Season in Strathglass Read online

  I ask for a malt whisky. There's no malt. She answers cheerily, ‘You can have Whyte and Mackay or Whyte and Mackay or Whyte and Mackay.’ Three bottles. No malt, but it will serve.

  Louise smiles at adversity.

  Frank, her customer, runs a fire station in Birmingham and spends his two weeks off in eight in a cottage he bought just out of Cannich. He tells me of his 90-year-old neighbour, Old Duncan. ‘You should speak to him. He's got lots of stories about the old days. He's writing a book about it.’

  In comes Brian, a young Jamaican. Brian Chisholm – he's researching his roots in Affric, which is Chisholm country. What will he find? A Chisholm from Affric who came to the sugar island as a planter? A slave girl as his several-greats-grandmother?

  Brian, while here, has set up an art gallery in a wing of the hotel where the dining room was. The room has been stripped and is eerie. Two bare bulbs cast a pale glow in the barn-like interior, which smells of damp. On the walls hangs an eclectic (to be polite) mix of pictures in different sizes and styles, most of them gaudy. But in one corner is something special, a small group of icons, as in an Orthodox church – meek virgins, adoring saints, babes wise beyond their years, all crowned in golden glories. Inclined heads, tapered fingers, arcane meanings. Not sentimental images for the tourists but the real thing, made by a nun who lives in Cannich.

  Icons in Affric! Wonder of wonders.

  In the garden seen from the bedroom window at Comar is a summer house, a gazebo with a table and weathered seats inside – a place to work, maybe, when the weather's warm. Beyond the fence there's a field dotted with browsing sheep, then a line of bare trees with a glimpse of the river, broad and rippling, and a ridge of forested hill hazy in the weak March sunshine.

  Breakfast is set on the big table in a room furnished with antique oriental pieces. Ian was brought up in India, where his father was a planter. It's part dining room, part kitchen. Ian speaks from the Aga.

  I ask about the icons. ‘Sister Petra Clare,’ says Ian. He says she's renowned far and wide for her work and gets orders for icons from across continents.

  Sister Petra Clare lives at Marydale, the Catholic church in the pine trees across the road from the Cannich caravan park, where she offers a retreat to the faithful which Ian describes as ‘gently commercial’. She may be seen walking down the street with hiking boots under her ample skirts.

  (Some days later I do see her in the street – a large lady in flowing white from head to toe. Below her skirts, she's wearing – this I notice – thick socks and heavy shoes, not hiking boots this day. She proceeds in a stately fashion past the shop, billowing like a ship under sail. Should I say hello? But the moment is lost. She walks on with a wan smile on her pale face.)

  As for the hotel, Ian thinks it's a hopeless case and it probably never made money, except for a brief interlude when the dams were building. Between the wars when it was a modest country hotel, it was favoured by the gentry who came to fish for salmon or trout or stalk the red deer. They dressed for dinner.

  In those days as a simple country hotel, an unpretentious two-storey stone-built affair with an inviting air, it had a welcome for travellers. Then it got beyond itself. At the height of the dam-building boom, a wing was added in a 1930s ocean-liner style with a rounded facade and large metal-framed windows, brightly washed in white or cream. It was a mistake – the good times would never last.

  Ian says Louise bought it on an impulse. She inherited money, arrived in Strathglass and fell in love with it and that was that. Gradually the paint began to peel, the window frames rusted and the hotel decayed.

  I tell Ian that when Catherine and I spent a night at the Glen Affric Hotel years ago on the eve of our trek through Affric and Kintail it was a welcoming place, with lively company at the bar and in the dining room. There was warmth and chatter. We saw it at its best and remember it fondly.

  3

  There's no answer from Sister's quarters at Marydale Church, a grey stone building with a short steeple like a pencil stump. Maybe she's out or praying or singing the office or sleeping – she'll rise early for devotions.

  The heavy church door swings open. In the porch is a small stone pyx with an inch of water in the hollow and a brass plate telling that it came from the ruins of a church built by the chief of the Chisholms to celebrate his conversion to Catholicism in 1660. A newel staircase winds up to the gallery and a heavy bell-rope knotted round an iron ring dangles from a trapdoor in the ceiling. Sister Petra Clare yanks on it to summon her flock to mass?

  According to a notice, this is the church of Our Lady and St Bean and associated with it is the Sancti Angeli skete. Skete? A word not in my dictionary. There's an explanation on the wall: ‘Sketes are small monastic houses and hermitages devoted to solitude and the community life. Sancti Angeli skete comes under the direction of the Abbot of Pluscarden. The Latin ritual is observed.’ There's more – this, not addressed to me: ‘Have you ever thought of becoming a nun?’

  A framed document at the door relates history. Marydale parish is, or was in the 1930s when the document was put up, a swathe of land stretching from Drumnadrochit pier on Loch Ness to Benula in the north, a place now inundated by the Mullardoch dam, and far into Glen Affric in the west. The Marydale priest pre-war had a lot of ground to cover. Would he have had a car? A pony, a pushbike at least?

  Inside, the church is plain, not ancient but bright and airy, simple and seemly. The ceiling, vaulted like the rib-work of an upturned boat, is coloured sky blue and dotted with stars. There's a plaster statuette of the virgin in pale robe, and Stations of the Cross along the wainscotted walls.

  I venture up the corkscrew staircase (tucking in elbows in case of knocks) to reach the gallery. There are icons and unlit candles in red glasses on the front shelf and sheets of crabbed notation, angular dots hopping across the page – Gregorian chant, a mystery to me.

  Back in the open air again I notice the date 1866 picked out in gold lettering on an antique black-painted ronepipe. The church, now almost a century and a half old, has a tidy, well-kept look, as you'd expect of a building renovated and maintained by Historic Scotland – and happily, still functioning as built, still a working church. Historic Scotland is mostly about ruins.

  4

  Gl-- Affric Hot -l.

  More letters are missing.

  A window's broken. But the door's ajar and Louise is at home.

  Louise appears in a padded jacket and ushers me in. It's cold inside. A large log cut from the trunk of a tree is an island in the centre of the lobby floor. There's a ruck of unopened letters scattered on a side table. Bills, perhaps? Louise says the electricity has been cut off.

  She takes me into the lounge where I sit on a distressed sofa beside a broken-tiled fireplace, circa 1950s, with the ashes of a dead fire in the grate. Two small curly-haired dogs rush at me barking and one leaps up and thrusts himself under my elbow.

  She tells me she bought the hotel with money her mother left her when she died and at first she considered running it jointly with a local man who wanted to offer accommodation to his fishing clients. But his plans didn't accord with her freewheeling vision, which tended more towards a community of souls than a commercial undertaking, and he pulled out. Louise admits that the hotel has been ‘a bit catastrophic’.

  But she seems remarkably untroubled. The money's gone but the magic lingers on. A woman who phoned asking for payment of a bill broke off in the middle of the call to say she could hear birdsong. Louise held her mobile to the open window so that she could listen. ‘Birds, trees – I just love it here,’ she says.

  Lying open on the table is a leather-bound book like an old-fashioned ledger, the pages covered in neat handwriting. ‘I write down my thoughts in this book,’ she says.

  Might I read her thoughts? A key to her soul? I'm too diffident to ask so Louise remains an enigma.

  5

  I want to talk to a deerstalker.

  ‘John MacLennan's your man,’ sa
ys Ian. ‘My neighbour.’

  So I go down the lane and cross the road to John's bungalow on the hillside above Comar Lodge, where we sit outside in the pale sunshine.

  John MacLennan has been stalking man and boy on the West Affric hills, hard country many miles away at the far end of the glen. According to the local custom he's Johnny Affric. His father Duncan, in whose footsteps he follows, was Dunky Affric (and John's wife is Cathy Affric). Billy MacLennan, his cousin, is the local builder and stalker at Fasnakyle but Billy's not an Affric – he's Billy Charm after his dad, who was called the Blue Charm. Strange name.

  John's a thickset man, sturdy and deeply bronzed. He wears a deerstalker hat, green jersey with shoulder pads and wellies – he's been gardening. Cathy appears with a tray of coffee, shortbread, sponge cake and scones warm from the oven. This is a treat. She's famous along the glen for her baking.

  West Affric, once a private estate, now belongs to the National Trust for Scotland which bans stalking for sport on its land. There's a twist to this. The trust needed to keep deer numbers down to encourage the ancient pinewood to regenerate and the group of sportsmen who used to shoot there volunteered to do the culling for them. So the trust kept its hands clean, the syndicate continued to stalk and John kept his job.

  John attended the discussion when they all sat round the table and the deal was struck – somewhat uneasily on the part of the trust. He was amused to hear the trust's man grudgingly admit, ‘I suppose the stalking's all right so long as you don't enjoy it.’ My question is this: can I go out on the hill with them? Not to shoot – just to watch, as an innocent observer.

  John gives me a hard look. ‘How fit are you?’ he asks. I must have passed muster. ‘Phone me in August,’ he says.

  6

  Cannich. The caravan park again.

  I settle down to watch an old TV series, Weir's Way. I've been given the box set of DVDs.

  Tom Weir, mountaineer, writer and broadcaster, came to Glen Affric to make the series 30 years or more ago but this is the first time I've had a chance to watch it.

  As the film opens, he strides down the back road above the still-functioning hotel at Cannich, in breeches and a bobble hat, with an old-fashioned sloppy rucksack on his back – a wee man with stocky legs and a wee round face and a blob of a nose. He looks over Cannich village as it was then in the early ’70s. The ground is bare beyond the shinty park, where there are bungalows now. This had been the site of a hutted encampment where 2,000 hydro workers lived when the dams in Glen Affric and Glen Cannich were being built.

  He stands on top of the Affric dam in a woody gorge (relatively secluded, unlike the dams at Mullardoch and Monar), explaining that at first it was planned to flood the whole glen, converting Loch Beinn a'Mheadhoin and Loch Affric into a single great loch, swamping the stretch of river that links them, along with picturesque stands of Caledonian woodland, and submerging Affric Lodge and the keeper's house next to it. Common sense prevailed, luckily.

  It's winter. He skips down snow-covered steps, followed less confidently by a dark-bearded man in a kilt – Finlay Macrae, then district officer for the Forestry Commission with Glen Affric in his beat. A visionary, a lover of the old trees, Finlay Macrae is a legend among foresters yet.

  Tom meets the MacLennan brothers, Donald and Duncan, both tall and trim and in their 60s. Duncan, stalker John's father, now in his 90s – the Old Duncan I heard of at the hotel – does most of the talking. He's been a stalker, a forest ranger and a shepherd in his time and now has been writing his reminiscences.

  Donald, also in his 90s, was a great fisherman in his day. People would ask him what fly he used. ‘Och, just the blue charm,’ he'd say, thus acquiring a nickname. He became ‘the Blue Charm’ or just ‘the Charm’.

  ‘What do you do on holiday?’ asks Tom.

  ‘A bit of fishing, a bit of shooting,’ the Charm replies. Work or play.

  Tom meets Duncan's wife and her younger son, another Duncan. Young Duncan, a bright lad, ruddy-faced and just out of his teens, says he doesn't fancy a desk job in town. Affric is where he wants to be, working in the open like his dad and his uncle. (Now he takes clients fishing on the loch. He has driven the school bus and, on occasion, he pulls pints in the pub.)

  Tom Weir climbed on Everest before Hillary and Tenzing got to the top. In a postscript to the film, shortly before his death, when he's aged and feebler, he's asked if he has any regrets. ‘I wish I was young again,’ he says. A wistful note to end the film.

  7

  At the Spar shop, Cannich.

  Here comes the Charm in deerstalker hat, upright on a yellow bike, pedalling in stately fashion down the road past the hotel.

  He dismounts to buy milk and a loaf, a tall figure, erect, elderly, white moustached. I say hello and we talk a bit.

  ‘Blethering again,’ says a man in passing.

  The Charm remembers Tom Weir in Affric. He showed him an eagle's nest and he admired the wee man's neat footwork on rock.

  Blethering . . . For no reason at all, he starts to reminisce about the war and how he was captured at St Valery, fighting with the Highland Division in the rearguard on the way to Dunkirk. It rankles still that they were left behind. How the Germans walked their prisoners all the way to Poland, where he worked in a coal mine deep underground for two years. After that, they were marched back again, on the road from January to March, their progress marked by a line of turds in the snow, mile after mile.

  As I leave the shop with the newspapers under my arm there's no sign of life at the sad hotel across the road. Nor at the distressed cottage in a field round the corner with sagging tin roof and flaking walls. It looks derelict but someone lives there and in the small caravan parked beside it all the same. He's called Geordie. His rag-fleeced sheep crop the grass around the cottage and the neighbours complain when they stray beyond. Gardens are sacrosanct.

  Further on, past the shinty park, are the modern bungalows of ‘Little England’, an unofficial name where, no doubt, few of the residents speak with a good Scots accent. Not that it matters – incomers or not, we're all Jock Tamson's bairns, aren't we? Among the pine trees stands Marydale Church and Sister Petra Clare's solitary quarters, silent and still, peaceful as should be.

  A puddly road leads to the caravans and my temporary quarters. I turn in, thinking that this place begins to feel like home. I could live here – well, for a little while at least. On the other hand, I'm not country and I suspect I'd find it hard to adjust. I wave to Matt who runs the site with amiable efficiency. An incomer from the south, he has seamlessly integrated into the community – obviously no problem for him. Little England? Pah!

  8

  I find Finlay Macrae at home in Dingwall.

  It's 30 years after his meeting with Tom Weir in Affric. The inky beard is turning to grey. Tweed breeches knotted above sturdy calves. On the table lies a box with a set of bagpipes – he's a great piper. Affric pinewood has echoed to his tunes. When a new forestry office was to be built at Dingwall, he had the plans changed so there was room in the corridor for him to pace up and down while he practised.

  A Skye man, Finlay was reluctant to leave the west coast when his job took him to Easter Ross. ‘The bottom fell out of my world,’ he says. But that was before he found Glen Affric. ‘When I first saw Affric, the colour was on the birch and it was a wonderland.’

  Finlay became a conservationist when it wasn't orthodox forestry to protect the Caledonian pinewoods.

  He got to know the wildlife.

  Birds you get in Affric are the pinewood specialists, the caper [capercaillie], the crested tit, Scottish crossbill. The wryneck has been seen. Also associated waders, the red and black-throated diver, the osprey. Siskin and redpoll, they all add to the variety. And the moorland birds, greenshank, golden plover, the dotterel and the ptarmigan, both of which are found only above two thousand feet. The ring ouzel can be heard.

  The two best times to see Affric are in May with a little snow on t
he tops and fresh growth on the birch shading into the deep green of the pine, and in autumn when all the colours are showing. In the days before good communications I would just disappear into the forest.

  Finlay tells me that once when he and a colleague had taken a boat up Loch Mullardoch and were walking along the rough ground on the south side, they came on a set of bare bones bleached white – the skeleton of a horse picked clean. When he told this to an old forester later, the man said, ‘That would be Jimmy.’ Those were the days when horses did the heavy hauling. The forester was working with Jimmy the Clydesdale when the horse slipped and broke a leg. They had to leave him lying and next morning they went back and shot him.

  9

  ‘You've come at the right time,’ says Sister Petra Clare. ‘I've just put the kettle on.’

  A place is laid on the plain deal table, with a water jug and a glass. Sister lives frugally. We have coffee and she offers dry bread from a bowl.

  Her face is pale, the skin translucent and a little waxy like alabaster, which suggests too much time spent indoors. A web of tiny wrinkles fans from the corners of her eyes when she smiles. A girlish smile. She wears a light blue top over a white smock. Under the skirts, I notice thick grey socks and trainers.

  Propped against the wall is a large icon of the virgin and child against a background of gold lustre. Bare toes peep from under her purple robe and her hands are open as though offering the child for adoration as he floats free before her breast. The Madonna's nose is long and thin, with a bump in it. (I think of the poet Edith Sitwell, pictured in the biography I'm reading.) Under the straight line of her eyebrows, her eyes are brown.

  Brown eyes? Do we know this? Is it biblical?

  ‘Well,’ says Sister, ‘brown eyes seem to be right for the Middle East. But let's be honest, brown or blue, who knows?’