A faint shout carries in the still air and I catch sight of Catherine's blue jacket on a hilltop some distance away. I must have ranged wider than I thought and I make haste to join her, sweating with the exertion.
‘Glen Affric with Loch Affric and site of Glen Affric Lodge, looking westward, 8 April 1929.’
Look westward we do. We're at the Steven memorial with the distant blue hills of Kintail in view. A narrow mud path leads up through the trees to this viewpoint or belvedere where there is a tablet inscribed to Professor H. M. Steven and others unnamed who first campaigned for the conservation of the old Caledonian pinewoods. Steven wrote an influential book The Native Pinewoods of Scotland with his co-author Jock Carlisle, a young research fellow at Aberdeen University. The prof devised the strategy, Carlisle did the legwork – he walked these hills in rain, sun and snow in search of the ancient woods. I met Jock Carlisle in Canada and I have the book.
Below us, a ribbon of water between the lochs Beinn a'Mheadhoin and Affric reflects the evening sky, calm and pearly. We are near where Adam stood on that April day – perhaps among those pine trees clustered on a knoll about a quarter of a mile away.
We trudge through rank heather and boggy hollows to the knoll, a hogs-back littered with tumbled rocks, among which the old pines grow tall. They're in disarray – some fallen and rotting in the mossy bed, others dead but still standing among a litter of twigs and shed branches.
We clamber over rocks and recumbent tree trunks, ducking under low branches until, at last, checking with the photograph, every feature falls into place – the wooded headland, the cottage on the inlet, the trestle bridge beside it, the bend in the narrow road, the serpentine head of the loch, the water calm and palely glimmering, the far-off hills touched by shafts of sunshine. The pair of tall pine trees that framed his shot still stand. Few time-elapsed changes are apparent – the road is now partly obscured by a later flush of birch but, essentially, the scene is as Adam caught it. This is where he stood – we see with Adam's eyes.
I have one more photograph but there's no time to follow it up – we have to leave for home. I'll be back.
85
May, six months later and I have returned alone. The Adam photo shows pale Loch Affric in the distance backed by rising hills, the tops streaked with snow, prominent among them the elegant spire of Sgurr na Lapaich with a slash of white water on its flank where a burn drops towards the loch. In the middle distance a man in a tweed jacket sits astride a dappled pony, broad-backed and round-bellied, on a narrow track. He holds the reins loosely in his hands. His face is turned towards the camera but, at this distance, the features are indistinct. The track winds through a thick ground cover of heather. In the foreground are three pine trees and a sapling on a mound. ‘R M Adam on deer pony, Athnamulloch path, Glen Affric, 18 April 1930.’
The shutter clicked three-quarters of a century ago but the scene, I guess, should be much the same today.
A second shot taken from a different angle shows the pony with another man in the saddle and a figure standing knee-deep in the heather behind him. ‘W Finlayson, stalker and resident of Alltbeithe, with postman.’
It's many years since any postman carried the mail this far up the glen. It's also years since Alltbeithe was an inhabited house. There's only a youth hostel at Alltbeithe now, one of the remotest, far out west on the track to Kintail.
Old Duncan, who was a teenage boy when the photos were taken, peers at the print. Even at 90 his memory is keen but the name W Finlayson doesn't ring a bell. ‘There was a Henderson at Allbeithe about that time,’ he says. ‘A Donald Finlayson lived at Camban’ – but Donald Finlayson left the glen before Adam's visit. And anyway Camban, a cottage further up the glen and even more isolated than Alltbeithe, has been empty since 1926.
It's unseasonably wet and cold. Flurries of driving rain with a touch of sleet in it, swelling storm clouds chasing glints of sunshine across the sky, the cliff face of Sgurr na Lapaich squall-streaked and edged with snow. At the car park, a party of climbers, booted, gaitered and waterproofed, set off for the hill. I don't envy them. I keep to the low ground on the Athnamulloch path, these days metalled and upgraded to a forestry track.
Keeping an eye open for likely spots, branching off the track in search of a matching view, map blobbed by rain and flapping in the wind . . . nothing conforms. As I emerge from deep vegetation at the trackside, a tall figure in a squashy yellow oilskin hat is taken by surprise at my sudden appearance. We put our heads together over the photograph. ‘You need to be higher,’ he says and I agree.
We walk on, chatting, Adam forgotten. The stranger is Dutch. ‘My name is Dirk but you can call me Dick.’ Dick or Dirk tells me he had a florist's shop near Rotterdam but sold it when his wife died and he turned 60. Now he takes long trips to Scotland every summer. Last year, it was Aviemore – next year, perhaps Orkney. Is it good in Orkney? I say yes – wide horizons, big skies, high cliffs, lots of standing stones.
The white cottage with the red tin roof at Athnamulloch comes into view on grassy flats, where our paths separate. Dirk walks on towards Alltbeithe, I cross a burn by a wobbly plank and peer into the cottage window. There's no sign of life but people have spent time here recently – there's a couple of bottles on the ledge, one whisky and the other sloe gin, an odd coupling, and a scatter of paperbacks, one called Comanche. Welcome to the Wild West, Athnamulloch.
I retrace my steps and resume the search. So many trees but never the right ones until, on a whim, I make a rapid descent through 50 yards of rank vegetation and suddenly Adam's three trees are before me just as he pictured them. A branch or two may have fallen or bent further towards the ground but the kink in the spindly third tree (now dead and leafless) is unmistakable. Every distant peak on the horizon matches.
The odd thing is there's no sign of the track which is so clearly seen in the photograph. The meandering pathway where the pony stood with Adam on its back has disappeared – obliterated, as I now realise, by a mantle of heather, moss and coarse grasses. Nature has reclaimed her own. Somewhere under my feet, the old stony surface lies buried, abandoned when the forest road was made on a different line. The old Athnamulloch path has vanished from the face of Affric, along with Adam, stalker Finlayson and the anonymous postman of 80 years ago.
86
Ian, seventh son at Cougie, drives a tractor under the gaze of his two tousle-headed boys. He wears a fur hat skin side out like Davy Crockett's. I ask him where to find what's left of the Iron Fence and he points the way.
I first heard of the Iron Fence years ago when Catherine and I trekked through Glen Affric and found a reference to it at the Alltbeithe hostel – the note on the kitchen wall that told how, late in the 19th century, ‘West Affric became part of the massive deer forest of a railway magnate called Winans.’
Donald Fraser's booklet on Guisachan tells more. By the 1870s, bit by bit, the American tycoon Winans had acquired shooting rights over 350 square miles of bleak mountain and moorland stretching from Beauly in the east to Kintail in the west. He had a great fence erected around this vast territory, snaking over hill and hollow in order – so he hoped – to prevent the deer on his land from straying on to neighbouring estates. He considered the deer his own. Small furnaces for the blacksmiths he employed on the work flared along the line in the mountain wilderness.
I set off along a forest road though a great slice of the forest has gone, felled, logged and extracted except for a few naked stems left standing as habitat for birds and burrowing insect. Drifts of pale sawdust surround newly cut stumps alongside the road and the air is heavy with the smell of resin.
I pass into Mr Kwint's West Guisachan estate (‘Walkers welcome’, it says on the gate, with the usual proviso about the shooting season – in sum, walk on if you like but don't stray from the track) and stop by a lochan which seems much larger than it's shown on my map. Old map – after this edition was made, a small dam was built to enlarge the lochan for fishing, common pra
ctice in this fishing country.
I sit on the low curve of masonry that serves as a dam, contemplating grey featureless waters. Scattered on a nearby knoll are the flattened remains of a fishing hut blown down in a gale – panels of tin roofing and splintered planks and an assortment of rubbish. A dinghy lies upturned on the grass.
I cut across moorland to where the ground dips abruptly into a narrow gully and a burn gushes over a tiny fall. Hanging across the burn is a tall gate-like structure designed to stop animals from escaping along the watercourse. The barrier itself isn't old – it replaces an original – but the rusted hawser supporting it, spanning the gully, belongs to an earlier era, as do the five hefty iron hooks on which the structure hangs. Winans’ work – the handiwork of a bygone age.
Winans was no sportsman. Not for him the arduous stalk on foot in pursuit of a single chosen stag. He organised deer hunts on a prodigious scale, with great numbers of the animals driven into a dead-end defile where he and his mounted companions might slaughter them at will. There was talk of a Gatling machine gun and questions were asked in parliament.
Winans scandalised the shooting fraternity by his bloodthirsty methods and angered them for his querulous resort to litigation on the slightest pretext. In the end, having been bested in court over a trifle, he quit the killing fields of Affric to live out the rest of his life in Brighton.
The Iron Fence, his legacy to the Highlands, was left to decay or to be adapted to more peaceful ends.
A week later, I struggle cross-country through dense heather and high bracken and ford a burn where it rushes noisily over shallows. A new deer fence is silhouetted against the sky.
The track from my little fishing loch is sadly changed. The fine walking route of just a week ago has been gouged by stalkers’ vehicles into a rutted morass of mud and black peat. What have you done, Mr Kwint? Your ‘Walkers welcome’ rings hollow now.
Under an overcast sky, the brown moorland is bleak and uninviting. As the main track sweeps away to the south, a white post and a small cairn – just a heap of few stones – point the way to Loch Affric. Some way along this minor track, at a high vantage point, there stands a sturdy iron corner post, well over head height, bearing on its shank a battery of rust-bitten cogwheels – the stretchers which once held the fence wires in tension. Some twists of rusty wire still dangle from it in looped disarray. In the distance, I can see a corner of Loch Affric and, closer, there's a small lochan amid clusters of pine trees. In this lonely spot – a rusting memorial to William Winans and his failed dream of Highland empire.
Heading down to the Affric shore, I hear the sound of gunfire. Someone on the foreshore near Affric lodge is engaged in shooting practice. ‘Crack, crack!’ goes the rifle at regular intervals and the sound of it follows me all the way along the narrows and down to the bridge near the car park.
‘Crack, crack!’ – muffled now.
It's not good for your hearing, marksman. You may go deaf. ‘Crack! Crack!’
87
Winans died in Brighton on 23 June 1897 but I search the newspaper archive in vain for a mention of his death. It was his posthumous misfortune to breathe his last at the time when Queen Victoria was celebrating her Diamond Jubilee. The loyal columns of the Glasgow Herald, for one, were filled to bursting with accounts of the event and Winans’ demise failed to make the edition.
On the web I find that William had a son, Walter, who lived in Britain all his adult life and successfully assumed the role of English gentleman. He spoke with an impeccable accent, sported Dundreary whiskers and tipped a jaunty bowler hat. He had something of an artistic bent too – he sculpted horses. Like his father, he had a taste for blood sport on a grand scale. An expert shot, he declared that he hoped to kill at least one specimen of every game animal on earth.
‘I have shot over a thousand stags,’ he told an interviewer from the New York Times on his single brief visit to the States (to see a horse show). Possibly a fair proportion of his thousand stags were shot on his father's range in West Affric.
Walter met his end in 1910. While pony trotting, he crossed the finishing line slumped in his sulky and was declared dead with the reins still clasped in his lifeless hands.
Slowly the Winans fence decays. Long sections have been uprooted and, here and there, its rusty iron posts have been adapted to buttress a modern deer fence erected to keep today's deer not in but out of forest land.
There's a radio programme A History of the World in 100 Objects. The piece of rusting ironmongery I found in the Affric hills could surely qualify as one of a hundred objects in the history of the Highlands.
88
Descending from the Hill Lochs (still looking out for telltale signs of Iron Fence as I go), I come on a Land Rover slewed across the road. The driver's a big-made man with working hands – nails edged with black, I notice – who says his name's Younie, John Younie – strange surname. He farms at Drumnadrochit but rents grazing up here. He has sheep on the ground and later this month he'll bring cattle.
It would be fine apart from the ticks. ‘Last year, I lost 90 sheep through ticks,’ he says. Tick infestation seems to occur in pockets – ‘Bad here but there are none in Drumnadrochit.’
Ticks can carry lime disease which attacks the nervous system – a bad business. They cling to the heather and bracken and rub off on your legs as you brush by (the spores of bracken are carcinogenic, too – nature's not always benign). I shan't wear shorts.
‘Here's one,’ says John, grabbing Minnie his lively collie by the scruff and prizing a bloated insect from the nape of her neck. He climbs down with the tick between his thumb and forefinger, drops it on the ground and grinds it under his heel. There's an orangey splat on the tarmac – Minnie's blood.
‘You can get stuff at Tesco's to rub on your skin and it works,’ he says. ‘I rubbed it on my hands and I didn't get a bite after that.’
There are ways of dealing with ticks. They burrow under the skin and you have to extract them whole. It's said they'll disengage smartly if you touch them with a lighted match but I don't fancy that. Besides, I don't carry matches.
George at Upper Glassburn says John Younie used to deliver coal as a sideline to his farming. He arrived at George's place at midnight in a downpour of rain, his face streaked with coal dust black as sin. The huge truck with its flashing lights couldn't get up the awkward bend in the drive so George and he howked up several tons of coal on their backs.
George paid by cheque which John crumpled in his coaly hands and stuffed in a pocket, damp and dirty, along with his scruffy wad of notes.
‘Your bank manager won't thank you for that,’ says George.
‘He doesn't,’ says John.
89
For once, the post office at Tomich is open when I pass by. Out of curiosity, I peer in. Joyce, who works for Donald Fraser at Guisachan cottages, stands behind the counter. It's tiny – hardly more than a cubicle – and it's a time capsule. The clock stopped in the 1940s.
Old wartime posters brown with age cover the woodchip walls, urging customers to join the Wrens or the RAF or the Royal Observer Corps, or to save for victory, or send a telegram to the forces overseas at a cheap rate. On another wall, a blue line on a large map shows Donald Fraser's progress round the world in the Spirit of Affric, the boat he built himself, tracing his way across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal and into the Pacific via the Antipodes and on towards the Red Sea.
It's too late, of course, to invest in the war bonds advertised on the wall. I buy stamps instead.
90
Straight off the wall, almost, news of Spirit of Affric and all who sail in her. Ian from Comar Lodge tells me he's just back home from India after a spell on board with Donald and his crew mate. He was at sea for two months not counting the landfalls. The longest spell at sea was nine days. He says he was never seasick – a bit queasy once or twice when the waves were 14 feet high. Before he came aboard they'd been the size of a house so he missed the worst
of it. Even so, he hurt his back when thrown across the cabin. ‘There's not a lot of room in a 40-foot boat,’ he says.
He says Donald's voyage is part of an event called the Blue Water Rally, which is not a race but, roughly speaking, a loose convoy of boats circumnavigating the world. They keep in touch every day and meet at designated marinas. Yachties appear to be a gregarious bunch – once ashore, he says, you go out for a drink, meal, a nightcap on a neighbour's boat. In bed by midnight all the same.
91
Who's that man with the mahogany legs? A man in shorts whose wiry legs are the colour of old leather has been talking to the lady in the Cannich shop. ‘They're the brownest legs I've ever seen,’ I say when he's gone.
‘That's Richard,’ says she. ‘He's a great walker. He's out on the hills every day. He's never at home.’
Richard lives in the first house past the bridge at Cannich, on a steep hillside. I've driven past many times and never noticed it half-hidden among trees.
Today he's at home – tomorrow he's off to Wales and more hills. I open the gate and climb the many steps to his door. He leads me into the kitchen, which is bachelor untidy. ‘A coffee?’ Where's the coffee? He searches in cupboards, finds the jar at last, drops a spoonful in a mug and rummages in a drawer. ‘There are biscuits here somewhere.’ He finds a crumpled packet.
‘A broken biscuit is fine,’ I say.
Season in Strathglass Page 17
