Season in Strathglass

by Fowler, John;

  23

  February. At the River Bend.

  The water is still and untroubled now. There's a hush in the air. Thin bands of mist cling to the hillsides but the tops are clear in sunlight. There's snow on the higher hills and the far mountains are pure white. Upstream, where the river emerges from Loch Carrie, breaking ice sparkles in pale sunshine.

  Catherine and I walk along the curve of the riverbank, following a faint grassy trail through stone-littered and rather boggy ground, with a multitude of small plant life at our feet – all kinds of delicate mossy fronds, lichens and fluted fungi among carpets of brown alder leaves. A pad of fungus raises little scarlet-tipped bell mouths to the air. A small stone the size of a melon is a botanic garden in miniature, capped with a profusion of little species – what botanists call the ‘lower plants’. If Joe were here he'd name them all.

  There's a brief intrusion. A yellow bin lorry comes speeding along where the road makes a cord with the river bend. So Monday must be bin day in the glen. Green wheelies wait at the farm lane ends. It'll take half the morning to collect the rubbish from the few households here – a country outing for the binmen and all in the day's work. How lucky for them.

  24

  Past Tomich a rough track in a field leads to a little gabled house with green scrollwork eaves, the oldest house in the district. Kyle, who manages the fishing on the Hill Lochs, lives there. If he's out on the loch today he'll get wet. The windscreen wipers are swishing.

  Today I explore, being in search of a place out west called Cougie, which has passed into legend. The way some people talk you'd think it was the end of the world.

  George at Upper Glassburn has directed me to take a ‘scenic’ route, which means tackling a steep muddy track through Plodda woods – Land Rover terrain, gouged and bouldered, which George no doubt takes at a lick on his postie run. George has many irons in the fire including delivering the post part-time and, for two days in the week, he drives a wee red van along the strath and up and down two glens with élan. But for me it's an obstacle course.

  I emerge at last on the forestry road that leads to Cougie where the road surface is better but not much.

  Sprays of muddy liquid squish from the wheels as I dodge the potholes. Some miles on, at a bend in the river at the forest edge, I reach an odd jumble of buildings – a low timber chalet, a cottage and a shed or two. I'm not impressed. This dreich weather does the place no favours – until I meet Val whose cheery greeting brightens the day.

  Val is the chatelaine at Cougie, a large lady with frisking hair who talks with a hint of Welsh in her accent. She invites me to sit with her on the veranda with the rain dripping on the plastic canopy over our heads. Hens pick about in the ground in front of us – these unconcerned birds are survivors. ‘A pine marten got six of them the other night,’ she says.

  Birds flit by. ‘Goldcrests,’ she says. ‘We get a lot of bullfinches some years. Some years they strip the cherry tree and there's no blossom next spring.’

  Val runs part of the long chalet as a hostel for walkers. Trekkers walking between the west coast and Affric often arrive on her doorstep. A name board on a door with the letters scored into the wood means nothing to me. Gaelic? In fact it's Arabic, inscribed there when her daughter lived with a Moroccan partner. The inscription seems less exotic and romantic when you know that it translates as wooden hut.

  Returning, I take the back road from Cannich to Struy alongside the River Glass. Fishermen stand like statues thigh-high in its dark waters. A herd of Sheena's cattle, black and red, are grazing on its low-lying meadows.

  Sheena is the daughter of Iain Thomson, a man of many talents who has turned his hand to writing. He's been a cattle farmer and, before that, he was a shepherd at Strathmore at the head of Loch Monar in the far reaches of Glen Strathfarrar. He wrote a fine book about his experiences there and, since then, has published others. I pass the old caravan parked by farm buildings where he writes. It's a tubby little vehicle, elderly, a bit the worse for wear and looks as if it could accommodate two at a squeeze. He's writing a novel now.

  Near Struy, I stop at a two-storey timber house where, leaning on the five-bar gate at the top of the drive, I chat with Tim. Tim's an ecologist and woodland consultant. I first met him when he was warden at Beinn Eighe Nature Reserve in the north-west Highlands. He says he loved the job but got fed up with the increasing bureaucracy. He was lucky to find this place – he bought 13 acres across the river from Struy, built the house and now he has his own young cattle to fulfil a long-held ambition. Somewhat incongruously for a man of green credentials, he's a sports car enthusiast. When he was young, he and his brother used to race souped-up Austin 7s. He's moved on since then. Parked at the side of the house are a 4x4, a mud-spattered Jag and a vintage Porsche under wraps.

  25

  George's home at Upper Glassburn is a rambling two-storey house with gabled windows in the roof and a porch framed by rustic columns made from pine trunks. The house stands high above a sharp bend in the road between Cannich and Struy overshadowed by trees. Turning into the lane calls for caution since traffic (what there is of it) tends take the corner at speed. There's a bed-and-breakfast sign attached to a tree at the lane end.

  At the top of the stairs in this house hangs a small painting, naive in style, of a green-hulled fishing boat (I called it a smack – which George took as a slight) buffeting through white-crested waves. ‘The Janet,’ says George, ‘my first boat.’ George skippered her as a young man fishing off the west coast.

  When he came ashore for good, he thought there was money to be made cutting peat – no shortage of peat in the Highlands – and imported a peat harvester from Finland. Unfortunately the enterprise failed. But George is not easily defeated and, when a friend stopped him in the street and asked if he could drive a lorry, he jumped at the chance. Next morning at the crack of dawn, he was at the wheel of a clapped-out truck blasting out exhaust fumes, clanking up the Oban brae with a load of granite kerbstones bound for the outer isles. The business prospered. George declined the offer of a partnership in favour of a percentage of the turnover, a deal which gave him the funds to buy the Cnoc Hotel at Struy plus the inn across the road, where he made a genial host and his wife Ishbel cooked good, plain meals for the guests.

  The hotel, a row of converted cottages on a grassy bank just out of Struy, has a cheery look when the lights are lit and the inn has come up in the world since its days as a country howff with an earthen floor. The joke was that, in winter, you had to drink up fast before the beer froze in the glass.

  George also sings. There's a pile of CDs for sale on the sideboard at Upper Glassburn featuring him and his son John in an hour's worth of folk song – ‘Ca’ the Yowes’ and ‘Scots Wha’ Hae’ and such – which they recorded at the old ferryman's cottage down the strath at Aigas.

  George has sung his songs to guests at Aigas, the baronial tower house on the road to Beauly where the naturalist Sir John Lister-Kaye lives and from where he runs an upmarket field centre. Courses there include heritage tours, which I guess have a special appeal to American visitors. I can imagine George on a festive night charming the Americans with song and story – bearded as he is, dressed for the occasion in the kilt, the very image of a minstrel Scot.

  26

  This morning, there's honey for breakfast at Upper Glassburn, special honey, delicious, the colour of old bronze and crusty at the rim of the jar. ‘There's a story about that,’ says George. For sure, there's always a story with George. He knows everyone and their stories too.

  For example, the formidable lady from America, ‘slightly hippy but not short of cash’, who bought the old stables near Guisachan House where she planned to live the green life. The first frosts of winter put paid to that dream and she promptly returned to the States though she continued to visit every summer. She'd shipped in a consignment of essential provisions in bulk (George says by the ton), including a load of Mexican honey. George helped her out now and
again doing odd jobs like mowing the lawn. When she finally sold the stables, she asked if he'd like a sum of money. ‘A sum of money?’ George was taken aback but rallied, made a joke of it and named a tentative figure.

  It has to be said here that George's hearing isn't perfect.

  ‘A tub of honey,’ she repeated crisply.

  George left with a barrel of honey in the back of his truck and guests at Upper Glassburn sample it yet. He says there's two or three hundredweight still in his garage. It must be 40 years old by now and still maturing and no doubt all the better for that.

  Personalities spring to life in George's conversation – Janet the Wheel in Tomich whose simple paintings were ‘discovered’ by an American academic who hailed her as a primitive of genius. Alas, her fame didn't last. Why the Wheel? Even George who knows everything doesn't know that, only that she came from a long line of Wheels.

  And there were the genteel females, not young, who booked into Upper Glassburn while attending an alternative lifestyle retreat nearby called the Centre of Light. ‘I called them Linda's Lassies,’ says George. ‘They tended to be women of a certain age. I suppose they spent their time chanting and banging drums and communing with the spiritual.’ One guest would eat nothing cooked – to Ishbel's dismay, all her meals were ‘raw fruitarian’ (not my phrase – I read it in a newspaper). Heaped bean sprouts were a staple. But then Linda moved her Centre of Light elsewhere with accommodation provided and now bean sprouts are off the menu at Upper Glassburn.

  In the long evenings at George and Ishbel's, George, whisky in hand, can be persuaded to reminisce. From his time at the Cnoc Hotel, there's his tale of the English barrister, very pukka, clipped of speech, stiff-backed as befits a former officer in the Guards. But it was the wife who wore the trousers. She managed everything, even laying out his clothes in the morning, though not always to his satisfaction. ‘George,’ he said at breakfast parade, as he called it (always at eight hundred hours precisely), ‘George,’ he said, ‘I found 16 points of error in my kit today.’ Then, sotto voce: ‘Say nothing – wife watching.’

  One night when all the guests had retired to bed, perhaps after a nightcap or two, strange sounds were heard overhead. Thump, thump, thump, then silence. Thump, thump, thump again. And so on. George and Ishbel were somewhat alarmed. George decided to investigate and as he reached the top of the stairs he was confronted by the barrister marching down the corridor, stark naked. He snapped smartly to attention, looked George straight in the eye and without a word strode on. At this point, a bedroom door opened and a woman's arm reached out, grabbed the naked barrister by the neck and pulled him inside.

  Next morning, he appeared immaculately turned out as usual, not at the stipulated eight hundred hours but five minutes early. ‘Appalling behaviour, George,’ he said stiffly. ‘Are you going to throw me out?’ George assured him he wouldn't but was unable to confirm that no one else had seen the episode. All through breakfast, as the guests entered and were hailed by George – ‘And did you sleep well?’ – the barrister suffered agonies of embarrassment while his wife sat stony-faced.

  Once, Tom Sharpe, the satirical novelist (Porterhouse Blue and the Wilt novels), and his wife called at Upper Strathglass for afternoon tea and decided to stay the night. At dinner, George observed him moving from table to table between courses, seating himself with different guests in turn. George was puzzled and quizzed him about it later.

  Research, answered Sharpe. Talking to strangers gave him ideas for his books – a story here, a catchphrase there, an anecdote, a line of dialogue, a quirky detail, a character study. Thus Mrs Sharpe had learned to eat alone.

  George, I imagine, didn't mention the naked barrister.

  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 hid
es 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.