A signposted walk leads to a higher level through Guisachan's former policy woods. Douglas firs abound, one snapped in a recent storm and measuring its length on the turf. Another, broken off long ago, stands bare and pitted by wood-boring insects. Here and there, there are big sequoias – Wellingtonias by another name – some still protected by rusted metal railings and, around them, the stumps of spruce and larch, planted thoughtlessly in the years of aggressive forestry and now felled to give the big trees room to recuperate.
Once the first Tweedmouth had acquired the estate, he set about improving the property. He built the mansion and its associated buildings – kennels, stables, laundry, brewery, meal mill – and the model village at Tomich including a school, plus the handsome farmhouse with its dairy and stable block.
He, and after him his son, held open house for celebrated guests. His daughter-in-law Fanny was a Spencer Churchill and her nephew Winston was an occasional house guest. Somewhere (not in Fraser's book) there's a photograph of the young Churchill standing beside a motor car outside the Guisachan carriage stable. He learned to drive there.
Earlier visitors included the artists Landseer and Millais. The Duke and Duchess of York, later George V and Queen Mary, came to stay and, while there, planted the pair of horse chestnut trees (still to be seen), along with a third planted by an Indian maharajah. Gladstone came and, sometime about 1890, planted three Douglas firs near Plodda – ‘now a noticeable landmark towering above the surrounding Forestry Commission plantations’, according to Donald Fraser. In the glory of his prime Gladstone would chop down mighty trees with his axe for sheer pleasure, sometimes watched admiringly by bonneted ladies, so he may have gazed enviously at some of the giants at Guisachan. But by then, in 1890, the old warrior was in his 80s and his tree-felling exploits were in the past.
Old photographs in Donald Fraser's booklet give a glimpse of life as it was at the big house. One shows a line of horses, dogs and humans, including Lord and Lady Tweedmouth, posed before the house, which dominates the scene like a stage set. This, according to the caption, was a shooting party, though there's no sign of guns. Tweedmouth, heavily bearded and clutching his wrists limply in a less than lordly fashion, is dressed casually for the sport in a swallow-tailed tweed coat. His lady wears a skirt to her ankles and a hat flat and wide as a pancake. Among various dogs, an ancestral golden retriever lies in front of his master looking leonine. Eight docile ponies are held by tweeded retainers in breeches – one with spats over his stockings – except for the figure dressed incongruously in a dark suit, collar and tie and a bowler hat, who is identified as Sandy Post – Sandy the postman. This is the outdoor party and you wonder what busy life existed invisibly behind the windows and ‘downstairs’ – the cook, the housekeeper, the footmen, the maidservants and skivvies and all.
Behind this gathering the many tall sash windows of the house are neatly curtained. There are stone balustrades at roof level, mansard attics in the roof, decorative ironwork on the ridges and a perfect forest of tall chimneypots. Another photo shows the house from a different angle with the carriage drive curving towards it and a tiny tree protected by a wire enclosure. This, says Donald's caption, is ‘the newly-planted Wellingtonia’. He suggests the reader might compare it with the giant of today. Yet another picture shows a large domed orangery or greenhouse nestling at the back of the house, all trace of which is gone.
The second Lord Tweedmouth, besides his interests as a landed gentleman, had political ambitions. He became a Liberal MP, served as Chief Whip in Gladstone's last government and then as First Lord of the Admiralty when the Liberals returned to power early in the 20th century. He was said to be one of the finest shots in Britain and, according to Donald Fraser's text, ‘was always ready to take himself off from dawn to dusk to a rewarding trout stream’. But after Fanny died, still young, in 1904, he retreated from Guisachan and sold it. With his departure, the big house began its gradual decline. Let out to a variety of shooting tenants who had no particular love for it, the house was sold on and, finally, the last owner took the roof off and it was left to decay.
There's a postscript. At Upper Glassburn, a bed and breakfast place where I like to stay, talk of Guisachan prompts landlord George to open a drawer and pull out a few sheets of paper – a schedule for the sale of Guisachan Estate at auction in London, dated July 1935.
Included in the sale were the mansion house (‘23 miles distant from Beauly station on the Highland Railway’), home farm, hotel, post office and shop, school and school house, sawmill, plus the village of Tomich with its 25 cottages (householders all named in the sale document) and sundry lodges and other dwellings in the neighbourhood – the tenants’ homes in Tomich were to be bought and sold in Berkeley Square without a by-your-leave like agricultural implements in a farm roup.
Also thrown in are the deer forest, the grouse moor and the fishing rights, making a grand total of 7,242 acres. The canny lawyer who bought all this in 1935 promptly got rid of the deer forest and sold the rest of the land to the Forestry Commission, which set about blanketing it with spruce and larch and pine, usually of foreign origin.
The bare details in the schedule give an insight into life in the grand country house – 15 bedrooms for residents, 16 bedrooms for servants, five bathrooms, 10 lavatories and WCs, four drawing rooms and a boudoir. There were stables for 20 horses and a garage for three cars – horses still being the principal mode of transport. Housemaids’ sinks and coal bunkers were provided on every floor – I picture some skivvy digging into the bunker at the crack of dawn, filling the scuttles and lugging them along the corridors to the guest rooms in a trail of coal dust.
16
Walter on the phone – hard-of-hearing Walter. There's a shriek in the background. ‘It's the parrot,’ he says.
Did he say parrot? (My hearing's dodgy too.)
It is a parrot. Perched in its roomy cage, a bird with a hooked beak. Long John Silver comes to mind. Parrots are coloured like the rainbow, aren't they? But this one's drab. He makes a dart at the bars with fierce intent; he squalls and squawks with wordless fury.
Walter leads the way to his den where the bird is almost but not quite out of earshot. There's an occasional muffled volley from next door. Through the wide window are views of fields, woods and hill. The den is a mixture of ancient and modern, with a computer on the desk and other electronic gadgetry but also an African mask and carvings on the shelves and a flintlock musket with bayonet fixed hanging on the wall. Perhaps Walter was an old colonial with an interest in antique weaponry. But it seems not: ‘They're just decoration’.
Walter is tall, heavily built, has bushy eyebrows, walks stiffly and eases himself into the swivel chair at the desk. He's a leader of the community with a gruff way of expressing forthright opinions – scorning, for example, all professional environmentalists and conservationists, which is what the talk turns to. All this twaddle about protecting birds of prey . . . Ask the locals, he says, the locals know best. Ask the stalkers and the gillies. But, because country folk don't write down their lifetime experiences, nobody listens to them and they're dismissed as having nothing to contribute to the debate.
Take pine martens, says Walter. (Pine martens are furry, bright-eyed, mean little killers, harried almost to extinction by gamekeepers but now legally protected and proliferating.) Walter's wife, bringing the tea tray, agrees. A pine marten took their neighbour's rabbits the other day and, before that, another neighbour lost all her chickens.
We talk of the woodlands, the Forestry Commission, and Trees for Life, an organisation with an outstation in Plodda woods whose members have been helping the commission to plant native trees. Trees for Life aims to combine an alternative philosophy (it's linked with the Findhorn Foundation) with practical work literally at ground level. Their director is Alan Featherstone. ‘I call him Alan Featherbrain,’ says Walter.
‘You have to meet Stuart,’ says Walter. ‘I'll take you.’
We drive up a st
eep tree-shaded lane just before Tomich, past a derelict car, some builder's junk, an untidy pile of plastic bags and a stack of planks and arrive in a storybook.
There's a lawn with a winding path, a murmuring stream and a water-wheel, a well and a host of daffodils in flower. At the focus of view stands a tiny cottage with latticed peephole windows and a low oval doorway. It's a hobbit house out of Tolkien.
An elfin woman perched on top of a ladder is busy at some work under the eaves. Below her Stuart, equally short in stature, appears at the threshold with an invitation to come in. ‘Mind your head,’ he says – at five foot three he fits neatly within the door frame but anyone taller has to stoop. ‘Tina,’ he says, introducing the woman on the ladder, and we exchange vertical greetings.
The tiny low-ceilinged living-room-cum-kitchen is a surprise. It's cosy, snug as a nest, gleaming with polished wood, copper and chinaware, and there's hardly a straight line anywhere. A settle curves round an eccentric table – a piece of solid dark furniture fluted like the base of a cathedral pillar or the stump of some great forest tree – which it was. Stuart carved it by hand from the base of a cut-down yew.
It looks a dead weight, a brute to move, but not so. Yew, says Stuart, is so dense that it sinks in water but he hollowed it out and honeycombed it with miniature concealed drawers so that it glides on castors at a fingertip touch.
There are other curiosities. The fire in the hearth serves a double purpose, heating both the living room and also, by a curious sleight of hand, the stove in the adjacent kitchen area, where two shining copper hotplates serve as a poor man's Aga. The keyhole TV concealed behind panel doors pivots within the width of the wall to provide late-night viewing in the adjoining bedroom. Everywhere are inventive devices, all practical and most of them conceived of and crafted by Stuart. Before-and-after photographs show the stages in his conversion of the former derelict cottage and byre into this nursery-rhyme dwelling.
Stuart is a woodman by heart and by trade. His life has been spent working with timber, from tree-felling to carpentry. He once operated a sawmill in Australia. But he wears a hair shirt – working with hardwoods like oak or elm, the species of timber a craftsman prefers, triggers an irritating allergy due, he suspects, to some chemical in the wood. Softwoods like spruce and fir don't affect him in the same way but softwoods he disdains.
A narrow turning stair leads to Tina's bright bedroom under the attic roof. Halfway upstairs a door opens off the landing into the lavatory where the stately throne-like loo has been hollowed from the bole of another tree, a burr elm, beautifully figured. It's a joy to sit on. Perched there you may observe the garden through a small window (a loo with a view), meditate and listen to the birdsong. And from the adjoining shower cubicle you may step straight into the garden, robed if you wish, but, in any case, screened from view by the trees.
No one will pry. The cottage is sequestered, unseen, its very existence unsuspected from the road below.
One year later Stuart and I sit side by side on the settle with mugs of tea on the yew-tree table while Tina chops rhubarb in the galley kitchen. I feel like a character in a tale by Beatrix Potter – ‘The Tale of Nutshell Cottage’.
Stuart's inventive mind is crammed with theories – in this case, a long and baroque fantasy concerning Rosslyn Chapel and the Templars and a tantalising biblical code (but not The Da Vinci Code – it was before that phenomenon) which Stuart credits implicitly: gospel truth. He pulls a book from the hand-made shelf, a work written by a former journalist on the Washington Post. Influenced by the theories of a maverick mathematician, the writer argued that predictions about future events could be found embedded in the Old Testament and may be decoded from the text by computer analysis of word and letter patterns. By this means, it can be shown that the Kennedy assassination, Hiroshima, the Holocaust, 9/11 and many more disasters were all foretold in scripture.
I listen with hooded eyes. If only we had known.
What horrors lie ahead? – and can we change the script before it's too late?
I don't ask. Better to turn the conversation to safer topics, like his life story – his spell as a cane-cutter in Australia, his time as a national serviceman in Korea calculating the position of enemy gun emplacements from flashes in the night or his experiences on holidays in peacetime Vietnam, charmed by the kindness and friendliness of the people. He fishes out the tourist snaps – the places he and Tina saw, the people they met and, especially, their waif of a translator, whose name they struggled to pronounce until she asked them to call her Tweet. ‘Tweet's lovely,’ he says.
And he talks about his inventions, like his proposed device for heating water by the sun. Serious physics is involved though the preparatory work has been practical and simple. With a nail, a stake and a length of string, he traced an outline of the sun's shifting shadow throughout the daylight hours, giving him the pattern for a parabolic mirror which, when polished and fixed in position, would concentrate the sun's rays on a water tank, thus causing the water to boil.
He's in full flight when there's a knock on the door. Chance visitors from Holland have arrived, a tall man and a gangly wife who saw Stuart's house on Dutch TV and have come here to see for themselves. They've come unannounced but Stuart breaks off to give them the guided tour, upstairs and down. They coo and ooh and aah at his cabinet of delights and leave happy at what they've seen.
‘I'm not clever,’ says Stuart. ‘I just try harder. That's what Einstein said, by the way. But I'm not Einstein, I'm not much good at anything.’ (This is not true.)
Will his sun heater work? Perhaps he should patent it? No. This will be his gift to mankind. And he adds, ‘I'm trying to die penniless. I live simply. I don't need much. I can live on my pension. I can go to Vietnam – it doesn't cost the earth.’
He says any spare cash he gets helps to pay for small things for the people he meets in Vietnam, who have little. So, as I leave, my coins chink in the mug by the door.
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 o
f 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.
Season in Strathglass Page 4
