Season in Strathglass (9 page)

34

Liz lives in a grass-roofed ecological house in the hamlet of Knockfin. She's a scientist, a botanist, and the boars were her idea. She calls them her ‘piggies'.

There are canoes under a canopy at the door and a stack of wood at the side of the house. Behind the house, the hillside rises steeply to a line of birches, with the ground in between covered in grass and heather and swathes of bracken.

Liz says nobody likes bracken. It spreads like wildfire, kills all other plants and it's practically indestructible. But she reckoned her piggies would do the trick. They root out and eat the tough rhizomes in the soil and they feed on the young shoots when they first poke through and fronds begin to unfurl –just the thing for the hillside behind the house, where she could study their impact on the vegetation.

Not everyone was as enthusiastic as she. Folk envisioned wild boar running loose and attacking them on their country walks. The community council split over the question and it was only when the Forestry Commission offered a piece of woodland near Hilton and funding to go with it that the project could go ahead.

Most of the animal management and care is done by Rae, a local forester, but Liz takes her turn at feeding time. She admits it can be a little scary. When the sows sense her presence they scurry from the wood, snuffing and puffing around her, to be followed by Boris the boar ambling down at a more stately pace. He's harmless enough, she says, but he's big and she's small and slim and she feels uneasy in his presence.

‘Come and see them,' she says. ‘Come at feeding time.'

35

Rae loves his pigs. You can see it in his face. Catherine and I join him on a visit to the piggies. There's a thin covering of snow as we drive into the woods over a bumping track
Rae swings open the metal gate and leads us into the enclosure. No sign of animal life as yet. All's quiet in the forest – until he tips a bag of feed into the wooden trough and, on his call, a file of chunky long-snouted beasts, sows and their piglets, dark in the coat, some tinged with auburn, materialise from the trees and cluster round the trough.

Boris delays his appearance. He's last on the scene, an actor making his entrance and not intending to be upstaged. Or perhaps he was just deeper in the trees than his familiars. Down the hill he saunters at last, picking his way among a brash of broken branches. Once at the trough, he shoulders his way through for his breakfast.

We admire his rough coat, his furry heart-shaped ears and the short curled pile on his flanks. At first, I don't see his tusks, which I'd imagined as long scimitars, but not so. They're small, tucked neatly in his jaws but interlocking and businesslike nevertheless. Rae says the grinding together of upper and lower fangs keeps them sharp. I can imagine my shinbone crunched between them.

But Rae, giving Boris a gentle pat on the back, says he's not dangerous – though he adds a caveat: ‘Don't take him by surprise.' And further: ‘You won't outrun a boar.' They have to get used to you. ‘Keep talking to them, talk all the time and they'll accept you.'

Rae says pigs have their own words, special sounds which mean different things that allow them to communicate. He hears them conversing at night – they're naturally nocturnal animals and this daytime feeding is not their normal habit. Acorns and beech nuts are their preferred diet – thin pickings around here, where oak and beech trees are uncommon – but they'll root out the fleshy bracken tubers. Which, of course, is why they're here.

A fence divides their enclosure from the adjacent woodland and the difference in ground vegetation is marked. Deep heather and bracken flourishes on the pig-free ground but, on our side of the fence, it's been hoovered. And there's new growth, too. Rae shows us the proof – a sprinkling of inch-high feathery green shoots poking through the snow. These are infant pines, showing that the trees can regenerate here once the ground vegetation is disturbed. All the area where we stand was pinewood until the foresters cut down the best trees for timber, sparing only few gnarled specimens – the picturesque spreading pine trees we like to see now. Then they planted commercial conifers of foreign origin, quick to grow, soon to harvest. Green shoots at our feet show that the native forest can return.

Meanwhile, Boris and friends gobble greedily, their soft snuffling muzzles deep in the trough. Cuddly though they look, they're not pets. These little piggies are heading for market: ‘Monday is pig day at Dingwall,' says Rae. But don't mention the word abattoir. Rae won't have it. He may be pragmatic about their fate but he prefers the dignity of plain English for their end. ‘I don't like the word. I say slaughterhouse.'

Agreed. Who'd want to read a book called
Abattoir-Five
?

36

It's a wild morning, with lowering sky, wind-driven clouds and pelting rain filling potholes up to the brim on the Plodda road.

Off the road and into the wood there's barely a sound or stir, only a pattering on the leaves overhead. A lane leads downhill through tall grey trunks but everything else is green – the grass, the moss mantling the earth and the rocks and stumps of trees felled long ago. I suspect that the lane, now muddy and rutted, with jutting boulders, may once have been a carriage drive leading to the ruined house of Guisachan. It's a bumpy ride.

We find Dave the tree-feller, a stocky greybeard, sizing up the standing timber, all these columns in a shady temple, glancing about, touching a stem here and there, looking up into the green canopy, gauging by eye alone the girth and height of Douglas firs planted more than a century ago.

The Douglas fir is a splendid tree. In maturity, its trunk is tall and ramrod straight, the rough bark gouged by russet fissures. When felled, the heartwood shows a delicious cream and red in cross-section. Boat-builders love it.

Dave selects his tree after careful scrutiny. ‘Saw's blunt,' he says, seating himself on a stump with the chainsaw across his knees, sharpening the teeth with a small file. Dave, a freelance forester, says he has been cutting timber all his life, mainly in the south of England where he learned the trade from his father in the era of the horse, the axe and crosscut saw. For preference, he says, he likes to fell old hardwood trees like oak or beech. His busiest time ever was after the great gale of '87 which tumbled the woodland trees wholesale.

His strategy is to guide a falling tree between two neighbours so that their side branches will slow its descent and prevent it snapping when it hits the ground. Suppose it swings out of true? He gives me a wry look, shakes his head: ‘It won't.'

He bends to the tree and the saw roars, spitting an arc of sawdust as the chain bites into the wood. With two swift applications, he cuts out a crescent of timber (he calls it a ‘dob') then moves round the trunk to cut towards the newly made notch. As the saw slices deeper, his young assistant Neil hammers in a metal wedge behind it to prevent the chain jamming.

Can this be dangerous? I edge towards a nearby forest giant, aiming to dodge behind it in case of need.

I should have known better. There's a loud crack. (No one shouts ‘Timber!') The tree teeters, tilts, tiptoes almost, then falls downwards with gathering speed, tearing through a mass of foliage to hit the ground with a thump. A slow shiver runs along the stem, snakelike, as if life is easing out of it as it comes to rest on the designated spot. Cut down in its prime – though a centenarian, it's a stripling in terms of its natural span.

Taking up the saw again, Dave shears off the side branches and measures the length – more than 160 feet from butt to tip – from which he cuts a usable length of 70 feet. A big tree but not the biggest he has cut down in Plodda. ‘A fine stick,' says he. All trees great or small are sticks to the forester.

The Douglas firs extracted from Plodda are high-grade timber, much more valuable than the spruce trees harvested in their thousands. Can the wood survive the loss of so many fine specimens? It seems so. The fellers argue that since thinning creates life-giving light and space the forest will be enhanced rather than injured by the loss of a select few stems.

Not everyone agrees. Dave says he was harangued last week by a woman, an American volunteer for Trees for Life who have a base nearby. She accused him of vandalism, of dealing mortal blows to the living wood. Every tree was sacred in her eyes. He gave the stock answer – he was creating space for new growth. A tree falls – as it must in nature, given time – light floods in, seeds germinate, new trees grow. He doesn't think she was convinced.

Now the skidder lurches forward. The skidder is a huge tractor on fat wheels, each one taller than a man and laced with a web of chains to grip in the soft ground. Sitting high in the cab, Dave manoeuvres it into position then climbs down to help Neil sling a chain round the butt end of the tree and another felled earlier. He remounts and the machine moves off dragging the twin logs behind.

The ground in Plodda wood is treacherous, wildly uneven, boggy in parts and thick with trees – a challenge to the driver dragging six tons of lively timber behind him. The skidder rears and plunges, the logs buck and ply, gouging the soil and ripping through the undergrowth, smashing small timber en route to the roadside pick-up point. Down it plunges into the green chasm of a ravine, churning soil into a brown sludge where a small burn flows, barely visible in its mossy carpet at the best of times and now a quagmire. An elephant extracting teak from the jungle might be daintier but there are no elephants in Affric.

37

Walking through Plodda woods, Catherine and I find timber stacks where trees have been newly harvested. The ground's badly churned, and tree debris lies all around. Among the litter are wedges cut from the base of the trees by the chainsaw – crescents of freshly cut timber beautifully patterned, with a bright orange core. Dobs, as Dave the woodman called them.

We stagger back to the car with a couple in our arms – they're a fair weight – with the idea of varnishing them to preserve the colour. They'll look handsome and ornamental somewhere. (But in the end we don't.)

On our way back to Comar Lodge, we stop at the cemetery at Fasnakyle. A tall, thin elderly man, slightly stooped, is brushing leaves from a grave under the trees. We think he's a gardener at first but it's Old Duncan tidying his wife's grave. He doffs his cap to Catherine and she's charmed by the courtesy.

38

Back to Cougie, where the Pococks live in cheerful isolation. Cougie, way out west, is seven miles or more from Tomich and several from the nearest habitation. It's an isolated clearing in the woods – a few flat fields with a river running through and a huddle of low buildings, mainly timber, reached by a hard-packed forestry road badly in need of repair after winter damage. It's an oasis of open ground in the midst of dark forest.

A white-painted stone cottage, the only one of its kind, used to be the keeper's house for the neighbouring landowner, the Dutchman, Kwint. Mr Kwint had bad luck after the keeper left – later tenants did a moonlight flit and then squatters trashed the place – and he decided to sell. In the sales pitch, it sounded idyllic, but though potential buyers came in numbers they didn't buy. In the end, the Pococks made an offer and it was theirs.

The Pococks, father, mother and a vanload of family, had arrived one day out of the blue and stayed on as tenants and then owner-occupiers. There they sat tight, resisting all subsequent offers to buy them out from interested parties including the Forestry Commission whose trees surround them like a green ocean.

What brought them from the Welsh valleys to settle in this outpost? Val's husband John, stocky, grey-haired, sunk deep in a battered sofa in the living room, tells the story, with the occasional comment from wife in the kitchen, where she has venison sizzling in the pan.

They'd fallen in love with Scotland. Every year the family would head north in a Bedford work bus converted to seat a growing squad of children, chugging along narrow Highland roads in a cloud of exhaust fumes on the lookout for a site for their two bell tents. Camping holidays were fine but John, fretting at his office desk in the Welsh coalfields, wanted more. An offer of promotion felt like the first nail in his coffin and he decided to quit before the lid closed. A wild goose chase in the Bedford took father, mother and children rattling over to the remote Applecross peninsula in the north-west where he'd heard there were crofts for sale. They arrived to find . . . no crofts for sale in Applecross.

On the off chance, John walked into the Forestry Commission office in Inverness. In those days, it was the commission's policy to take on men to work part-time as foresters, with the enticement of a smallholding to supplement their wages off-season – a few acres and a cow or a pig for pioneering families.

John enquired.

‘Nothing doing,' said the man behind the desk. On second thoughts: ‘There's a place called Cougie but you wouldn't be interested in that.'

‘Tell me about it,' says John.

‘You wouldn't want it.'

‘Try me,' says John.

The forestry man listed all the drawbacks. It was isolated, there was no water, it was damp . . .

‘Fine,' says John.

Reluctantly, he was handed the keys and off they set cross-country again, past Tomich and heading into the unknown. Val pipes up from the kitchen: ‘Halfway along the road, before we'd even seen the place, I said this is it. This feels like home.'

They got to the wooden house in Cougie to find it in darkness with the windows boarded up and the previous occupants' belongings still scattered about. But it still felt good.

‘We took it on the spot,' says John.

After a spell as a forestry trapper armed with shotgun and rifle, shooting animals harmful to growing trees like rabbits and deer, he joined a Forestry Commission tree-planting squad. There's a line of trees on the skyline above the house, the fringe of a great plantation. ‘I planted those,' says John. ‘I planted a million trees with
this
–' and he takes up an old spade propped against the wall, the blade worn wafer thin with use.

Now John's trees have reached harvesting size and will soon be cut down. He dug them in on the bare moorland 40 years ago and soon he'll see them felled.