by Neil Ansell
The range of my hearing is very limited; I just don’t have the high notes, and I lose more year on year. I remember first becoming aware of this when I was only twenty or so. I was out walking through fields with a girlfriend at dusk, I don’t even remember where now, but it must have been somewhere on our travels. She was raising her voice, louder and louder, as she talked to me, and I asked her why. She said she could hardly hear herself think, for the din of the crickets. What crickets? I asked.
One by one, I am losing my birds, and I have just had to add the meadow pipit to my ever-growing list of those whose song I have lost for ever. I wonder now, if I were to return to my nightingale wood in Sweden, would I be overcome again by the torrent of song, or would there just be a big fat echoing nothing, an absence?
I don’t know if it is really true that having one of your senses diminished makes the others keener, but it certainly makes you more dependent on them, and the compensation, I think, is that it has helped make me an acute observer, and has made me appreciate what I do have. It is no great surprise that the acuity of our senses should be dulled by age. Most people will end up needing reading glasses, sooner or later, and as it is with sight so it is with hearing. But the problem I am having feels more like a sudden collapse rather than a gradual decline, and I have started from such a low baseline. When I have been to an audiology appointment, and they have tested my hearing against a series of bleeps of increasing volume and rising frequency, they have joined the dots and created a little graph, amplitude on one axis and frequency on the other. The range of my hearing in visual form looks like a low plateau – much lower than it should be – that comes to a sudden cliff edge which drops to nothing far sooner than it should. My hearing is a retreating glacier that is shrinking unconscionably fast.
It is not in my nature to be much of a planner. In deciding to visit this area of the Highlands I had no particular itinerary, I just wanted to come to a nice part of the world and roam about and take a good look at it, with no overarching route in mind. Generally I avoid preordained long-distance footpaths; I don’t measure my times or my miles, and I don’t make it into a competition, not even with myself. Though I like my birds, I have never felt inclined to keep a list of what I have or haven’t seen. If that means that I am not a proper birder, then so be it; I am a watcher, not a collector. I have no particular desire to bag summits, though if I see a top that I like the look of then I may decide to head that way on a whim. Rather, I wake in the morning and take account of how I am feeling and what the weather is like. Then I will perhaps take a look at a map and pick an area that looks worth exploring, though even that is provisional, for if I see something that appeals as I go then I may happily deviate from my chosen course.
This is my way; I am not suggesting that it is the only way, or even the best way. There are, I suppose, as many ways to engage with the world as there are people. These are personal preferences, not rules I have made for myself. I wouldn’t even claim that I deliberately avoid footpaths. They are often where they are for a reason; guided by the lay of the land, by gradients and the distribution of lakes and streams. The route I was taking was an old, long-established trail that led over the peninsula to a former settlement on its northern shores. I had been intrigued by something I had noted on the map. Up on the tops was a chain of interlinked lochans running north to south that created a long barrier, and the trail crossed them at their narrowest point. Stepping stones, the map said, and I was curious. It took me longer to get there than I had anticipated; the trail was heavy-going, steep and rocky with lots of false summits. Then the ground levelled off and I found myself crossing a boggy grassland, soft underfoot so that my boots sank almost to their tops with every step. And then I was looking down over the lochans. Lochan Stole, peaceful loch, was the largest, and was indeed broad and perfectly calm and peaceful. At the pinch point where it met Lochan Ropach there was an ancient row of boulders making the crossing, perhaps thirty feet long. It was a beautiful spot; there was something about the lightness of this touch of man on the wilderness. If it had been a more recent bridge the impact would not have been the same at all. It made me feel that we could perhaps belong in the wild places after all, without automatically destroying them for our convenience. I crossed and sat on a rock at the far side. There was a perfect silence. The blue sky and the surrounding hills were reflected in the totally calm clear waters of the two lochs. The only movement was the gentle flow of water between the rocks of the stepping stones.
Immediately after the crossing, the trail rose steeply to the final pass, cutting diagonally across the hillside. As I rose my view widened and I could see across Lochan Ropach to where a river flowed from it, and then formed a third lochan that was invisible from down below, in the lee of a great sheer crag. Something at my feet caught my notice; a gobbet of frogspawn. My first of the year, and it was far from water on a bare hillside. It must have been carried here from the waters below. At first I thought crow, but then I noticed a scat in the heather right beside the frogspawn, a small twisted scat that was greyish-white; all bone. I began to examine the footpath more carefully, looking for tracks. As a kid running wild I used to fancy myself as something of a tracker, and pored over books that showed animal tracks and trails with a dedication that schoolwork could never match. I soon picked up the trail; even here on the dry hillside there was a stickiness to the ground from that earlier shower. I had expected fox, but these footprints were more feline than vulpine. They were fresh, recent, and led uphill ahead of me. I had heard that wildcats are less averse to water than domestic cats, and have even been known to swim on occasion, and I have heard of them taking frogs as prey, but I had not previously heard of them taking frogspawn. I imagined that I had just missed it, that it had been down at the water’s edge when it saw or heard or scented my approach, and had slipped stealthily away, unnoticed.
I was able to follow its trail for a few yards only, for then it left the path and I lost it. Not such a great tracker after all. I knew there was little chance of my seeing it; it would be far away now, or perhaps watching me from somewhere on the hillside among the heather, at a safe distance. I continued my climb; I knew that I would soon reach the summit of my journey.
After the trudge of earlier in my walk, it came sooner than I expected; a sudden vista all along the sunlit length of Loch Nevis, and behind it the rugged wilds of Knoydart. The fastnesses of Knoydart are packed with the high mountains that make it almost inaccessible from the mainland – the highest, Ladhar Bheinn, is over three thousand feet high. All of them were capped with snow that merged imperceptibly into the clouds that hung over them, with none of their summits quite visible. With the mountains reflected in the waters beneath, it looked as if land and sea and sky were all merged together into one continuum. There was a sudden shadow over my head; an eagle lifting off from a ridge just fifty feet above me. It was a white-tailed eagle, a sea eagle. At such close range the size of the bird was extraordinary, for the sea eagle is even bigger than the golden eagle. It has a wingspan of eight feet, and its wings are also much deeper than those of its cousin, giving the bird its characteristic ‘barn door’ silhouette. It circled above me, turning its head this way and that as it scrutinised me, and slowly began to rise. Its tail was a pure, unsullied white, the white of a fresh snowfall, the white of the mountaintops around me. As it rose, circling, it began to drift back towards the lochans I had come from, and I followed below, watching as it turned in the sunshine. With each turn its tail would glint like a mirror. It circled higher and higher over Lochan Stole, becoming smaller and smaller, until I could barely see it any more, until all I could make out was that repeated glint of light, and then that too winked out as it disappeared into the clouds far above.
The sea eagle is a reintroduction, first to the island of Rum, from where it has slowly spread to the neighbouring islands and coastline, though numbers are still low enough that seeing one is something special. The sea eagle di
ed out only in 1912, so was missing from our shores for just a generation or two. Though many of the birds I watched on my walks as a youngster are struggling, and have fallen into a precipitous decline over the course of a single human lifetime, most of the birds of prey are doing well. Through a combination of the banning of toxic pesticides and some judicious reintroductions, they have been brought back from the brink. Attitudes towards them have improved, and they face a lot less persecution than they once did, with a few exceptions, chief among them the beleaguered hen harrier, which has the misfortune of having as its primary chosen habitat the grouse moor. As a child, I watched daily the kestrels that nested just a hundred yards from my home, and once, just once, I watched in amazement as a sparrowhawk took out a starling on our garage roof. But that was it. Peregrines looked like they would go the way of the sea eagle, and the red kites that clung on in Wales were down to their last pair. Now, every city has its peregrines and sparrowhawks, and red kites soar over our motorways. My years in Wales corresponded with the extraordinary recovery of the red kite. My first two years there I saw just one a year from my window, and I would have to head far into the hills to have much chance of seeing more. Just a few years later they would be commoner than the buzzards; it would be unusual to look from my window and not have one in view somewhere in that wide vista, and every little copse held a nesting pair.
The eagle had led me back along the trail as far as the stepping stones, but I decided against retracing my steps further. There was that third lochan, a place to which no trails led, and it seemed a pity to come so close and not take the chance to explore it too. And the crags that overhung it were appealing too, a sheer buttress that faced west and then curved round to the south, no doubt overlooking Loch Morar. I figured that I could follow the waters back to the loch-side, as long as the descent was manageable. It might, of course, be the case that there was no trail for a reason, but my route began well, with level grassy ground on the shore of Lochan Ropach. The loch fed into a broad tumbling mountain stream, almost a small river, which continued a short way before filling the last in the chain of lochans. This was a little smaller than the others, but with a different ambience, for rather than being surrounded by hills, the high cliffs rose sheer above its shore. They were massive, imposing; a place that looked as if it must surely be home to eagles and peregrines. Below it was a jumble of boulders, some the size of houses and capped with heather and birch. They had fallen into piles, between which were crevices, niches, small caves, and I peered into each one, thinking, if I was a wildcat then this is where I would choose to make my home.
At the lip of the lochan, the ground suddenly fell away like at the brink of a plateau, just as the buttress of cliffs curved around to face south. There was a last massive boulder, a sentinel, just where the slopes began; if it had rolled a foot or two further it would have tumbled all the way down. The waters flowing from the lochan poured down the mountainside in a succession of waterfalls. The whole vast expanse of Loch Morar suddenly appeared in full view. I could see why there was no footpath here; it would be too steep an ascent to make for comfortable walking, but I could see the way clear. If I took care I would have no trouble making my way back down to the shores below. I sat in the sunshine by that last fallen rock and drank in the view. It was almost sunbathing weather. I could see the whole panoply of the loch’s islands spread beneath me, artfully placed like mossy boulders in a Japanese garden. And I could see beyond, to the sea, to the Sgurr of Eigg and the snowy peaks of Rum. The beauty made me want to laugh; it was almost ridiculous. I am not normally one given to talking to himself, but I unexpectedly heard myself say, I am so happy.
The Promise of Rain
While the end of March had been unseasonably warm and sunny, almost beach weather, April came bearing storm warnings. There would be at least gale force winds, all ferries had been cancelled, and the forecast was for continuous heavy rain. It would not put me off from walking. It would make for a more challenging experience, but if I had come in search of wildness, I could hardly complain if I found it.
The previous day I had taken advantage of the sunshine by following the shore. I had found long beaches of fine white quartzite sand backed by dunes and wind-carved woods, and I had found one quite different beach of shell-sand, with a dense litter of disintegrating seashells, of limpets and cockles, of mussels and winkles, of razor shells and sand gapers, and little coralline blooms that looked like tiny ossified florets of cauliflower, precious and unexpected. I could not quite work out what made this particular beach different from all the others; I could only suppose that it had a subtly different orientation against the prevailing currents, which made it the catchment area for all the less dense material from the deeps.
Between the bays were rocky headlands, sometimes backed by cliffs that I had to clamber around. This was metamorphic rock, settled in thin layers like filo pastry. Some long-ago tectonic event had contorted these layers, turning them almost ninety degrees, so that thin strips of exposed rock pointed up to the skies high above the western horizon. It was sometimes like walking on sharp knife-edges and made for heavy going. In the cliffs I found a series of hidden caves which I investigated one by one. They were small but deep, dripping with water and coated with liverworts that gradually faded away as I penetrated deeper and the light disappeared. As I emerged from one of these caves I found myself being mobbed by a rock pipit that buzzed repeatedly at my head, furious that I had invaded its home. It seemed a little early for it to be nesting, but it had apparently claimed the cave as its own. The rock pipit of these rocky shores is a bird so unobtrusive in appearance that it often escapes notice, but it is strangely confiding. Or perhaps confiding is not the right word; it is almost courageous. Walking along the jetsam of the tideline it will sometimes seem reluctant to even step out of my way; if it deigns to fly off it will as likely as not be for just a few feet. Its attitude seems to be that it belongs here, and I do not.
I sat at the tip of a headland, facing into the onshore breeze and looking out at a scatter of rocky wave-lashed islets, slick with seaweed. Currents rushed between them, and in the churning waters a diver was hunting. The bird was nearly fully dressed in its summer clothes, with bold black and white stripes on its long neck. Soon it would be gone, for this was the great northern, the largest and scarcest of our divers, and the only one which never nests here. It would be leaving imminently for the wilds of Iceland, its only nesting ground in Europe. It is really the transatlantic cousin of our own divers. The great northern diver is the loon of the Americas, the bird which Henry Thoreau chased fruitlessly around Walden Pond in a rowing boat.
In a tiny pocket-sized bay of sand hidden among the rocks I found a trail in the sand. The footprints led from the water’s edge up to the top of the beach where they disappeared among the rocks. They led into what could not really be described as a cave, for at this beach everything was in miniature. It was more just a crevice between the rocks, over which a third boulder had fallen to form what looked like a scale model of a dolmen. It was a one-way trail; nothing led out, and I squatted down and peered inside. A pair of eyes glinted back at me from the deepest recesses of the hollow, and I backed away. My negligible tracking skills had led me to an otter holt. For all I knew there might be cubs inside, and the best thing I could do would be to leave them in peace.
But that was yesterday; I could not imagine that I would find any trails to follow in this wind and rain, and there would be no lounging on sunny beaches. I decided to head back to Loch Morar, and take my chances against the elements. I had been taken by the mixed woods that swept up the low hills overlooking the islands, and my map told me there were more hidden lochans up there. The first thing I saw when I set off into the rain was a bird of prey. Small and dark, it swept along in the lee of the brash of birch and bracken that backed onto the shore. It twisted and turned, following the contours of the wood just a couple of feet above the ground. It dashed, it banked and tu
rned with perfect control even though it was flying straight into a gale force wind. My first thought was that it was a little male sparrowhawk; sparrowhawks hunt in this way, utilising cover to launch surprise attacks on their prey. But this was a falcon, a merlin down from the moors, barely larger than a blackbird. They nest high up in the hills, and in winter come down to lower ground, often to the coasts where the food is; there are slim pickings up on the moors of winter.
Loch Morar was a different beast from my visit just a couple of days before. Then it had been calm and peaceful and scenic; now, it was hard to believe that it was an inland loch rather than a sea-loch. It was dense with white-caps, and its size and great depth had delivered a rolling swell, so that waves crashed against its shore, and showered water over the loch-side road, and over me. I find a curious pleasure in being out in such wild weather; like being on a boat in rough seas, it makes me want to whoop.
The place I had chosen to depart from the loch and head inland was a moderately steep heather hillside studded with solitary Scots pines, but flanked to both sides with woods of birch and pine. A little way up the hill the slope levelled so that there was hidden ground above, out of sight of the road and of all habitation, a valley between the crags. There was something that drew me to this spot, I had noticed it on my previous visit to the loch. It felt somehow that it held promise; sometimes a particular spot can have that effect. The ground was soft underfoot and I knew my boots would not take it. I could have gone on to find a trail, but the weather was far beyond any hope of keeping dry; I might as well just accept that I was getting a soaking and live with it. I had not gone far when I came upon a fresh kill; a pair of outspread wings, and between them, just where it should be, a head, but no body at all, that had been taken. This was very recent, for blood still dripped from the stumps of the mottled wings. I picked up the skinned skull by the tip of its bill. The bill was long and straight and pale with a darker tip. It was a snipe, which has the longest bill of almost any of our birds, at least in proportion to its size, and very recently it had been living and breathing, no doubt hiding out for the day in this very spot. It had not been taken by a bird of prey, for there would have been plucked feathers scattered all around; rather this was the work of a mammal that had snipped it off at the wings and neck and carried the rest away into a hidden spot, perhaps not far away. Once again, I thought, wildcat. It felt as though I was being shadowed, that it was here somewhere, hidden among the trees, watching me cautiously as it feasted on its prize. I felt it was circling me, always just out of sight, leading me onwards into the wilds with a trail of clues, communicating with me through its absence. My spirit animal, if I was to believe in such a thing.
