Season in Strathglass (8 page)

27

Upper Glassburn, evening. I arrive to find George and Ishbel sitting with two hillwalking guests, David and Alastair, a glass in their hands. I get a dram too. David is burly, stoutish, a retired schoolmaster from Oxford. Alastair's lean, an actuary in Edinburgh – possibly he attacks hills as a relief from his desk job. He's a Munroist, now polishing off the peaks
around Affric, Glen Cannich and Strathfarrar – two today. David follows behind. He says he aims from one boulder ahead to the next, so his hill climbing is calibrated by the higher stones. Today he sat on a rock in the sunshine while Alastair pushed to the top.

Alistair spreads out a map showing all the hills he's climbed circled in pencil, one tight group interlocking like the Olympic logo. Sgurr na Lapaich is marked off, Tom a' Choinich, Mam Sodhail, Carn Eighe and several more. Tomorrow he'll round off with Carn nan Gobhar above Loch Mullardoch, which sparks my interest. I might join him.

David tells me that, before he retired, he was headmaster of the King Edward School in Oxford, rather a prestigious place, I imagine. Yet his origins were humble. He spent his boyhood in Bo'ness on the Firth of Forth where, at the age of seven, he learned that he was adopted. At 19 he was taken on as an unqualified teacher at a tough village school near Stirling. When he asked how to keep order, he was told, ‘Belt the hell out of them.' Once he was mystified when a boy knocked on the classroom door and asked if he'd any shoes. ‘Only what I'm wearing,' he answered and the boy retreated without a word. Later he learned the school ran a cobbling class and shoes for repair were collected every week. It sounds like good practical education – not on offer now, I guess.

He progressed – went to college and ended up lecturing. After a spell at an international school in Luxembourg, he was headhunted by Winchester before moving to Oxford. And he still speaks with a good Scots accent.

David, stiff from his climbing, heads for home, leaving Alastair to his final hill. As we drive up Glen Cannich, I fight to keep pace with the lemon yellow coupé as Alastair flings it round the bends and twists of the road. He's a man in a hurry.

We park under the bleak wall of the dam, where stags with ragged coats are browsing. We search but do not find a reasonable track at the end of the loch. By rights there ought to be a route along the shore but the grey bouldery waterline, scored by fluctuating water levels, offers no practical
access. Down below us on the grey foreshore – you can't truly describe it as a beach – we see Carl the Dane's boat hauled up with a tractor beside it but there's no sign of a track along that rocky shoreline. Alastair says they paid Carl a tenner each a couple of days ago to reach the hills at the far end of the loch and back.

Mud, mud, black peat and stony ruts gouged by some vehicle. Spongy and waterlogged, it's hard walking till we find traces of a barely defined track. We contour above the loch, avoiding the worst bogs, till we reach the Mullardoch burn which we follow upwards. This echoing burn enlivens a dark landscape of muted browns, greens and greys turning to black as it tumbles over shelves of rock, pausing briefly in shallow pools where (a passing thought) it would be good to plunge into on a summer's day. It is not that day. The reach of loch below us is the colour of slate. Spits of rain turn to a steady drizzle. Strands of mist cling to the tops and a band of cloud looming on the horizon indicates bad weather on the way.

We are lapped by rounded hills crumbling here and there into rocky outcrops, with a band of snow under what could be (but isn't, of course) the summit ridge. Carn nan Gobhar (Hill of the Goats) is no craggy fell but a featureless dumpling ‘of no great distinction' in the words of the Munro book. Nevertheless, for the true Munroist (not me), it must be scaled. Alastair, tall, fit and trim, strides upwards and I grit my teeth and keep pace step for step with an increasingly leaden distaste.

Why am I doing this?

Somewhere above the 600-metre mark my determination falters. I'm conscious that nothing will be seen from the top in this weather. I'm tired, not at my best, and my spirit fails.

Go ahead, Alastair, I'll loiter here.

I watch him advance to the head of the glen, a lone figure moving fast and briefly silhouetted against the sky. I'd expected to see him turn to the left and continue to what appears to be the summit ridge but he disappears from sight. This is another hilltop that hides itself behind a bulky shoulder.

Now that I've abdicated from the climb, I can wander over to the burn
with a clear conscience and watch how it tumbles from one still pool to the next, finding more to attract me in its secret hollows than in the broad brushstrokes of the glowering hills. Ambling downwards beside the burn, I stop to inspect the solitary tree we passed on the ascent when we were pushing on with no time to glance aside. Trees always attract me – I wrote a book about them once. Twin trunks rise from the root then split to form four slender stems. Smooth pale bark and an early flush of leaves opening penny-bright tell me it's an aspen – not exactly a rarity in these parts but not as common as other species native to the Highlands – birch, pine and alder, to name three. Aspen is the shaking tree, the trembling one,
Populus tremula
to give it its official name, because of the way its foliage shivers and shimmers in a breeze.

I love aspens. I like their disc leaves peppered on thread-like stalks, uncurling in spring, as now, like little flames on bare branches, and, in the autumn, making a golden glory. This tree is reclusive, a lone specimen in a seemingly treeless desert, hidden for half its height in a gully, rooted at the water's edge where the burn runs over lichen-spotted rock. The bank is steep, almost vertical, and I view it from above.

‘Aspen seldom forms a tall tree; it is most often seen as a thicket of sucker shoots in some marshy spot.' I quote the forest writer Herbert Edlin, one who knows. Seldom tall? In this case, well, tallish. On the elevated bank high above its roots I now discover a host of suckers unnoticed before. At my boot, on the narrow track itself, springs one little twig carrying a single infant leaf tinged dark green shading to bronze and red and then I find another and another and yet more. They spread over a surprisingly wide radius, little torches on spindly stems, bristling through the vegetation, none more than a foot high. The root system must extend cup-like from the gully bottom to the top of the bank. A small shoot, bearing twin-fretted leaves, pokes up defiantly from a knobble of root exposed on the narrow track and polished by many passing feet. Elsewhere, it might hope to make a tree. But this dwarf growth expends its energy in vain. Each shoot shows the telltale signs of having been bitten off by deer. They'll never flourish.

At length a diminutive figure crests the skyline – Alastair returning. He says the last section to the summit was a little steep and there was a flurry of snow as he stopped to eat a sandwich at the top. At my level, there was only rain. One more Munro has fallen to him – only nine more to go. By summer, he expects to tick off his last peak. There'll be a small celebration at the top for a few family and friends, hopefully on a more elegant hill than this. Back at the dam wall, we part and ahead of me the yellow coupé streaks down the glen in serpentine flight.

28

Caravan park, Sunday morning, 8 a.m. Catherine is here for the weekend in search of dragon- and damselflies – her latest thing. Glen Affric is a hotspot on the dragonfly map.

Across the road at Marydale, Sister Petra Clare rings the bell – we're up late. Crispy bacon rolls for breakfast, an indulgence. Hail cholesterol.

So, a leisurely start. At the Coire Loch, we splodge around in the mossy, reedy margins and find a black darter and then a common hawker which C tries to photograph but it's too quick for her – a tantalising gleam of blue on diaphanous wings, never settling. Here, there, gone.

We progress up the glen, still on the lookout. Small Loch Salach a' Ghiubhais would be promising, she says, if only the sun would shine, which it doesn't. Still, there's a common hawker to record and one butterfly, a meadow brown. Not a lot, but she's satisfied.

29

There's snow on the hills and menacing clouds. ‘It's a thin wind still,' says Donny, who looks after the Guisachan cottages for Donald Fraser. Thin, meaning sharp, keen, biting.

The bare birch woods are red against the hillsides.

In Tomich, asking directions at the inn, I see a sprightly, elderly man walking his dog down the road. ‘Albert Dormer,' says my informant. ‘He used to be bridge correspondent for
The Times
.' When he lived in Tomich? ‘No, that was before.'

What chance brought him here to live?

30

Catherine and I walk down the road at Guisachan in the dark, with a faint moon glimpsed through the foliage. The clock tower at the steading is ghostly in the mirk, like the gothic house in
Psycho
. It's pitch black under the trees but we have torches and, at the foot of the drive, there are lights, a line of globes glowing faintly. Moths have landed on some of the globes. C identifies a winter moth and a few pale brindled beauties.

31

One of the Tomich cottages is for sale and, on a whim, we call to view. We fall in love. It's perfect – it's the home in Affric we've always wanted. For three days and nights, we dream.

But we're not country folk. It's not for us.

32

Albert Dormer, who's in his 80s, came to live in Tomich 15 years ago when he tired of London. He found the cottage by chance on a house-hunting trip north with his ex-wife, who encouraged him to buy. He says she probably thought it was fine to live 500 miles apart. It could have been further. They'd looked at a house on the Pentland Firth.

His dog Pickles, a bouncy ginger poodle, jumps on my lap when I sit down on the settee, followed by a Siamese cat who curls herself alongside. Like commas. Both accept stroking.

For years, Albert, a tournament player, was bridge correspondent for
The Times
and he's written several books on the game. Through bridge, he met Jaime Ortiz-Patino, wealthy grandson of a tin-mining magnate in Bolivia, bridge player and owner of the Valderrama golf course in Spain, and together they travelled on behalf of the World Bridge Federation. Patino had a mission to stamp out cheating in the international game. (Albert says the Italians were the worst.)

He no longer plays. Instead he takes Pickles for long walks in the morning, reads the newspapers, watches a little television and feeds the geese in his garden.

33

The weather's turned cold again, with snow on the tops. Rain drummed on the caravan roof overnight and, outdoors, the wind nips. There's been one downpour already and, in spite of a few ragged blue patches in the sky, there will be more. Dark clouds moving fast on the horizon give promise of squalls to come.

Not the best day to explore the loch country on high moorland between Affric and Glen Moriston. Nevertheless . . .

Hilton pond beyond Tomich is a circle of ornamental water in front of a big white house where there's said to be an osprey's nest in the trees. I can't find it. How can you tell? What does an osprey nest look like?

A track leads into mixed woodland – conifers, birch and rowan and, here and there, an old pine, all tangled with grey-green lichens. The mossy ground squelches with water. It's all a dripping dampness. But the track has a stony surface, laid down possibly for pony traffic between the glens, and boots ring out pleasantly on it.

A burn almost worthy of being called a river flows fast alongside, gushing over the track where the map shows a ford – it's no great obstacle, I can splash through with feet more or less dry. Then I come on a notice – ‘Wild boar reservation 200 metres ahead' – and, beyond it, the high perimeter fence of an enclosure. I'm glad of this fence. How wild are wild boars, after all? They have tusks.

But, when a couple of dun-coloured beasts emerge from the woods and trot along on their side of the barrier, they seem innocuous – smaller than I expected and peaceable. A second billboard informs that the reservation
has been set up with various scientific objectives in view, including studies into the effect of boars on vegetation, such as tree regeneration, and the prospects of farming them. Boar steaks.

I walk on with one more river to cross – a burn, rather. A hop and a leap onto the grassy bank on the other side bring me to a stile at the woodland edge, with open moorland beyond. Wreckage of a footbridge a little off the track indicates what must have been another route, now abandoned. Here the burn is spanned by two parallel tree trunks, or possibly old telegraph poles, with a few rotten planks nailed across and a gap where the remainder are missing. A single small pine and a leafless, warped birch tree stand guard.

Ahead is an intrusion – a pylon. Tall, unfriendly, gaunt against the lowering sky. And not alone but one of a chain carrying the electricity transmission line from Beauly southward to connect with the grid. I see the wires looping from pylon to pylon in diminishing perspective down towards Tomich and beyond. Ugly enough as they are, there is worse to come – the electricity company plans to replace them with giants up to twice their height to carry power from the new wind farms mushrooming in the north. This is not a prospect I like and nor do many of the locals. There's going to be an inquiry.

It's cold. The path deteriorates as it ascends steeply towards the pass, cut into channels by winter weather and the lack of maintenance. Rivulets run down it.

The wind freshens. Murky clouds rear on the horizon and a veil of precipitation drifts over the hills as dirty weather sweeps in. Soon all to the west is blotted out. Light fades and the first flecks of snow float on the wind, thickening by the minute until it's a perfect welter. The hoped-for view down from the top of the pass seems ever less certain and it takes little self-persuasion to turn back for home.

The sheltered wood is an altogether friendlier place than the open moor. Softly falling snowflakes drift through the trees. A lattice bridge (unmarked on the map) is a good place to pause, to watch the agitated waters of the burn below and warm cold fingers round a cup of hot soup from the flask.