In Cannich, I dry off in the Slaters Arms and, coming out, I meet John MacLennan, his face burnished by the wind. He's been out on the hill all day.
‘Have a dram,’ I say.
But he declines. ‘I've had a few already,’ he responds with that wee smile of his.
77
The turbines are running at Fasnakyle Power Station – I know because of the Niagara cascading into the river below it, churning the stream into whirlpools. The power station, dominating a bend in the Affric, is a handsome building in blond stone which I admire every time I pass. There's even sculpture on the facade – Celtic beasts carved by Hew Lorimer, a sculptor who, like his mentor Eric Gill, believed that art has a spiritual function. Let there be light and there was light – with the help of the North of Scotland Hydroelectric Board.
A man in a yellow hard hat doesn't think I should enter but I manage to glance through the open door of the turbine hall. It's high, bright and airy, with three turbine domes in line down the centre of the floor like giant toadstools. There's a sudden blast of colour – blue turbines, white walls, green steel girders high up under the yellow roof supporting a yellow travelling crane.
What a space. It takes the breath away. Why, it could even become the Highland Tate Modern, some day. Smaller than that London one, true, but brighter.
78
A horse has been seen inside the old Glen Affric Hotel.
Inside? That's right. At a window looking out. Two people have told me so.
I know Louise has a horse, but this?
I don't know what to think.
79
Walter and Bob bustle into the kitchen at the Backpackers. Walter is tall and long-legged, a bit gaunt, with white wavy hair. Bob is bald, maybe a bit shorter, plumper and he wears glasses. They've just arrived after tramping up several hills together and tomorrow they'll climb some more. Walter and Bob are seasoned in the hills.
We share the last couple of inches in Walter's whisky bottle and, when that's done, Bob uncorks another. Slainte! They invite me to share their meal of beans and bolognaise and potatoes all mixed up in the same pot.
This pair could reminisce about hills all night long. Mam Sodhail isn't difficult, says Walter, big hill though it is. There's a good path right to the top. He says there's a big cairn and the ruin of a stone hut at the summit.
After supper, they head for a pint at the Slaters Arms while I stay on to write up notes. My cell-like room is bare and somewhat chilly. A smell of stale smoke from last night's fire drifts from the stove in the lounge. It's not cosy.
So I phone George at Upper Glassburn and book a room for tomorrow night. ‘Would you have dinner?’ No need to ask.
80
The old Scottish Mountaineering Club's well-thumbed guide The Western Highlands, published nearly 80 years ago, may not be up to date but, between its faded red covers, it still makes good reading. I can't say the same for the maps. The scale is too small, the detail too crowded and the emphasis whimsical. Beauly is set in bigger type than Inverness, which can never have seemed right. Drumnadrochit rates notice only as Drumnadrochit Hotel and there's no mention of Cannich at all, just the Glen Affric Hotel. Loch Beinn a'Mheadhoin is spelt in the old style, as pronounced – Beneveian – which I can approve of.
This note occurs:
Mam Sodhail and Sgurr na Lapaich. On account of their commanding position in the North-West of Scotland these two mountains were made important stations for the Principal Triangulation in connection with the Ordnance Survey of the British Isles. The station on Mam Sodhail was on the highest point of the mountain, and was marked by a stone pile, 23 feet high and 60 feet in circumference . . .
That's a lot of stones.
A more recent Munro book tells more: ‘The summit has a huge circular cairn which was an important point in the Ordnance Survey's primary triangulation of Scotland in the 1840s.’
In the National Library of Scotland's map room in Edinburgh, I open a large leather-covered volume – Account of the Observations of the Principal Triangulations, being an ‘account of the Observations of the Principal Triangulation; and of the Figure, dimensions & mean specific gravity of the Earth as derived therefrom’, drawn up, as it says, by Captain Alexander Ross Clarke of the Royal Engineers.
I read that among the sites from which observations were made was ‘the mountain of Mamsuil [sic] on the borders of the counties of Ross and Inverness, about 7 miles north-west of Captain Inge's shooting lodge at Glen Affaric and 20 miles west of Inverncannich’.
On this summit, a Colour-Sergeant J Winzer and his party of soldier-surveyors lodged or camped throughout the month of August and possibly longer in 1848, scanning the surrounding high points, taking bearings, measuring angles and recording distances. Rain, hail or shine. It can be wild up there in any season but the official report makes no mention of the weather.
I shall follow in your footsteps, Sergeant Winzer.
81
The forecast's not good. North-westerly winds up to 30 miles an hour on the hills ‘will impede steady walking on higher exposed areas’. Risk of one or two flurries of hail and snow on the highest summits.
Mam Sodhail is 1,181 metres (3,862 feet old style) – you don't get much higher. But, if not now, when?
I'm on the track along Loch Affric, north side, at 8.20 in the morning. The sky's a welter of varying shades of grey with fast-moving clouds parting and swiftly closing over scant patches of blue. There's some hope but it's dark and sombre over by Kintail where the weather's coming from. The wind whips up waves across the loch and there's a line of thin foam where they break on the shore.
Seen from a distance, the path ascending the deep-cut glaciated valley appears as a long brown thread. The multitudinous burns are knotted strands of white water. Somewhere above is the hill, invisible as yet in a dense bank of mist. Stray shafts of wan sunlight cast pools of bright green on the hillside with theatrical effect. An embryonic rainbow flickers through the mist.
The way, washed by floodwater, is stony and steep. Loose stones clatter and roll under my feet – such attractive stones they are, rounded and veined and glistening in the wet.
I linger in the corrie, hoping for signs that the mist will clear for a decent interval. A sudden glimpse of the summit is all too brief – the veil falls again but there's sufficient promise to draw me onwards. In a grassy meadow under an abrupt scarp, an infant burn exits from a pool, whence the path climbs steeply in measured zigzags up to the ridge. It's a craftwork of canny engineering from Victorian days when stalkers’ paths were maintained and it still serves. Here Sergeant Winzer and his companions sweated in their serge uniform jackets in the summer of ’48. Here their ponies or mules picked their way up, labouring under loads of timber for building, the heavy theodolite and its associated impedimenta, food and cooking utensils, everything required for their encampment. Was there a regular traffic up and down this track during their occupation of the mountain top or did they hold out, isolated, cut off for the duration? I can only speculate.
Behind me, the glen unfolds below in a long bare corridor reaching towards the loch shore. There's no sign of life on the path though it's visible for most of its length. No other walker has appeared all day. It seems strange to have this hill all to myself when the summer's barely gone.
On the exposed ridge, the wind is less fierce than anticipated, buffeting me and chilling my hands but less troublesome than the forecast implied. It's easy walking now – a low-angled ascent over firm ground littered with stones. A corner of drystane wall emerges from the dimness, the remains of a substantial hut – two chambers linked by a low arch. I have to duck to enter.
The mist clears briefly. Views come and go in swift succession and suddenly the cairn built by the triangulators of ’48 appears on the crest – a squat circular wall like an Iron Age broch broken-off at the top. It's solidly built like some kind of fortification (army engineers knew their masonry defences) and about nine feet high, half its original
height. When whole, it must have been awesome.
82
In June 1945, just as the war in Europe ended, Duncan MacLennan climbed Mam Sodhail on business. He tells me about it by his fireside in Cannich – brings out a faded sheet of paper with torn edges, ripped from a jotter by the look of it. On this is written:
Ordnance Survey copy to D Maclennan, Glen Affric Lodge. To hire of four ponies over rough steep track to top of Mam Soul with cement and sand, rate £1. 1s per day: £4. 4s. With expenses (hauling of cement, sand etc to top of Mam Soul and expenses in connection with same): £19 . . . [illegible]
That June, Duncan spent four days assisting in the construction of a trig pillar for the Ordnance Survey on top of Carn Eighe, Mam Sodhail's twin peak. The laden ponies stopped short of the final dip and ascent, leaving their burden to be manhandled up a last treacherous scree slope.
Duncan says the sand was dug from the shore at the head of Loch Affric and ferried across the loch to a landing stage at the start of the climb. Two of the beasts of burden were his own deer ponies and he hired two more for the job. The six Ordnance Survey men had no easy task – he recalls them lugging heavy car batteries on their shoulders for lighting at the top. They worked non-stop, he says. ‘They just didn't have enough hours in the day.’
As for the derelict bothy, he doesn't associate it with the survey party of the 1840s. More likely, he says, it would have been built as a shelter for the guards installed there to spy out deer poachers – a lonely outpost.
83
Notice outside the Tomich Post Office:
Butterflies of the glen, how to identify and record them, Saturday 27. Strathglass shinty club, next game at Cannich, throw-up 2.30pm. Strathglass community council minutes: report on pylons; proposed alteration to Glen Affric Hotel – application for a bar.
I've heard about this proposed bar. But it's not Louise. Maybe she has a tenant.
84
The October weather's bright with a nip in the air and clear skies morning, noon and night. This is the season to see Affric at its best, when the birch is ablaze with colour.
We have taken Chalet Number 9 in the village of Cannich for a week. We have laid in a store of provisions, with books to read, wines red and white and malt whisky for a dram at night. We have our boots; we shall walk out by day, turn up the heating in the evening and sleep snug under doubled duvets.
At eight in the morning, I'm scraping frost from the windscreen, Catherine still in bed (bad back). By nine o'clock I'm striding along by the lochside. The sun's low, the sky a tent of unbroken blue, the water glassy dark, a perfect mirror for trees and hills.
I climb through close-growing plantation trees dripping with swags of grey lichen, labouring as I cross ridges and ruts made by the foresters who ploughed up the ground before planting. Now the corrugations are mantled with thick spongy moss. It's good to breathe lungfuls of crisp air.
I emerge from the plantation to find steep slopes and heathery bluffs above. Below my feet, the crust of frosty soil is softening as the sun gains strength. The view is spectacular. The long dark loch seen through cohorts of majestic pine trees stretches below me, its outline broken by green promontories and pine-shaggy islands. Far mountains are white with snow.
Peace. A crystal silence, broken only by the faint hoarse baying of a lone lusting stag echoing across the water.
I scramble among heathery ledges, skirting icy patches, until, on the edge of a steep drop among sentinel pines, I get a pulse of excitement – this, surely, is the spot where the photographer Robert Moyes Adam set up his camera almost 80 years ago. The caption on the photograph I clutch in cold fingers reads: ‘Loch Beinn a'Mheadhoin with birch and pine forest, Glen Affric, 10 April 1929’. My view matches his exactly. The black-and-white photograph shows a rock-littered slope with trees below and a long boomerang of loch filling the hollow. Scattered pine and birch still flourish as he saw them through the lens but, where the plantation grows, the hillside was bare in his day. A corner of Loch Affric shows as a dot of water in the distance. White-rimmed clouds give hints of pale sunshine.
The rising sun behind me casts long shadows. The gaunt distant hills are touched with a rosy flush. I gaze but not for long. I have to get back. Boots ring pleasantly on the hard surface as I tramp along the forest track. The car's still in deep shade and the lock's frozen, causing some minutes of frustration before I manage to open the door.
I drive down the long glen and reach Cannich just after 11. And, at four in the afternoon, C and I are strolling in T-shirts by the loch, millpond calm with the glory of golden birch among dark pines reflected in the water.
‘Not more than two per cent of all my pictures are taken from anywhere near a road,’ said Robert Moyes Adam, who roamed throughout Scotland with a half-plate camera recording nature. There's a photograph of him on a pony taken far up Glen Affric. He probably set the camera on its tripod and focussed for a helper to take the shot.
He came to Glen Affric in 1929 and returned a year later, prompted by plans to harness Highland rivers for the generation of electricity. A private company had a bill before parliament which proposed to dam the three great lochs of the Beauly catchment in Glen Affric, Glen Cannich and Glen Strathfarrar in order to generate hydroelectric power on a large scale. Horrified at the prospect, Adam set out with his bulky equipment to record the beauties and hopefully stop the desecration.
I found his sequence of Affric pictures in the photo archive at St Andrews University and have some of the prints with me. Can I find the sites? See what's changed? I shall try.
At the foot of the glen we catch sight of a cyclist flickering through the trees – Tony from Skipton, speeding down the Glen Affric road on his bike in his yellow top and an old check cap on his head. Tony and I first met a month ago in a walkers’ hostel in Kintail and got on famously. We thought we might meet again here. He pedals furiously out of sight without seeing us but I call on him at the hostel in Cannich and tonight he'll come to dinner.
We have soup, we have stew, we uncork the bottle. Grey-bearded, ruddy-faced, bright-eyed behind his specs, Tony talks – how he talks! – in a thick Yorkshire accent compounded by his helter-skelter way with words. I could have done with subtitles. He tells long tales of how he'd worked in factories, set up as a window cleaner, lived with his mother and devoted his time to nursing her when she was ill. When she died, he turned his hobby to advantage – always a club cyclist, he got on his bike and rode round the country taking pictures to sell for postcards and calendars.
He's regularly in Affric in October because the autumn fire in the leaves reflected in the water makes for spectacular pictures. A trip covers his costs and he doesn't ask for more. Hostels and bunkhouses provide a bed. He travels light with just two of everything – shirts, pants and vests – and every second day he washes them.
Tony lives alone but says he's never lonely. He cycles with his club every weekend and, this Christmas, they'll all go to Ambleside – to the hostel, of course.
Then he mounts his bike and pedals off into the frosty night. We like Tony but I don't suppose we'll meet again. Maybe some day I'll find his name on a postcard – Picture: Tony Rostron.
Beinn nan Sparra. The photograph shows a bare hilltop with a large tilted rock prominent in the foreground like a sea creature breaking the surface. ‘Glen Affric from Beinn nan Sparra with lochs Affric and Beinn a'Mheadhoin, 3 April 1929.’ Adam wrote a brief description on the print: ‘Grassy slope with rocky outcrops to the fore; rocks and trees on lower slope; lochs and snow-capped peaks on horizon.’
It's almost noon when we set off. We have a key for the padlocked gate allowing us to drive along the south shore of Loch Beinn a'Mheadhoin to a fork in the forest road where we park. Larch and pines – Scots pine and the black-veined Corsican pine – gladden the way. A grassy path beckons into the woods, a glade walk overhung with delicate birch branches. Stony patches indicate that it may have been an old drove road, now overgrown and neglected.
The track peters out among plantation conifers and we come to a clearing of oozy heather bog encircled by thick forest, noticing the white plastic supermarket bag hanging from a branch where we emerge. We splodge across yielding ground but find no gap in the thick barrier of evergreen to continue on our way. It's impenetrable – a hedge for Sleeping Beauty. There's nothing for it but to return to the plastic bag, tied there no doubt as a guide to the lost like us.
Little Loch na Gabhlach, when we discover it behind a light screen of birch trees, is a dream – hardly more than a pond rimmed with reeds, dappled with lily pads and ringed by a circle of dark trees. A bed of golden moss gleams in an inlet beside the bone-white stem of a dead tree and a slender young pine. A flight of small birds skims soundlessly across the surface.
Across from where we stand, a fringe of evergreen trees lit by a glint of watery sunshine casts reflections on the surface, with blue rugged hills rising above. These trees, dense and geometrically ordered, planted possibly 30 years ago, have grown tall and stately. In forestry terms, they're ripe for felling but I hope they'll be reprieved. Let them mature in peace. There's an air of Canadian wilderness about this lochan. A birch bark canoe on its waters wouldn't seem out of place.
A little further on and we come on a second lochan, Loch Carn na Glas-leitre, larger and gloomier than Gabhlach, with a single islet in the centre. Littering the ground around is a brash of young lodgepole pine felled in the name of nature conservation (because they're an ‘alien’ species – i.e. not Scots pines). Dry bones, sapless, bleached white.
Beinn nan Sparra comes into view – a long rough ridge thinly dotted with pines. A fence bars the way to the top and I clamber over but Catherine, suffering from her bad back, prefers to sit in the sunshine while I explore further, wandering among dips and knolls in search of the Adam view. It never seems right. The loch cannot be the same, of course, for the shoreline is 20 feet higher than it was in Adam's day and islands and inlets have been swamped. The sea-monster rock is nowhere to be found.
Season in Strathglass Page 16