I take a dram, I buy the book The Endless Tide. On the blurb, these words: ‘Iain R. Thomson currently lives near Beauly. He is well known all over the Highlands. From farm servant to the Royal Horse Guards to cattleman for a Russian cattle baron, his life has been rich in extraordinary incident.’
Here in the bookshop on a blustery winter's night, he's in his element, holding court, now darting here and there to greet friends, now seated at a table with a stack of books at his elbow, pen in his hand and a line of buyers queuing for his signature, which he dashes off with a flourish. A tall, lean, rangy man with a beaked nose and a head of grey hair, wearing countryman's check breeches, green stockings, polished brown brogues, his sweater sleeves rolled up to elbow. The speech he makes is like his book, a headlong rush of anecdote and yarn told with gusto.
The entertainment continues. A small wisp of a man, a prizewinner at the Mod, sings a wistful Gaelic ballad in a lightsome voice. Then Iain slings an accordion round his neck, the fiddler joins him and they make energetic music. We should have danced.
There's no one I know among the guests (a surprise) but I chat with one or two: a woman of a certain age wearing lime yellow trousers and jazzy waistcoat and a tall farmer with a fine head of flowing hair, leaning on a shepherd's stick, who tells me he's one of the DC Thomson publishing clan in Dundee – ‘the Beano and the Dandy’, as he says.
The Herald has sent me a copy of The Endless Tide for review. Here's an extract:
In the course of his life Iain R Thomson has been variously shepherd, cattle farmer, agro-politician, deep-sea yachtsman, jack of all trades, reveller, and latterly something of a philosopher-poet . . . Here, zestfully told, are tales of rubbing shoulders with the great and the good, Margaret Thatcher for one, and – more to his liking – the Queen Mother, of boisterous nights with cronies in the Castlebay Bar on Barra; of the perils of transatlantic crossings under sail and a flood of gripping adventures in small boats sailing around the Western Isles.
Born the son of a sea captain, fascinated as a boy both by tales of seafaring and by the drama of the cattle ring, he opted out of formal education – ‘Goodbye school . . . bye-bye college’ – and got himself hired as an ‘orra loon’ on a north-east farm in the days when there were people in the fields and the horse was king. Thereafter he spent several years as a young man, with wife and small children, shepherding in one of Scotland's remotest glens.
A short quotation from the book captures his prose style in full flight (he's describing the Viking longships): ‘Graceful, buoyant as a feather, they skimmed the sea, flexing to the waves, breasting a shoulder, swooping through a trough as a fulmar will at the merest tilt of a wing.’
He's an incurable romantic – but shrewd too.
57
I meet Iain from time to time – in the caravan where he writes, in the bar at the Cnoc Hotel and now, with Catherine, in the Lovat Arms in Beauly. Iain, in his 70s, still has an eye for the ladies and he and she get on famously.
He's been fascinated with cattle and sheep since he first saw them in the ring as a boy. Later, when he quit the army, his CO was astonished that he should choose to abandon life as a guardsman for the mud and muck of the byre. For Iain, it was the taste of freedom. Shepherding at Strathmore at the head of Loch Monar gave him his chance. The remoteness and self-sufficiency of life there, as chronicled in Isolation Shepherd, were liberating. ‘I loved being on my own, far from interference,’ he says. And: ‘As soon as I go north I'm a happy chap.’
With the pride of an expert, he's scathing about a TV programme which purported to tell how the cattle drovers of previous centuries led their herds from the Highlands to their markets or trysts in the south. Authenticity vanished when the supposed drovers couldn't get their beasts across a river. The cattle stood on the bank stubbornly refusing to enter the water. What you do, he says, is you take a calf, sling a noose round its neck and haul it into the water behind a boat by main force. ‘It's half strangled, its tongue lolls out, it bawls – don't tell the RSPCA. The mother follows, of course, and then all the others.’
Another tip – how to bury a dead bull in a field. The point of the awkward operation (a bull is a ton weight or more) is to ensure it doesn't end up in the hole on its back, otherwise its feet will stick out of the ground. This is history, of course. You wouldn't be allowed to do it now.
He tells how he came to figure in An Element of Regret. The film had originally focussed on the pinewoods of Glen Affric and Finlay Macrae, the bearded, pipe-playing head forester there. It happened that the director Edwin Mickleburgh chanced to overhear Iain in the bar of an Inverness hotel telling a friend about his time as a shepherd. He had a few words and a drink or two with him and hired him on the spot. And so, in a sense, Iain poached the leading role while Finlay, from what I've heard, was less than pleased.
Iain again. The talk turns to graves. ‘I happened to have some cash and bought a stone,’ says he. He had it erected in Struy kirkyard ‘to honour the memory’ of his forefathers, and his own name is already carved on it too – ‘all except the dates’. It stands beside the little kirk, a tall plain black stone incised with a long list of names, among whom are: Hector Mackenzie Fraser, inspector of the poor, Iain's great-great-grandfather; Hector Fraser, master mariner SS Tiranu Maru (great-grandfather), ‘went down with his ship Liverpool bay October 1918’; Hector Fraser Thomson, master mariner (father), SS Brittany Coast, port commissioner Valetta, Malta 1942; Iain Robert Thomson (himself), farmer, Strathglass [no dates as yet] and his son Hector Fraser Thomson, ‘killed in Teanassie burn 3rd March 1971, aged 15’.
Iain remembered young Hector on the last page of his second book The Long Horizon: ‘I hurt my back pulling a plough at the mouth of the shed. Hector stayed off his studies to help. A hard day for a boy . . . Above the Teanassie burn the fence wires were cut and he fell.’
58
‘Best to meet early,’ said Sheena, Iain Thomson's daughter, so I'm on the road at seven. On the way, a stag leaps in front of the car from a high bank on the narrow back road to Struy. On and on, it runs ahead, a Landseer monarch not at bay but sadly out of its element. Best to leave plenty of room in case he turns – which he does, suddenly. He rears up and I jam on the brakes, at which he skids ungracefully, bellyflops on the turf then staggers to his feet, clears the fence with a bound and is last seen heading across the flats towards the river in a lordly scamper.
Sheena won't be pleased to hear about this. She's just won a battle to have the deer fenced off from her ground and here's one back.
No one's about at the steading, a long stonewalled building with the little white caravan where Iain writes his books parked at the side. It's he who turns up first in an old red car. ‘I didn't know you were coming,’ he says. ‘Have a cup of tea. Sheena won't be here for half an hour.’ And he disappears into the caravan. No sooner said than she arrives and, not intending to waste a minute (there are a hundred large beasts to feed), she starts the day's work and my mug of tea is left untasted.
Most of the cattle are a cross between Aberdeen Angus and Salers, a French breed – ‘Good ranching cattle,’ she says, which means they're hardy and happy in the Scottish outdoors, and good milkers too. The Aberdeen Angus connection adds a premium to the beef price.
When Iain quit farming, he sold his cattle to his daughter to start her off. (‘She got them at a good price,’ he says later, sotto voce.) Now, since her partner died, he helps out. He says she's a good cattlewoman.
The bulls are fed first: Sean, Jack, Strathglass Oakleaf and Indiana Jones, three with the black sheen of Aberdeen Angus, one red-rusty – the Salers. Sean the Aberdeen Angus has a ruff of black curls on the nape of his neck – he's handsome and valuable too, £3,000 worth of muscle, bone and beef. Among the females, one, a 17-year-old grandmother to a good number of the younger generation, is clearly a favourite – she gets a kindly word and a pat on the ragged rump in passing. She's out to grass, sure of her keep for her natural life. She'll n
ever find a place in the food chain, that's for sure. But, in any case, since she was born before BSE, mad cow disease, a cut of her rather stringy rump would be illegal eating.
A bull down the lane bellows loudly as we approach. ‘Just saying hello,’ says Sheena reassuringly.
Then she manoeuvres a tractor out of the shed and I perch on a wheel casing while she spears a bale of hay on the forklift and we trundle down the road with the bale hoisted aloft. She grumbles that these big tractors weren't designed for women – she has to stretch to reach the pedals and the gears aren't easy – but she drives it like a dodgem all the same. Meanwhile, Iain emerges from his caravan, mounts his bike and pedals off ahead of us.
Sixty cows and their calves await us in a compound. As the tractor noses through a welter of heaving black backs and Iain stands on the trailer shovelling out pellets of feed, the cattle close in behind us, jostling for a place at the trough. Iain jumps down among them, whacking and prodding with his stick to make sure all get a share.
Back at the steading, we swill muck off our boots in a burn and Sheena announces that she'll be spending the rest of the day spreading muck. I opt out of that to join Iain in his poky caravan. There's barely room for the two of us to sit at the table among a litter of books and papers including a fading copy of the Financial Times two months old. There's also a diminutive stove and a fridge for the milk. Iain puts the kettle on and gives a stir to the pan of porridge plop-plopping on the ring. This time I'll get my tea.
‘I wrote two books here,’ says he. And he's just finished a book of poems which he doesn't ‘suppose anyone will publish’.
There doesn't seem to be a handle on the door. ‘Kick it,’ he says, which I do and it swings open.
His parting words: ‘Give me a call next time and we'll have a pint.’
59
John MacLennan comes to the caravan park at Cannich. It's evening, dark and misty, and I go out to the gate to guide him in. A full moon shimmers through the trees – ghostly.
I pour him a glass and talk about his father Old Duncan and how I saw him in the film An Element of Regret. Duncan, in his middle years then, was talking about the ethics of stalking and the satisfaction in a clean kill for both stalker and ‘the gentleman’.
‘Would you talk about “the gentleman” nowadays?’ I ask.
‘Not at all,’ says John. Such barriers have been broken. ‘In the old days stalkers were never on first-name terms with the guest. It was always “Sir”. But that's all gone.’
Names . . . In those days, he says, when red deer were fewer in number and the sport was not so commercialised, stalkers would know their stags by name. No longer.
Stalkers were hired in the spring and, before the shooting season they were sent out to collect the antlers shed on the hill, just to keep a check on numbers. A stalker might be sent out to kill a particular stag and, if he didn't succeed, he'd think nothing of coming back empty-handed. It's not so now.
As John speaks, his father comes vividly to mind, reminiscing by his fireside about the old days. ‘If a stag ran off you took your hat off to him,’ he told me. ‘That's what I'd call sport.’
John says that a bit of ground on every estate was kept as a sanctuary where the stags were left in peace till they came out to the hinds at the rut. They'd be fed regularly on maize and locust beans which kept them in the sanctuary. These days, especially with so many hillwalkers about, the stags keep on the move.
This is all unknown territory to me. What if I had a stag in my sights, I ask (an unlikely event), where would I aim – at the head or the heart?
Wrong on both counts. John says the best place to shoot a stag is the chest area behind the shoulder – ‘the boiler house where the vital organs are’. Talk of a heart shot is a fallacy. The heart isn't big and it's low down. The head's out too, mostly, unless you're aiming from behind at the back of the head. ‘There's a good chance of only breaking the jaw if you aim at the head and the stag would be off with a cruel wound and die of starvation.’ And John wouldn't favour a neck shot unless you're within a hundred yards of the quarry, aiming fairly high on the neck to make sure of severing the spine.
If I really want to know about stalking, he says, I should read the book Deer Stalking in Scotland by Kenneth Whitehead. I think I might.
John says that he started stalking full time in April 1965 when he and his father were working with ponies. That lasted until about 1969 when vehicles took over, allowing stalkers to penetrate further into the hills. In those days, his father would come up the loch by boat. ‘There are places where I stalk now he was never on.’
Now, after more than 40 years on the hill, he reckons he's got about five years to go. It's the end of a tale. There will be no more MacLennans – with or without a ‘gentleman’ – in Affric.
60
Deer Stalking in Scotland, as recommended. A primer (published 1964), short and easy to read – even the technical bits (muzzle velocities etc.).
Sometimes Whitehead chuckles.
If during a crawl you happen to be following your stalker but carrying the rifle yourself, be certain to see that the safety catch is on and the barrel is not pointing up your stalker's backside. For this reason stalkers generally prefer to carry the rifle themselves, only handing it to the gentleman [gentleman again, in the 1960s] when the firing point is reached.
Also: when aiming at a stag while lying on your back with the barrel pointing down your legs, don't shoot yourself in the foot.
Sensible words, too, on the question of what to eat on the hill. Nothing elaborate – ‘a few sandwiches – preferably meat – and a piece of slab cake with perhaps an apple or an orange, easily carried in the pocket. Tomato sandwiches should not be included, for when squashed, the whole becomes a soggy mess.’ This I know from experience.
Whitehead remarks that ‘whisky is best left at the bottom of the hill’. Wise.
61
Stormy last night, with wind and rain. Came a thump in the night on the caravan roof and I rose from bed bare-legged to investigate, opened the door half expecting to find someone there but saw only inky darkness. I conclude that a branch from a pine tree has landed on the roof and go back to sleep.
Walk down the road for a paper in the morning. Caught in a drizzle but encouraged at breakfast by a hint of brighter weather. Sure enough, the sun breaks through on my way into Glen Cannich.
Near the top of the hairpins above the village, I see four men peering into the undergrowth at the roadside. They don't look like locals. One carries a couple of plastic bags, bulging and knobbly with stuff inside. Gathering mushrooms, I think, to sell round the hotels and restaurants.
The river comes into view as I reach the top of the pass and start my descent into the glen. Through a screen of riverside trees, out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of a narrow footbridge spanning the stream. I climb down the bank to investigate. It's a bridge all right but only just – a mere strip of concrete with a wire handrail leading nowhere as far as I can see. No sign of a track on the far bank, just a solid mass of heather covering the steep slope. There must have been a purpose for it once but what now?
Upstream the river comes surging over rocky barriers, the water beer-bottle brown as it sweeps over rocks and slides under my feet in a dark surge. A shrubby alder rooted in a rocky islet perkily defies the current. Downstream the river drops noisily out of sight into a winding gorge.
I follow it downstream, negotiating hummocks of moss of the red and green sort (what species I cannot tell), plunging through heather thigh high – waist high, even – stooping under dangling birch and pine branches, following faint animal tracks and water runnels and dodging half-hidden pools brimming with oozy aquatic plant life. Now the river dashes over a rock shelf in a solid chute into a gorge 20 feet below where it boils between high rock walls before emerging, a spent force, in a lazy pool where whorls of foam bubbles sparkle in the sunshine like Milky Ways.
A butterfly settles, brownish with
orange roundels on the wings. No doubt Catherine will identify it when I phone.
‘Scotch Argus,’ she says. ‘Common.’
I should have known.
62
Thirty dead alder trees in a line, by my rough count, lean over a stretch of the Cannich River. Naked, stick-like, forked, spiky, mostly stripped of bark and gleaming silvery in the sunlight. Alder, thou art sick; what ails thee?
Frank at Culligran has an answer. He shows a page in a scientific journal headed ‘Foliage loss in alders’. Apparently it's widespread. Ten per cent of alder trees in England and Wales have been killed (literally decimated) by the most likely culprit, a fungal disease now ominously spreading northwards. The fungus penetrates the root and works its way up the stem. Symptoms are black tarry patches on the trunk and ill-formed foliage turning yellow and dropping early to leave the crown bare. A nasty ailment with an ugly name – Phytophthora.
Surgery does no good. It won't help to chop down a sick tree since the spores, swept along by the current, proceed to attack healthy trees further down river.
Frank says some of his trees at Culligran have been infected. And Tim at Struy says he's noticed a couple of alders on his ground suspiciously thin in the crown. It's scary.
63
Just before the hump bridge at Struy a green-bladed signpost, slightly awry, points the way to Glen Strathfarrar. It's easy to miss. A last-minute swerve may be required.
Half a mile into the glen a gate across the road bars the way. ‘Glen closed’ it says. How can you close a glen?
A note attached to the gatehouse doorway explains. Cars may not enter on Tuesdays (this is Tuesday) and Wednesday mornings in the season and they're strictly limited in number to 25 at one time. Out of season, never. You may walk in or bike if you like.
Season in Strathglass Page 13
