Season in Strathglass

by Fowler, John;

  Years ago, I first came on this glen and was stopped at the gate. Out from the gatehouse came a large man who issued me with a ticket and told me somewhat grumpily, I thought, to be back by six or I'd be shut in. I read the instructions on the ticket:

  Do not light fires, stoves or other appliances

  Keep dogs on a lead and avoid disturbance of wildlife

  Refrain from moving any plants or animals

  Park with regard for others and take your litter home

  Comply with any request from the warden, the proprietors or their agents, who will identify themselves to you

  Five commandments, annotated so:

  These conditions are necessary to protect the beauty of the glen and the scientific interest of the nature reserve. [It's no longer a nature reserve.] Note that no shooting, fishing or camping is allowed. Please drive with care. Maximum speed 30 mph.

  I remember that day – the drenching rain, the sight of galleries of tall trees on the far bank of the river and no way to cross to them as the ford marked on the map looked dubious in the extreme.

  I love these grand Caledonian pines, seemingly untouched by the ages. That day, I climbed through clumps of old pine trees clustered on either side of a heathery gully through which a burn called the Liatrie romps over a stony bed, crashing over falls in its downward race. The trees were fenced around to keep out deer which would eat the young shoots – protected so that a new flourish of young trees might succeed the old when they die. A cloud of small moths rose at my feet.

  On my way back, I saw briars in bloom by the wayside, pink and white. By the waters of Loch Beannacharain, dark and mysterious, a solitary walker down from the misty tops was striding homeward in gaiters and waterproofs sopping wet. I offered him a lift but he preferred independence and marched on. I'd have appreciated his talk, dripping though he was.

  My bed for the night was in the youth hostel at Cannich, now closed. It was crowded with a heterogeneous lot, mainly foreigners, Germans, French, Dutch, clashing pans in the kitchen. An Englishman and a couple of grizzled Scots were comparing notes on their hill-climbing day so I escaped for a pint at the then flourishing Glen Affric Hotel across the road. On my return, the trio were still engaged in hill talk.

  They asked where I'd been that day. Glen Strathfarrar? Had I done the four? The four? Four what? Then I twigged – they were talking about Munros. Well, I admitted, I wasn't there to climb hills – I was looking at trees. That seemed to perplex them.

  Some months later I read the following in The Coniston Tigers, a book by the Lakeland writer and climber Harry Griffin (whom I once met at his home in Kendal when he was old): ‘One poor day I went off on my own to collect the four Munros in Strath Farrar. After completing the traverse in heavy rain, when swollen burns had to be waded . . .’ and so on. When he came down to the road, a man in a car, ‘an unusual sight in that glen’, offered him a lift which he declined because his gear was so wet.

  Cars are no longer unusual in Glen Strathfarrar but they're accepted only on sufferance. Who's glen is it, anyway?

  That I may discover.

  64

  White water explodes in the air, gushing in a halo of iridescence from the base of a little dam. Windborne spray pecks my face. Surrounded by hills of breath-taking grandeur, this miniature dam and its associated works are unspeakably ugly – grey concrete wall, grey windowless cube of a building, grey pipelines reaching up the hillsides on either side like the wings of an anorexic angel. Further upstream, there's another even smaller dam fed by a staircase of many little waterfalls.

  Two Land Rovers have halted a little further up the glen. The driver of the foremost, a stalker in tweeds, has stopped to scan the hills through his telescope. His three passengers stare at me blankly as I speak.

  ‘Where are you shooting?’

  The stalker points to the hill ahead, Meallan Odhar. Asks, ‘Where are you walking?’

  ‘Sgurr na Lapaich.’

  ‘Which way?’

  ‘By the corrie.’

  ‘Fine.’

  That concludes the conversation. I shan't disturb their sport. It's been a taciturn exchange between stalker and walker, civil if not affable – not untypical.

  This day I hope to climb the Sgurr, the great pyramid at the head of Glen Strathfarrar. Its towering presence has long dominated my thoughts, just as it dominates the upper reaches of the glen.

  Steady walking on a good track brings me to the great high corrie under the great rampart of the hill, a waste of broken ground, trackless, cleft by a web of channels and peaty haggs. The last bastion of the hill looms in deep shadow backlit by the descending sun. The waters of two small lochans gleam under it.

  As I breast the rim of the corrie, I'm startled by the noise of many voices. Today, at the height of the rut, the corrie is full of echoes as many stags give vent to their lust in testosterone-fuelled bedlam. Rare gulfs of silence are followed by new crescendos.

  I'm uneasy, to say the least. Stags are large beasts and, in the rutting season, can be aggressive. Where are they? They're unseen though my ears tell me that they're all around. Sounds come from all quarters. I catch sight of a string of deer moving slowly along a distant ridge, hardly bigger to the naked eye than insects, too far away to count. The roaring ones are well camouflaged in the shadows, present in numbers but not visible to my eye, even with binoculars.

  I feel uneasy, menaced. I loiter, lose heart. Do I really want to go on? I convince myself it's late in the day, it's a good hour still to the top, I won't be down before sunset – no. And then, half ashamed of my cowardice, I turn tail.

  As I descend by high zigzags, the hills to the north glow in the late sunshine like old friends. I see the bleached shoreline of blue Loch Monar and the glinting thread of the Farrar River gliding sinuously down the glen into the distance. There's a muffled gunshot and then another and, shortly afterwards, I see a couple of figures disappearing round the shoulder of Meallan Odhar – no doubt they're part of the shooting party encountered earlier.

  I leave the track to get closer to the burn (the Allt an Eas Bhain Mhoir, a large name for small waters) as it tumbles down by fits and starts, rattling along half-hidden between its banks before plunging abruptly into a narrow gorge. Above the gorge stands a tall aspen tree, the delicate tracery of its thinning autumn leaves illuminated by the sun. In a fortnight's time, it'll be bare. A hoard of small leaves bright as gold coins spilled on the ground lies at my feet.

  As I descend I see the stalker's vehicle inching its way along the surfaced track. It crosses ahead of me before I reach the valley bottom and I catch sight of antler tines in the back as it passes – the day's kill.

  At the upper dam, the lively burn loses itself, sinking underground in a man-made diversion and echoing from various grilles as it rushes along subterranean channels, leaving the river bed a rubble of dry boulders moistened here and there by a few still pools glazed in a petroly sheen by chemicals in the peat.

  The saddest part is to come. I walk across the heath towards a gorge overhung by two small pine trees. I can imagine it as a beauty spot, once. Now it's dry. I walk dryshod over rocks and stones marbled grey and red that once formed the bed of a living river.

  But there's to be a resurrection. The spume of water bursting from the mini-dam where I left the car returns the river to its natural course, which now, after its brief hiatus, resumes its course for eventual confluence with the Farrar. Here it's known as the Uisge Misgeach, the drunken water, which is ironic in the present circumstances – it was named long before the hydro engineers tamed it and channelled it underground.

  65

  On an impulse, I call on Tim, who's just back from the Porsche rally. He pushes aside the laptop and makes coffee. From the window, there's a view of meadows, trees, bare hill and sky. ‘I love waking up to the view,’ he says.

  He and Alice nearly didn't make it to the rally. The Porsche broke down, belching black smoke on its way to a pre-rally service at
Oxford. There, the mechanic worked all night rebuilding the engine to get it on the road. It stuttered again in France but was coaxed to Le Mans.

  On the way back, still in France, it came to a halt again. Along comes a convoy of fellow rallyists heading for the ferry and, in no time, 30 vintage Porsches are lined up at the side of the road and a scrum of car enthusiasts swarm round the stricken car, heads under the bonnet.

  Where's the Porsche now? (There's a gap in the space at the side of the house.)

  It's back in Oxford with the man.

  66

  Frank Spencer-Nairn's home at Culligran is a long white house with a line of attic windows in the roof. It's reached by a lane bordered by alder trees near the bottom of Glen Strathfarrar. A small burn runs alongside, issuing into the wide River Farrar at shingle beds close to the lane end.

  Frank's grandfather bought Culligran's several thousand acres of hill and forest from Lovat lands in the 1930s with money made from linoleum. Nairn linoleum was a byword for generations – in the days before fitted carpets it floored countless bourgeois villas and tenement single-ends.

  Catherine and I sit in Frank's kitchen (tiled floor, no lino) round a big plain table. There's an Aga, of course, a wine bottle or two on the worktops, picture postcards on the wall. A young German pointer greets us energetically before curling up in his cage in the corner.

  There are deer on Frank's hills and salmon and trout in his river – five miles of fishing on his stretch of the Farrar. He lets out the shooting and fishing and, on the odd occasion, he'll go out stalking himself. These are the traditional pursuits of a Highland estate. But Frank has moved with the times. In the 1980s, he diversified into holiday homes – a cottage and five chalets – and, at the same time, he began to farm deer with a nucleus of 60 hinds rounded up in the wild. Now his herd numbers 170 hinds and 11 stags. This month (September), he tells us his shed is full of weaned calves. They'll be despatched to Yorkshire in December to be fattened and killed and the venison will be packaged for the shops.

  Frank is the only laird resident in the glen. Five landowners share ownership of long Glen Strathfarrar but only Frank has made his home here. They all visit, of course, and may be seen in the stag-shooting season with guns in their hands or a rod.

  He lists them. Frank's cousin Angus, who is something in the City and lives in Jersey, has the Struy Estate on the other side of the river – his son and his family live in Struy Lodge. The Edinburgh lawyer Colin Stroyan has Pait and West Monar at the head of the glen and East Monar is owned by the wealthy David Allen who has featured in the Sunday Times Rich List. Finally, there is the mysterious Mr Salleh, Frank's neighbour at Braulen, the largest estate in the glen – a brooding expanse of bare mountain and brown moorland, 30,000 acres of thin soil, rock and heather. Braulen is a Highland sporting estate of the middling kind – good for deer stalking and not much else, economically speaking.

  Mr Salleh – if that is his given name (there is uncertainty about it) – is seldom seen. He visits only occasionally. He is said to be a Malaysian of Indian stock. Andy Wightman, writer of the book Who Owns Scotland, could discover only that Braulen was acquired in 1990 by a company of Malaysian origin registered in the Cayman Islands and owned by nominee trusts in the Channel Islands.

  Frank says he has met Mr Salleh only once in 11 years. Colin Stroyan twice sent word to invite him to dinner and got no response. Sir John Lister-Kaye, the naturalist and author who runs the Aigas field centre, has tried and failed to make his acquaintance.

  What can be said of this man of mystery? Scott, who lives in the glen and briefly worked as a gillie at Braulen, remembers him setting out on his first stalk dressed in blue denims with a gold chain round his neck. ‘You'd have seen him a mile off.’ And so would the stags. Maybe someone had a word with him because, next time, he turned up in tweeds. Iain Mackay, once Iain Thomson's neighbour at the head of Loch Monar, has been a stand-in stalker at Braulen and says he's a good shot. He found him pleasant to work for. ‘He won't agree to see anyone but, if you happen to meet him, he's fine.’

  George (of Upper Glassburn), when he had the Cnoc Hotel, served Mr Salleh a late dinner when he was on his way to Braulen from the airport. ‘He liked the stew,’ says George.

  And that's as much as I can tell.

  Three miles further up the glen from the rock pillar at Loch Beannacharain, Braulen Lodge stands just off the road, a three-gabled, two-storey house of red sandstone. It looks in good trim. In former times before a cash-strapped Lord Lovat sold Braulen, the lodge was smaller, a bit down at heel, though a place of lively social gatherings when the Lovats had shooting guests.

  Salleh spruced it up, replaced an unsightly timber annex with a third gable so seamlessly that it's hard to spot the join. Maybe the pink stone of the addition is a little brighter than the time-touched masonry of the original but the change is subtle.

  George says stones were dug from the river bed and cut by hand to match the stonework of the house. A squad of specialist masons brought from Glasgow (he thinks they'd been working on Glasgow Cathedral) were so tormented by midges that work had to be halted till the summer was over.

  Today, there's no sign of life behind the white metal grille (which has a faintly oriental look) at the front porch, hinting at tight security. I don't ring the bell.

  67

  It's been raining hard for days. The puddle under the kitchen window (we have taken a week in one of Frank's chalets) grows and grows but today it's dry at last and we take a walk. There's dew on the ground and a touch of frost and the sound of water running through the woods where the river runs fast. Early sunshine falls on leafless trees spotted with lichens and moss.

  An electric hum – so we're nearing the power station, a stone-arched cavern in the hillside. A Gaelic inscription: Neart nan Gleann, ‘Power from the Glens’.

  Now there's a rumbling of rushing water. Catherine and I turn into the birch wood to investigate, following an earth track through heather clumps and decayed bracken, wet boggy hollows and outcropping rock. Reaching an abrupt high edge, we see the river below churning through a narrow gorge. Black water swirls between fantastically twisted rock strata. Huge geological pressures formed this cauldron. The map names it Culligran Falls but I guess not many passing strangers find it. Unfrequented except by fishermen, I suspect.

  During the morning, snow flurries alternate with spells of sunshine and white clouds moving fast across blue skies. From time to time, the hills are blotted out by storms.

  Where the strath opens up into grassy flats and the broad Loch Beannacharain, we reach the rock pillar that indicates the start of Braulen, the neighbouring estate to Culligran. Stags, bearing only the shabby remnants of antlers ready to drop, have come down from the hills for the fodder dumped for them here and twice we see feral goats on the slopes.

  It's been a day of all weathers – sun, snow and wind – and, after a bath, our faces glow.

  Still it rains. The puddle in the grass below the kitchen window is a miniature loch. It was dry ground when we came.

  According to a leaflet left in the chalet, Winans the American magnate and mass slaughterer of deer corralled his stags on the flat ground further up the glen between Loch Beannacharain and Loch a’ Mhuilidh. The leaflet contains a veiled warning to wanderers in these parts: ‘Hillwalking disturbs the deer and causes extreme inconvenience during the stalking season’ and so ‘from early September until October 21 permission is likely to be refused’. Signs posted along the glen by the South Ross Deer Management Group are less intimidating: ‘The estates in this group recognise the tradition of open access to the hill’ – so long as you don't frighten the deer, especially the stags. So keep to the paths. Stags are cash.

  This is March. You don't shoot stags in March and we may walk.

  In the late afternoon, Catherine and I drive to the head of Glen Strathfarrar and the Monar Dam. The glen grows bleaker by the mile as the mountains close in dark and forbidding. There's snow on
the tops, it's sunless and a chill wind blows – a ‘thin’ wind, you might say.

  The road winds on into this remoteness, rising over steep drops until finally it curves round a hillside where a way has been blasted from the bedrock. Old pines cluster in the bottom of the gorge where a meagre river, starved by the half-moon dam, meanders among dry boulders and slabs, running deep only where the channel narrows. A fallen tree, bare and long since dead, lies athwart the riverbed.

  We leave the car and walk up the private road towards Monar Lodge and associated buildings, which lie in a dip by the lochside – a timber house, a stone cottage and green-painted sheds. Now Donnie appears, a young man with a round cheery face and stubbly beard under a woolly hat. He tells us he's from Port Glasgow and came here to work as gillie and under-stalker. He'd seen a television programme about a Highland gamekeeper and thought: ‘That's the life.’ So he quit industrial Clydeside and, nine years later, he's happy here. He likes the lonely life (but admits that he walks his dog less on the open hill now that TV has come to the glen and he watches Sky).

  From where we stand, only the eastern end of the loch is visible. Huge mountains surround Loch Monar and these steep monochrome hills of bare rock and heather look fiercely inhospitable on this day – a stark black and white. Shepherding must be difficult in these conditions. What sort of life can it be? It's not for me, no thanks, but Iain Thomson, the isolation shepherd, loved it in his time and so does Donnie now.

  68

  A hundred bright eyes glint in the gloom of a windowless shed like stars in the night sky. Nervous deer calves huddle in a corner, heads turned towards the light of the opened door. Long-nosed aristocratic faces, pricked ears.