Season in Strathglass (17 page)

71

Strolling in the Square in the evening, I stop at the art shop to gaze at a large coloured engraving on an easel in the window. It's a stalking scene – or, rather, an
après
stalking scene. In the foreground, figures in Highland dress led by a piper cross a humpback bridge. There's a gillie with the dogs and, on the crown of the bridge, the chieftain walks tall, a tartan plaid slung over his shoulder and a feather in his cap, followed by two retainers and a boy leading two ponies with stags slung sack-like across their backs, antlers spiked against the sky. In the rear, a stalker with guns on his shoulder chats to a group of peasant women at the wayside. A sliver of blue loch is just visible beyond, with snow-capped hills in the distance. A copperplate inscription reads
The Chief's Return from Deer Stalking
and the artist is named as Sir Edwin Landseer.

Landseer, a great favourite of the Victorians, is unfashionable now but this Landseer I liked. It's deer stalking as grand opera. Did it ever happen that way? Since Landseer took pride in the accuracy of his scenes despite a tendency to romanticise, it probably did. It's different nowadays. Where's your Highland dress, the full panoply? And the ponies? Gone, mostly, ousted by the stalkers' Argocats and Land Rovers.

Next morning, I return to the shop and a deal is done.
Return from Stalking
is lifted from its easel and put into store to be collected later and I amble back to the guest house where I've spent the night.

This guest house is rather grand in its way – a large villa close to the Square with spacious rooms reached by a handsome staircase. On the landing stands a wardrobe in dark figured wood garnished with carved oak leaves, about nine feet tall and wide in proportion. Thinking of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
,
I sneak a glance inside but it doesn't lead to Narnia. The way is blocked by neat piles of bed linen.

72

A gate leads off the Square into the grounds of a ruined priory as reclusive as the monks who once lived there – a gaunt building screened by big trees. Grandest of all is a sycamore with a huge spread of foliage held aloft on up-stretched boughs. But the elm tree beside the gate is a sad spectacle – an ancient ruin to match the priory. It's said to have been planted by Mary Queen of Scots and looks its age – a time-wizened stem leaning at an angle, shorn of its crown from which a cluster of sprouting shoots indicate the last snatch at life of a decaying leviathan. Two more elderly elms shade the few gravestones at their feet. One, split down the middle and held together by webbing straps, gets regular health checks and medication from Historic Scotland.

First glimpse of the building is of a bare red sandstone gable where the great window was, stark against the sky. The body of the church is roofless. The nave is high and narrow, with tombstones sunk flat on the turf floor. On one side are three pear-shaped windows, the stone salt-bitten and etched by wind and rain. There's a feeling of arrested decay about the place. Why was it abandoned to the elements and when? Possibly misguided zealotry on the part of Protestant reformers, the dilapidating rage of religious fundamentalists. The glib answer is to blame John Knox.

According to an information panel, the priory was established in 1230 though the ruined building dates from later. It was, it says on the board, a Valliscaulian foundation – an order of monks which took its name from its place of origin, the Val-des-Choux (Valley of the Cabbages) near Dijon. A maximum of 20 monks was permitted in Valliscaulian houses and it's suggested that Beauly housed no more than a handful. Only the prior had contact with the world.

Life was hard. Silence reigned. They had no mattresses. A thankless regime. They lived in hope of what? Of their daily bread and ale or of something more than the bare necessities? Salvation, I guess.

73

The station at Beauly is really only a halt. You stick your hand out and the train stops. A single line of rail curls round the tiny platform which is only one coach long. Beauly scrapes on to the railway map but only just.

To the left, the line disappears under the road through an arch of red sandstone, buttressed these days by concrete. That way leads, several hours up the line, to Thurso and Wick in the far north. Inverness is the other way. At the end of the short platform, signs poke out from spires of rosebay willow herb warning: ‘Do not alight here'. You'd tumble into the undergrowth if you did. ‘

‘Alight' – it's curious word, gives pause for thought. Railways like it but you don't see it much elsewhere. I look up a dictionary. ‘
Rather formal or old use
,' says Chambers. ‘
Poetic
,' says another. Or, as Samuel Johnson had it long ago, ‘The word implies the idea of descending; as, of a bird from the wing, a traveller from his horse or carriage.'

On this sunny morning, delicate leaves of wych elm flutter down from the trees to settle on the track. Oddments of debris litter the elderly wooden sleepers – an old glass bottle, once green but now opaque, coated with black oil as if transmuted. When did I last see timber sleepers? Ageing, dark brown, knotted and split – a reminder of the time when wheels on rails went clickety-click and still do here.

A peacock butterfly settles on the platform edge, unfolding its wings to the sun's rays. ‘A peacock alighted (alit?) on the platform edge' –
poetic
.

74

In bed at Comar Lodge, reaching for a book to read from the selection on the bedside table, I find this:
Paul Kruger, His Life and Times
, a faded edition of more than 30 years ago by a Cambridge academic. Boer Wars etc. – a bit esoteric for a B&B. I wonder who left it there.

I read Kruger's words, I hear them gruff and guttural: ‘Whether we conquer or die, freedom will come to Africa as surely as the sun rises through tomorrow's clouds . . . Then shall it be from Zambesi to Simon's Bay, Africa for the Afrikanders.' Wrong, of course – when freedom came, the sun rose not on Afrikaaners but black Africans.

75

Scott multi-tasks. He grows his own food. He drives a van for the library service, delivering books to the housebound. He takes a hand with the desktop publishing business his wife runs – she's also the school secretary. And he's the district's part-time registrar.

Deanie is two houses and a ruin reached by way of a rough track. It's the last outpost of Lovat land in the glen, sandwiched as it is between Mr Salleh's Braulen Estate and Frank Spencer-Nairn's Culligran.

We sit on a bench looking down the garden Scott made – a tiny pool, poppies in bloom, other flowers and shrubs and a vegetable patch, of course. He points to the corner where he has planted the Gaelic alphabet – in other words, the 18 trees which, in folklore, represent the Gaelic letters. They're growing sturdily – Gaelic thrives in his garden. He says that, when he came to Deanie, it took three days to move in all his household goods mainly because of the compost, which is close to his heart. He loaded it onto a trailer and brought it all with him. ‘I couldn't leave it,' he says, feelingly.

Being a peripatetic registrar here can be demanding. One wedding at which he officiated took place beside a lochan above Loch Monar, a romantic spot or so the happy couple thought until the tempest struck. The wind howled and the rain bucketed. A dozen or so guests including a mother and her seven-month-old baby turned up for the ceremony, dripping, some trudging up the muddy track, others jolting along in a stalkers' vehicle. They'd brought a tent but failed to pitch it in the storm so the wedding took place in the open and, on the way down, the walkers had to wade through two burns in spate.

76

It's 10 miles round Loch Affric. The river's in turmoil and all the burns are high, spilling over the rough track often ankle deep. I splash through on submerged stone, thinking, ‘What will these burns be like later when the sodden hills have released all their weight of water?' Stalkers' vehicles have churned the peat in many places and, a short way off the track, I see two figures hunched in a parked Argocat, peering into the gloom. Not a good day for their sport, I guess.

Out of the landscape comes the only human I'll meet from first to last, a young Frenchman, heavily laden, who's trekked in from the west coast, having stopped overnight at Alltbeithe. It's not the weather that bothers him, he says, but the midges.

In Cannich, I dry off in the Slaters Arms and, coming out, I meet John MacLennan, his face burnished by the wind. He's been out on the hill all day.

‘Have a dram,' I say.

But he declines. ‘I've had a few already,' he responds with that wee smile of his.

77

The turbines are running at Fasnakyle Power Station – I know because of the Niagara cascading into the river below it, churning the stream into whirlpools. The power station, dominating a bend in the Affric, is a handsome building in blond stone which I admire every time I pass. There's even sculpture on the facade – Celtic beasts carved by Hew Lorimer, a sculptor who, like his mentor Eric Gill, believed that art has a spiritual function. Let there be light and there was light – with the help of the North of Scotland Hydroelectric Board.

A man in a yellow hard hat doesn't think I should enter but I manage to glance through the open door of the turbine hall. It's high, bright and airy, with three turbine domes in line down the centre of the floor like giant toadstools. There's a sudden blast of colour – blue turbines, white walls, green steel girders high up under the yellow roof supporting a yellow travelling crane.

What a space. It takes the breath away. Why, it could even become the Highland Tate Modern, some day. Smaller than that London one, true, but brighter.

78

A horse has been seen inside the old Glen Affric Hotel.

Inside
? That's right. At a window looking out. Two people have told me so.

I know Louise has a horse, but this?

I don't know what to think.

79

Walter and Bob bustle into the kitchen at the Backpackers. Walter is tall and long-legged, a bit gaunt, with white wavy hair. Bob is bald, maybe a bit shorter, plumper and he wears glasses. They've just arrived after tramping up several hills together and tomorrow they'll climb some more. Walter and Bob are seasoned in the hills.

We share the last couple of inches in Walter's whisky bottle and, when that's done, Bob uncorks another.
Slainte!
They invite me to share their meal of beans and bolognaise and potatoes all mixed up in the same pot.

This pair could reminisce about hills all night long. Mam Sodhail isn't difficult, says Walter, big hill though it is. There's a good path right to the top. He says there's a big cairn and the ruin of a stone hut at the summit.

After supper, they head for a pint at the Slaters Arms while I stay on to write up notes. My cell-like room is bare and somewhat chilly. A smell of stale smoke from last night's fire drifts from the stove in the lounge. It's not cosy.

So I phone George at Upper Glassburn and book a room for tomorrow night. ‘Would you have dinner?' No need to ask.

80

The old Scottish Mountaineering Club's well-thumbed guide
The Western Highlands
, published nearly 80 years ago, may not be up to date but, between its faded red covers, it still makes good reading. I can't say the same for the maps. The scale is too small, the detail too crowded and the emphasis whimsical. Beauly is set in bigger type than Inverness, which can never have seemed right. Drumnadrochit rates notice only as Drumnadrochit Hotel and there's no mention of Cannich at all, just the Glen Affric Hotel. Loch Beinn a'Mheadhoin is spelt in the old style, as pronounced – Beneveian – which I can approve of.

This note occurs:

Mam Sodhail and Sgurr na Lapaich. On account of their commanding position in the North-West of Scotland these two mountains were made important stations for the Principal Triangulation in connection with the Ordnance Survey of the British Isles. The station on Mam Sodhail was on the highest point of the mountain, and was marked by a stone pile, 23 feet high and 60 feet in circumference . . .

That's a lot of stones.

A more recent Munro book tells more: ‘The summit has a huge circular cairn which was an important point in the Ordnance Survey's primary triangulation of Scotland in the 1840s.'

In the National Library of Scotland's map room in Edinburgh, I open a large leather-covered volume –
Account of the Observations of the Principal Triangulations
, being an ‘account of the Observations of the Principal Triangulation; and of the Figure, dimensions & mean specific gravity of the Earth as derived therefrom', drawn up, as it says, by Captain Alexander Ross Clarke of the Royal Engineers.

I read that among the sites from which observations were made was ‘the mountain of Mamsuil [
sic
] on the borders of the counties of Ross and Inverness, about 7 miles north-west of Captain Inge's shooting lodge at Glen Affaric and 20 miles west of Inverncannich'.

On this summit, a Colour-Sergeant J Winzer and his party of soldier-surveyors lodged or camped throughout the month of August and possibly longer in 1848, scanning the surrounding high points, taking bearings, measuring angles and recording distances. Rain, hail or shine. It can be wild up there in any season but the official report makes no mention of the weather.

I shall follow in your footsteps, Sergeant Winzer.

81

The forecast's not good. North-westerly winds up to 30 miles an hour on the hills ‘will impede steady walking on higher exposed areas'. Risk of one or two flurries of hail and snow on the highest summits.

Mam Sodhail is 1,181 metres (3,862 feet old style) – you don't get much higher. But, if not now, when?

I'm on the track along Loch Affric, north side, at 8.20 in the morning. The sky's a welter of varying shades of grey with fast-moving clouds parting and swiftly closing over scant patches of blue. There's some hope but it's dark and sombre over by Kintail where the weather's coming from. The wind whips up waves across the loch and there's a line of thin foam where they break on the shore.

Seen from a distance, the path ascending the deep-cut glaciated valley appears as a long brown thread. The multitudinous burns are knotted strands of white water. Somewhere above is the hill, invisible as yet in a dense bank of mist. Stray shafts of wan sunlight cast pools of bright green on the hillside with theatrical effect. An embryonic rainbow flickers through the mist.

The way, washed by floodwater, is stony and steep. Loose stones clatter and roll under my feet – such attractive stones they are, rounded and veined and glistening in the wet.

I linger in the corrie, hoping for signs that the mist will clear for a decent interval. A sudden glimpse of the summit is all too brief – the veil falls again but there's sufficient promise to draw me onwards. In a grassy meadow under an abrupt scarp, an infant burn exits from a pool, whence the path climbs steeply in measured zigzags up to the ridge. It's a craftwork of canny engineering from Victorian days when stalkers' paths were maintained and it still serves. Here Sergeant Winzer and his companions sweated in their serge uniform jackets in the summer of '48. Here their ponies or mules picked their way up, labouring under loads of timber for building, the heavy theodolite and its associated impedimenta, food and cooking utensils, everything required for their encampment. Was there a regular traffic up and down this track during their occupation of the mountain top or did they hold out, isolated, cut off for the duration? I can only speculate.

Behind me, the glen unfolds below in a long bare corridor reaching towards the loch shore. There's no sign of life on the path though it's visible for most of its length. No other walker has appeared all day. It seems strange to have this hill all to myself when the summer's barely gone.

On the exposed ridge, the wind is less fierce than anticipated, buffeting me and chilling my hands but less troublesome than the forecast implied. It's easy walking now – a low-angled ascent over firm ground littered with stones. A corner of drystane wall emerges from the dimness, the remains of a substantial hut – two chambers linked by a low arch. I have to duck to enter.

The mist clears briefly. Views come and go in swift succession and suddenly the cairn built by the triangulators of '48 appears on the crest – a squat circular wall like an Iron Age broch broken-off at the top. It's solidly built like some kind of fortification (army engineers knew their masonry defences) and about nine feet high, half its original height. When whole, it must have been awesome.