The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (22 page)

The brown sails of the cattle boats
have gone from The Minch. On slipways and jetties from Skye to Kintyre, thrift grows undisturbed in the crannies of stones once smooth and polished with the tread of hooves. Lonely saltings where the Uist droves once grazed, and throughout the Highlands in hill pass and moorland, as in the minds of men, the passing years increasingly dim and obscure the mark and the memory of the men and beasts that once travelled the drove roads of Scotland.

The Cairngorms are a landscape on which both history and snow – perhaps the two substances my grandfather loved most – lay thickly. Climatically speaking, the Cairngorms are Britain’s Arctic. In winter, storm winds of up to 170 miles per hour rasp the upper shires of the range, and avalanches scour its lee slopes. My grandparents saw the tremble of the aurora borealis from the north windows of their house: billowing curtains of green or, more rarely, red light. In places on the summit plateaux of the massif, the wind blows so hard and insistently that vegetation exists in bonsai form: pine trees grow to just a few inches high; there are dwarf willows; and a miniature creeping azalea called
Loiseleuria procumbens
– which became one of my grandfather’s favourite alpine plants – forms mats barely an inch high among the pebbles, keeping its head down, staying prostrate (
procumbens
). The massif is a terrain shaped by what Nan Shepherd once called ‘
the elementals’.
Mountain landscapes appear chaotic in their jumbledness, but they are in fact ultra-logical landscapes, organized by the climatic extremes and severe expressions of gravity: so hyper-ordered as to seem chance-made.

Anna ‘Nan’ Shepherd was born in Aberdeen in 1893 and died there in 1981, and during her long life she, like my grandparents, spent hundreds of days and covered thousands of miles exploring the Cairngorms on foot. Her reputation as a writer rests on the three modernist novels she published between 1928 and 1933 (
The Quarry Wood
,
The Weatherhouse
,
A Pass in the Grampians
), but to my mind her most important work is her least known – an eighty-page prose meditation on the Cairngorms, and more generally on our relationship with landscape – called
The Living Mountain
, written in the 1940s but not published until 1977. It is a difficult work to characterize. A celebratory prose-poem? A geo-poetic quest? A philosophical enquiry into the nature of knowledge? None of these quite fits, though it is all of them in part. Shepherd herself called it ‘
a traffic of love’
between herself and the mountains – with ‘traffic’ implying ‘exchange’ and ‘mutuality’ rather than ‘congestion’ or ‘blockage’.

The book’s prose is both exhilaratingly materialist – thrilled by the alterity of the Cairngorm granite, by a mountain-world which ‘
does nothing,
absolutely nothing, but be itself’ – and almost animist in its account of how mind and mountain interact. What Shepherd understood – like Edward Thomas, and like so many of the other people in this book – was that landscape has long offered us keen ways of figuring ourselves to ourselves, strong means of shaping memories and giving form to thought. Like Thomas, she thought topographically, and like Thomas she understood herself to be in some way thought
by
place. On the mountain, she wrote, moments occur at which ‘
something moves
between me and it. Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered. I cannot tell what this movement is except by recounting it.’

Better than anyone else I have read, Shepherd ‘recounted’ the power of the Highland landscape to draw people into intimacy with it, and showed how particular places might make possible particular thoughts. Slowly and effortfully, my grandparents acquired an intimacy with the Cairngorms. Torrans and its fields became a compact between the wildness of the uplands and the civilization of the valleys. Striking accommodations and compromises were often arrived at with the terrain. Where she encountered erratics so heavy they couldn’t be shifted, my grandmother built rock gardens around them and grew alpine succulents between them. They had an acre of land behind the house that ran up to the treeline of the forestry, and seventeen acres of rough marshy pasture. On one side the pasture sloped down to a stream gorge with three waterfalls, by the sides of which grew
geans
. On the other it fell to the banks of the River Avon itself, whose waters in spring spated with snow-melt from the Cairngorms, and in whose summer pools the salmon, following their migration routes up to the source, would hang and flicker. When the water was warm enough, which was almost never, my brother and I would float downstream, goggled and snorkelled, our heads under the water, looking for the shadows of the fish. On the shoulder of moor that faced Torrans from the south, gorse showed yellow and
ling
showed purple, and curlew would sometimes settle there in number, setting high curved cries adrift across the valley.

The house and the pasture stood on an unusual upsurge of Scottish limestone, which sits above the hard-wearing mica-schists of the Avon valley and beneath the great granite batholith of the Cairngorms themselves. The calcium in the soil made it fairly good grazing land, and so sheep and cattle were brought onto the pasture in summer. My grandparents also planted their land up with trees, both those native to Scotland, and exotics which stood in memory of the countries where they had lived. They planted willows, cherries, alders and birches in number, as well as special singletons: a
Nothofagus antarctica
, a
Metasequoia glyptostroboides
(the coelacanth of trees, thought long extinct, then discovered alive in China in 1950), a Western Hemlock, a Korean Fir, a Noble Fir, and a red-barked Tibetan
Prunus
. Gradually, they named their land into being: ‘The Torrans Burn’, ‘The Crocodile’, ‘Alison’s Folly’, ‘The Avon Express’. Small acts of verbal landscaping, a temporary habitation. It was, though, always a struggle to manage the incursions of the wild: the snow that drifted to ten feet against the sides of the house in deep winter, the deer and rabbits that ate the seedlings, the family of pine martens that one year nested in the roof and liked to play in my grandmother’s underwear drawer.

Somewhere on the moorland of the first watershed, we crossed over from the schists onto the Cairngorm granite proper: a medley of quartz, feldspar and tiny sheets of dark glinting mica, which weathers over time to a grey brown but which, when cracked open or scarred, reveals a rock the pinkish colour of flesh. It was on the granite that we entered the Lairig Ghru.

The Lairig Ghru is the great glacier-gouged valley that divides the Cairngorm massif from north to south, and whose highest point – at over 2,600 feet – is higher than the summits of most British mountains. It is also among the most affecting places I know. Entering the Ghru from north or south, I have always had the feeling of crossing a portal or border. People have died in the Lairig Ghru, and more have died on the summits to either side of it. One of Shepherd’s own students perished in a blizzard, ‘
far out of her path’,
her body found months after her death – once the drifts had thawed – with abrasions to her knees and hands where she had crawled over rough granite boulders, battered to the ground by exhaustion, snow and wind.

Through the droving centuries, the Lairig Ghru was the main route across the massif, taking cattle down through Glen Lui and then on south to Braemar. Sheep coming from Skye would occasionally be driven across the pass, and its last recorded use as a drove route was in 1873. It posed problems to the drovers, however, in terms of distance, severity of weather and ground underfoot. Each winter brought fresh stone-fall from the surrounding crags, and the upper reaches of the pass became strewn with leg-breaking boulders, ill-suited to the hooves and long legs of cattle. So late each spring, men were sent up to the high pass to shift the boulders and open the path.

David and I entered the Lairig Ghru from the south, moving up and over the pink flat steps of granite down which the young River Dee split and tripped. We passed between the gatekeeper peaks of the valley: Devil’s Point to the west, with its diagonal flashings of
scree
, and the black flank of Carn a’ Mhaim to the east, down which a thin line of white water was crashing, thousands of feet above us. Both peaks loomed, close and intimidating, and I felt the signal prickle of entering a wild space.

Then we were over the border, and into the pass proper. On the valley floor flourished a fragrant and complex ground cover: bog myrtle, bog asphodel, juniper with its ginny scent, the creeping azalea, dwarf pine trees, saxifrages, bilberry and ling. I began to gather bunches of Cairngorm flora; one to place on my grandfather’s coffin, and one to burn on the summit pass. Where the river swung close to the path, we stopped and bathed our feet in its pools. The midges still smoked the air, still maddened us.

So it was up and on for another four or five miles, towards the high point of the Ghru, the pass itself. David walked ahead and, left alone, I was struck suddenly by a hammer blow of sadness. Looking west, I saw the snows of Braeriarch. In the shaded north-east-facing corries and crags of that great mountain, old snow often lies all year round, sintering slowly into ice, sitting in cold stagnancy, the snow breeding its own little ice age. It’s a reminder that winter never really leaves the Cairngorms, or rather that this is the point from which the cold musters itself again each year, and out of which it pours. A reminder, too, that the summit of the Lairig Ghru was, 12,000 years ago, not a watershed but an ice-shed: the point from which glaciers crept seawards to north and south, scouring out the shape of the Highland landscape we now know, scavenging into the granite.

Granite was my grandfather’s best-loved rock. He shared his liking of granite with one of his heroes, Goethe, to whose writing he had been introduced when studying at Oxford in the mid-1930s under Walter Ettinghausen, who later went on to found the Israeli Foreign Service. As a young man, Goethe wrote an essay entitled ‘Über der Granit’: an essay on (
über
, ‘concerning’) the subject of granite, but also an essay about literally being on (
über
, ‘over’) granite. Granite – that igneous rock of upsurges and plugs – satisfied Goethe for its connection to the earth’s hot core. Shepherd valued granite for similar reasons. One October night she slept out on the granite of the plateau in air that was as ‘
bland as silk’,
and while half asleep felt herself become stone-like, ‘
rooted … in … immobility
’. On a hot summer day she lay down and sensed under her ‘
the central core of fire
from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and snow – the total mountain’.

Over the course of his eighties, my grandfather got less and less often to the granite, felt less often the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun. He gave up the summits for the passes, then the passes for the valleys, and at last the valleys for the limestone land around the house. His mobility decreased, and his eyesight lessened. He could only walk in memory the routes in the Cairngorms that he knew so well underfoot. Balustrades were fixed on the path down to the gorge to prevent slips and falls. Stiles became difficult to negotiate. Even in his nineties, however, he was occasionally to be found on his old cross-country skis – long heavy wooden skis, made in Austria in the 1930s – sliding up and down the driveway. As his legs weakened and his sight failed, his desire for the hills – for the bend in the path, for the hill after this one – remained undiminished. Unable to reach the mountains himself, he began to live through stories told to him by his children and grandchildren, nourished on accounts of walks taken by others, or by the recollections of his own climbs and treks. Even in the furthest depths of his age, when he was increasingly mentally confused, brief periods of intense clarity would occur, lucid river-pools in the mind, and he would offer topographically accurate accounts of turns in certain Himalayan valleys, or the summits which were viewable from a particular Scottish peak.

We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places – retreated to most often when we are most remote from them – are among the most important landscapes we possess. Adam Nicolson has written of the ‘
powerful absence[s]’
that remembered landscapes exert upon us, but they exist as powerful presences too, with which we maintain deep and abiding attachments. These, perhaps, are the landscapes in which we live the longest, warped though they are by time and abraded though they are by distance. The consolation of recollected places finds its expression frequently in the accounts of those – exiles, prisoners, the ill, the elderly – who can no longer physically reach the places that sustain them. When Edward Thomas travelled to fight on the Western Front, the memories of his ‘South Country’ were among the things he carried. ‘
When standing at the entrance
of his dugout,’ wrote his widow, Helen, after his death:

he looked north and saw, or dreamed he saw, Sussex, with her gentle downs scattered with sheeplike grey boulders, and thorn trees bent and wracked by the wind, and the sheltering folds where the wind never came; and Kent, the Weald of Kent, whose clay oaks and hops and apples love, whose copses the nightingale seeks; Hampshire, with her hangers of beech and yew, merry tree, and white beam, and the cottage at the foot of the hill.