Season in Strathglass (4 page)

7

At the Spar shop, Cannich.

Here comes the Charm in deerstalker hat, upright on a yellow bike, pedalling in stately fashion down the road past the hotel.

He dismounts to buy milk and a loaf, a tall figure, erect, elderly, white moustached. I say hello and we talk a bit.

‘Blethering again,' says a man in passing.

The Charm remembers Tom Weir in Affric. He showed him an eagle's nest and he admired the wee man's neat footwork on rock.

Blethering . . . For no reason at all, he starts to reminisce about the war and how he was captured at St Valery, fighting with the Highland Division in the rearguard on the way to Dunkirk. It rankles still that they were left behind. How the Germans walked their prisoners all the way to Poland, where he worked in a coal mine deep underground for two years. After that, they were marched back again, on the road from January to March, their progress marked by a line of turds in the snow, mile after mile.

As I leave the shop with the newspapers under my arm there's no sign of life at the sad hotel across the road. Nor at the distressed cottage in a field round the corner with sagging tin roof and flaking walls. It looks derelict but someone lives there and in the small caravan parked beside it all the same. He's called Geordie. His rag-fleeced sheep crop the grass around the cottage and the neighbours complain when they stray beyond. Gardens are sacrosanct.

Further on, past the shinty park, are the modern bungalows of ‘Little England', an unofficial name where, no doubt, few of the residents speak with a good Scots accent. Not that it matters – incomers or not, we're all Jock Tamson's bairns, aren't we? Among the pine trees stands Marydale Church and Sister Petra Clare's solitary quarters, silent and still, peaceful as should be.

A puddly road leads to the caravans and my temporary quarters. I turn in, thinking that this place begins to feel like home. I could live here – well, for a little while at least. On the other hand, I'm not country and I suspect I'd find it hard to adjust. I wave to Matt who runs the site with amiable efficiency. An incomer from the south, he has seamlessly integrated into the community – obviously no problem for him. Little England? Pah!

8

I find Finlay Macrae at home in Dingwall.

It's 30 years after his meeting with Tom Weir in Affric. The inky beard is turning to grey. Tweed breeches knotted above sturdy calves. On the table lies a box with a set of bagpipes – he's a great piper. Affric pinewood has echoed to his tunes. When a new forestry office was to be built at Dingwall, he had the plans changed so there was room in the corridor for him to pace up and down while he practised.

A Skye man, Finlay was reluctant to leave the west coast when his job took him to Easter Ross. ‘The bottom fell out of my world,' he says. But that was before he found Glen Affric. ‘When I first saw Affric, the colour was on the birch and it was a wonderland.'

Finlay became a conservationist when it wasn't orthodox forestry to protect the Caledonian pinewoods.

He got to know the wildlife.

Birds you get in Affric are the pinewood specialists, the caper [capercaillie], the crested tit, Scottish crossbill. The wryneck has been seen. Also associated waders, the red and black-throated diver, the osprey. Siskin and redpoll, they all add to the variety. And the moorland birds, greenshank, golden plover, the dotterel and the ptarmigan, both of which are found only above two thousand feet. The ring ouzel can be heard.

The two best times to see Affric are in May with a little snow on the tops and fresh growth on the birch shading into the deep green of the pine, and in autumn when all the colours are showing. In the days before good communications I would just disappear into the forest.

Finlay tells me that once when he and a colleague had taken a boat up Loch Mullardoch and were walking along the rough ground on the south side, they came on a set of bare bones bleached white – the skeleton of a horse picked clean. When he told this to an old forester later, the man said, ‘That would be Jimmy.' Those were the days when horses did the heavy hauling. The forester was working with Jimmy the Clydesdale when the horse slipped and broke a leg. They had to leave him lying and next morning they went back and shot him.

9

‘You've come at the right time,' says Sister Petra Clare. ‘I've just put the kettle on.'

A place is laid on the plain deal table, with a water jug and a glass. Sister lives frugally. We have coffee and she offers dry bread from a bowl.

Her face is pale, the skin translucent and a little waxy like alabaster, which suggests too much time spent indoors. A web of tiny wrinkles fans from the corners of her eyes when she smiles. A girlish smile. She wears a light blue top over a white smock. Under the skirts, I notice thick grey socks and trainers.

Propped against the wall is a large icon of the virgin and child against a background of gold lustre. Bare toes peep from under her purple robe and her hands are open as though offering the child for adoration as he floats free before her breast. The Madonna's nose is long and thin, with a bump in it. (I think of the poet Edith Sitwell, pictured in the biography I'm reading.) Under the straight line of her eyebrows, her eyes are brown.

Brown eyes? Do we know this? Is it biblical?

‘Well,' says Sister, ‘brown eyes seem to be right for the Middle East. But let's be honest, brown or blue, who knows?'

She invites me to see her workroom. This is a privilege since it's in the quarters reserved for female retreat and normally out of bounds to men.

On a bench, laid out like an alchemist's stall, is her collection of pigments in bottles and boxes containing brightly coloured powders, some ground from rock or clay, others reduced from metals and many scarce and difficult to get – in some cases because of health and safety regulations. One box contains a powder of viridian brightness called Moscow green, precious because it's no longer to be had.

Next door is her work in progress – a series of panels commissioned to celebrate the return of the Carmelite order to Britain after many years in exile. Under a golden sky, a mitred ecclesiastical figure – the patriarch of Jerusalem – sits on a throne with a tip of crimson cushion peeping from under his bottom. He's presenting a scroll to the leader of the newly founded order of Carmelite monks who kneels at his feet.

The patriarch wears a white gown embroidered with pale blue crosses, while the Carmelite is more humbly dressed in a woolly garment hooped bee-like in bands of white and brown. This two-tone fashion, says Sister, caused a stir. The Carmelites were mocked as the ‘pied' brotherhood – pied as in magpies and other birds of variegated plumage – as a result of which they changed into habits in a less flamboyant style. Also in the frame is the prophet Elijah, by virtue of the time he spent as a hermit on Mount Carmel, and a number of brothers busy at various tasks. Some chop logs for firewood, one carries freshly baked loaves from the oven, another washes his pied habit in a tub and yet another scans an illustrated text. A group of monks appears to be just gossiping, passing the time of day.

Sister explains that the Carmelites owe their origin to the decision of certain crusading knights to opt out of their mission to kill infidels, seeking salvation instead on Mount Carmel, Elijah's former retreat in the Holy Land. ‘I think of them as the first conscientious objectors,' she says. ‘I'm not sure whether it was the third or fourth crusade. The third was Richard the Lionheart. The fourth was the sack of Constantinople – if so, they were well out of it.'

Every year Byzantium renews itself in Marydale, a little. Here Sister Petra Clare runs a class in icon making (‘You don't call it painting,' she explains. ‘Technically, you
write
an icon.')

She extends an invitation: ‘Come and see us.' So I shall.

10

Marydale, autumn.

How to write an icon. Class starts in the kitchen with a reading from a book on the veneration of icons as established by the Council of Nicaea (now Iznik in Turkey) in the year 787. In spite of the dry language, the council appears to have been a stormy affair – lots of long beards wagging. ‘It got quite venomous,' she says. ‘Rather like prime minister's question time in parliament. They were really going at it.'

We watch a slide show of icons, with commentary by Sister, who draws attention to an image of James and Peter tumbling in space, weightless like astronauts, Peter head over heels: ‘Just look at the arm and leg movement.' Andrew in swirling cloak: ‘The garments point up to the head of the saint like a gentle candle flame, St Andrew inspired by the holy spirit.' Christ
in glory framed or, rather, bracketed by Elijah and Moses: ‘See how their forms echo the oreole.' And: ‘See how Christ's feet are never planted but seem to float. The feet become irrelevant to the body weight.'

In such ecstatic freefall, feet can be fun. ‘I always think humour comes out in the feet. You can imagine little dialogues going on between them.'

Class takes place in a small bare hall adjoining the church where work progresses at tables strewn with papers and pencils, tracings and sketches. Sister moves round each student, nodding approval or giving advice:

Never start without thinking of the form . . . Work out from the energy lines . . . Get the proportions right and you find where the energies are, then you can fire away . . . Iconography is like Gregorian chant – there are things you don't grasp until you've practised it again and again.

Four students, all male, three of them priests and none of them young, are seated at the tables. Brian, an Anglican priest in his 60s from Loughborough, attends every year. He says he can't draw and traces every line, which Sister rather disapproves of. David is clearly more accomplished – he's meticulously outlining a Christ figure on squared paper. He says he has drawn and painted for more than 40 years, is a deacon in the Birmingham diocese and would have trained for the priesthood if he hadn't been married. Doctoring was his profession until he retired after a heart attack. Aonghas, small and dark, is a priest in Dublin. Michael, too, is a priest, formerly in the Glasgow housing estate of Drumchapel but now living and working in the north of Scotland. He wears a small silver cross on his jumper.

At midday pencils are laid aside and we cross to the church and climb to the gallery, ducking heads on the twisting stair, where the five of us make a crowd. In the gallery, candles illuminate several small icons each the size of a postcard.

Sister gives a short reading, touches a finger on the keyboard in front of her to find a note and waveringly chants the first phrase, followed by Michael's ringing baritone and rather feebly by the others. The text seems to be a dialogue with God, a series of alternating couplets seeking protection from, and vengeance on, the enemy.
Ding them doon!
We shuffle to our feet and sit again at intervals between psalms, with periods of silence for contemplation and prayer.

A short break outdoors in the sunshine follows, terminated by Sister vigorously ringing a large handbell as a summons to lunch.

Lunch at Marydale is a silent feast. We do not talk. Under a big cross on the dining-room wall, the table is set with thick crockery plates and bowls decorated with a gilt cross, upturned glasses and cutlery laid on napkins. There's a jug of water and cartons of apple and orange juice. After a short reading and a prayer, Sister leads us in line into the kitchen, where she ladles herself lentil soup from the pot, thick and brown, and we follow. We cut hunks of brown bread from a loaf on the sideboard, take a lump of cheese, a spoonful of pâté and an apple, banana or peach from the fruit bowl.

Once all are seated, Sister switches on an old tape machine on the windowsill and out booms an ecclesiastical voice reverberating in some church or perhaps cathedral, delivering a homily on the meaning (or, rather, the five meanings) of Lent – a journey, an offering, a fasting, a forgiving . . . and the fifth? I forget the fifth. But I recall the joke – you can eat steak every day including Friday, says the bishop on tape, and still be more forgiving than if you fast on lentils. A recorded titter ripples round the congregation and we chuckle too as we spoon our lentil soup.

From my seat at the end of the table, I look out through the window at a tree-covered hillside, a sky puffy with white clouds and, closer at hand, a woman cultivating the monastic garden, an appropriately life-enhancing (and biblical) activity.

11

Class is coming to its end. David has finished his icon, a grave greybeard St Nicholas with a pattern of crosses on his dress. Michael adds the last touches to the picture on his easel. Brian pores over a notebook. Sister sits with Aonghas, who's rubbing out bits of his pencil work, correcting the line.

‘You missed the monks,' says Patricia when I return later to say goodbye. Patricia, from Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, is in retreat at the Marydale skete.

If only I'd known . . . This morning, I've been in Glen Affric and found the car park at the top of the glen thronged. Milling around three white minivans was more than a score of men of all ages, dressed in jeans or leather jerkins or tweed jackets, chattering and laughing. Somehow they didn't look like your average tourists. Who could they be? Monks from Pluscarden Abbey, as I learned later.

Once a year they break free of the cloisters and they'd called at Marydale for the midday office. They sang with gusto – 30 male voices raised in praise. The rafters rang.

Sister says they arrived out of the blue. She thought they might have left a message warning of their visit but she hadn't checked her emails. She's not very practical that way, which figures. Nuns are unworldly – right?

12

Breakfast at Comar Lodge, Ian at the Aga with the frying pan in his hand (‘One egg or two?').

Where's a good short walk in the neighbourhood? – ‘The Hill Lochs,' says he. ‘Start at Tomich.'

Tomich, three miles upstream from Cannich, looks a village out of place and time. It's a row of neat stone cottages all built to the same pattern, with latticed attic windows and flower baskets at the doors. There's more to it than that, but not much. These doll's-house cottages survive more or less as built, though gentrified now, along with a small hotel and a tiny Post Office – a wooden chalet painted blue with fretwork eaves, open for business six hours a week. At the roadside stands a memorial drinking
trough, with fountain (now dry) in a shell-like recess from which, in another climate, I fancy Venus might emerge naked. But it's springtime in Tomich with a frost on the ground and a nip in the air.

The fountain bears medallion portraits of the Tweedmouths, lord and lady, in low relief. All the land for miles around belonged to the Tweedmouths and Tomich was their model village.

Tall iron ornamental gates stand permanently open at a wonky angle. At the top of the drive a stable block, unseen from the road, comes suddenly into view. This is no ordinary stable block but a rather grand affair, a handsome steading in pink stone designed to impress, with a clock tower above the archway. It has been converted into tourist accommodation but this is the slack season and there's no one about except for a man in a tractor digging in the field.

Not far from this elegant stable block is a villa in the same pink sandstone, which used to be the home farm for the Guisachan Estate in the Tweedmouths' day. Here lives Donald Fraser, once a farmer in a gentlemanly sort of way, amateur sailor and owner of the remains of the estate.

The track leads up past the stable block to open moorland, a heather-darkened landscape of hollows and hillocks. Ahead there's a glint of water – Loch a'Ghreidlein, the first of the Hill Lochs. A low hill above it is topped by what might be, as seen from a distance, a slender obelisk, a needle outlined against the sky. In spite of its name, Beinn Mhor (Big Hill), it is only 401 metres high but the climb is stiff enough to cause me to break sweat. At the top, I find the heather burned off and green shoots already poking through the tangle of charred stems. They crunch pleasantly underfoot.

The monument turns out to be a Celtic cross engraved with the names Edward, Lord Tweedmouth (died 1909) and Fanny, his lady (1904), erected – it says – by the grateful tenants of Guisachan Estate. (Grateful for what?)

Tweedmouth? It sounds familiar. But I'm thinking John Buchan of
The Thirty-Nine Steps
and other ‘shockers' as he called them, later a grand public servant and consequently Lord Tweedsmuir. Tweedmouth was obviously quite another fellow.

There are five Hill Lochs but from the top of Beinn Mhor I see only two. The three smallest lochans in the chain are hidden by a shoulder of the hill and by dips and rises in the land below. This is a Lakeland in miniature, the lochs diminishing in size to the smallest only 30 or 40 metres across. Even that pool has a name – Loch na Gobhlaig. Southwards from my viewpoint lies a swathe of dark conifer woodland with pale patches of larch showing through. In the days of the Tweedmouths, this was open moorland. Towards the west rises the knobbly brow and steep scarp of the little hill Beinn nan Sparra (Hill of the Spars), shaggy with scattered pine trees. A string of pylons punctuates the middle distance. In the far west, the high hills of Affric and Kintail stretch across the horizon streaked with snow. Through half-closed eyes – I squint against the wind – they have the look of distant Alps.

It's chilly, winter barely gone. I look around briefly, take it all in, then hasten down.

Perched over the water's edge at Loch a'Ghreidlein is a wooden boathouse and, close by it, a beehive-shaped cairn of grouted stones blotched with golden lichens, ‘in memory of a lover of this countryside' – a fisherman no doubt. At the foot of the cairn is the bone of a small animal, picked clean by hoodie crow or some hook-billed bird.

In the shallows further round the lochan, just under the surface, there lurks ghostly debris – blanched branches and tree stumps embedded in the peat. No trees grow round the Hill Lochs now.