Season in Strathglass (7 page)

22

The Cannich river curves away from the road in a wide bend round a broad flat of heather and coarse grass. I call this spot the River Bend, with capitals. Here, the stream is broken by shallow cataracts and stony islets, each of them crowned by one or more hardy little trees. On the far side are tall pinewoods and a backdrop of dipping blue hills – Creag a Chorre Duibh, the Rock of the Black Corrie.

On a day when the river is in spate after heavy rain, I can hear it before I see it. Even in the car, the sound of turbulent waters is audible over the engine noise.

A stony tractor track leads towards the river and midway along, blocking the track, stands a parked caravan and car. A man at the open door of the caravan observes the rain glumly but, as I approach splashing through the puddles and prepared with a pleasantry, he retreats inside and slams the door behind him. Maybe he thinks I'm someone in authority who'll ask him to move on.

Above the broad river, I look down at the flood thrashing over rocky shelves and jutting boulders, splitting into many channels, surging in walls of solid water, tearing at islets in the stream, each surmounted with clusters of little trees. Whole hillsides brimming with water have fed this angry torrent. Just watching the maelstrom from my safe vantage point gives me a sudden frisson, something between fear and fascination.

A month later in London, standing in front of a painting by the Victorian artist John Everett Millais at an exhibition in Tate Britain, I experience a sense of déjà vu. The scene is in the Highlands and Millais called it
The Sound of Many Waters
. The artist set up his easel almost at river level looking upstream. Rocky islets part the floodwaters. Small trees sprout from the rocks. It might be the very scene at the River Bend. Only the woodland on the riverbanks – leaf trees in autumn colours in place of the dark pines – is the give-away. Millais took up his brush elsewhere. The nearest he's likely to have been to this glen was Loch Ness, where he painted ruined Urquhart Castle in a rainstorm. In fact, no artist of distinction seems to have found inspiration in Strathglass, which is surprising. And no poets either, now that I think of it. No Lakers here. I wonder why.

The sound of many waters echoes everywhere in this strath and these three glens. Trees, water and stone, the great trinity, the body and soul of Affric and Strathglass. Waters come in many forms: wide sheets of mirror glass reflecting sky and hill in calm weather or whipped into spindrift in a gale; little eyelet lochans bleared with underwater vegetation; freshets gurgling through the undergrowth unseen but loudly heard; mere squelches seeping through the moss; mad burns dashing over shelves of rock and eddying darkly at the base of falls. And always sensed beneath the green mantle or visible in naked extrusion, the presence of bedrock, age-old and everlasting foundation of all.

23

February. At the River Bend.

The water is still and untroubled now. There's a hush in the air. Thin bands of mist cling to the hillsides but the tops are clear in sunlight. There's snow on the higher hills and the far mountains are pure white. Upstream, where the river emerges from Loch Carrie, breaking ice sparkles in pale sunshine.

Catherine and I walk along the curve of the riverbank, following a faint grassy trail through stone-littered and rather boggy ground, with a multitude of small plant life at our feet – all kinds of delicate mossy fronds, lichens and fluted fungi among carpets of brown alder leaves. A pad of fungus raises little scarlet-tipped bell mouths to the air. A small stone the size of a melon is a botanic garden in miniature, capped with a profusion of little species – what botanists call the ‘lower plants'. If Joe were here he'd name them all.

There's a brief intrusion. A yellow bin lorry comes speeding along where the road makes a cord with the river bend. So Monday must be bin day in the glen. Green wheelies wait at the farm lane ends. It'll take half the morning to collect the rubbish from the few households here – a country outing for the binmen and all in the day's work. How lucky for them.

24

Past Tomich a rough track in a field leads to a little gabled house with green scrollwork eaves, the oldest house in the district. Kyle, who manages the fishing on the Hill Lochs, lives there. If he's out on the loch today he'll get wet. The windscreen wipers are swishing.

Today I explore, being in search of a place out west called Cougie, which has passed into legend. The way some people talk you'd think it was the end of the world.

George at Upper Glassburn has directed me to take a ‘scenic' route, which means tackling a steep muddy track through Plodda woods – Land Rover terrain, gouged and bouldered, which George no doubt takes at a lick on his postie run. George has many irons in the fire including delivering the post part-time and, for two days in the week, he drives a wee red van along the strath and up and down two glens with élan. But for me it's an obstacle course.

I emerge at last on the forestry road that leads to Cougie where the road surface is better but not much.

Sprays of muddy liquid squish from the wheels as I dodge the potholes. Some miles on, at a bend in the river at the forest edge, I reach an odd jumble of buildings – a low timber chalet, a cottage and a shed or two. I'm not impressed. This dreich weather does the place no favours – until I meet Val whose cheery greeting brightens the day.

Val is the chatelaine at Cougie, a large lady with frisking hair who talks with a hint of Welsh in her accent. She invites me to sit with her on the veranda with the rain dripping on the plastic canopy over our heads. Hens pick about in the ground in front of us – these unconcerned birds are survivors. ‘A pine marten got six of them the other night,' she says.

Birds flit by. ‘Goldcrests,' she says. ‘We get a lot of bullfinches some years. Some years they strip the cherry tree and there's no blossom next spring.'

Val runs part of the long chalet as a hostel for walkers. Trekkers walking between the west coast and Affric often arrive on her doorstep. A name board on a door with the letters scored into the wood means nothing to me. Gaelic? In fact it's Arabic, inscribed there when her daughter lived with a Moroccan partner. The inscription seems less exotic and romantic when you know that it translates as wooden hut.

Returning, I take the back road from Cannich to Struy alongside the River Glass. Fishermen stand like statues thigh-high in its dark waters. A herd of Sheena's cattle, black and red, are grazing on its low-lying meadows.

Sheena is the daughter of Iain Thomson, a man of many talents who has turned his hand to writing. He's been a cattle farmer and, before that, he was a shepherd at Strathmore at the head of Loch Monar in the far reaches of Glen Strathfarrar. He wrote a fine book about his experiences there and, since then, has published others. I pass the old caravan parked by farm buildings where he writes. It's a tubby little vehicle, elderly, a bit the worse for wear and looks as if it could accommodate two at a squeeze. He's writing a novel now.

Near Struy, I stop at a two-storey timber house where, leaning on the five-bar gate at the top of the drive, I chat with Tim. Tim's an ecologist and woodland consultant. I first met him when he was warden at Beinn Eighe Nature Reserve in the north-west Highlands. He says he loved the job but got fed up with the increasing bureaucracy. He was lucky to find this place – he bought 13 acres across the river from Struy, built the house and now he has his own young cattle to fulfil a long-held ambition. Somewhat incongruously for a man of green credentials, he's a sports car enthusiast. When he was young, he and his brother used to race souped-up Austin 7s. He's moved on since then. Parked at the side of the house are a 4x4, a mud-spattered Jag and a vintage Porsche under wraps.

25

George's home at Upper Glassburn is a rambling two-storey house with gabled windows in the roof and a porch framed by rustic columns made from pine trunks. The house stands high above a sharp bend in the road between Cannich and Struy overshadowed by trees. Turning into the lane calls for caution since traffic (what there is of it) tends take the corner at speed. There's a bed-and-breakfast sign attached to a tree at the lane end.

At the top of the stairs in this house hangs a small painting, naive in style, of a green-hulled fishing boat (I called it a smack – which George took as a slight) buffeting through white-crested waves. ‘The
Janet
,' says George, ‘my first boat.' George skippered her as a young man fishing off the west coast.

When he came ashore for good, he thought there was money to be made cutting peat – no shortage of peat in the Highlands – and imported a peat harvester from Finland. Unfortunately the enterprise failed. But George is not easily defeated and, when a friend stopped him in the street and asked if he could drive a lorry, he jumped at the chance. Next morning at the crack of dawn, he was at the wheel of a clapped-out truck blasting out exhaust fumes, clanking up the Oban brae with a load of granite kerbstones bound for the outer isles. The business prospered. George declined the offer of a partnership in favour of a percentage of the turnover, a deal which gave him the funds to buy the Cnoc Hotel at Struy plus the inn across the road, where he made a genial host and his wife Ishbel cooked good, plain meals for the guests.

The hotel, a row of converted cottages on a grassy bank just out of Struy, has a cheery look when the lights are lit and the inn has come up in the world since its days as a country howff with an earthen floor. The joke was that, in winter, you had to drink up fast before the beer froze in the glass.

George also sings. There's a pile of CDs for sale on the sideboard at Upper Glassburn featuring him and his son John in an hour's worth of folk song – ‘Ca' the Yowes' and ‘Scots Wha' Hae' and such – which they recorded at the old ferryman's cottage down the strath at Aigas.

George has sung his songs to guests at Aigas, the baronial tower house on the road to Beauly where the naturalist Sir John Lister-Kaye lives and from where he runs an upmarket field centre. Courses there include heritage tours, which I guess have a special appeal to American visitors. I can imagine George on a festive night charming the Americans with song and story – bearded as he is, dressed for the occasion in the kilt, the very image of a minstrel Scot.

26

This morning, there's honey for breakfast at Upper Glassburn, special honey, delicious, the colour of old bronze and crusty at the rim of the jar. ‘There's a story about that,' says George. For sure, there's always a story with George. He knows everyone and their stories too.

For example, the formidable lady from America, ‘slightly hippy but not short of cash', who bought the old stables near Guisachan House where she planned to live the green life. The first frosts of winter put paid to that dream and she promptly returned to the States though she continued to visit every summer. She'd shipped in a consignment of essential provisions in bulk (George says by the ton), including a load of
Mexican honey. George helped her out now and again doing odd jobs like mowing the lawn. When she finally sold the stables, she asked if he'd like a sum of money. ‘
A sum of money
?' George was taken aback but rallied, made a joke of it and named a tentative figure.

It has to be said here that George's hearing isn't perfect.

‘A
tub
of
honey
,' she repeated crisply.

George left with a barrel of honey in the back of his truck and guests at Upper Glassburn sample it yet. He says there's two or three hundredweight still in his garage. It must be 40 years old by now and still maturing and no doubt all the better for that.

Personalities spring to life in George's conversation – Janet the Wheel in Tomich whose simple paintings were ‘discovered' by an American academic who hailed her as a primitive of genius. Alas, her fame didn't last. Why the Wheel? Even George who knows everything doesn't know that, only that she came from a long line of Wheels.

And there were the genteel females, not young, who booked into Upper Glassburn while attending an alternative lifestyle retreat nearby called the Centre of Light. ‘I called them Linda's Lassies,' says George. ‘They tended to be women of a certain age. I suppose they spent their time chanting and banging drums and communing with the spiritual.' One guest would eat nothing cooked – to Ishbel's dismay, all her meals were ‘raw fruitarian' (not my phrase – I read it in a newspaper). Heaped bean sprouts were a staple. But then Linda moved her Centre of Light elsewhere with accommodation provided and now bean sprouts are off the menu at Upper Glassburn.

In the long evenings at George and Ishbel's, George, whisky in hand, can be persuaded to reminisce. From his time at the Cnoc Hotel, there's his tale of the English barrister, very pukka, clipped of speech, stiff-backed as befits a former officer in the Guards. But it was the wife who wore the trousers. She managed everything, even laying out his clothes in the morning, though not always to his satisfaction. ‘George,' he said at breakfast parade, as he called it (always at eight hundred hours precisely), ‘George,' he said, ‘I found 16 points of error in my kit today.' Then, sotto voce: ‘Say nothing – wife watching.'

One night when all the guests had retired to bed, perhaps after a nightcap or two, strange sounds were heard overhead. Thump, thump, thump, then silence. Thump, thump, thump again. And so on. George and Ishbel were somewhat alarmed. George decided to investigate and as he reached the top of the stairs he was confronted by the barrister marching down the corridor, stark naked. He snapped smartly to attention, looked George straight in the eye and without a word strode on. At this point, a bedroom door opened and a woman's arm reached out, grabbed the naked barrister by the neck and pulled him inside.

Next morning, he appeared immaculately turned out as usual, not at the stipulated eight hundred hours but five minutes early. ‘Appalling behaviour, George,' he said stiffly. ‘Are you going to throw me out?' George assured him he wouldn't but was unable to confirm that no one else had seen the episode. All through breakfast, as the guests entered and were hailed by George – ‘And did you sleep well?' – the barrister suffered agonies of embarrassment while his wife sat stony-faced.

Once, Tom Sharpe, the satirical novelist (
Porterhouse Blue
and the Wilt novels), and his wife called at Upper Strathglass for afternoon tea and decided to stay the night. At dinner, George observed him moving from table to table between courses, seating himself with different guests in turn. George was puzzled and quizzed him about it later.

Research, answered Sharpe. Talking to strangers gave him ideas for his books – a story here, a catchphrase there, an anecdote, a line of dialogue, a quirky detail, a character study. Thus Mrs Sharpe had learned to eat alone.

George, I imagine, didn't mention the naked barrister.