At length a diminutive figure crests the skyline – Alastair returning. He says the last section to the summit was a little steep and there was a flurry of snow as he stopped to eat a sandwich at the top. At my level, there was only rain. One more Munro has fallen to him – only nine more to go. By summer, he expects to tick off his last peak. There'll be a small celebration at the top for a few family and friends, hopefully on a more elegant hill than this. Back at the dam wall, we part and ahead of me the yellow coupé streaks down the glen in serpentine flight.
28
Caravan park, Sunday morning, 8 a.m. Catherine is here for the weekend in search of dragon- and damselflies – her latest thing. Glen Affric is a hotspot on the dragonfly map.
Across the road at Marydale, Sister Petra Clare rings the bell – we're up late. Crispy bacon rolls for breakfast, an indulgence. Hail cholesterol.
So, a leisurely start. At the Coire Loch, we splodge around in the mossy, reedy margins and find a black darter and then a common hawker which C tries to photograph but it's too quick for her – a tantalising gleam of blue on diaphanous wings, never settling. Here, there, gone.
We progress up the glen, still on the lookout. Small Loch Salach a’ Ghiubhais would be promising, she says, if only the sun would shine, which it doesn't. Still, there's a common hawker to record and one butterfly, a meadow brown. Not a lot, but she's satisfied.
29
There's snow on the hills and menacing clouds. ‘It's a thin wind still,’ says Donny, who looks after the Guisachan cottages for Donald Fraser. Thin, meaning sharp, keen, biting.
The bare birch woods are red against the hillsides.
In Tomich, asking directions at the inn, I see a sprightly, elderly man walking his dog down the road. ‘Albert Dormer,’ says my informant. ‘He used to be bridge correspondent for The Times.’ When he lived in Tomich? ‘No, that was before.’
What chance brought him here to live?
30
Catherine and I walk down the road at Guisachan in the dark, with a faint moon glimpsed through the foliage. The clock tower at the steading is ghostly in the mirk, like the gothic house in Psycho. It's pitch black under the trees but we have torches and, at the foot of the drive, there are lights, a line of globes glowing faintly. Moths have landed on some of the globes. C identifies a winter moth and a few pale brindled beauties.
31
One of the Tomich cottages is for sale and, on a whim, we call to view. We fall in love. It's perfect – it's the home in Affric we've always wanted. For three days and nights, we dream.
But we're not country folk. It's not for us.
32
Albert Dormer, who's in his 80s, came to live in Tomich 15 years ago when he tired of London. He found the cottage by chance on a house-hunting trip north with his ex-wife, who encouraged him to buy. He says she probably thought it was fine to live 500 miles apart. It could have been further. They'd looked at a house on the Pentland Firth.
His dog Pickles, a bouncy ginger poodle, jumps on my lap when I sit down on the settee, followed by a Siamese cat who curls herself alongside. Like commas. Both accept stroking.
For years, Albert, a tournament player, was bridge correspondent for The Times and he's written several books on the game. Through bridge, he met Jaime Ortiz-Patino, wealthy grandson of a tin-mining magnate in Bolivia, bridge player and owner of the Valderrama golf course in Spain, and together they travelled on behalf of the World Bridge Federation. Patino had a mission to stamp out cheating in the international game. (Albert says the Italians were the worst.)
He no longer plays. Instead he takes Pickles for long walks in the morning, reads the newspapers, watches a little television and feeds the geese in his garden.
33
The weather's turned cold again, with snow on the tops. Rain drummed on the caravan roof overnight and, outdoors, the wind nips. There's been one downpour already and, in spite of a few ragged blue patches in the sky, there will be more. Dark clouds moving fast on the horizon give promise of squalls to come.
Not the best day to explore the loch country on high moorland between Affric and Glen Moriston. Nevertheless . . .
Hilton pond beyond Tomich is a circle of ornamental water in front of a big white house where there's said to be an osprey's nest in the trees. I can't find it. How can you tell? What does an osprey nest look like?
A track leads into mixed woodland – conifers, birch and rowan and, here and there, an old pine, all tangled with grey-green lichens. The mossy ground squelches with water. It's all a dripping dampness. But the track has a stony surface, laid down possibly for pony traffic between the glens, and boots ring out pleasantly on it.
A burn almost worthy of being called a river flows fast alongside, gushing over the track where the map shows a ford – it's no great obstacle, I can splash through with feet more or less dry. Then I come on a notice – ‘Wild boar reservation 200 metres ahead’ – and, beyond it, the high perimeter fence of an enclosure. I'm glad of this fence. How wild are wild boars, after all? They have tusks.
But, when a couple of dun-coloured beasts emerge from the woods and trot along on their side of the barrier, they seem innocuous – smaller than I expected and peaceable. A second billboard informs that the reservation has been set up with various scientific objectives in view, including studies into the effect of boars on vegetation, such as tree regeneration, and the prospects of farming them. Boar steaks.
I walk on with one more river to cross – a burn, rather. A hop and a leap onto the grassy bank on the other side bring me to a stile at the woodland edge, with open moorland beyond. Wreckage of a footbridge a little off the track indicates what must have been another route, now abandoned. Here the burn is spanned by two parallel tree trunks, or possibly old telegraph poles, with a few rotten planks nailed across and a gap where the remainder are missing. A single small pine and a leafless, warped birch tree stand guard.
Ahead is an intrusion – a pylon. Tall, unfriendly, gaunt against the lowering sky. And not alone but one of a chain carrying the electricity transmission line from Beauly southward to connect with the grid. I see the wires looping from pylon to pylon in diminishing perspective down towards Tomich and beyond. Ugly enough as they are, there is worse to come – the electricity company plans to replace them with giants up to twice their height to carry power from the new wind farms mushrooming in the north. This is not a prospect I like and nor do many of the locals. There's going to be an inquiry.
It's cold. The path deteriorates as it ascends steeply towards the pass, cut into channels by winter weather and the lack of maintenance. Rivulets run down it.
The wind freshens. Murky clouds rear on the horizon and a veil of precipitation drifts over the hills as dirty weather sweeps in. Soon all to the west is blotted out. Light fades and the first flecks of snow float on the wind, thickening by the minute until it's a perfect welter. The hoped-for view down from the top of the pass seems ever less certain and it takes little self-persuasion to turn back for home.
The sheltered wood is an altogether friendlier place than the open moor. Softly falling snowflakes drift through the trees. A lattice bridge (unmarked on the map) is a good place to pause, to watch the agitated waters of the burn below and warm cold fingers round a cup of hot soup from the flask.
34
Liz lives in a grass-roofed ecological house in the hamlet of Knockfin. She's a scientist, a botanist, and the boars were her idea. She calls them her ‘piggies’.
There are canoes under a canopy at the door and a stack of wood at the side of the house. Behind the house, the hillside rises steeply to a line of birches, with the ground in between covered in grass and heather and swathes of bracken.
Liz says nobody likes bracken. It spreads like wildfire, kills all other plants and it's practically indestructible. But she reckoned her piggies would do the trick. They root out and eat the tough rhizomes in the soil and they feed on the young shoots when they first poke through and fronds be
gin to unfurl –just the thing for the hillside behind the house, where she could study their impact on the vegetation.
Not everyone was as enthusiastic as she. Folk envisioned wild boar running loose and attacking them on their country walks. The community council split over the question and it was only when the Forestry Commission offered a piece of woodland near Hilton and funding to go with it that the project could go ahead.
Most of the animal management and care is done by Rae, a local forester, but Liz takes her turn at feeding time. She admits it can be a little scary. When the sows sense her presence they scurry from the wood, snuffing and puffing around her, to be followed by Boris the boar ambling down at a more stately pace. He's harmless enough, she says, but he's big and she's small and slim and she feels uneasy in his presence.
‘Come and see them,’ she says. ‘Come at feeding time.’
35
Rae loves his pigs. You can see it in his face. Catherine and I join him on a visit to the piggies. There's a thin covering of snow as we drive into the woods over a bumping track Rae swings open the metal gate and leads us into the enclosure. No sign of animal life as yet. All's quiet in the forest – until he tips a bag of feed into the wooden trough and, on his call, a file of chunky long-snouted beasts, sows and their piglets, dark in the coat, some tinged with auburn, materialise from the trees and cluster round the trough.
Boris delays his appearance. He's last on the scene, an actor making his entrance and not intending to be upstaged. Or perhaps he was just deeper in the trees than his familiars. Down the hill he saunters at last, picking his way among a brash of broken branches. Once at the trough, he shoulders his way through for his breakfast.
We admire his rough coat, his furry heart-shaped ears and the short curled pile on his flanks. At first, I don't see his tusks, which I'd imagined as long scimitars, but not so. They're small, tucked neatly in his jaws but interlocking and businesslike nevertheless. Rae says the grinding together of upper and lower fangs keeps them sharp. I can imagine my shinbone crunched between them.
But Rae, giving Boris a gentle pat on the back, says he's not dangerous – though he adds a caveat: ‘Don't take him by surprise.’ And further: ‘You won't outrun a boar.’ They have to get used to you. ‘Keep talking to them, talk all the time and they'll accept you.’
Rae says pigs have their own words, special sounds which mean different things that allow them to communicate. He hears them conversing at night – they're naturally nocturnal animals and this daytime feeding is not their normal habit. Acorns and beech nuts are their preferred diet – thin pickings around here, where oak and beech trees are uncommon – but they'll root out the fleshy bracken tubers. Which, of course, is why they're here.
A fence divides their enclosure from the adjacent woodland and the difference in ground vegetation is marked. Deep heather and bracken flourishes on the pig-free ground but, on our side of the fence, it's been hoovered. And there's new growth, too. Rae shows us the proof – a sprinkling of inch-high feathery green shoots poking through the snow. These are infant pines, showing that the trees can regenerate here once the ground vegetation is disturbed. All the area where we stand was pinewood until the foresters cut down the best trees for timber, sparing only few gnarled specimens – the picturesque spreading pine trees we like to see now. Then they planted commercial conifers of foreign origin, quick to grow, soon to harvest. Green shoots at our feet show that the native forest can return.
Meanwhile, Boris and friends gobble greedily, their soft snuffling muzzles deep in the trough. Cuddly though they look, they're not pets. These little piggies are heading for market: ‘Monday is pig day at Dingwall,’ says Rae. But don't mention the word abattoir. Rae won't have it. He may be pragmatic about their fate but he prefers the dignity of plain English for their end. ‘I don't like the word. I say slaughterhouse.’
Agreed. Who'd want to read a book called Abattoir-Five?
36
It's a wild morning, with lowering sky, wind-driven clouds and pelting rain filling potholes up to the brim on the Plodda road.
Off the road and into the wood there's barely a sound or stir, only a pattering on the leaves overhead. A lane leads downhill through tall grey trunks but everything else is green – the grass, the moss mantling the earth and the rocks and stumps of trees felled long ago. I suspect that the lane, now muddy and rutted, with jutting boulders, may once have been a carriage drive leading to the ruined house of Guisachan. It's a bumpy ride.
We find Dave the tree-feller, a stocky greybeard, sizing up the standing timber, all these columns in a shady temple, glancing about, touching a stem here and there, looking up into the green canopy, gauging by eye alone the girth and height of Douglas firs planted more than a century ago.
The Douglas fir is a splendid tree. In maturity, its trunk is tall and ramrod straight, the rough bark gouged by russet fissures. When felled, the heartwood shows a delicious cream and red in cross-section. Boat-builders love it.
Dave selects his tree after careful scrutiny. ‘Saw's blunt,’ he says, seating himself on a stump with the chainsaw across his knees, sharpening the teeth with a small file. Dave, a freelance forester, says he has been cutting timber all his life, mainly in the south of England where he learned the trade from his father in the era of the horse, the axe and crosscut saw. For preference, he says, he likes to fell old hardwood trees like oak or beech. His busiest time ever was after the great gale of ’87 which tumbled the woodland trees wholesale.
His strategy is to guide a falling tree between two neighbours so that their side branches will slow its descent and prevent it snapping when it hits the ground. Suppose it swings out of true? He gives me a wry look, shakes his head: ‘It won't.’
He bends to the tree and the saw roars, spitting an arc of sawdust as the chain bites into the wood. With two swift applications, he cuts out a crescent of timber (he calls it a ‘dob’) then moves round the trunk to cut towards the newly made notch. As the saw slices deeper, his young assistant Neil hammers in a metal wedge behind it to prevent the chain jamming.
Can this be dangerous? I edge towards a nearby forest giant, aiming to dodge behind it in case of need.
I should have known better. There's a loud crack. (No one shouts ‘Timber!’) The tree teeters, tilts, tiptoes almost, then falls downwards with gathering speed, tearing through a mass of foliage to hit the ground with a thump. A slow shiver runs along the stem, snakelike, as if life is easing out of it as it comes to rest on the designated spot. Cut down in its prime – though a centenarian, it's a stripling in terms of its natural span.
Taking up the saw again, Dave shears off the side branches and measures the length – more than 160 feet from butt to tip – from which he cuts a usable length of 70 feet. A big tree but not the biggest he has cut down in Plodda. ‘A fine stick,’ says he. All trees great or small are sticks to the forester.
The Douglas firs extracted from Plodda are high-grade timber, much more valuable than the spruce trees harvested in their thousands. Can the wood survive the loss of so many fine specimens? It seems so. The fellers argue that since thinning creates life-giving light and space the forest will be enhanced rather than injured by the loss of a select few stems.
Not everyone agrees. Dave says he was harangued last week by a woman, an American volunteer for Trees for Life who have a base nearby. She accused him of vandalism, of dealing mortal blows to the living wood. Every tree was sacred in her eyes. He gave the stock answer – he was creating space for new growth. A tree falls – as it must in nature, given time – light floods in, seeds germinate, new trees grow. He doesn't think she was convinced.
Now the skidder lurches forward. The skidder is a huge tractor on fat wheels, each one taller than a man and laced with a web of chains to grip in the soft ground. Sitting high in the cab, Dave manoeuvres it into position then climbs down to help Neil sling a chain round the butt end of the tree and another felled earlier. He remounts and the machine moves off dra
gging the twin logs behind.
The ground in Plodda wood is treacherous, wildly uneven, boggy in parts and thick with trees – a challenge to the driver dragging six tons of lively timber behind him. The skidder rears and plunges, the logs buck and ply, gouging the soil and ripping through the undergrowth, smashing small timber en route to the roadside pick-up point. Down it plunges into the green chasm of a ravine, churning soil into a brown sludge where a small burn flows, barely visible in its mossy carpet at the best of times and now a quagmire. An elephant extracting teak from the jungle might be daintier but there are no elephants in Affric.
37
Walking through Plodda woods, Catherine and I find timber stacks where trees have been newly harvested. The ground's badly churned, and tree debris lies all around. Among the litter are wedges cut from the base of the trees by the chainsaw – crescents of freshly cut timber beautifully patterned, with a bright orange core. Dobs, as Dave the woodman called them.
Season in Strathglass Page 7