Season in Strathglass (19 page)

86

Ian, seventh son at Cougie, drives a tractor under the gaze of his two tousle-headed boys. He wears a fur hat skin side out like Davy Crockett's. I ask him where to find what's left of the Iron Fence and he points the way.

I first heard of the Iron Fence years ago when Catherine and I trekked through Glen Affric and found a reference to it at the Alltbeithe hostel – the note on the kitchen wall that told how, late in the 19th century, ‘West Affric became part of the massive deer forest of a railway magnate called Winans.'

Donald Fraser's booklet on Guisachan tells more. By the 1870s, bit by bit, the American tycoon Winans had acquired shooting rights over 350 square miles of bleak mountain and moorland stretching from Beauly in the east to Kintail in the west. He had a great fence erected around this vast territory, snaking over hill and hollow in order – so he hoped – to prevent the deer on his land from straying on to neighbouring estates. He considered the deer his own. Small furnaces for the blacksmiths he employed on the work flared along the line in the mountain wilderness.

I set off along a forest road though a great slice of the forest has gone, felled, logged and extracted except for a few naked stems left standing as
habitat for birds and burrowing insect. Drifts of pale sawdust surround newly cut stumps alongside the road and the air is heavy with the smell of resin.

I pass into Mr Kwint's West Guisachan estate (‘Walkers welcome', it says on the gate, with the usual proviso about the shooting season – in sum, walk on if you like but don't stray from the track) and stop by a lochan which seems much larger than it's shown on my map. Old map – after this edition was made, a small dam was built to enlarge the lochan for fishing, common practice in this fishing country.

I sit on the low curve of masonry that serves as a dam, contemplating grey featureless waters. Scattered on a nearby knoll are the flattened remains of a fishing hut blown down in a gale – panels of tin roofing and splintered planks and an assortment of rubbish. A dinghy lies upturned on the grass.

I cut across moorland to where the ground dips abruptly into a narrow gully and a burn gushes over a tiny fall. Hanging across the burn is a tall gate-like structure designed to stop animals from escaping along the watercourse. The barrier itself isn't old – it replaces an original – but the rusted hawser supporting it, spanning the gully, belongs to an earlier era, as do the five hefty iron hooks on which the structure hangs. Winans' work – the handiwork of a bygone age.

Winans was no sportsman. Not for him the arduous stalk on foot in pursuit of a single chosen stag. He organised deer hunts on a prodigious scale, with great numbers of the animals driven into a dead-end defile where he and his mounted companions might slaughter them at will. There was talk of a Gatling machine gun and questions were asked in parliament.

Winans scandalised the shooting fraternity by his bloodthirsty methods and angered them for his querulous resort to litigation on the slightest pretext. In the end, having been bested in court over a trifle, he quit the killing fields of Affric to live out the rest of his life in Brighton.

The Iron Fence, his legacy to the Highlands, was left to decay or to be adapted to more peaceful ends.

A week later, I struggle cross-country through dense heather and high bracken and ford a burn where it rushes noisily over shallows. A new deer fence is silhouetted against the sky.

The track from my little fishing loch is sadly changed. The fine walking route of just a week ago has been gouged by stalkers' vehicles into a rutted morass of mud and black peat. What have you done, Mr Kwint? Your ‘Walkers welcome' rings hollow now.

Under an overcast sky, the brown moorland is bleak and uninviting. As the main track sweeps away to the south, a white post and a small cairn – just a heap of few stones – point the way to Loch Affric. Some way along this minor track, at a high vantage point, there stands a sturdy iron corner post, well over head height, bearing on its shank a battery of rust-bitten cogwheels – the stretchers which once held the fence wires in tension. Some twists of rusty wire still dangle from it in looped disarray. In the distance, I can see a corner of Loch Affric and, closer, there's a small lochan amid clusters of pine trees. In this lonely spot – a rusting memorial to William Winans and his failed dream of Highland empire.

Heading down to the Affric shore, I hear the sound of gunfire. Someone on the foreshore near Affric lodge is engaged in shooting practice. ‘Crack, crack!' goes the rifle at regular intervals and the sound of it follows me all the way along the narrows and down to the bridge near the car park.

‘Crack, crack!' – muffled now.

It's not good for your hearing, marksman. You may go deaf. ‘Crack! Crack!'

87

Winans died in Brighton on 23 June 1897 but I search the newspaper archive in vain for a mention of his death. It was his posthumous misfortune to breathe his last at the time when Queen Victoria was celebrating her Diamond Jubilee. The loyal columns of the
Glasgow Herald
, for one, were filled to bursting with accounts of the event and Winans' demise failed to make the edition.

On the web I find that William had a son, Walter, who lived in Britain all his adult life and successfully assumed the role of English gentleman. He spoke with an impeccable accent, sported Dundreary whiskers and tipped a jaunty bowler hat. He had something of an artistic bent too – he sculpted horses. Like his father, he had a taste for blood sport on a grand scale. An expert shot, he declared that he hoped to kill at least one specimen of every game animal on earth.

‘I have shot over a thousand stags,' he told an interviewer from the
New York Times
on his single brief visit to the States (to see a horse show). Possibly a fair proportion of his thousand stags were shot on his father's range in West Affric.

Walter met his end in 1910. While pony trotting, he crossed the finishing line slumped in his sulky and was declared dead with the reins still clasped in his lifeless hands.

Slowly the Winans fence decays. Long sections have been uprooted and, here and there, its rusty iron posts have been adapted to buttress a modern deer fence erected to keep today's deer not in but out of forest land.

There's a radio programme
A History of the World in 100 Objects
. The piece of rusting ironmongery I found in the Affric hills could surely qualify as one of a hundred objects in the history of the Highlands.

88

Descending from the Hill Lochs (still looking out for telltale signs of Iron Fence as I go), I come on a Land Rover slewed across the road. The driver's a big-made man with working hands – nails edged with black, I notice – who says his name's Younie, John Younie – strange surname. He farms at Drumnadrochit but rents grazing up here. He has sheep on the ground and later this month he'll bring cattle.

It would be fine apart from the ticks. ‘Last year, I lost 90 sheep through ticks,' he says. Tick infestation seems to occur in pockets – ‘Bad here but there are none in Drumnadrochit.'

Ticks can carry lime disease which attacks the nervous system – a bad business. They cling to the heather and bracken and rub off on your legs as you brush by (the spores of bracken are carcinogenic, too – nature's not always benign). I shan't wear shorts.

‘Here's one,' says John, grabbing Minnie his lively collie by the scruff and prizing a bloated insect from the nape of her neck. He climbs down with the tick between his thumb and forefinger, drops it on the ground and grinds it under his heel. There's an orangey splat on the tarmac – Minnie's blood.

‘You can get stuff at Tesco's to rub on your skin and it works,' he says. ‘I rubbed it on my hands and I didn't get a bite after that.'

There are ways of dealing with ticks. They burrow under the skin and you have to extract them whole. It's said they'll disengage smartly if you touch them with a lighted match but I don't fancy that. Besides, I don't carry matches.

George at Upper Glassburn says John Younie used to deliver coal as a sideline to his farming. He arrived at George's place at midnight in a downpour of rain, his face streaked with coal dust black as sin. The huge truck with its flashing lights couldn't get up the awkward bend in the drive so George and he howked up several tons of coal on their backs.

George paid by cheque which John crumpled in his coaly hands and stuffed in a pocket, damp and dirty, along with his scruffy wad of notes.

‘Your bank manager won't thank you for that,' says George.

‘He doesn't,' says John.

89

For once, the post office at Tomich is open when I pass by. Out of curiosity, I peer in. Joyce, who works for Donald Fraser at Guisachan cottages, stands behind the counter. It's tiny – hardly more than a cubicle – and it's a time capsule. The clock stopped in the 1940s.

Old wartime posters brown with age cover the woodchip walls, urging customers to join the Wrens or the RAF or the Royal Observer Corps, or to save for victory, or send a telegram to the forces overseas at a cheap rate. On another wall, a blue line on a large map shows Donald Fraser's progress round the world in the
Spirit of Affric
, the boat he built himself, tracing his way across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal and into the Pacific via the Antipodes and on towards the Red Sea.

It's too late, of course, to invest in the war bonds advertised on the wall. I buy stamps instead.

90

Straight off the wall, almost, news of
Spirit of Affric
and all who sail in her. Ian from Comar Lodge tells me he's just back home from India after a spell on board with Donald and his crew mate. He was at sea for two months not counting the landfalls. The longest spell at sea was nine days. He says he was never seasick – a bit queasy once or twice when the waves were 14 feet high. Before he came aboard they'd been the size of a house so he missed the worst of it. Even so, he hurt his back when thrown across the cabin. ‘There's not a lot of room in a 40-foot boat,' he says.

He says Donald's voyage is part of an event called the Blue Water Rally, which is not a race but, roughly speaking, a loose convoy of boats circumnavigating the world. They keep in touch every day and meet at designated marinas. Yachties appear to be a gregarious bunch – once ashore, he says, you go out for a drink, meal, a nightcap on a neighbour's boat. In bed by midnight all the same.

91

Who's that man with the mahogany legs? A man in shorts whose wiry legs are the colour of old leather has been talking to the lady in the Cannich shop. ‘They're the brownest legs I've ever seen,' I say when he's gone.

‘That's Richard,' says she. ‘He's a great walker. He's out on the hills every day. He's never at home.'

Richard lives in the first house past the bridge at Cannich, on a steep
hillside. I've driven past many times and never noticed it half-hidden among trees.

Today he's at home – tomorrow he's off to Wales and more hills. I open the gate and climb the many steps to his door. He leads me into the kitchen, which is bachelor untidy. ‘A coffee?' Where's the coffee? He searches in cupboards, finds the jar at last, drops a spoonful in a mug and rummages in a drawer. ‘There are biscuits here somewhere.' He finds a crumpled packet.

‘A broken biscuit is fine,' I say.

Through the kitchen window, he keeps an eye on the birds. (Birdseed is plainly easier to locate than biscuits.) ‘I can flick a nut out of the window and a chaffinch will take it on the wing,' he says. Yesterday a great spotted woodpecker visited. One of the pleasures of hillwalking is the chance it gives him to watch and listen to the birds. One day in Glen Strathfarrar, he picked up the faint cry of a ring ouzel, a summer visitor to the mountains, which he reckons must have carried across two miles from a corrie on Mam Sodhail.

His living room is sparsely furnished except for one item – a handsome old grandfather clock (which
was
his grandfather's) in the corner that strikes the hour with a wheeze and a gentle tuning-fork chime. A pair of time-worn binoculars lie ready on the window sill. His boots rest against the log basket by the black stove.

Richard bought the house and land when it was going cheap shortly after he quit his job with the Forestry Commission 20 years ago. The lure of working outdoors had been dulled by too much wearisome planting of trees from a sack on his back and too many hours spent cooped up in a transit van with a squad of heavy smokers.

We take a walk around his two acres of steeply sloping ground, where he's made a semblance of order out of wilderness. He cleared narrow winding paths through the undergrowth and, over the years, has dug out most of the whin – the last of it, reprieved, glows in vibrant yellow bloom on a bank. Bracken's a curse. He stoops to tug out a frond unfurling at his feet and picks up a switch of birch to whack off any other sign of rogue growth.

He points to a seedling horse chestnut which, he says, he'll transplant to a better spot and an oak sapling threatened by small trees and brushwood around it. He'll clear the brush and give the oak space.

Among the trees high above the house is the wooden summer-house he built as a vantage point, with a mattress inside for reclining on while enjoying the view over sunlit river and strath. It's a refuge, too, when the midges are bad.

Richard has ‘done' all the Munros, some of them many times. Did he say
hundreds
of times? Surely not. There are only 360-odd walking days in the year, for goodness sake!

Now he's ticking off the Marilyns. This is a technical term, like Munro, and just as pointless. A Marilyn, he explains, is a hill of any size so long as it's at least 150 metres (or 492 feet) high with a rise of at least 150 metres from base to summit all round, no matter from which side you approach it. In other words, it's a peak and not a lump. According to this crazy definition, Ben Nevis is a Marilyn but Cairn Gorm is not.

There are numerous Marilyns in Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland and the Isle of Man (the qualifying countries) and Richard calculates he has only 32 to go, including the stacs of St Kilda, the island far off the west coast – a severe challenge. He's currently working out how to get there and how to climb them. One problem is to find a safe landing place and another is the attitude of the National Trust for Scotland which discourages climbing in case it disturbs the cliff-nesting seabirds.

Has he a favourite hill in these parts? Yes – Sgorr na Diollaid in Glen Cannich. It's 818 metres high and he's climbed it many times and in all weathers. For Richard, it's a morning or afternoon jaunt. From the bailey bridge, it takes him two hours up and down. ‘You just follow your nose,' he says – there's no track.

I look it up in my hill book: ‘A fine little rocky peak with particularly good views of the Strathfarrar, Mullardoch and Glen Affric hills.' It sounds enticing but I'm running out of time. Right now I have another hill in mind.

There's a shadow. Richard tells me that he has inherited a gene which in the end will severely curtail his active life. This surely explains his obsessive pursuit of the heights: forever walking, climbing, scrambling. He's a driven man.