Season in Strathglass (16 page)

67

It's been raining hard for days. The puddle under the kitchen window (we have taken a week in one of Frank's chalets) grows and grows but today it's dry at last and we take a walk. There's dew on the ground and a touch of frost and the sound of water running through the woods where the river runs fast. Early sunshine falls on leafless trees spotted with lichens and moss.

An electric hum – so we're nearing the power station, a stone-arched cavern in the hillside. A Gaelic inscription:
Neart nan Gleann
, ‘Power from the Glens'.

Now there's a rumbling of rushing water. Catherine and I turn into the birch wood to investigate, following an earth track through heather clumps and decayed bracken, wet boggy hollows and outcropping rock. Reaching an abrupt high edge, we see the river below churning through a narrow gorge. Black water swirls between fantastically twisted rock strata. Huge geological pressures formed this cauldron. The map names it Culligran Falls but I guess not many passing strangers find it. Unfrequented except by fishermen, I suspect.

During the morning, snow flurries alternate with spells of sunshine and white clouds moving fast across blue skies. From time to time, the hills are blotted out by storms.

Where the strath opens up into grassy flats and the broad Loch Beannacharain, we reach the rock pillar that indicates the start of Braulen, the neighbouring estate to Culligran. Stags, bearing only the shabby remnants of antlers ready to drop, have come down from the hills for the fodder dumped for them here and twice we see feral goats on the slopes.

It's been a day of all weathers – sun, snow and wind – and, after a bath, our faces glow.

Still it rains. The puddle in the grass below the kitchen window is a miniature loch. It was dry ground when we came.

According to a leaflet left in the chalet, Winans the American magnate and mass slaughterer of deer corralled his stags on the flat ground further up the glen between Loch Beannacharain and Loch a' Mhuilidh. The leaflet contains a veiled warning to wanderers in these parts: ‘Hillwalking disturbs the deer and causes extreme inconvenience during the stalking season' and so ‘from early September until October 21 permission is likely to be refused'. Signs posted along the glen by the South Ross Deer Management Group are less intimidating: ‘The estates in this group recognise the tradition of open access to the hill' – so long as you don't frighten the deer, especially the stags. So keep to the paths. Stags are cash.

This is March. You don't shoot stags in March and we may walk.

In the late afternoon, Catherine and I drive to the head of Glen Strathfarrar and the Monar Dam. The glen grows bleaker by the mile as the mountains close in dark and forbidding. There's snow on the tops, it's sunless and a chill wind blows – a ‘thin' wind, you might say.

The road winds on into this remoteness, rising over steep drops until finally it curves round a hillside where a way has been blasted from the bedrock. Old pines cluster in the bottom of the gorge where a meagre river, starved by the half-moon dam, meanders among dry boulders and slabs, running deep only where the channel narrows. A fallen tree, bare and long since dead, lies athwart the riverbed.

We leave the car and walk up the private road towards Monar Lodge and associated buildings, which lie in a dip by the lochside – a timber house, a stone cottage and green-painted sheds. Now Donnie appears, a young man with a round cheery face and stubbly beard under a woolly hat. He tells us he's from Port Glasgow and came here to work as gillie and under-stalker. He'd seen a television programme about a Highland gamekeeper
and thought: ‘That's the life.' So he quit industrial Clydeside and, nine years later, he's happy here. He likes the lonely life (but admits that he walks his dog less on the open hill now that TV has come to the glen and he watches Sky).

From where we stand, only the eastern end of the loch is visible. Huge mountains surround Loch Monar and these steep monochrome hills of bare rock and heather look fiercely inhospitable on this day – a stark black and white. Shepherding must be difficult in these conditions. What sort of life can it be? It's not for me, no thanks, but Iain Thomson, the isolation shepherd, loved it in his time and so does Donnie now.

68

A hundred bright eyes glint in the gloom of a windowless shed like stars in the night sky. Nervous deer calves huddle in a corner, heads turned towards the light of the opened door. Long-nosed aristocratic faces, pricked ears.

Today their numbers will be swelled from the herd of farmed deer at Culligran, which at present are scattered over an enclosed stretch of tree-studded hillside. The herding party is Frank Spencer-Nairn, big Hamish, who's his manager, Frank's son Douglas and a helper called Julian. I'm on the sidelines, a watcher.

‘Our chief management tool is a bag of feed,' says Frank, tipping out a trail of pellets. A string of animals moves closer, warily. Suddenly there's a breakaway and hinds and calves turn tail and flee. Much running and shouting and waving to get them back. Separating calves from their mothers is tricky as they keep dashing for freedom.

When all are rounded up again, the calves are manhandled into pens to be labelled by sex – blue for a male, yellow for a female – which Hamish determines by lifting their tails. Tags are punched into an ear and then a metal disc bearing the animal's number, a statutory requirement. Deer are vulnerable to foot-and-mouth disease and their movements must be recorded. Last thing is to thrust a needle into the rump, which delivers a shot of vitamins, and another under the skin at the shoulder to inject prophylactic drugs.

The calves don't take it calmly. Wide-eyed, they buck and kick, banging against the planks. Sometimes Hamish has to wrestle a lively beast in a headlock. When the last group has gone through the pen, they're marshalled into trailers and taken to the shed to join the others. Their eventual fate – venison cuts on a Waitrose slab.

I talk to Julian. Lean-faced with black hair, nearing 50 I guess, he tells me he was cattleman at nearby Erchless (where years ago Iain Thomson was cattleman for a previous owner) until the boss decided to sell the herd and laid Julian off. A cattleman is a specialist but Julian has had to pick up casual work where he can find it. For the time being, he still lives in a house on the estate and he doesn't want to move – as he says, it's his home and he's among the people he knows.

Weeks later, I pass roadworks near Struy. Among the yellow-jacketed gang is Julian. He waves. Now a road mender.

69

I sit at a table in the window of a café called the Corner on the Square watching the world go by – the world of Beauly, that is. The sun shines and there are people about.

At first sight, the town seems hardly more than a broad square flanked by trim houses and nice shops. Nevertheless, it has a certain charm and status and the Corner, a café-cum-delicatessen selling wines, cheeses and high-class groceries, is a Mecca for ladies of the county set.

The Square's a microcosm. There's a butcher – ‘black pudding and haggis champion of the north of Scotland' – a baker and a fruit-and-veg shop – all you need for survival. The Co-op and another small supermarket eye each other from opposite sides of the street. A café humbler than the Corner offers plain fair – coffee, tea, baked potatoes, bacon rolls, egg and chips – plus postcards and assorted tourist ephemera and, this being the sunny side of the square, two tables are set out on the pavement – Beauly caff goes continental. There's a hotel, the Priory, with attached rhyming (and punning) fish and chip shop, ‘the Friary', a gift shop, an art shop with paintings in large gilt frames, the accent being on sheep and gloomy heather moors, and a pub. Maggie Blyth – there
is
a Maggie Blyth, I have met her – is a chic dress shop for sophisticated ladies. Here, Catherine has shopped and I have bought for her. Hard by, for a time, was Maggie Blyth Men, a similar showcase for stylish males, where sitting at his desk was
Garry Blyth himself, coiffed, with a cravat at his neck. Alas, Maggie Blyth Men did not last. On a return visit, I find it shuttered and bare.

In the centre of the Square, a small stone obelisk commemorates war dead – not those of the world wars but men who died in South Africa in the Boer War of 1899–1902. There's a particular reason for this. The inscription tells that it was erected in 1905 by Lovat tenantry to commemorate the raising of the Lovat Scouts for service in South Africa by Simon Joseph 16th Lord Lovat ‘who desired to shew that the martial spirit of their forefathers still animates the Highlanders of to-day and whose confidence was justified by the success in the field of the gallant corps whose existence was due to his loyalty and patriotism'. It was Lovat's belief that stalkers and gillies, marksmen all, handy with their ponies and trained in stealthy approach over rough country, would be well qualified to meet the Boer irregulars on the veldt. Many enlisted.

All Strathglass was Lovat country. Their lands stretched from Beauly to the far west and the Lovat baronial seat, Beaufort Castle, is just a mile or two away – former seat, it should be said, for, now that the Lovat wealth and lands have been frittered away, it belongs to Ann Gloag of Stagecoach, businesswoman and philanthropist. Close to the Square is a house that used to be the Lovat Estate office and, beside that, the Lovat Arms Hotel, grandest building in town –
modestly
grand, as befits the place – somewhat French in style with mansard roof. Here Catherine and I spent a couple of nights, attracted by its homely atmosphere – log fire blazing in the hearth – and sleeping under a canopy swagged in tartan. One night, a party of elderly bus trippers made merry in the dining room. One dame in her 70s introduced us to her companion: ‘He's not my husband – he's the boyfriend.' Cackle, cackle.

A short step from the Square, there is a time capsule: Campbell and Co., Highland outfitters ‘by royal appointment' (the Queen Mum), where you may be served by the latest Campbell in the line and his two elegant sisters. Here I place an order for breeks or plus-twos, the tweed breeches worn as working garb by stalkers and farmers and casually by the gentry and wealthy visitors who like to show a well-turned leg.

In a small back room lined with pictures of tartan-clad clansmen, silver-haired James Campbell takes my measurements, shows his pattern books and I choose a check. It's a surprise to see how many colours are combined in the weave though the overall effect is muted – there are at least three shades of green, from olive to very nearly black, through which run thin lines of mustard and red.

James lays out his two big pattern books on the table –
Scottish Estate Tweeds
and
Our Scottish District Checks
– heavy, floppy volumes of sample patches. In the old days, lairds used to dress their servants with their own choice of livery. Estate tweeds were big business when small armies of outdoor workers were employed – keepers, stalkers, gillies, gardeners, foresters and hands, all to be clad. It's still done, though on a lesser scale, says James. When an estate changes hands it's not unusual for the new owner, English, American, Scandinavian or Arab perhaps, to change the livery to a style more to his taste.

He's heard tales of his grandfather taking to the moors in company with a landed client to match the colours of a proposed tweed to the tones of the heather, the grasses, the mosses. In what season? For the colours change. Late summer and early autumn might be best when the sporting season is at its height.

You step inside the shop and feel the years roll back – wooden shelves heaped with rolls of tweed, deerstalker hats, pork pies and other country headgear piled up in pagoda-like stacks, racks of heavyweight jackets and breeches – such an air of yesteryear. An American who came into the shop was so entranced that he photographed it from every angle, saying that he wanted to replicate it in the States.

But what's to come? Some day, all this must change and probably not for the better. Ian at Comar Lodge thinks so. He forecasts that the Campbells will eventually sell and whoever buys the shop won't keep it that way and may not even continue the business. It's the prime site on the main street and it's not the tweeds sold there that counts. The ironmonger's next door was similarly old-fashioned until it was reinvented 20 years ago – although not wholly, for the wooden stairs creak as they always did and there's still old timber panelling on the upper floor.

James Campbell would hate the shop to change but there's no one to take over – he and his sisters are the last of the line. They'll have no trouble selling. When they moved from the flat above the shop to a bungalow nearby, rumours circulated that they were giving up the business and offers to buy flooded in.

The business began in 1858 under a different name and the Campbell interest came when James's grandfather married a daughter of the firm. It's been Campbell & Co. since the 1920s. James says the '70s to the '90s were the boom years, with the bulk of the trade coming from American visitors. Now there are fewer Americans around and business is calmer.

Royalty has shopped here, hence the coat of arms on the facade. The Queen Mother would despatch an equerry for her shopping and Princess Margaret came in person. Camilla has been but not Charles so far. The coat of arms – ‘by royal appointment' – has to come down under a rule that declares it must be removed five years after the royal customer's death. It will then join another in the attic from the short reign of Edward VIII. Did Mrs Simpson ever call? Probably not.

James is no ordinary tailor and outfitter. He's been made a papal knight, at the mention of which he smiles deprecatingly. How many of us have had their inside leg measured by a papal knight?

70

In a small antique shop just off the Square, the lights glint on silver and a shelf crowded with Staffordshire figures, historic and mythical, including the Gladstones, Mr and Mrs. He's severe, she frumpish. Who'd buy Mr Gladstone now, four times prime minister, classical scholar and grand old man though he was in his time? I for one, if I'd the money to spare – I've a soft spot for him.

There's local interest. Gladstone came to Guisachan as a house guest when elderly and out of office and past all thought of wielding his axe on Tweedmouth trees.

The Staffordshire Gladstone is ghostly in plain white glaze relieved only by a hint of gold on the waistcoat, a touch of black on his toecaps and black pinpoint eyes. I could have had him for £145 or £400 the pair. So he's worth more with his missus than alone.