reminiscences which he's had typed, hoping, I suspect, that I can help him get them published. In this I fail.
My eye lights on this: âWhen I was only six â and there were two younger than me â an angel came and took our loving mother to the quiet gardens of another paradise.â How strange. Fey. It's not what I expected.
Duncan tells me he was born in 1914 and he worked as a shepherd, water gillie, stalker at the Chisholm Estate at Fasnakyle and, later, head stalker in Affric. He saw the dams go up in Affric and Glen Cannich and the great flood of December 1962 which swept away bridges in Affric and threatened to blow the dams.
The talk turns to wildlife and it seems that Old Duncan has a great contempt for conservationists, a feeling shared by many keepers, stalkers and farmers: âThey won't listen,â he says. Pine martens are a particular culprit when it comes to the decline of the capercaillie, the great bird of the pine forest, now a threatened species. He was keeping an eye on a caper nest with two eggs until the day he found the eggs smashed and pine marten droppings beside them. He says his hens were killed by a fox âjust for badnessâ. When vermin â his word â were kept down, other wildlife flourished. Keepers knew where the nests were and would leave some untroubled. In his view, keepers are the true conservationists.
Such is the wisdom, I find it hard to make a judgment. On the one hand, scientists produce their statistics; on the other, country folk like Duncan, who observe nature at first hand from one year to the next, assert the evidence of their own eyes. I sit on the fence.
21
I've seen the apocalypse. It's at the end of the road in Glen Cannich.
On this dreich day, mist hangs low over the hills and the rain is soft and insistent. The road out of Cannich village rises steeply, twisting and turning and at the high point of the pass a vista opens over the treetops, wave after wave of birch foliage seeming all the greener for the wet, like gentle oriental gardens gone to wilderness.
Then the road dips to follow the river, ultimately crossing by a bailey bridge. This is where, according to birdman Dave, an eagle may be seen. No big bird spirals upwards into the overcast. Some other day perhaps.
Here the enclosing trees pull back to open up a rugged countryside of high moorland and black craggy hills, the view ahead hemmed in by rocky slopes. Where exposed, the underlying bedrock glistens in the pale light. There are few dwellings. A wheelie bin stands at the end of a track, a long haul from the stalker's house a quarter of a mile away (on reflection, he probably drops it from his 4 x 4).
Lashing rain now â bracken and heather sodden at the roadside. Even so, there's a glamour about this quiet glen, so reclusive compared to Affric's blatant charms. The road rises inexorably until a last curve brings the dam into view, unseen until then, and the song dies on my lips.
A long black barrier extends half a mile across the whole width of the glen, hill to hill, a black concrete bastion only partially softened by wisps of mist. From this angle, there's no sign of the immense waters held behind it. Mullardoch's not just the longest dam in the land, it must be the ugliest â a monument to brutalism. The spirit of the place seems malign.
I scramble down to the marshy valley floor where a thin trickle of water emerges from the foot of the dam and runs into a pool on the first lap of its long journey eastwards to the North Sea. Once, when in spate, it would gush over cataracts. The dam wall, stained black with an algal growth, towers 160 feet above me, impounding a huge mass of water â the mere thought of it makes me quake. A walk across the top of the dam is quite as unsettling, with the sheer drop on one side and a grey choppy sea pent up on the other. A gleam of sunshine would soften the blow but there's no let-up in the weather.
A few souls live close
My eye lights on this: âWhen I was only six â and there were two younger than me â an angel came and took our loving mother to the quiet gardens of another paradise.â How strange. Fey. It's not what I expected.
Duncan tells me he was born in 1914 and he worked as a shepherd, water gillie, stalker at the Chisholm Estate at Fasnakyle and, later, head stalker in Affric. He saw the dams go up in Affric and Glen Cannich and the great flood of December 1962 which swept away bridges in Affric and threatened to blow the dams.
The talk turns to wildlife and it seems that Old Duncan has a great contempt for conservationists, a feeling shared by many keepers, stalkers and farmers: âThey won't listen,â he says. Pine martens are a particular culprit when it comes to the decline of the capercaillie, the great bird of the pine forest, now a threatened species. He was keeping an eye on a caper nest with two eggs until the day he found the eggs smashed and pine marten droppings beside them. He says his hens were killed by a fox âjust for badnessâ. When vermin â his word â were kept down, other wildlife flourished. Keepers knew where the nests were and would leave some untroubled. In his view, keepers are the true conservationists.
Such is the wisdom, I find it hard to make a judgment. On the one hand, scientists produce their statistics; on the other, country folk like Duncan, who observe nature at first hand from one year to the next, assert the evidence of their own eyes. I sit on the fence.
21
I've seen the apocalypse. It's at the end of the road in Glen Cannich.
On this dreich day, mist hangs low over the hills and the rain is soft and insistent. The road out of Cannich village rises steeply, twisting and turning and at the high point of the pass a vista opens over the treetops, wave after wave of birch foliage seeming all the greener for the wet, like gentle oriental gardens gone to wilderness.
Then the road dips to follow the river, ultimately crossing by a bailey bridge. This is where, according to birdman Dave, an eagle may be seen. No big bird spirals upwards into the overcast. Some other day perhaps.
Here the enclosing trees pull back to open up a rugged countryside of high moorland and black craggy hills, the view ahead hemmed in by rocky slopes. Where exposed, the underlying bedrock glistens in the pale light. There are few dwellings. A wheelie bin stands at the end of a track, a long haul from the stalker's house a quarter of a mile away (on reflection, he probably drops it from his 4 x 4).
Lashing rain now â bracken and heather sodden at the roadside. Even so, there's a glamour about this quiet glen, so reclusive compared to Affric's blatant charms. The road rises inexorably until a last curve brings the dam into view, unseen until then, and the song dies on my lips.
A long black barrier extends half a mile across the whole width of the glen, hill to hill, a black concrete bastion only partially softened by wisps of mist. From this angle, there's no sign of the immense waters held behind it. Mullardoch's not just the longest dam in the land, it must be the ugliest â a monument to brutalism. The spirit of the place seems malign.
I scramble down to the marshy valley floor where a thin trickle of water emerges from the foot of the dam and runs into a pool on the first lap of its long journey eastwards to the North Sea. Once, when in spate, it would gush over cataracts. The dam wall, stained black with an algal growth, towers 160 feet above me, impounding a huge mass of water â the mere thought of it makes me quake. A walk across the top of the dam is quite as unsettling, with the sheer drop on one side and a grey choppy sea pent up on the other. A gleam of sunshine would soften the blow but there's no let-up in the weather.
A few souls live close
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