The Dun Cow Rib. John Lister-Kaye
two men in rapid succession. Nellie often told me that the expedition to Scotland for six weeks each year was the highlight of her father’s calendar. The entire household turned out to wave them off.
They were headed for Lennox Castle in the Campsie Fells, north of Glasgow, lying between the Kilsyth, Kilpatrick and Gargunnock hills, the Scottish lair of my grandfather’s greatest sporting ally, Captain Billy Kincaid-Lennox, Chief of Clan Lennox, whose purple grouse moors stretched into the heathery uplands to the north. It was an annual August migration; ‘the Glorious 12th’ an absolute fixture in my grandfather’s diary.
After the grouse, in September they moved further north to the far-flung borders of Sutherland for more grouse and for stalking red deer in the high hills, sports which, together with fly-fishing for Atlantic salmon leaping upstream to spawn, had defined the Scottish Highlands ever since Queen Victoria and Prince Albert established the famous triad of patrician sports – grouse, deer and salmon – at Balmoral in the 1850s, later immortalised by Sir Edwin Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen and by John Buchan as a ‘Macnab’, when you achieved all three in one day. When Captain Billy and my grandfather had stalked their stags, they turned south again just in time for the partridge and pheasant shooting season in England.
Heading down through Yorkshire, they always stopped off at our family’s ancestral seat, Denby Grange, where our cousin, Sir Kenelm, ran a celebrated shoot, before ending up at Captain Billy’s home pheasant shoot at Downton Castle in Shropshire. Flicking through the pages of both Sir Kenelm’s and my grandfather’s game books, I see that before and immediately after the Second World War, among the names of dukes, earls and other titled gents who attended shooting parties at Denby are Sir Aymer Maxwell and his brother, Mr Gavin Maxwell, of whom my grandfather observes in his looping copperplate hand, ‘shot extremely well’. Many years later, after becoming a celebrated travel writer and adding ‘global best-seller’ to his name, Gavin would tell me that the grey partridge shoots at Denby were a cherished feature of his upbringing.
When so many gamekeepers and estate workers, as well as their officer-class employers, went off to the world wars, these seasonal migrations temporarily halted, but the tradition was deep-rooted and by the time I was born immediately after the war it had begun to pick up again exactly where it had left off. I’m not sure how long my grandfather continued these annual shooting expeditions – he was seventy-three when I was born, and West died in 1943 and was never replaced – but throughout my formative years the enticing echo of those predatory days resounded through the corridors of the Manor House.
As I grew older and was swept up in the shooting culture myself – I was given my first gun at thirteen – so I was allowed to inspect the game books and to listen spellbound to my grandfather reminiscing with my father about those pre-war expeditions, about their extravagant bags of hundreds of grouse in a day, always, for some arcane reason, counted in ‘brace’. Talk of shooting until the gun barrels were too hot to hold; of blunt and characterful gamekeepers who ruled their estates with forthright opinions; of pointers, terriers and retrievers; of walking up ptarmigan in the highest hills or stalking roe deer in the woods; of crawling through mountain bogs with a tweed-clad stalker to close in on a stag. I was enthralled and longed for the opportunity to travel to Scotland myself, to partake of this grand, glowing Highland tradition.
At some point during those impressionable years I had found in the library at the Manor House a fine green cloth-bound volume with a gold thistle embossed on the cover, entitled Wild Sports and Natural History of the Highlands (1848) by Charles St John, the younger son of Viscount Bolingbroke. Beside it, also in handsome green cloth bindings in two volumes, embossed with ‘Ye Hunter’s Badge’ of the heads of a red deer stag, a sea eagle, a salmon and a seal, all enclosed within a heraldic shield, was John Colquhoun’s The Moor and the Loch (1880). Both were best-sellers of their day; the acknowledged sporting handbooks of the period, which graced the library shelves of every sporting lodge and country house in Britain.
Inspired by my grandfather’s tales of the Highlands, I took the books down and studied them wide-eyed with awe. Eventually I would inherit them. Recently I looked them out again, blew the dust from their tops and plunged back into their rough-edged pages. I not only wanted to refresh my memory, but was also on a journey to revisit the old buzz I had gleaned from them so long ago. I wanted to try to figure out just how they would have influenced my formative awareness of the bizarre contradictions and conflicts that then existed – and for many still do – between ‘sport’, natural history and nature conservation.
It was in those celebrated tomes that I first encountered the Scottish wildcat. Both books contained a chapter dedicated to the species, accompanied by crudely effective pen-and-ink illustrations of what the artist imagined a wildcat should look like. The results certainly look wild, but that is where the resemblance ends – not so surprising since both authors freely admit that the wildcat is very rare, so it is most unlikely that their illustrators had ever seen one. But John Colquhoun and Charles St John certainly had. They both claim proudly to have hunted down and killed many wildcats. More than this, St John openly advocated the extirpation of wildcats as heinous vermin.
I remember heaving down the weighty two-volume Webster’s dictionary to discover the meaning of extirpate. As a ten-year-old I was shocked. ‘To root out, to destroy totally, to EXTERMINATE.’ Why, I struggled to comprehend, would anyone seek to wipe out such an exquisitely beautiful wild animal? I read on.
St John insists: ‘the damage they would do to the game must be very great’. He then recounts the demise of one wildcat he happened upon while fishing in Sutherland. Armed with a stout stick he pursued her with his terriers
until she took refuge in a corner of the rocks . . . As soon as I was within six or seven feet of the place she sprang straight at my face . . . Had I not struck her in mid air as she leapt at me, I should probably have got some severe wound . . . she fell with her back half broken among the dogs, who, with my assistance dispatched her.
Then in slightly more conciliatory tone he adds, ‘I never saw an animal fight so desperately, or one which was so difficult to kill.’
Colquhoun, writing thirty-five years later than St John, opens his short treatise on the wildcat by firmly stating, ‘The wild-cat [sic] is now rare in this country.’ He goes on to say, ‘Although I have spent a great part of my life in the most mountainous districts of Scotland, where killing vermin is . . . my own recreation, I have never seen more than five or six genuine wild-cats.’ He then describes them with creative hyperbole thus: ‘the hair long and rough, the head exceedingly broad, ears short, tusks extremely large’ and ‘the great length and power of the limbs’. He builds a picture of a truly fearsome beast. ‘Lambs, grouse, hares, are all seized with equal avidity . . . The female fears nothing when in defense of her young, and will attack even man himself.’
Much of this is sensationalist baloney, which begs the question whether Colquhoun was exaggerating to excite his readers, or even whether his claim to have seen and killed wildcats was actually true. That question might also be fairly addressed of Gavin Maxwell in the early chapters of Ring of Bright Water:
Wildcats grow to an enormous size, at least double that of the very largest domestic cat . . . Once I caught one accidentally in a rabbit snare, a vast tom with ten rings to his tail, and that first year at Camusfeàrna I twice saw the kittens at play in the dawn . . . there was no hint of the ferocity that takes a heavy toll of lambs and red-deer calves.
Although laced with his enchanting lyricism, much of the rest of Maxwell’s anecdotal record rings largely implausible:
The males sometimes mate with domestic females [entirely true and now a very real problem for the species] but the offspring rarely survives [certainly not true] either because the sire returns to kill the kittens as soon as they are born [highly unlikely] and so expunge the evidence of this peasant wenching, or because of the distrust in which so many humans hold the taint of the untamable [appealing, but sadly also untrue]. It is the wild strain that is dominant, in the lynx-like appearance, the extra claw, and the feral instinct; and the few half-breeds that escape destruction usually take to the hills and the den life of their male ancestors.
Yes,