Season in Strathglass (6 page)

17

Up before seven, I go outside for a breath of fresh air and walk among the pine trees at the caravan park. The ground is soft and mossy and scattered cones crackle under my feet. No one else stirs – it's Sunday and most of the vans are still unoccupied.

Sitting by the table at breakfast, I see cars arrive at the church across the road and people appear. I see Sister Petra Clare hurrying across the gravel to greet her flock, billowing in white.

I cycle by the river and stop at a little roadside cemetery. It's modern and not particularly picturesque. There's no church and never has been – no gravestones hoary with age. The broad River Affric swirls past under a high bank and a man up to his waist in the water is fishing. Not far beyond, where there's turbulence in the water, stands the Fasnakyle Power Station and, on the other side of the road, half hidden in the trees, is a substation festooned with power lines and beside it is the small stone villa at the top of a slope where a Mr Kwint, owner of a nearby estate, stays when he visits his land from his home in Holland. There's no other habitation except for a derelict but-and-ben, once home to Black Sandy (black because of his beard, not his nature).

I push open the iron gate and enter. Conifer and alder trees line three sides, with a trickle of burn, more of a ditch really, running over stones outside the fence. There are gravel paths and two or three neat rows of headstones in a grassy triangle, with gaps here and there and room for more. Most of the slabs are plain – some highly polished black granite. Some of the older stones are already dotted with lichens while a few of the more recent have pictures engraved on them – a deer on a hill and, on another, a shepherd and his dog (‘partner of Sheena', it says).

Turnover seems to be slow – there can't be more than 30 graves in all, dating from the '70s to the present.

I read the names. Here lies Clement Lister Skelton (August 1919 to February 1979), ‘actor and author'. What books, what stage? He left this world in confident assurance: ‘My love, my love, we will all be merry in heaven.' The posy of roses above his grave is only slightly faded.

There's an Ivan Orr Toulmin-Rothe, forester – a strangely exotic name. And Wladislaw Rura, occupation unspecified, with an eagle and gilt crown cut into the stone at the top and two lines in Polish below, now hard to decipher. Tender inscriptions, banal enough, reach out bravely beyond the formulaic – innocent expressions of grief carved in stone. Mary McKechnie, ‘asleep amid the hills she loved, to awake in heaven', joined 13 years later by her husband ‘who whilst walking in the hills lay down amongst them and fell asleep'. A cry for June Hamilton: ‘O for the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still.' A quotation? – not one that I recognise.

Most touching of all are the reminders of young lives lost, such as the 24-year-old soldier of the Queen's Own Highlanders: ‘May his sacrifice help to bring the peace and freedom for which he died' (forlorn hope). Saddest of all, the infant deaths – the child who died at Christmastime (a bambi on his stone), another, a ‘darling infant son' (a twin) and ‘our baby son . . . went to sleep'.

No one I knew lies here but I'm moved. I close the gate softly behind me.

18

Comar Lodge, five in the morning.

It's pitch dark, Ian and Jane still sleeping. I creep downstairs and walk gingerly down the lane by torchlight, startled by sounds of heavy breathing – unseen cattle in the field. Strong smell of dung and the warm gust of a beast's breath over the fence.

Headlights approach on the road and Dave the birdman pulls up in his Land Rover. He clears a space in the clutter and I climb aboard.

We head uphill from Cannich, turning off at a signpost indicating a chambered cairn. But old stones are for another day – we're off to witness a lek. Dave is the RSPB's man here and a lek is the dawn mating display of black grouse – cock birds facing up to their rivals and displaying in front of the females. (Black grouse are cousins of the more familiar red grouse and the now rare capercaillie, grandest bird of the forest.) Leks take place twice in the year, in spring and autumn. A brief flurry, says Dave, and then, soon after sunrise, the show's over.

The sky begins to lighten as we drive along a rough road through avenues of big trees, with a farmstead and a few old houses just visible at
a bridge over the River Enrick. Twice, gates barring the road have to be opened. We reach open moorland where a slit of water known as Loch Comhnard glints in the half-light. Here we leave the vehicle and Dave sets off long striding through shrubby heather sprinkled with tufts of white bog cotton – a favourite feed for black grouse, he says. I find it hard to keep up. The slope is sore on thigh muscles and the pulse races.

We can't be far from the action. There's a faint burbling in the air like the noise of distant running waters but in fact it's the sound of blackcock in a state of agitation. Dave scans the ground ahead with binoculars and finds birds clustered on a distant grassy ridge. He counts 11 but they're too far away to be seen with clarity – a small congregation of black blobs in jerky movement.

Is this all? Did we rise early for this? Frankly, I'm disappointed. It's not David Attenborough.

Now the sun edges above the low, blue, distant hills and strands of cloud on the horizon are barred with red. Hanks of mist shroud Affric and the glens of Strathglass. A rising wind chills on the small eminence on which we stand and gloves, muffler and woolly hat are welcome.

Dave decides to move on, leading the way through a tangle of recently felled young trees. They're lodgepole pines of North American origin and, as such, unwelcome on RSPB territory. Crossing this tract of deadwood and tussocks pitted with bog pools is hard labour. Two red deer move across the skyline on the far side of the Enrick and then a couple of roe deer hinds bound across the felled trees just ahead of us, white rumps bobbing.

All the time Dave's on the lookout for birdlife of all kinds – lark, thrush, lapwing in baggy-winged flight down by the loch. We hear the call of the curlew and the chip-chip of the crossbill. Two greylag geese rise from the loch, circle and return. Dave says the pair remain all year round, nesting in the heather close to the water. He hopes they'll breed.

Driving back along the Enrick, casting an eye about, Dave stops, raises his binoculars. Hush! He's seen three black grouse, two males and a female, just yards away in the roadside vegetation. They're clear to the
naked eye and, seen through binoculars, they leap in scale – the males large and glossy black with white under-feathers showing at their tails and bright red wattles above their eyes. One, speckled with white, is a young bird, probably a year old. One of the two males hops with fluttery bobs in the air, a foot or so off the ground, then pauses and stands casting haughty glances. His rival male lowers his head, stretches his neck and makes a running charge through the undergrowth. They square up to each other, jabbing and thrusting just short of making contact. Dave says there's seldom more to it than that, at most a few feathers will fly. Meanwhile the slender-necked, grey-brown female stands by patiently awaiting the outcome.

Dave is pleased to find them. He encouraged the farmer to graze his cattle here for a couple of months to promote the growth of a sward for the birds to feed on and here's evidence it has worked.

Another day, another early morning wait at the lane end. Dave's late. Five minutes, ten, fifteen . . . Cars go by, one two three, and a truck and then the farmer from down the lane who waves from his tractor. Otherwise the road is empty.

The old Land Rover appears at last and I hoist myself into the seat. Jenny the collie, who's been curled on the floor, rouses herself to lick me round the ear.

Again we bump along the Corrimony track to Loch Comhnard, where we tumble out and set foot on a heathery hill.

‘Listen!' says Dave and he purses his lips and cheep-cheeps. Chip-chip comes back a faint call. ‘Reed bunting,' says he.

Two dots curve above our heads: ‘Meadow pipit chasing a cuckoo.' (Small brown birds in flight look much alike to me.) Then, ‘Mistle thrush,' as another brown bird lands on the grass not far from where we stand. From uphill, where a big old rowan leans over a rocky cleft, comes an imperative cry: ‘Chaffinch.' But even I know that.

Today we're looking for trees – seedling trees in trial plots planted by the RSPB with the long-term aim of improving the habitat for bird
life, hence Dave's interest. The trees will provide shelter and food for several species but mainly black grouse. Here, on this hillock, the carpet of brown heather is sprinkled with green dots where infant pine trees are just beginning to poke above the vegetation.

A wooden stake has been driven into the ground in the centre of the plot. Dave attaches a tape measure to the stake then draws out the tape to precisely 5.6 metres. My job is to walk in a circle round the post like a horse in a meal mill, keeping the tape taut, while he hunkers down and notes the condition of each seedling tree within the defined circle, assessing its health and measuring its growth since the last inspection.

One specimen has a sickly yellowy look which indicates that it's severely parched. Dave blames a bone-dry April. ‘Pathetic,' he says.

Dave's interest in the progress of his plants is more than botanical. Money comes into it. The trial plots are subsidised by grants and if too few saplings come away in a given period, the Forestry Commission will claim the money back. So far so good – Dave reckons that even the feeble specimen has made sufficient growth to count.

The next plot lies in a hollow. Dave, stricken: ‘Oh my God, pine weevil. God, there's always something.' He finds a little curled-up caterpillar on a pine shoot, then the weevil itself, which he pinches between his fingers. He discovers no more so it's hardly an infestation. ‘We may get away with it.' Then on second thoughts, dolefully: ‘Maybe we'll have to spray after all.' Chemical sprays are not good news for conservationists.

All's well in a dell where the heather grows high and the pine plants are fresh and sturdy, flourishing in the shelter. ‘Nice dry bank, sunny situation – just fine.' And ‘Wow, look at that. Don't want to wax lyrical but that one is
away
.'

Everywhere there are wildflowers. Wood avens, globeflower, chickweed wintergreen, plenty of wood anemone and a little blue flower carried on slender stems springing from fleshy leaves – butterwort, the fly eater.

All around there's a promising growth of shrubby things. I prick my finger on a little broom-like shrub – ‘Petty whin,' says Dave (petty for small). It's something I've never seen, or at least never noticed before, though Dave says there's quite a lot on this ground.

Down by a small burbling burn half hidden in a grassy dell, there's a spread of low, grey-green shrub willow. Sheep and cattle and deer in winter once grazed here freely and the willow got blitzed. Four years ago, this part of the moor was fenced off, the willow got its chance and in a few years' time the scrub will be trees.

19

Dave said I'd see crossbills at Coire Loch. Would I know one if I saw it? A small finch-like bird, it says in the book, ‘with distinctive crossed mandibles' – i.e. a twisted beak. Good for cracking pine cones and getting to the seeds.

A narrow track winds through the pinewood, up and down and round about, till I reach the lochan – not so much a loch as a large pond, almost a perfect circle with boggy margins, surrounded by trees. It's just off the tourist drag in Glen Affric. A small burn filters into it on the far side. It's best seen from above, on a knoll with pine trees – where two young Japanese pose for a photograph by a craggy old pine.

I find the path below teeming with small frogs (toads?), olive green and slimy, some entwined in clumsy embrace, knots of them every two or three yards. It must be the mating season – not hopping but humping. They drag themselves along with hind legs outstretched. Croak, croak, croak. A sight to gladden naturalists but not me. Slimy things. Frog princes? No wonder the maiden hesitates to kiss.

I have to watch my step or I'll crush them underfoot. And not a crossbill in sight.

20

Old Duncan sits by a log fire glowing in the redbrick hearth. A weathered shepherd's stick is propped by the door. He hands me a sheaf of his reminiscences which he's had typed, hoping, I suspect, that I can help him get them published. In this I fail.

My eye lights on this: ‘When I was only six – and there were two younger than me – an angel came and took our loving mother to the quiet gardens of another paradise.' How strange. Fey. It's not what I expected.

Duncan tells me he was born in 1914 and he worked as a shepherd, water gillie, stalker at the Chisholm Estate at Fasnakyle and, later, head stalker in Affric. He saw the dams go up in Affric and Glen Cannich and the great flood of December 1962 which swept away bridges in Affric and threatened to blow the dams.

The talk turns to wildlife and it seems that Old Duncan has a great contempt for conservationists, a feeling shared by many keepers, stalkers and farmers: ‘They won't listen,' he says. Pine martens are a particular culprit when it comes to the decline of the capercaillie, the great bird of the pine forest, now a threatened species. He was keeping an eye on a caper nest with two eggs until the day he found the eggs smashed and pine marten droppings beside them. He says his hens were killed by a fox ‘just for badness'. When vermin – his word – were kept down, other wildlife flourished. Keepers knew where the nests were and would leave some untroubled. In his view, keepers are the true conservationists.

Such is the wisdom, I find it hard to make a judgment. On the one hand, scientists produce their statistics; on the other, country folk like Duncan, who observe nature at first hand from one year to the next, assert the evidence of their own eyes. I sit on the fence.

21

I've seen the apocalypse. It's at the end of the road in Glen Cannich.

On this dreich day, mist hangs low over the hills and the rain is soft and insistent. The road out of Cannich village rises steeply, twisting and turning and at the high point of the pass a vista opens over the treetops, wave after wave of birch foliage seeming all the greener for the wet, like gentle oriental gardens gone to wilderness.

Then the road dips to follow the river, ultimately crossing by a bailey bridge. This is where, according to birdman Dave, an eagle may be seen. No big bird spirals upwards into the overcast. Some other day perhaps.

Here the enclosing trees pull back to open up a rugged countryside of high moorland and black craggy hills, the view ahead hemmed in by rocky slopes. Where exposed, the underlying bedrock glistens in the pale light. There are few dwellings. A wheelie bin stands at the end of a track, a long haul from the stalker's house a quarter of a mile away (on reflection, he probably drops it from his 4 x 4).

Lashing rain now – bracken and heather sodden at the roadside. Even so, there's a glamour about this quiet glen, so reclusive compared to Affric's blatant charms. The road rises inexorably until a last curve brings the dam into view, unseen until then, and the song dies on my lips.

A long black barrier extends half a mile across the whole width of the glen, hill to hill, a black concrete bastion only partially softened by wisps of mist. From this angle, there's no sign of the immense waters held behind it. Mullardoch's not just the longest dam in the land, it must be the ugliest – a monument to brutalism. The spirit of the place seems malign.

I scramble down to the marshy valley floor where a thin trickle of water emerges from the foot of the dam and runs into a pool on the first lap of its long journey eastwards to the North Sea. Once, when in spate, it would gush over cataracts. The dam wall, stained black with an algal growth, towers 160 feet above me, impounding a huge mass of water – the mere thought of it makes me quake. A walk across the top of the dam is quite as unsettling, with the sheer drop on one side and a grey choppy sea pent up on the other. A gleam of sunshine would soften the blow but there's no let-up in the weather.

A few souls live close by, even under the brow of the dam itself, where a lilliputian cottage sits on the riverbank. On the approach to the dam, a high white wall alongside the road masks a tall house mistakenly designated ‘hotel' on the map. And, almost on the lip of the dam itself, a gate gives access to a timber house half hidden in trees. There's a pile of newly sawn logs beside the gate and a boat parked outside but Carl the Dane who lives there is not at home.

Below, another boat is beached just above the water line. There must be traffic on the loch.

Today I knock on the door and find Carl in. We sit in the modest kitchen – Carl and his wife Ninon and I, with jam jars and pickles and tins on the table and cups of tea in our hands. Bespectacled, wearing a rusty-coloured sweater, his close-cropped white hair ginger at the roots, Carl looks more like a farmer than Highland laird – and sonsie Ninon the picture of a farmer's wife.

Carl still has a home in Denmark, where he
was
a farmer and kept dairy cattle and pigs. But farmers get a raw deal, he says. ‘Nobody likes farmers in Denmark and nobody likes them here.'

For much of the year, they live in this wooden house on the brink of Loch Mullardoch – I can't say overlooking the dam because trees hide the view. The garden at this autumnal season is spattered with fallen birch leaves.

The boat drawn up on the shore below is his. From May to September, he ferries parties of walkers and climbers halfway up the loch to reach the high hills.

When he was young, Carl worked for a year as a gamekeeper and thought he'd be a keeper for the rest of his life but his father put his foot down. ‘No way to make a living,' he said and Carl stayed on grudgingly to end up running the home farm.

He came to Scotland to stalk deer in 1967 and wanted to buy a piece of land then but Ninon resisted. She must have had a change of heart because, 12 years later, he bought the Benula Estate in the mountainous country at the far end of the loch. As he grew older, he sold off much of it, though he still shoots over his own and other people's ground – sometimes visiting the deer forests south of Loch Ness.

Like so many others, Carl laments the perceived loss of wildlife in the Highlands. It's a recurring theme. The eagles have gone, he says. Twenty-five years ago, when he first came to live by the dam, he could count six pairs of golden eagles. This year, a man from the RSPB couldn't find any. Grouse, pheasant, white hares – there used to be lots of them but not any more. Black grouse – the same. In the past, he'd see maybe 40 black grouse at lek but hasn't seen a lek in the last couple of years. Ducks, too. Once you could count 30 pairs of mallard. This year he's seen only one with ducklings and he'd seen none the year before.

He blames all licensed predators, with pine martens at the head of the list. Among their prey is the capercaillie, a threatened species. His neighbour had peacocks (‘Screechy things,' he says with distaste) and a pine marten got them all. ‘He got my geese, he got all my ducks except one.' But you can't shoot pine marten any more – it's illegal to kill them. In Carl's opinion, the best pine marten is a pine martin squashed flat on the road.

All hook-billed birds and red-toothed animals of the kind that used to be classed as vermin and harried mercilessly by farmers and gamekeepers are guilty in Carl's eyes. There are songbirds in the trees around his house. ‘It's nice to see them on the bird table. Then the bloody sparrowhawk gets them.'