clearly now … one, one, seven.”
At that moment you could have slapped me across the face with a large wet trout and I wouldn’t have noticed.
There was no way he could have known that.
That was strictly between me and my work field book which was fifty miles away in a portacabin in Inverness.
I gibbered, “Eeeeemmm, how, erm, what?”
He gave me the faintest smile and proceeded to tell me all about me.
My past, present and future.
In frightening detail.
I drove home that night with his clear, lilting voice still speaking in my head and wondered if he was still in there.
Years and years later
I like to think I’ve an open mind about the unexplainable, supernatural, the unknown, all that kind of thing, but I don’t really believe in too much of it.
I know that stories become legends and get added to over time and that can spoil them as they become unbelievable and all a bit silly.
However, I’ve no idea how he saw what I was thinking and showed it back to me.
It was so specific and yet hidden.
It would have taken a lifetime to guess and yet it was the first thing he said to me.
He didn’t even know I was going to be there. Either did I.
Of course that doesn’t mean that everything he said came to pass but I don’t think he ever claimed that was what he was all about.
I’ve never visited another seer.
Once was enough for me.
If I come across a shiny stone on the edge of a loch with a perfect circle in the centre I’ll resist the temptation to look through it and instead skim it back into the waters where it can rest until the next seer finds it.
While writing this I searched to see if there was anything about the person I knew as the seer on-line and to my surprise I found footage from a BBC TV Nationwide report from a number of years before I sat in his reading room …
It’s not mine to keep, I have to tell a person what I see.
The Seer performed by Kirsten Adamson w/ Jon Mackenzie
Excellent read. The buildup was quite good.
Wow, this was absolutely gripping, E! Such a great read - I've got the chills......!