At the Water's Edge. John Lister-Kaye
of drab urbanisation, we have come to accept as the countryside norm. A downward somersault of the heart pursues me across a farmscape of mechanically levelled spaces cleared by growth economics, and now shared mostly by rooks and pigeons – the man-manipulated relics of a far more diverse and abundant wildlife that frequented these lands long ago. Buzzards and hooded crows wheel over pheasants squashed at the roadside. Here I feel out of place and burdened, despondent for country lives locked into the orthodoxy of political systems and tractor cabs, suppressed by dull routine and duller necessity.
But once I cross the old, three-arched, sandstone bridge over the Beauly River the glen road lifts and weaves and narrows, expelling my gloom. After a few miles the birchwoods and the river take over; houses vanish, squeezed out by steepening valley sides and pressing trees. Arable farms dwindle away and become honest crofts, the once subsistence smallholdings of a native people who have lived out the turbulent choreodrama of this land for a thousand years, the reading of whose history is almost as cathartic an experience as the task of breaking and cultivating their tiny upland fields. That word ‘glen’ – that particular defining quality of Highland-ness – has somehow sneaked in and taken the landscape over, an unmistakable and palpable quality of separateness and latent wildness that awards it its special place in the consciousness of all Highland people.
What I love about glen land is its very rough-and-unreadiness, its sense of nature unbowed, its patrician intransigence, still struggling, damned if it’s going to be reined in, and offering nothing to humans but back-breaking toil. Yet for all this, my mood soars with the wheeling buzzards to the steep valley slopes and the hills beyond. Those who have always lived here, the glen’s dwindling residuum of native Highlanders, seem to reflect the land’s resistance; they are also patrician and unflinching, clinging to these unrelenting metamorphic rocks with a poetic tribalism celebrated across the globe.
Above the flood plain and the steep valley sides the soils are acidic, dark and wet, the best they can manage from the rocks and the glacial till, the ubiquitous boulder clay that was clumsily smeared across the moors by the departing ice. With a nonchalant nod of the head towards the skyline, this land is euphemistically known by its crofting incumbents as the ‘high ground’, by which is meant poor-quality seasonal grazing of heather, coarse grasses and peat bog. Only the river flats have alluvium, and their productivity is persistently threatened by flash floods from melting snow in the mountains.
Everything up here in the hills is clean and resonant, like fine glass – the rocks, the air, the snow and the stinging rain. In sunlight the glen glistens and sparkles with the mica and quartz of its metamorphic schists and from its omnipresent water tumbling from the hills. The crash of falling water is never far away. It’s as though in a last stand for independence nature is fighting off the lie and the whirlwind of romantic deception; you feel that it’s had enough, clenched its teeth and refused to cooperate any longer with the advance of man’s ambitions.
Such uncompromising country has always given sanctuary to wildlife, although man has long plotted against it. The wolf, the bear, the lynx, the wild boar and the beaver were all vanquished long ago, and their habitats of woods, wetlands and forests systematically removed with them, but, encouraged for sport, the red deer have thrived. Their furtive presence speaks plainly from the hatch-work of paths criss-crossing from moorland brown to valley green. Such relative rarities as the red squirrel, the pine marten and the wildcat still cling on, although all three have struggled to make it through the twentieth century and still face many threats. Yet roe deer, foxes, badgers and otters are commonplace and in the high hills golden eagles thrive on the inevitable harsh-winter fatalities from the surfeit of sheep and deer that have dominated this land for so long. Thankfully the woods are never empty of birds.
To the north there are no roads, save one track for extracting commercial lumber. In this direction the bowl’s curving side is curtained by spruce and pine; a managed plantation forest where the only relief is occasional rocky escarpments breaking through halberds of military green. And to the west, lifting above ever rougher and wetter pasture, the crimped valley light explodes across a smothering of blanket peat where a sea of heather and bog is lost in the milky haze of higher hills and clouds.
This landscape is unexceptional for this part of the Highlands. Our glen could have many names. How I came to live here is a tale already told in Song of the Rolling Earth, but these hills and fields and the wooded slopes I walk almost every day, the river and the burn and the wild creatures they harbour have been such a central part of my life for so long that writing about them is irresistible, a force majeure that has elevated the keeping of a journal – a personal record of the land and its wildlife in my time – from the status of a chore into a joy.
The loch is only eight acres in size. Its water is dark with peat. It is roughly heart-shaped, with one or two bays and sedgy marshes; an earth dam sixty yards long flattens the point of the heart. The burn from a smaller natural lochan flowing out across a rock sill was dammed in the late nineteenth century as a water supply, more than doubling the size and depth of the loch. Tucked neatly into its own hollow, the loch is its own secret, hiding from the visible world. It nestles there on the edge of human intervention: above it the wind sings across uninhabited moorland, wild woods of downy birch, eared willow and Scots pine, rowan and aspen, goat willow and wych elm, juniper, gorse and broom crowd in to its banks, and below the dam the manipulated quilting of forest and field is where people have always lived. Over the years I have created a circular trail around the loch. In places the water laps at the path’s edge, which then veers off into the woods, winding over bogs and heathery knolls, only to be lured in again at a little bay or a marsh as though the walker has been drawn back, unhappy to be out of sight of the water for long. In summer water lilies burst from a surface of green plates; in winter my loch brims with pure sky.
On the loch’s northern shore stands a timber fishing hut I built many years ago, called the ‘Illicit Still’, and where I sometimes sit to write. ‘The day was squinting bright and ear-tinglingly cold’, I would later enter in my journal.
February 16th In the afternoon I took off up the hill to the loch. I needed to stretch my legs and I wanted to check the snow for tracks. Straightaway I found the trail of a fox that had used my path while sauntering through. The single-file line of his unhurried paws wove a border of Celtic symbolism up the middle of the track that you could read like a text. That pleased me. I like the thought that the route I take is acceptable to the deer and the badgers, the foxes and pine martens around my home. Whether I meet them or not, I draw satisfaction from their presence. I followed this fox straight to the loch. He had meandered along, pausing here and there; he had left the path to check out something in the bushes and returned again a little further on. I could see where he had stood as still as a gravestone, ears cocked, the heat of his pads burning deeper into the snow, listening to mouse or vole rustlings in the undergrowth, assessing, biding his time for the pounce, then abandoning it and padding on up the path.
The loch was frozen and that was where our paths parted. He carried on across the ice; I wasn’t prepared to risk it. So I turned aside and went to the fishing hut. It has an old chair and a bunk and a stove, nothing special, just enough for backwoods comfort, somewhere I often come to think and write. I lit the stove and sank into the armchair beside it and kicked off my boots. I sat looking out at the white world outside and the frozen loch, waiting for the warmth to percolate through to my toes. Slowly I realised I wasn’t alone.
A woodmouse, Apodemus, was eyeing me up from the woodpile stacked on the far side of the stove. ‘Hullo,’ I said quietly. I have always loved woodmice. They have style, real élan, and are as golden as hamsters, with huge, shining eyes and ears and a long, flowing tail that wafts behind them like a thread in the wind, never touching the ground. (They used to be called long-tailed fieldmice). They outclass the house mouse in every way. This particular mouse was not in conversational mood, and he disappeared back into the woodpile. But he wasn’t alone. As I sat quietly for the next hour I heard constant rustlings inside the old sofa beside my chair, more in the roof. There were many more than three bad mice. It was a winter