Season in Strathglass (18 page)

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.

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.