Season in Strathglass (5 page)

13

In the grocer's shop in Cannich, I have bought a small yellow-covered booklet called
Guisachan, a History
in which Donald Fraser tells the story of the Tweedmouths and their association with this part of the world.

The first Lord Tweedmouth, plain Edward Dudley Coutts Marjoribanks before ennoblement, was a wealthy industrialist and keen country sportsman who bought the Guisachan Estate in the mid 19th century for its 20,000 acres of shooting. He is said to have got it cut-price when he finessed the owner out of a 300-year-old inheritance.

The owner held a dinner party at which Marjoribanks was a guest. Wine and spirits flowed. In the course of the feast, the host grumbled that he'd ‘sell Guisachan tomorrow' if anyone offered £60,000 – £52,000 according to another version of the tale – for it. ‘Done!' cried Marjoribanks from the far end of the table. When the owner, sobered in the light of morning, tried to withdraw the offer, Marjoribanks held him to it. A gentleman's word was his bond in the etiquette of the day.

In due course the first Tweedmouth, father of Edward on the monument, cleared his tenants from their scattered drystone, mud-floored huts and settled them at Tomich in newly built estate houses where, in spite of all the latest Victorian mod cons, the uprooted tenants (grateful as maybe) apparently never felt at home. It's said they made regular pilgrimage to gaze tearfully on their old forsaken cabins.

14

Donald Fraser opens the door. ‘We usually sit in the kitchen,' he says, leading the way.

An appetising aroma of baking greets us there – Donald's wife Sue is baking cakes and offers me one straight from the oven. Mmm.

Donald's livelihood used to be farming, but he gave that up years ago. He says that farming cattle at Guisachan didn't appeal to him and, when the bottom fell out of the beef market in the 1980s, he sold the herd to concentrate on the holiday trade, building chalets behind the trees and converting the nearby stable block and farm steading into cottages for tourists.

Now he's about to set out on a great adventure. Outside, a marquee has been set up on the lawn. Their daughter is to be married on Saturday, 200 guests are invited, and then Donald is off to sea. ‘I'm a serious sailor,' says he.

Donald, fortyish, sturdy, is going to sail round the world in a boat he built himself in a shed. He built the shed too. A friend from the village will crew her. She's already made her maiden voyage via the Bay of Biscay to the Med, where Donald will board her for the voyage.

He learned to sail dinghies at school and, when he progressed to Sandhurst and a career as an army officer, boats came into that too. He was attached to a team maintaining and sailing yachts for the armed services, based at a diving school on the Solent. Why would the army need yachts? ‘Character building,' he says, ‘part of the training.'

They looked after themselves well. There was the odd trip to Cherburg to bring back a few crates of duty-free French wine – all part of the training, of course.

His boat is a 39-foot steel-hulled vessel named
Spirit of Affric
. A naval architect drew up the plans and the steel plates were cut to size by computer and trucked up to Tomich where he put them together, learning the craft of boatbuilding as he went along. The timberwork and fittings were cut from larch and oak trees felled at Guisachan. So a piece of Affric sails the seven seas.

15

I take the potholed woodland road beyond Tomich that leads to a car park in the trees with a signpost pointing to Plodda Falls, a local beauty spot. A slender spout of water gushes a hundred feet into black pools. The track ends at a cliff edge where a narrow iron lattice bridge spans a gorge. Now it goes nowhere since it's blocked by a railing but, in Tweedmouth days, it led to a network of adventurous paths on the far side. Downstream from the bridge, I walk through an avenue of handsome Douglas fir trees established long before the Forestry Commission appeared on the scene to engulf the ornamental trees with commercial conifers.

At length, the woodland opens out into a kind of distressed parkland marked by two ragged chestnut trees and, by the roadside, men are at work on old outbuildings with a picturesque little turret on top. A builder's van
stands outside, planks are propped against the wall and through frameless windows comes the sound of hammering and sawing. Gentrification is in progress. The old estate stable is about to become a country residence.

A few hundred yards on, unexpectedly, I come on the last remains of the old Guisachan House, gaunt and ruinous in its dilapidation. A fence of rickety paling surrounds it and red signs – Danger, don't enter! – warn off inquisitive intruders. The roof 's off, the windows are out, the walls all broken and crumbling. Door frames gape. Laths poke from broken plaster. Screes of broken masonry choke the interior and overhanging stones threaten to totter and fall. Small trees and shrubs have taken root in crevices in the masonry.

Where the main entrance was, formal steps lead up to a jagged gap in the facade. The bay windows from which house guests could survey the park are blank. And, at the back of the ruin, only an outline on the stonework shows where the orangery was.

It's a sad remnant. If the weather hadn't got to it first, the builders might now have been busy there too, hammering and sawing, converting the mansion into flats for incomers or holiday homes. But Guisachan is gone with the wind like Tara.

It has a footnote to fame of a sort. A slate tablet in the grass (no longer a lawn) dated 2002 records Guisachan as birthplace of the golden retriever. Here in 1868, as Donald Fraser recounts in his history of Guisachan, the first Tweedmouth mated a yellow wavy-coated retriever bought from a cobbler in Brighton with a Tweed water spaniel. Black retriever crosses, an Irish setter and even a bloodhound were involved in the line before the breed was established. Thus Guisachan House in its decay has become a place of pilgrimage for doggy folk.

A signposted walk leads to a higher level through Guisachan's former policy woods. Douglas firs abound, one snapped in a recent storm and measuring its length on the turf. Another, broken off long ago, stands bare and pitted by wood-boring insects. Here and there, there are big sequoias – Wellingtonias by another name – some still protected by rusted metal railings and, around them, the stumps of spruce and larch,
planted thoughtlessly in the years of aggressive forestry and now felled to give the big trees room to recuperate.

Once the first Tweedmouth had acquired the estate, he set about improving the property. He built the mansion and its associated buildings – kennels, stables, laundry, brewery, meal mill – and the model village at Tomich including a school, plus the handsome farmhouse with its dairy and stable block.

He, and after him his son, held open house for celebrated guests. His daughter-in-law Fanny was a Spencer Churchill and her nephew Winston was an occasional house guest. Somewhere (not in Fraser's book) there's a photograph of the young Churchill standing beside a motor car outside the Guisachan carriage stable. He learned to drive there.

Earlier visitors included the artists Landseer and Millais. The Duke and Duchess of York, later George V and Queen Mary, came to stay and, while there, planted the pair of horse chestnut trees (still to be seen), along with a third planted by an Indian maharajah. Gladstone came and, sometime about 1890, planted three Douglas firs near Plodda – ‘now a noticeable landmark towering above the surrounding Forestry Commission plantations', according to Donald Fraser. In the glory of his prime Gladstone would chop down mighty trees with his axe for sheer pleasure, sometimes watched admiringly by bonneted ladies, so he may have gazed enviously at some of the giants at Guisachan. But by then, in 1890, the old warrior was in his 80s and his tree-felling exploits were in the past.

Old photographs in Donald Fraser's booklet give a glimpse of life as it was at the big house. One shows a line of horses, dogs and humans, including Lord and Lady Tweedmouth, posed before the house, which dominates the scene like a stage set. This, according to the caption, was a shooting party, though there's no sign of guns. Tweedmouth, heavily bearded and clutching his wrists limply in a less than lordly fashion, is dressed casually for the sport in a swallow-tailed tweed coat. His lady wears a skirt to her ankles and a hat flat and wide as a pancake. Among various dogs, an ancestral golden retriever lies in front of his master
looking leonine. Eight docile ponies are held by tweeded retainers in breeches – one with spats over his stockings – except for the figure dressed incongruously in a dark suit, collar and tie and a bowler hat, who is identified as Sandy Post – Sandy the postman. This is the outdoor party and you wonder what busy life existed invisibly behind the windows and ‘downstairs' – the cook, the housekeeper, the footmen, the maidservants and skivvies and all.

Behind this gathering the many tall sash windows of the house are neatly curtained. There are stone balustrades at roof level, mansard attics in the roof, decorative ironwork on the ridges and a perfect forest of tall chimneypots. Another photo shows the house from a different angle with the carriage drive curving towards it and a tiny tree protected by a wire enclosure. This, says Donald's caption, is ‘the newly-planted Wellingtonia'. He suggests the reader might compare it with the giant of today. Yet another picture shows a large domed orangery or greenhouse nestling at the back of the house, all trace of which is gone.

The second Lord Tweedmouth, besides his interests as a landed gentleman, had political ambitions. He became a Liberal MP, served as Chief Whip in Gladstone's last government and then as First Lord of the Admiralty when the Liberals returned to power early in the 20th century. He was said to be one of the finest shots in Britain and, according to Donald Fraser's text, ‘was always ready to take himself off from dawn to dusk to a rewarding trout stream'. But after Fanny died, still young, in 1904, he retreated from Guisachan and sold it. With his departure, the big house began its gradual decline. Let out to a variety of shooting tenants who had no particular love for it, the house was sold on and, finally, the last owner took the roof off and it was left to decay.

There's a postscript. At Upper Glassburn, a bed and breakfast place where I like to stay, talk of Guisachan prompts landlord George to open a drawer and pull out a few sheets of paper – a schedule for the sale of Guisachan Estate at auction in London, dated July 1935.

Included in the sale were the mansion house (‘23 miles distant from Beauly station on the Highland Railway'), home farm, hotel, post office and shop, school and school house, sawmill, plus the village of Tomich with its 25 cottages (householders all named in the sale document) and sundry lodges and other dwellings in the neighbourhood – the tenants' homes in Tomich were to be bought and sold in Berkeley Square without a by-your-leave like agricultural implements in a farm roup.

Also thrown in are the deer forest, the grouse moor and the fishing rights, making a grand total of 7,242 acres. The canny lawyer who bought all this in 1935 promptly got rid of the deer forest and sold the rest of the land to the Forestry Commission, which set about blanketing it with spruce and larch and pine, usually of foreign origin.

The bare details in the schedule give an insight into life in the grand country house – 15 bedrooms for residents, 16 bedrooms for servants, five bathrooms, 10 lavatories and WCs, four drawing rooms and a boudoir. There were stables for 20 horses and a garage for three cars – horses still being the principal mode of transport. Housemaids' sinks and coal bunkers were provided on every floor – I picture some skivvy digging into the bunker at the crack of dawn, filling the scuttles and lugging them along the corridors to the guest rooms in a trail of coal dust.

16

Walter on the phone – hard-of-hearing Walter. There's a shriek in the background. ‘It's the parrot,' he says.

Did he say parrot? (My hearing's dodgy too.)

It
is
a parrot. Perched in its roomy cage, a bird with a hooked beak. Long John Silver comes to mind. Parrots are coloured like the rainbow, aren't they? But this one's drab. He makes a dart at the bars with fierce intent; he squalls and squawks with wordless fury.

Walter leads the way to his den where the bird is almost but not quite out of earshot. There's an occasional muffled volley from next door. Through the wide window are views of fields, woods and hill. The den is a mixture of ancient and modern, with a computer on the desk and other
electronic gadgetry but also an African mask and carvings on the shelves and a flintlock musket with bayonet fixed hanging on the wall. Perhaps Walter was an old colonial with an interest in antique weaponry. But it seems not: ‘They're just decoration'.

Walter is tall, heavily built, has bushy eyebrows, walks stiffly and eases himself into the swivel chair at the desk. He's a leader of the community with a gruff way of expressing forthright opinions – scorning, for example, all professional environmentalists and conservationists, which is what the talk turns to. All this twaddle about protecting birds of prey . . . Ask the locals, he says, the locals know best. Ask the stalkers and the gillies. But, because country folk don't write down their lifetime experiences, nobody listens to them and they're dismissed as having nothing to contribute to the debate.

Take pine martens, says Walter. (Pine martens are furry, bright-eyed, mean little killers, harried almost to extinction by gamekeepers but now legally protected and proliferating.) Walter's wife, bringing the tea tray, agrees. A pine marten took their neighbour's rabbits the other day and, before that, another neighbour lost all her chickens.

We talk of the woodlands, the Forestry Commission, and Trees for Life, an organisation with an outstation in Plodda woods whose members have been helping the commission to plant native trees. Trees for Life aims to combine an alternative philosophy (it's linked with the Findhorn Foundation) with practical work literally at ground level. Their director is Alan Featherstone. ‘I call him Alan Featherbrain,' says Walter.

‘You have to meet Stuart,' says Walter. ‘I'll take you.'

We drive up a steep tree-shaded lane just before Tomich, past a derelict car, some builder's junk, an untidy pile of plastic bags and a stack of planks and arrive in a storybook.

There's a lawn with a winding path, a murmuring stream and a water-wheel, a well and a host of daffodils in flower. At the focus of view stands a tiny cottage with latticed peephole windows and a low oval doorway. It's a hobbit house out of Tolkien.

An elfin woman perched on top of a ladder is busy at some work under the eaves. Below her Stuart, equally short in stature, appears at the threshold with an invitation to come in. ‘Mind your head,' he says – at five foot three he fits neatly within the door frame but anyone taller has to stoop. ‘Tina,' he says, introducing the woman on the ladder, and we exchange vertical greetings.

The tiny low-ceilinged living-room-cum-kitchen is a surprise. It's cosy, snug as a nest, gleaming with polished wood, copper and chinaware, and there's hardly a straight line anywhere. A settle curves round an eccentric table – a piece of solid dark furniture fluted like the base of a cathedral pillar or the stump of some great forest tree – which it was. Stuart carved it by hand from the base of a cut-down yew.

It looks a dead weight, a brute to move, but not so. Yew, says Stuart, is so dense that it sinks in water but he hollowed it out and honeycombed it with miniature concealed drawers so that it glides on castors at a fingertip touch.

There are other curiosities. The fire in the hearth serves a double purpose, heating both the living room and also, by a curious sleight of hand, the stove in the adjacent kitchen area, where two shining copper hotplates serve as a poor man's Aga. The keyhole TV concealed behind panel doors pivots within the width of the wall to provide late-night viewing in the adjoining bedroom. Everywhere are inventive devices, all practical and most of them conceived of and crafted by Stuart. Before-and-after photographs show the stages in his conversion of the former derelict cottage and byre into this nursery-rhyme dwelling.

Stuart is a woodman by heart and by trade. His life has been spent working with timber, from tree-felling to carpentry. He once operated a sawmill in Australia. But he wears a hair shirt – working with hardwoods like oak or elm, the species of timber a craftsman prefers, triggers an irritating allergy due, he suspects, to some chemical in the wood. Softwoods like spruce and fir don't affect him in the same way but softwoods he disdains.

A narrow turning stair leads to Tina's bright bedroom under the attic
roof. Halfway upstairs a door opens off the landing into the lavatory where the stately throne-like loo has been hollowed from the bole of another tree, a burr elm, beautifully figured. It's a joy to sit on. Perched there you may observe the garden through a small window (a loo with a view), meditate and listen to the birdsong. And from the adjoining shower cubicle you may step straight into the garden, robed if you wish, but, in any case, screened from view by the trees.

No one will pry. The cottage is sequestered, unseen, its very existence unsuspected from the road below.

One year later Stuart and I sit side by side on the settle with mugs of tea on the yew-tree table while Tina chops rhubarb in the galley kitchen. I feel like a character in a tale by Beatrix Potter – ‘The Tale of Nutshell Cottage'.

Stuart's inventive mind is crammed with theories – in this case, a long and baroque fantasy concerning Rosslyn Chapel and the Templars and a tantalising biblical code (but not
The Da Vinci Code
– it was before that phenomenon) which Stuart credits implicitly: gospel truth. He pulls a book from the hand-made shelf, a work written by a former journalist on the
Washington Post
. Influenced by the theories of a maverick mathematician, the writer argued that predictions about future events could be found embedded in the Old Testament and may be decoded from the text by computer analysis of word and letter patterns. By this means, it can be shown that the Kennedy assassination, Hiroshima, the Holocaust, 9/11 and many more disasters were all foretold in scripture.

I listen with hooded eyes. If only we had known.

What horrors lie ahead? – and can we change the script before it's too late?

I don't ask. Better to turn the conversation to safer topics, like his life story – his spell as a cane-cutter in Australia, his time as a national serviceman in Korea calculating the position of enemy gun emplacements from flashes in the night or his experiences on holidays in peacetime Vietnam, charmed by the kindness and friendliness of the people. He fishes out the tourist snaps – the places he and Tina saw, the people they met and, especially, their waif of a translator, whose name they struggled to pronounce until she asked them to call her Tweet. ‘Tweet's lovely,' he says.

And he talks about his inventions, like his proposed device for heating water by the sun. Serious physics is involved though the preparatory work has been practical and simple. With a nail, a stake and a length of string, he traced an outline of the sun's shifting shadow throughout the daylight hours, giving him the pattern for a parabolic mirror which, when polished and fixed in position, would concentrate the sun's rays on a water tank, thus causing the water to boil.

He's in full flight when there's a knock on the door. Chance visitors from Holland have arrived, a tall man and a gangly wife who saw Stuart's house on Dutch TV and have come here to see for themselves. They've come unannounced but Stuart breaks off to give them the guided tour, upstairs and down. They coo and ooh and aah at his cabinet of delights and leave happy at what they've seen.

‘I'm not clever,' says Stuart. ‘I just try harder. That's what Einstein said, by the way. But I'm not Einstein, I'm not much good at anything.' (This is not true.)

Will his sun heater work? Perhaps he should patent it? No. This will be his gift to mankind. And he adds, ‘I'm trying to die penniless. I live simply. I don't need much. I can live on my pension. I can go to Vietnam – it doesn't cost the earth.'

He says any spare cash he gets helps to pay for small things for the people he meets in Vietnam, who have little. So, as I leave, my coins chink in the mug by the door.