Ring of Bright Water. Gavin Maxwell
while as yet a quarter of a mile distant; a succession of mighty, hollow groans, interspersed with a sound as of one striking wooden boarding with a heavy mallet, conjured an image worse, if possible, than the bizarre reality. Halfway up the wooden stairway, where it turns at right angles to reach the small landing, an enormous, black, and strikingly pregnant cow was wedged fast between the two walls, unable to progress forward and fearful of the gradient in reverse. Her rear aspect, whose copious activity – whether under the stress of anxiety or from an intelligent desire to reduce her dimensions – covered the stairs below her with a positively Augean litter of dung, blocked both view and passage to any would-be rescuer; moreover she proved, despite her precarious foothold and elephantine fecundity, to be capable of kicking with a veritably faun-like flourish. It was, however, one of these moments of petulant aggression that brought, literally, her downfall; an attempt with both heels simultaneously collapsed her with a ponderous and pathetic rumble, and she lay on her great gravid belly with her legs trailing, mire-covered, down the stairs. When at the end of nearly an hour’s haulage I had restored her to the outside world I feared for her calf, but I need not have worried. Not long afterwards I assisted at her delivery, not with forceps but with ropes attached to protruding hooves; the calf fell with a terrifying crash to a stone floor, and half an hour later was on his feet and suckling.
With the goats cut short, as I have said, in their connubial prime, Camusfeàrna has ever since been dependent upon tinned milk. General supplies reach me by the same three-stage route as the mail, with the assistance of the friendly, haphazard cooperation to be found in remote places. I leave my order for the grocer, the ironmonger, or the chemist at Druimfiaclach in the evening; the Land Rover collects it in the morning and hands it to the skipper of the mail launch, who delivers it to the shops and brings the goods back – if, that is, they are to be obtained at the ‘shopping centre’. For though there are a surprising number of shops for what is really no more than a hamlet, there is also surprisingly little in them – the nearest place where such commonplace objects as, for example, a coat-hanger or a pair of blue jeans may be bought, is Inverness, nearly a hundred miles away on the opposite coast of Scotland, or Fort William, the same distance to the south. This is not due entirely to a somewhat characteristic lack of enterprise, but also to a Foolish Virgin attitude to the necessities of life that I had seen exemplified again and again during my ownership of the Island of Soay. It is only during my own time at Camusfeàrna that electricity has come to the district – though not to me – through the West of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board; before that all the houses were lit by paraffin lamps, and many of the people cooked by Primus stove. Yet, despite the notoriously capricious quality of the electric light in the north-west Highlands, every single shop in every single village immediately stopped stocking paraffin, methylated spirits, and candles. Last year, there was to my certain knowledge, no drop of methylated spirits for sale within a hundred miles. The friendly spirit of cooperation is, however, equal even to this situation: once I sent an SOS for methylated spirits to a distant village and received an odd-looking package in return. It did not look like methylated spirits, and I unwrapped it in puzzlement. Inside was a pencil note which I deciphered with difficulty: ‘Sorry no methylated spirits but am sending you two pounds of sausages instead.’
Three
I HAD BEEN AT Camusfeàrna for eight years before I piped water to the house; before that it came from the burn in buckets. During the first years there was a stout stone-piered bridge across the burn, and under it one could draw water that had not been fouled by the cattle at their ford a little lower; then, in 1953, the bridge was swept away by a winter spate, and there was none built again for five years. In the summer there is no more than a foot or so of water among the stones, deepening to three or four feet when it runs amber-coloured and seemingly motionless between the alder banks, but wedged high among the branches are wads of debris that show the level of its torrential winter spates. When the gales blow in from the south-west and the burn comes roaring down in a foaming peaty cataract to meet the invading sea, the alders stand under water for half their height, and in the summer blackened trailers of dry seaweed dangle from branches ten feet and more above the stream.
After the bridge had gone, the winter crossing of the burn to climb the hill to Druimfiaclach was always perilous, sometimes impossible. I stretched a rope between the alders from bank to bank, but it was slender support, for even when the water was no more than thigh deep the pure battering weight of it as it surged down from the waterfall would sweep one’s legs from the bottom and leave one clinging to the rope without foothold, feet trailing seaward.
The purely natural changes that have taken place during my ten years at Camusfeàrna are astonishing. One is inclined to think of such a landscape as immutable without the intervention of man, yet in these few years the small alterations to the scene have been continuous and progressive. The burn has swept the soil from under its banks so that the alder roots show white and bare, and some of the trees have fallen; where there are none at the burn side the short green turf has been tunnelled under by the water so that it falls in and the stream’s bed becomes ever wider and shallower. Farther down towards the sea, where the burn bends round to encircle Camusfeàrna, the burrowing of a colony of sand martins in the sand cliff that is its landward bank has had the same effect, undermining the turf above so that it gives beneath the sheep’s feet and rolls down to the water’s edge. Below the sand martins’ burrows is now a steep slope of loose sand where ten years ago it was vertical. The sand dunes between the house and the sea form and re-form, so that their contour is never the same for two years, though the glaucous, rasping marram grass that grows on them imparts an air of static permanency. The whole structure of these dunes that now effectively block much of the beach from the house, and incidentally afford to it some shelter from the southerly gales, is in any case a thing of recent times, for I am told that when the present house was built fifty odd years ago the field stretched flat to the sea, and the seaward facing wall of the house was left windowless for that reason.
The beach itself, wherever the rock does not shelve straight into the sea, is in constant change too; broad belts of shingle appear in the sand where there was no shingle before; soft stretches of quicksand come and go in a few weeks; sandbars as white as snowdrifts and jewelled with bright shells rise between the islands and vanish as though they had melted under the summer suns.
Even the waterfall, to me perhaps the most enduring symbol of Camusfeàrna, has changed and goes on changing. When I am away from the place and think of it, it is of the waterfall that I think first. Its voice is in one’s ears day and night; one falls asleep to it, dreams with it and wakens to it; the note changes with the season, from the dull menacing roar of winter nights to the low crooning of the summer, and if I hold a shell to my ear it is not the sea’s murmur that comes to me but the sound of the Camusfeàrna waterfall. Above the bridge where I used to draw my water the burn rushes over stones and between boulders with the alders at its banks, and a wealth of primroses and wild hyacinths among the fern and mosses. In spring it is loud with bird song from the chaffinches that build their lichen nests in the forks of the alders, and abob with wagtails among the stones. This part of the burn is ‘pretty’ rather than beautiful, and it seems to come from nowhere, for the waterfall is hidden round a corner and the stream seems to emerge from a thirty foot wall of rock hung with honeysuckle and with rowan trees jutting from cracks and fissures. But looking up the burn from the foot of that rock the word ‘pretty’ becomes wholly inapplicable; the waterfall is of a beauty it would be hard to devise. It is not high, for the tall cataracts of eighty feet are some two hundred yards higher up its course; it emerges between boulders and sheer rock walls to drop some fifteen feet, over about the same breadth, from the twilight world of the deep narrow gorge it has carved through the hill face over thousands, perhaps millions, of years. It emerges frothing from that unseen darkness to fall like a tumbling cascade of brilliants into a deep rounded cauldron enclosed by rock walls on three sides, black water in whorled black rock, with the fleecy white spume ringing the blackness of the pool. Up above the black sides of the pot there are dark-green watery mosses growing deep and cushioned wherever there is a finger-hold for soil; the domed nest that the dippers build here every year is distinguishable from the other moss cushions by nothing but its symmetry. The sun reaches the waterfall for only a short time in the afternoon; it forms a rainbow over