Season in Strathglass (12 page)

We take cans of beer from the cool box followed by a dram from the bottle that's been rolling on the bottom of the vehicle. Only now do we think of food, having fasted all day. John produces sandwiches made by Mrs MacLennan, venison soft as butter between thick slices of brown bread, followed by a slab of her home-made fruit cake. A feast.

At Fasnakyle, Andrew speeds away but there's still work to do for John and Chris.

We drive up to the Guisachan steading at Tomich where one of the outbuildings serves as a deer larder. It's a shed with tiled walls and a concrete floor and down the middle runs a drain. Half a dozen carcases hang on hooks – it's like a butcher's back shop – the tally from past days' shooting.

John and Chris sling one of our two stags onto a wooden horse where they cut out the red organs. Then they saw off the antlers and the head, first having prized out the hose-like windpipe. The head is flung into a bucket already half-filled with others. Dark, listless, sightless eyes in a pail.

They weigh the carcase on a spring balance – 15 stone 4 pounds, so John's estimate on the hill was pretty accurate. He takes the saw, cuts down the breastbone, wedges the breast open, sticks a label on the carcase to show the date and place where the stag was shot. The second stag, lighter by a stone, is butchered in the same way. Finally, John and Chris clean knives and saws and hose down the floor and a red river flows down the drain.

48

I wait among pine trees in the last car park in the glen. I'm on the lookout. I have a rendezvous.

A white van with the words ‘Forest Research' on the side comes winding slowly through the trees, the red-bearded, freckle-faced driver glancing about him.

‘Joe?'

‘John?'

We shake hands.

It's August but too early in the morning for the tourists to be about – the bikers, the hikers and the random strollers. We have the forest to ourselves.

We cross the Affric River, dark and still as it flows under the wooden bridge on its way to the great loch Beinn a'Mheadhoin, then plunge into an undergrowth of long grass and straggly heather, the heather bells just beginning to show colour. Who else comes here, off the beaten track, now
or at any time? A faint blush of purple is showing on the surrounding slopes. Behind us rears the prow of the lesser Sgurr na Lapaich (two hills in Strathglass share that name), a silent watcher.

The ground is broken and hummocky, the humps festooned with lush vegetation – mosses, blaeberry, cowberry and calluna. We brush through fine-spun, gauzy spider webs, almost invisible, which brush our faces in passing like soft fingertips. A wood ant, bigger and clumsier than the familiar garden kind, flops onto my hand. Joe says old forest like this is its natural home.

We reach a spot in open woodland where, in the near vicinity, a few spreading Scots pine grow alongside a birch or two dripping with hairy lichens, an alder and a spindly rowan. At our feet, a fallen trunk, species unknown, lies felted with vegetation, in slow decay. The remains of a pine tree, which snapped 10 feet from the ground in a winter gale, thrusts up a branch tufted with a single small mop of foliage.

This is Joe's research patch – a sheltered spot in the area marked Pollan Buidhe on the map.

He wanders among the trees, stopping to peer through a lens the size of a thimble, seeking out lichens and mosses lodged in crevices in the bark or drooping pendulously from branches. He hands me the lens and I struggle to focus (there's a knack in it). Suddenly, the blur resolves into a tiny forest of delicate fronds and fluted spicules, a secret landscape emerging from mists. He names this as a species of bryoria,
Bryoria fuscescens
in botanical terms, not by any means a rarity – it's all around. Joe's after something a bit more special.

The morning becomes a lesson in botany.
Parmelia saxatilis
– ‘brown branching hairy kind of stuff. It grows on rocks as well as trees. Saxatilis is Latin for growing on stone.' A mass of pale yellowy-green moss draped over a rock is
Racomitrium lanuginosum
, soft and spongy by the look of it but dry and fibrous to the touch. Swathes of
Alectoria sarmentosa
hang from a broken trunk and, close by on a lone pine atop a bluff,
Imshaugia aleurites
– a presumed indicator of woodland longevity. Its presence here helps, in a small way, to reinforce the theory that this pinewood has grown in unbroken succession for centuries and possibly thousands of years.

Elsewhere in Pollan Buidhe, other scientists are busy. Helen is studying what the pollen grains stored in the soil can tell us. With her is Alex. ‘I'm the partner,' says he. ‘I'm here to help carry the things.'

The sun shines, it's hot, a light breeze stirs the foliage. Pollan Buidhe on a summer's day is a Forest of Arden, except that Shakespeare's Arden never knew midges. Alex, who's small and dark, pulls a gauze veil over his face and trim beard for protection against the tiny bloodsuckers. Helen seems oblivious. I douse myself with insect repellent and we head into the undergrowth.

This cup-shaped hollow in Pollen Buidhe is ideal for Helen's purpose, which is to chart the vegetation that has grown in Affric through the ages. The clues are in the tiny pollen grains preserved for many centuries in the thick layer of peat that lies beneath the vegetation. Here the peat slowly accumulated to a depth of many feet, forming a sink into which a constant rain of pollen fell. Since no stream flushes through the ground the sediment of ages has remained undisturbed and little has seeped away. The picture is clear.

The ‘things' Alex helped to carry are mainly a bundle of long tubes. Helen takes the first tube and they screw it into the ground, adding another and then a third as the probe sinks deeper. When the full depth is reached, they withdraw the tubes, now filled with a core of dark peat, a visible record of the past. Each centimetre marks the passage of ten years – a metre's depth is a millennium. Bits of fibrous material survive even at that depth but it's the pollen, invisible to the naked eye, which will provide the information Helen needs.

49

September. Joe's back. His red crop-head pokes out of a window at the Backpackers as I drive up. The Backpackers is where he likes to stay on his field trips in Glen Affric. My cell-like little room (I'm here for one night only) is spartan. It has two narrow beds but no bedside light (a disadvantage for a night reader), a minimal hanging cupboard and no
chair. The walls are pale lilac and the thin curtain yellow. But it's cheap and I'm grateful for that.

In the kitchen, I watch Joe cook himself a mess (as in ‘mess of potage') of fried sausage and mash. It's somewhat surprising, I suggest, for Joe has a slightly alternative air – I'd expect him to be vegetarian. ‘Well,' he says, ‘you have to have real food sometimes.' He tells me he's just back from a wedding in Dorset where they roasted a pig on a spit outdoors.

It rains heavily overnight and, next morning, big pools have formed in the gravel yard outside the hostel. Strands of mist cling to the trees and wrap the hills. Grass, heather, bracken and all are sodden but the sun breaks through early as forecast. It'll be hot again.

At the top of the glen, waiting for Joe to return – he forgot some necessary item of kit and had to drive back to fetch it – I take a stroll. Birch leaves backlit by early slanting sunbeams sparkle like cut glass. The foliage is mottled with yellow, a first sign of autumn. Great shags of high heather are in full flower among moss and blaeberry beds. I sit on a stone and enjoy the warmth of the morning sun.

Joe appears – he must have driven like the wind – and we head for another study site in Pollan Buidhe. We're late and hasten up the steep bank recklessly, plunging over wildly uncertain ground. I tumble face down, pick myself up and stumble again. ‘You do a lot of falling about here,' Joe remarks.

Sometimes the heather is waist high. A fallen tree trunk has to be circumvented. Deadwood standing or fallen litters the ground in a debris of branches and shredded bark. A mossed-over corrugation in the peat is the earthly remains of a tree long deceased.

Joe finds an insect on his bare arm, a creature that half-crawls, half-hops in sluggish progress, flapping its wings all the time. It's a deer fly, he says. ‘They land on the deer, cast their wings and then burrow under the coat where they live parasitically.' (The life of a deer in the wild is not a bed of roses.) He shakes it off.

We reach the study site where pine trees are marked with orange tape and each is identified by a metal disc. Joe stops at a tree perched above a small stony burn to check the number on the disc, takes a compass bearing (orientation is important) and carefully outlines a square section of bark with pins and a piece of string – it's not high-tech. This is his microscopic field of study. The naturalist Edmund Wilson has written that a lifetime could be spent ‘in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree'. Joe's voyage round this pine tree, picking his way through the channels and creeks in the bark in search of telltale lichens, will be a little less time-consuming.

He identifies several different species of bryoria, adding a caution: ‘You have to be careful. Sometimes one species can pretend to be another.' With a knife, he cuts through a little blob on a hairy lichen (of the genus Usnea) and exposes flesh red as a jewel of blood.

Another species catches his eye. This is
Bryoria furcellata
. ‘Amazing,' he says. Through the lens, the drab speck springs into vivid detail. It has a fine branching structure, with little spines sticking out like antennae. ‘No question,' he says, ‘really distinctive, a beautiful specimen.' This is another lichen thought to indicate woodland succession, a hint that the pinewood has had a continuous presence in the neighbourhood, possibly even from the end of the Ice Age.

The downside is that this specimen is growing fractionally just outside Joe's string-and-pin enclosure. It's beyond the pale and won't be recorded. Who'd know, I ask. But Joe, with scientific rigour, won't have it. Furcellata's out.

50

What will the forests of Glen Affric look like in a hundred years' time, in a thousand years, in ten thousand? What changes will there be? Will there be more trees in the future or fewer? Will the mix of species remain the same? What will the landscape look like? These are the questions Joe is attempting to answer in his research for the Forestry Commission. Much depends on variable factors, from fluctuating forestry politics through to climate change.

Joe's fieldwork is only part of the task. The rest he describes as ‘heavy maths' (one of his degrees is in maths) and his essential tool is the computer. With so many factors to take into account, the uncertain effect of global warming being only one of them, a layman might wonder where to start. As Joe puts it, ‘Gut-wrenching decisions have to be made.'

I visit Joe at the forest research station at Roslin, a leafy place on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Hanging on a wall are maps of the lochs and woodlands of Glen Affric.

I thought the computer screen on his desk would show digitised images of a virtual forest – true-to-life pine trees, birches, hazel, alder, oak and the rest – but no. What I'm looking at is a series of diagrams based on information culled from many graphs and tables, garish and colour-coded like images from outer space, bright red for dense woodland, green for areas of more scattered trees. The computer whirrs and the pattern shifts almost imperceptibly, decade by decade until, over an imagined millennium, the change is dramatic. A thousand years from now, the woodland currently confined to the lower southern slopes of Beinn a'Mheadhoin has spread upwards to encircle most of the hill, with only an island of bare ground left at the summit. Tongues of forest now reach far into the naked glens of West Affric.

This is only one of many projections. It may happen that way or not. Who can tell for sure?

51

At Stirling University, Helen leads the way along a breeze-block corridor to her lab. Helen's time span is not in the future but in the past. She opens an industrial-size fridge to takes out a metre-long core of peat, a thousand-year record of vegetation in Pollan Buidhe. Possibly it was the very core I watched her draw from the ground. The column of peat is notched at two-centimetre intervals where small samples have been extracted for analysis.

She talks about ‘pollen rain', the shower of pollen grains that drenches the soil every year with monsoon regularity. Within this core of peat is the evidence of a thousand pollen storms. Through the microscope the separate pollen grains swim into view, each species having a distinctive shape. To my eyes, pine pollen has Mickey Mouse ears.

Her project is long term but already one tentative conclusion suggests that, 250 years ago, pine trees in the area of Glen Affric between the head of Loch Beinn a'Mheadhoin and the lower reaches of Loch Affric (including Pollan Buidhe) were sparse, with many fewer trees than grow there now. Most of the ground seems to have been open heath. This is a big surprise. The orthodox view has been that the pine forest has flourished abundantly from time immemorial. The Old Caledonian Forest may have been patchier than we thought.

52

Aigas is a red tower house with a single pepper-pot turret (hence its lopsided look) close to a spectacular reach of the Beauly River. The naturalist Sir John Lister-Kaye, ecologist son of a wealthy industrialist, bought this Victorian pile when it was damp, decaying and neglected and about to be demolished. He had a fight on his hands to save it from the elements and the intransigence of bureaucracy but prevailed against both. From here, he runs a flourishing wildlife holiday centre. Chalets in the grounds accommodate students of all ages, allowing them (as the glossy brochure states) to ‘share the wonders of the wild Highlands'.

Nine of us assemble in the drawing room for afternoon tea, settling comfortably in sofas and ample armchairs under the gaze of family portraits and the occasional stuffed creature – eagle, otter or owl. We are granted this privilege because the centre is choc-a-bloc with several groups and accommodation is under pressure. Sharing Aigas this week are school study groups and a large party of visiting American tourists (off to the Orkneys tomorrow and on Sunday, back at Aigas, they'll to the kirk).

Lady Lucy appears bearing a willow-patterned, round-bellied teapot the size of a capercaillie and an ashet piled with home-baked fruitcake. Sir
John, at ease in the window seat, expounds on the treats in store. We shall hear stags roar, see eagles soar and, tonight in the library, there's a wildlife presentation. All this and more we shall see, we shall see.

Next morning we're off to Strathconon, by way of Beauly and Muir of Ord, in a white minibus with a clanking door. ‘One of our wildest glens', it says in our notes for the day, but Strathconon turns out to be gentler than the Affric, Cannich or Strathfarrar glens and more populous. There are hamlets and occupied habitations along its length and not a ruinous but-and-ben to be seen.

All day the sun shines.

We turn into the glen and almost at once our eyes are directed to a cottage garden where interesting wildlife has been spotted before. Pencils and notebooks are ready – see that coal tit on the bird table. (Everything is recorded on this outing.)

Shortly afterwards, a small object whizzes past the windscreen. ‘Stonechat,' remarks Ieuan laconically, at the wheel. Ieuan, Welsh son-in-law of Sir John, trained and practised as a neurosurgeon until his love of the natural world caused him to switch careers. Everyone tumbles out of the van to watch a pair of red kites quartering a field – great excitement at this demonstration. We disembark again at placid Loch Meig where knowledgeable members of the party point out tufted duck, red-breasted merganser and other aquatic birds I cannot name. I identify two pairs of fishermen sculling in aluminium boats which glint in the sunshine, casting dazzling reflections on the water.

The naming of names continues throughout the day. Frog (common), pied wagtail, dipper bobbing and diving along the river's edge. Black darter dragonflies mating on a blade of grass in a reedy pool, emperor moth caterpillar furry at our feet, bog asphodel on the marshy bank, red-capped fly agaric, a poisonous toadstool, flaunting on a verge. Under plantation trees, Ieuan forages for the yellow crinkled caps of chanterelle which will be his supper for the night.

We lunch on a shingle bank of the Conon River, fine craggy peaks
around us. Ieuan sets up the telescope on a tripod, focuses and we take turns to look. The call goes up, ‘Deer on the hill' – a herd of hinds with two stags, some lying down, others grazing in a hollow just below the skyline – 17 in all. Soon there's a stir – the deer lift their heads in alarm and suddenly they're up and moving. Dark against the sky a great bird, an eagle, floats into focus, wings outstretched. Oohs! and Aahs! It turns, swoops again and then a third time, and the deer break into a trot that takes them over the skyline and out of sight. Sir John opines that the eagle was trying to harry them towards a cliff edge where a calf might fall and become easy prey.

On the way homeward there's a final show – a pair of sparrowhawks in a dance, and then two kestrels in whirling acrobatics.

‘You see this bare hillside?' – Sir John talking.

This day we're in Glen Strathfarrar. A sunny interval in a glade by the river, near Braulen Lodge. We gather round as Sir John expounds. This heather and bracken? These few trees? We see.

It's the cue for a dissertation on how the rich diversity of wildlife in the Highlands has slumped in the past century. This, according to Sir J, is borne out by the old game books for Braulen Estate when it was still in Lovat hands. The game books, shown to him by Lord Lovat, the war hero and dedicated landowner, provide, according to Sir John, documentary record of the natural productivity of Glen Strathfarrar from the turn of the 20th century to World War Two, some 50 years when wildlife proliferated in spite of enthusiastic shooting for game. It appears to have been a golden age which he believes cannot be matched now.

The game books tell of 40 to 50 brace of grouse shot for days in succession, of ptarmigan on the high tops, capercaillie too – the great grouse of the pinewoods rarely seen now but then found in profusion and shot regularly – widgeon, mallard and teal on the river, quantities of snipe on the river flats, salmon for the taking, trout remarkable in size – ‘anything from eight pounds and upwards, even a twelve-pounder now and then'. But: ‘I haven't heard of anyone catching a big trout, something
over four pounds, in the rivers Glass, the Beauly or the Farrar for many years.' As old Dougie, a notable catcher of trout both legitimate and poached, would confirm. Some blame the hydro dams for the decline of river fishing but Sir John believes there are other factors too.

Lovat told him that, as a boy, he had had the freedom of the hills. Too young to take part in shooting with the adults, he and his brother would depart on their own with rifle and shotgun into the woods and hills of Strathfarrar, bringing back mixed bags of wondrous variety. They'd take roe deer, then considered no better than vermin and beneath the notice of the grown-ups, and a wide range of assorted birds including curlew and lapwing – all pointing to a marked decline now in what Sir J calls natural productivity. ‘I think the only sensible explanation for this is the very intensive overgrazing by sheep and then deer. Forty years of sheep culture on the back of a livestock allowance which paid people to put as many animals on the land as possible, followed by the proliferation of red deer.' It's well known that red deer numbers have exploded in the years since the war.

Later in the day, near the head of the glen, we wander uphill botanising along a track beside a gully at the bottom of which a small burn trickles. Looming in the west, a presence throughout the day, is the great pyramid of Sgurr na Lapaich lit by the autumnal sun. It looks temptingly climbable. Some other time?

Ieuan points to various heathy things – ling heather with its strong-coloured bells; bell heather with large, paler bells clustered at the top of the stalk; cross-leafed heath with delicate sprays of green spaced around the stem. There are little cries of recognition as the naturalists among us encounter rarities and old familiars – Aha! Devil's-bit scabious. That shy little flower half-hidden in a crevice at our feet, its tiny white petals veined with pink, is eyebright – so named, says Ieuan, because it was used by herbalists in times gone by as a remedy for sore eyes.

Eyebright is duly recorded in our list of the day's finds. Among the birds – stonechat, long-tailed tit, meadow pipit, mistle thrush, hoodie crow. Less confident identification among the lesser creatures – ground
beetle, species unknown (a black and yellow bug revealed under a gooey turd-like ball). Even less precisely – ‘big black slug'. Clearly there's no slugologist in the company.

Sunday. The Americans, back from the northern isles, are off to the kirk and Sir John summons us to the library for a sermon on stalking. As we gather in the library, I decide not to mention my day on the hill with Andrew and Johnny Affric. Best not to steal Sir J's thunder.

He opens with a question: ‘How many are against blood sports?' Two of us raise hesitant hands. Sir John, who has shot for sport and for the pot, nature-lover though he is, declares that, whatever the ethics of the case, deer stalking is important to the economy. It brings cash to Strathglass and the Highlands as a whole.

He produces the tools of the trade: firstly, a three-draw telescope as used by shepherds and old sea salts, then a shepherd's stick, a horn-handled knife with a long thin business-like serrated blade (a family heirloom), a rifle and finally the bullet, small, bright copper-red and jewel-like. This, the death dealer, is split at the nose to flare on impact and maximise the damage. Otherwise it might not kill; might even pass harmlessly (i.e. not fatally) through the flesh.

This is how it goes, he says. Having paid handsomely in expectation of your sport, you arrive at the shooting lodge, which is likely to be spartan, with plain fare probably cooked by the stalker's wife – all the more welcome after a hard day on the hill. If you are a beginner, you will be asked to fire at a target and, if unskilled, may be recommended to practise. And if you then prove to be wildly incompetent, the stalker may decline to take you on the hill.

All being well, you set off. The stalker may carry your gun in its case, the gillie a rope coiled round his shoulders. And you – you carry your lunch box. After a long walk over rough terrain to locate your deer followed by a cautious approach to the herd, the stalker will select a suitable stag and bring you within range while the gillie drops tactfully out of sight. Both you and the stalker wriggle forward on your bellies, heads held low, to
within perhaps a hundred yards from the prey. Then the stalker hands you the gun and makes sure of the alignment. Now you have the prey in your sights.

Sir John demonstrates by levering himself awkwardly to the floor – his knees are wonky and he's waiting for an operation. He wriggles forward painfully.

You aim, fire and, if your aim is true, the deer drops. If you wound but don't kill your stag, the stalker will take the gun from you and hopefully despatch it. A clean kill is a matter of professional pride.

Then comes the gralloching. The stalker slits the carcase down the belly and scoops out the innards (‘You don't want the stomach juices to spoil the meat.') An image of entrails spilled on the turf, glistening and pudding-like, comes fleetingly to mind as Sir John continues – now the gillie steps forward with the rope to haul the carcase downhill.

We watchers in this drama now follow Sir J outdoors to a nearby field, where he props a thick plank against the bars of a metal trough. This is his target. Meanwhile Ieuan shoos away three inquisitive Highland cattle. Resting an elbow on the gatepost, Sir John takes aim and fires and we move forward to inspect the result. There's a neat hole where the bullet entered the plank and a larger, splintered hole where it exited at the back. We see how the shot, far from spent, carried on to punch through the quarter-inch metal bar behind the plank.

Thus ends the lesson.

Teatime. Coffee, rather, poured not from the china pot but an equally rotund copper kettle.

Laid open beside the tea table there's a small leather-bound volume called
Spicer's Sporting Records
for the season 1913 – a game log for Highland sporting estates ‘by Peter Spicer and Sons, Leamington and 60 Academy Street, Inverness, taxidermists by appointment to his imperial majesty the King of Spain'.

Not a good year was 1913. According to Spicer, ‘The season will ever be remembered as the worst on record.' The poor bag was ‘fully anticipated, as during the cold wet winter hundreds of the deer died on the hills'.

There are references to several estates in our area. At Fasnakyle, where the head stalker was a Mr John MacLennon (
MacLennon
? ‘My grandfather,' says John MacLennan), 70 stags were shot, a respectable total – the best weighing more than 19 stone. Seventy were also killed at Benula (head stalker Mr D. Finlayson) but in Affaric Forest (Affaric is an old spelling of the name) the count was a mere 27. At Struy, where 40 stags were shot, the heaviest weighed almost 22 stone.

If 1913 was a bad year, worse followed, whatever the deer count. By the start of the 1914 stalking season, a human slaughter was under way in France and Flanders. It's a fair bet that, by then, many of the younger shooting guests had laid aside tweeds for khaki, some never to return.

Johnny Kingdom comes to Aigas with his TV crew – this man with short curly black hair and a wee bald patch at the back of his head, tattooed arms, talking with a West Country inflection. He lives on Exmoor where most of his wildlife programmes are made and where, he says, it's the custom to hunt deer on horseback.

He and the crew are mostly segregated from the rest of us in the big house. I notice Lady Lucy carrying brown-bag lunches for them with interesting bottles in the bags. We get similar bags but no bottles.

Johnny stands with Sir J on the steps looking out over the grounds, wearing army fatigues and a slouch hat with a pair of feathers in it like Robin Hood. I overhear him say he wants to shoot a stag, with Sir John as his guide. Shocking! Except that he means to shoot his stag with a camera not a gun.

He gets his stag – said that he found the stalk hard going over some very rough ground but eventually a fine stag presented itself nicely to camera. ‘I find that they come to you,' he says. I wonder what John MacLennan – Johnny Affric – a stalker of more than 40 hard years' experience, would say to that.

It's five in the morning and dark when we gather in front of the house, still heavy with interrupted sleep. There's a clammy feeling in the air, mist clinging round ghostly treetops. No one talks much.

We rendezvous in Corrimony with Dan the new RSPB man. Dan's a Geordie, a broad-built man dressed in tweed breeches and green wellies. It's going to be wet underfoot, he says. And some of us, foolishly, are wearing trainers.

The morning mist begins to dissipate as we reach the moorland and, in the half-light before dawn, we see a few blackcock. It's not yet the season for the lek. They're not in the mood. What we hope for is to hear the roaring of stags, which have been elusive so far. Dan says we might even hear the screeching of sika deer, the Japanese species introduced into Britain some time ago and now spreading throughout the land and present here.