Season in Strathglass (13 page)

All's quiet except for the plod and splash of feet over marshy ground. There's no path through the heather and we spread out, trying to avoid the sloughs and finding a route as best we can. Those wearing trainers fare the worst. Heathers laden with water droplets brush our legs, soaking trouser legs and infiltrating boots.

Dawn breaks, the sun tipping the horizon. The hills of Affric, Cannich and Strathfarrar are blue in the distance above billows of white mist. Loch Comhnard's a shining disc below. We gather on a small rocky outcrop with a wide view of the surrounding countryside. Dan says that deer often gather around the channel of the Enrick River about half a mile away but its grassy lawns are untenanted this morning.

‘Listen,' he says at last and we all strain our ears. Sure enough, from a region of dark plantation trees still smoky with lifting mist, comes a faint sound of – what's it like? Snoring? – a stag giving voice a long way off, a mournful sound under the vault of the sky. Again it sounds and then again and then silence. We wait in vain for a repeat performance. Perhaps it's too early in the season. Late September it may be but the stags aren't roused to the full passion of the rut. October's the best time.

We troop back to the van, with the rising sun warming our backs, well satisfied to be out of doors in the wilderness under a cloudless sky and ready for breakfast deferred.

53

Notice at Tomich Post Office:

National Moth Night!!!! [four exclamations] Saturday. Learn about the beautiful insects that fly in your garden each night . . .We will be running light and sugar traps on the reserve until 10 pm . . . All moths will be returned unharmed once identified. Donations welcome.

I phone Catherine: ‘You should be here.'

‘It's moth night everywhere,' she says.

54

The little yellow wooden café is gone. Not a trace of it today as I make my way south through Glen Urquhart.

It was long in the going.

Once, on my way home from walking in the pinewoods of Glen Strathfarrar, I stopped there and sat by a sunny window with a cup of coffee and a slice of home-made apple tart on a plate. I talked amiably with the couple behind the counter, a black-haired Englishman and his blonde wife, and made a mental resolution to return on my next visit to Strathglass. I never did. When I next passed that way, the yellow paint was flaking, I could see the chairs and tables stacked higgledy-piggledy inside and the café was closed, never to reopen.

A pile of paperbacks was stacked on the counter beside the cakes and scones. The cover showed a young fresh-faced, dark-haired man crouching on a hillside cradling a lamb, with his shepherd's stick across his knee and two collie dogs at his side. The title was
Isolation Shepherd
and the author Iain R. Thomson, a name I didn't know. According to the blurb, it told of the author's shepherding days at the far end of Glen Strathfarrar in the 1950s. I bought a copy and started to read.

It opened: ‘A south westerly gale and heavy showers swept down Loch Monar. It had been blowing and raining since the previous day. Though summer storms are not infrequent in the high hill country, this one was severe . . .'

Aboard a small boat on the choppy waters were Thomson, his wife Betty, their two-year-old daughter and week-old baby son, along with their household effects piled under a tarpaulin.

Head on she met the full force of the weather in the wider open waters. Her cargo that day was my family and flitting, destined for a new home, six and a half stormy miles westwards . . . cradled in remoteness and grandeur at the upper reaches of Glen Strathfarrar.

They reached their cottage safely, found the fire already lit and ablaze, hung their wet clothes to steam at the hearth and made a simple supper. Outside, the sky cleared – a cue for the author to turn lyrical: ‘That night we unrolled the mattress on the floor and lay listening. Only the note of the burn and the catching voice of the wind on Creag na Gaoith sang the last of a summer's storm.'

I took the book home and finished it at a sitting. Since then, it has fallen apart through frequent thumbing and I've bought a fresh copy – it's still in print. Over time I heard more about Iain Thomson – that he'd farmed cattle in Strathglass, that he'd turned his hand to writing, and above all that he'd featured in a film about his strath and these glens made for television years ago. Apparently it was made by a man called Mickleburgh who lives somewhere in the area. Clearly, it's a film I ought to see.

From the village of Drumnadrochit, hairpin bends wind up to the moorland above Loch Ness and here I find a low house, part old and part new, that rambles this way and that so confusingly that it's a puzzle to find the entrance. Lawns, trees and shrubs transform cottage garden into a miniature park.

In the kitchen Edwin Mickleburgh introduces the woman standing at the table as Sue. She has her coat on. ‘Sorry,' she says, ‘I have to leave. There's lunch on the table'. And with that she goes.

‘Your wife?'

‘My third,' says he.

On the sideboard, prepared by Mrs Mickleburgh III, are plates of cold ham, cheese and tomatoes and a bottle of Chablis, chilled and uncorked.

Lunch consumed and glasses drained, we settle in the lounge to watch the video. The title,
An Element of Regret
, appears on the screen, introducing a two-part film made for Central TV, one of the early television companies, long gone. Edwin says that the documentary changed course halfway through filming. It was conceived as a celebration of the Affric pinewoods until a chance meeting with Thomson in the bar of an Inverness hotel persuaded him that the former shepherd had a better story to tell. It was two years in the making, a generous schedule that wouldn't be feasible now.

The film opens moodily with shots of dark clouds sweeping over the hills and the play of many waters in the glens, with a slow, gravelly voice hymning the allure of wilderness places. Cut to a gentler scene – a sunlit stretch of loch cleft by the bow-wave of a launch. In the stern stands Iain Thomson in his prime – hawk-like features, tanned cheeks aglow, talking of the years he spent at the head of the loch a decade and a half before the film was made (so we're in a double time warp).

‘I turned my back on civilisation', he says on screen. ‘I found myself there.'

There are cameo appearances by the locals. John MacLennan's father, in ruddy health, with the same wee deprecating smile I recognise in his son, talks about stag shooting and the importance of a swift despatch: ‘For the sake of the animal and for the sake of the gentleman, there's great satisfaction when you have a clean shot.' Donnie, veteran stalker on the Culligran Estate, uneasily contemplating his boss's intention to farm deer like cattle: ‘I wouldn't like it,' he says, imagining a slaughter of captive beasts.

Clips from the archive include a black-and-white Ministry of Information documentary made just after the war extolling the grand hydroelectric schemes then being planned or already under construction throughout the Highlands. Scenes from an unidentified location show huge mechanical diggers scooping out rock and earth to the accom paniment of an enthusiastic commentary. Cascading burns are dismissed as ‘running to waste' or elicit breathless admiration: ‘See that spate of water – that's
power
!'

Iain Thomson has another take on it – that the coming of hydroelectricity wrote the final chapter of the Highland clearances. He and his few neighbours were displaced to make way for the rising waters. ‘The hills are sad for the old days and they won't return,' he says. (A poetic fallacy – the hills are indifferent.) Shots of Iain's doomed croft house at Strathmore underline the message – stripped bare, surrounded by tilled fields beside a calm inlet of the old loch, it's an empty shell with flames leaping from the rafters.

Pait Lodge, once home to Iain's nearest neighbours half a mile across the loch and built on higher ground, still survives as a bolt-hole for a south-country laird and his guests. In the film, two elegant cars, one an open-top tourer, wind slowly along the narrow road towards the Monar Dam, where the occupants emerge, women in slacks, men in country casuals, chattering in cut-glass accents. It could be a picnic, with hampers and champers. The party sails down the loch before disembarking from the launch at Pait landing stage for their stay at the lodge. Hampers are unloaded. A lady hands a bunch of flowers for the gillie to hold while she steps ashore, to his clear embarrassment. Inside the lodge, the table is set, sparkling with crystal and silver, with napkins folded, glasses in place and candles lit.

‘It's a great place to relax,' the gentleman says to camera.

Far from Pait Lodge and his personal wilderness in Glen Strathfarrar, Colin Stroyan resides for much of the time in an old house in rural Perthshire. There's a row of bells in the kitchen for summoning servants
but those days are gone. His wife greets me at the garden gate with a trowel in one hand and a punnet in the other and takes me inside to Colin – a tall man, genial, heavily built and now a bit slow on his feet.

Stroyan is laird of West Monar and Pait, which together cover 35,000 acres of bare hill and moor straddling the top end of Loch Monar. He never saw the loch before the dam and likes it pretty well as it is. He bought the land not long after the great inundation, knowing that the family estate in Perthshire was destined to pass to his elder brother (Harrow and Eton, a judge on the English circuit, recreations field and country sports). As for himself, he spent a lifetime in legal circles in Edinburgh as a Writer to the Signet, a rather grand category of Scottish lawyers, acquiring a clutch of directorships on the way.

A painting on the wall shows a shooting party setting off for the day's sport against a backdrop of loch and blue hills – a lad in the forefront leading two ponies followed by younger versions of Stroyan and wife, tweed clad and striding out along the track beside a brawling burn, with stalker and gillie in the rear. In the background, Pait shooting box is screened behind a clump of trees.

The lodge and keeper's cottage beside it are all that remain of the former habitations that existed around the head of the natural loch. Stroyan had a causeway built to the lochside, demolished two outbuildings and made various improvements to the lodge but stopped short of putting in electricity – which is ironic, considering that the sole purpose of the dam was to provide hydro power. But dark nights are aglow in the soft lamplight. (A generator provides electricity for the keeper and his partner in their cottage.)

These days, Pait is a summer residence. Colin Stroyan sails up the loch to open it up in April and, from then until mid October, the family and friends enjoy country pursuits in comfortable isolation.

Deer stalking and fishing are his passion – his face lights up when he reminisces about sporting days. In his heyday, 12 hours on the hill kept him fit. What gives him his greatest pleasure now? His answer surprises – it's the vicarious thrill of seeing a novice get his (or her) first stag. He shot his first at the age of 11, more than 70 years ago, and he says that, even now, he could find the spot.

Colin Stroyan is not a fan of Iain Thomson, whose home was just across the bay from Pait. ‘He was only there a few years,' he says but I guess shepherding at the far end of Loch Monar, with a wife and young family to provide for, might teach something about the nature of the place.

‘The book's a good read,' say I.

‘Oh, yes, a good read . . .'

55

First sight on turning into Iain Mackay's croft house near Beauly is a shed with strings of onions dangling at the open doors. He's an organic grower. Dung's the thing.

Iain Mackay was Iain Thomson's nearest neighbour. He and his brother Kenny got no compensation for losing home and occupation when the waters rose – unlike the laird, their employer, Sir John Stirling. The sum Sir John received was never made public. Whatever it was, no doubt it softened the blow.

Sir John studiously avoided contesting the Monar hydro plan when it went to a public inquiry. Emma Wood, in her book
The Hydro Boys
,
quotes him as saying later that he ‘was not at all pleased at this ruination of [his] property' but that he ‘had to accept the views of the powers that be that it is a good thing to have all this power developed'.

Three lairds shared the Strathfarrar lands at that time – Stirling, Lovat and Sir Robert Spencer-Nairn, owner of the Culligran Estate and the only one to oppose the scheme at the inquiry. He had been assured by Tom Johnston, Churchill's wartime Scottish Secretary and by then mastermind of the Highland hydroelectric schemes, that Monar would never be dammed in his lifetime but he survived into his 90s and saw it happen.

Tom Weir put in a word for the mountaineers who were about to find the hills harder to reach. Iain Mackay also appeared at the inquiry, armed
with a petition from family and neighbours – 12 signatures in all, a paltry number as it might seem to the wider world but, in fact, one hundred per cent of the resident population. During the inquiry, he was asked to ferry the presiding QC and other interested parties on a fact-finding mission up the loch on a January day with a fresh wind blowing. Not far from the shore, these less-than-hardy souls decided they had seen enough and turned back.

Iain Mackay moved down the glen. He never married and lived with his sister until her death. Apart from his crofting, he has dabbled in various interests. On his travels around the country as a stalker for the old Red Deer Commission, he hawked Iain Thomson's book to shops and cafés on the way – including the yellow café where I first saw it.

He shows me a book about the flooding of the glen, which he wrote and published himself, called
The Last Highland Clearance
. The front cover shows two contrasting photographs taken from the same point near the site of the dam. One shows ‘the farm at Monar' before the dam was built. There are level green fields in the foreground bisected by stone walls and ringed with clumps of trees, beyond which stretches a serpentine twist of blue loch at the foot of hills, with a farmstead in the middle distance. The second act is starker. The loch has swamped fields and trees and its grey surface (on a dull day) fills the lower half of the picture. The raised shoreline, which formerly shelved gently to the water's edge, is now a grey bathtub ring and the bare hill above it is bleak.

Mostly, it's a book of pictures – images of then and now – and more polemical than most of that genre. Of the latter-day views, only one shows to advantage – a shot of Pait taken in a rosy twilight with a small boat moored at the edge of the placid loch. For the rest, the overriding feeling is a sense of loss. Only a few remnant trees above an eroded scar on the hillside remain after the flood, contrasting with the former scene – a handful of dwellings by a roadway, smoke rising from the chimneys, cattle grazing at the waterside. A man, identified as Willie MacLennan, leads his ponies along the road above his home near Benula Lodge – house and road now submerged and the people gone. Fire gleams behind
empty windows and flames leap from cottage roofs as the settlement at Strathmore is put to the torch in preparation for the flood.

A passage in the text tells an even more eloquent story than the pictures. It's an extract from a letter to Iain Mackay on the death of his mother. The writer, a man called Nettleton, had passed by Pait on a trek through the area when he was a young man waiting to be called up to the army in 1940:

I took ten days' holiday and travelled up north for the first time from my home near London. I packed my rucksack and set off crossing Glens Garry, Morrison, Affric, Cannich, Strathfarrar, Strath Bran, Fannich and Strath Dirrie. I spent two days at Benula at the head of Glen Cannich – this beautiful area was a hive of activity.

On my way over to your old home at Patt [
sic
], I got a welcome cup of tea at Lungard right at the head of the glen and again at Patt, from your mother. I was offered a boat run across to Strathmore but declined as I wanted to walk all the way and to see the marshes and meadows at the head of the loch. I found a dry hillock and got into my sleeping bag and spent the night listening to the constant cries of [waterfowl] and after a beautiful sunrise the chorus was increased by the blackbirds and thrushes in the woods at Strathmore and Patt answering each other across the loch. On getting up at 6am I found a greenshank lying on her eggs less than twenty yards from where I had slept – it was a night and a morning I will never forget.

It was well over forty years later I decided to do the same walk again.

Beautiful Benula has completely vanished from the face of the earth and I had some extra walking to get round to what was once the head of Loch Lungard. Patt lodge was still there and a small replacement house but everything else, including much of the wood, is gone. Strathmore and its woods are completely obliterated
and the thousands of birds seem to have vanished. I had miles of extra rough walking to get round the head of the loch. Beautiful Strathmore glen with all its meadows marshes and islands is now hundreds of acres of stinking mud. On my first visit there were dozens of small black duck on Loch Monar. This time I could see none.

This chimes with Emma Wood's comment in
The Hydro Boys
:

Loch Monar was one of the most important places in Britain for moor and waterfowl. Teal, widgeon, redshank, greenshank, curlew, snow bunting and lapwings were only some of the regular visitors to the loch before the creation of the reservoir destroyed their habitat.

She comments that today the dam builders might have a harder fight on their hands.

But would they lose? The naturalists, the conservationists, all those who cherish our wilder landscapes may speak with a louder voice than in the heyday of the old Hydro Board but green energy is big business today with plenty of industrial muscle and political influence behind it to promote its case.

The Monar Dam in Strathfarrar was the last of the great 20th-century hydro schemes in the Highlands. Fifty years later, the
Herald
newspaper carries a front-page headline in large type ‘Hydro is back as waters rise behind new Highland dam', referring to a new hydroelectric development at Glendoe which creates a huge new loch in a remote stretch of Inverness-shire moorland where no loch has existed before. Scotland's first minister Alex Salmond is pictured in hard hat and yellow oilskins, with a heap of spoil behind him and brown water gushing from an outlet as he opens a sluice to let the floodwaters in. His enthusiasm echoes Tom Johnston's half a century earlier that enough electricity would be generated in Glendoe to power a city the size of Glasgow – ‘Hydro is back!' On that day, it is also reported in another column that a survey has identified one thousand potential river sites in Scotland for small- to medium-scale hydro projects.

In his letter to Iain Mackay, the wanderer Nettleton, older and wiser, concluded sadly: ‘My first walk was the eight most wonderful days of my life and the last walk the saddest and most depressing.'

‘An element of regret' – the title of Mickleburgh's film and a straight lift from Iain Thomson's commentary – is not absolutely a ringing condemnation of change. In another scene from the film, you see Iain Thomson standing at the bar of the Cnoc Hotel reflecting on a way of life obliterated by the rising tide: ‘It's hardly possible to keep people quaint for the benefit of tourists.'