Jimmy Page: the rock God who left his mark on the North Highlands

One Australian guest was so surprised to hear that Jimmy Page had owned a house beside Loch Ness that I eventually had to produce the evidence on my smartphone. I can understand the reaction, because the guitarist behind Led Zeppelin is hardly an obvious figure to introduce while travelling through the Highlands, although Boleskine House is only one of his connections with the north. The other takes us almost to my doorstep in Caithness, where his name appears on a harbour wall I can pass while walking the dogs, a rather unexpected place to encounter someone whose music became famous around the world.

Page’s interest in Boleskine is easier to explain, given his fascination with Aleister Crowley, the occultist who had previously owned it. He collected Crowley’s writings and possessions, and buying the house in the early 1970s brought him into surroundings that suited those interests, overlooking Loch Ness with an old graveyard across the road. Although he spent relatively little time living there, he retained it until 1992, and the mountainside behind the house became a filming location for his fantasy sequence in Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same. Guests familiar with the film can therefore find themselves looking towards scenery they have already seen without knowing quite where it belonged.

I occasionally stop near Boleskine with people interested in rock music, although someone simply driving past would learn little about its famous former owner or the events that followed his departure. Long after Page sold it, the house suffered devastating fires, leaving a charitable foundation with the considerable task of restoring it before opening to visitors. Its story reaches well beyond his ownership, but the association gives people who might otherwise pass without a second thought a reason to become curious, much as reading a familiar name at a tiny Caithness harbour invites a question about how it got there.

At Phillip’s Harbour at Harrow, near the Castle of Mey, an inscription records that Jimmy Page reopened the harbour on 30 April 1979 after its reconstruction as a job-creation project. There is something wonderfully improbable about finding the name of Led Zeppelin’s guitarist in that setting, particularly when I am there for no grander purpose than giving the dogs a walk. I would like to know more about how he became the chosen dignitary, but the plaque leaves no doubt that he did, giving us a connection rather different from the country house and rock-film imagery farther south. Jimmy Page may not have been a Highlander, yet he has given me more than one opportunity to surprise guests who thought they knew where his story belonged.

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