Chorre Duibh, the Rock of the Black Corrie.
On a day when the river is in spate after heavy rain, I can hear it before I see it. Even in the car, the sound of turbulent waters is audible over the engine noise.
A stony tractor track leads towards the river and midway along, blocking the track, stands a parked caravan and car. A man at the open door of the caravan observes the rain glumly but, as I approach splashing through the puddles and prepared with a pleasantry, he retreats inside and slams the door behind him. Maybe he thinks I'm someone in authority who'll ask him to move on.
Above the broad river, I look down at the flood thrashing over rocky shelves and jutting boulders, splitting into many channels, surging in walls of solid water, tearing at islets in the stream, each surmounted with clusters of little trees. Whole hillsides brimming with water have fed this angry torrent. Just watching the maelstrom from my safe vantage point gives me a sudden frisson, something between fear and fascination.
A month later in London, standing in front of a painting by the Victorian artist John Everett Millais at an exhibition in Tate Britain, I experience a sense of déjà vu. The scene is in the Highlands and Millais called it The Sound of Many Waters . The artist set up his easel almost at river level looking upstream. Rocky islets part the floodwaters. Small trees sprout from the rocks. It might be the very scene at the River Bend. Only the woodland on the riverbanks â leaf trees in autumn colours in place of the dark pines â is the give-away. Millais took up his brush elsewhere. The nearest he's likely to have been to this glen was Loch Ness, where he painted ruined Urquhart Castle in a rainstorm. In fact, no artist of distinction seems to have found inspiration in Strathglass, which is surprising. And no poets either, now that I think of it. No Lakers here. I wonder why.
The sound of many waters echoes everywhere in this strath and these three glens. Trees, water and stone, the great trinity, the body and soul of Affric and Strathglass. Waters come in many forms: wide sheets of mirror glass reflecting sky and hill in calm weather or whipped into spindrift in a gale; little eyelet lochans bleared with underwater vegetation; freshets gurgling through the undergrowth unseen but loudly heard; mere squelches seeping through the moss; mad burns dashing over shelves of rock and eddying darkly at the base of falls. And always sensed beneath the green mantle or visible in naked extrusion, the presence of bedrock, age-old and everlasting foundation of all.
23
February. At the River Bend.
The water is still and untroubled now. There's a hush in the air. Thin bands of mist cling to the hillsides but the tops are clear in sunlight. There's snow on the higher hills and the far mountains are pure white. Upstream, where the river emerges from Loch Carrie, breaking ice sparkles in pale sunshine.
Catherine and I walk along the curve of the riverbank, following a faint grassy trail through stone-littered and rather boggy ground, with a multitude of small plant life at our feet â all kinds of delicate mossy fronds, lichens and fluted fungi among carpets of brown alder leaves. A pad of fungus raises little scarlet-tipped bell mouths to the air. A small stone the size of a melon is a botanic garden in miniature, capped with a profusion of little species â what botanists call the âlower plantsâ. If Joe were here he'd name them all.
There's a brief intrusion. A yellow bin lorry comes speeding along where the road makes a cord with the river bend. So Monday must be bin day in the glen. Green wheelies wait at the farm lane ends. It'll take half the morning to collect the rubbish from the few households here â a country outing for the binmen and all in the day's work. How lucky for them.
24
Past Tomich a rough track in a field leads to a little gabled house with green scrollwork eaves, the oldest house in
On a day when the river is in spate after heavy rain, I can hear it before I see it. Even in the car, the sound of turbulent waters is audible over the engine noise.
A stony tractor track leads towards the river and midway along, blocking the track, stands a parked caravan and car. A man at the open door of the caravan observes the rain glumly but, as I approach splashing through the puddles and prepared with a pleasantry, he retreats inside and slams the door behind him. Maybe he thinks I'm someone in authority who'll ask him to move on.
Above the broad river, I look down at the flood thrashing over rocky shelves and jutting boulders, splitting into many channels, surging in walls of solid water, tearing at islets in the stream, each surmounted with clusters of little trees. Whole hillsides brimming with water have fed this angry torrent. Just watching the maelstrom from my safe vantage point gives me a sudden frisson, something between fear and fascination.
A month later in London, standing in front of a painting by the Victorian artist John Everett Millais at an exhibition in Tate Britain, I experience a sense of déjà vu. The scene is in the Highlands and Millais called it The Sound of Many Waters . The artist set up his easel almost at river level looking upstream. Rocky islets part the floodwaters. Small trees sprout from the rocks. It might be the very scene at the River Bend. Only the woodland on the riverbanks â leaf trees in autumn colours in place of the dark pines â is the give-away. Millais took up his brush elsewhere. The nearest he's likely to have been to this glen was Loch Ness, where he painted ruined Urquhart Castle in a rainstorm. In fact, no artist of distinction seems to have found inspiration in Strathglass, which is surprising. And no poets either, now that I think of it. No Lakers here. I wonder why.
The sound of many waters echoes everywhere in this strath and these three glens. Trees, water and stone, the great trinity, the body and soul of Affric and Strathglass. Waters come in many forms: wide sheets of mirror glass reflecting sky and hill in calm weather or whipped into spindrift in a gale; little eyelet lochans bleared with underwater vegetation; freshets gurgling through the undergrowth unseen but loudly heard; mere squelches seeping through the moss; mad burns dashing over shelves of rock and eddying darkly at the base of falls. And always sensed beneath the green mantle or visible in naked extrusion, the presence of bedrock, age-old and everlasting foundation of all.
23
February. At the River Bend.
The water is still and untroubled now. There's a hush in the air. Thin bands of mist cling to the hillsides but the tops are clear in sunlight. There's snow on the higher hills and the far mountains are pure white. Upstream, where the river emerges from Loch Carrie, breaking ice sparkles in pale sunshine.
Catherine and I walk along the curve of the riverbank, following a faint grassy trail through stone-littered and rather boggy ground, with a multitude of small plant life at our feet â all kinds of delicate mossy fronds, lichens and fluted fungi among carpets of brown alder leaves. A pad of fungus raises little scarlet-tipped bell mouths to the air. A small stone the size of a melon is a botanic garden in miniature, capped with a profusion of little species â what botanists call the âlower plantsâ. If Joe were here he'd name them all.
There's a brief intrusion. A yellow bin lorry comes speeding along where the road makes a cord with the river bend. So Monday must be bin day in the glen. Green wheelies wait at the farm lane ends. It'll take half the morning to collect the rubbish from the few households here â a country outing for the binmen and all in the day's work. How lucky for them.
24
Past Tomich a rough track in a field leads to a little gabled house with green scrollwork eaves, the oldest house in
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