David Lintern rounds out the weirdest of years with a quiet walk through a multi-storied landscape.
Today, I’m hitting the pause button. There’s a brief lull in my schedule that coincides with a break in the weather, a benign day between early winter storms, with slowly clearing skies and a thaw after the first big dump of snow. Maybe even a glimpse of sun? After the year we’ve had, I’ll take it.
I’ve long had an eye on a giant cleft on the map, a sort of secret doorway to the plateau of the central highlands. Given the recent access issues at Dalwhinnie preventing easier passage onto my nominal summit, today seems like a good day to explore. It’s a short hop down the road for me and should suit the shorter winter daylight hours. I begin on an old Drover’s Road, on the fringes of a huge sporting estate, following a winding burn, in the simple company of water, rock, heather and peat.
And breathe…
I pass an empty holiday home, avoid the gates and fences marked ‘private’ and end up riverside, hopping across meanders and climbing crumbling banks before reaching a straggly looking woodland. There are few, widely spaced birch trees, and no new growth that I can spot in this quietened, midwinter landscape. It’s the kind of place I might have dismissed as a poor remnant of a much bigger forest in the past, but today I wonder if I’ve been too quick to judge. In the autumn, I spent a little time at an off grid learning centre called The Shieling Project near Beauly, and it prompted further learning and thinking around how we lived on, and cared for, land in the past.
Prior to enclosure and the development of sporting estates, much of the Highlands was common land. Summers were spent on the moors and in woodland clearings at sheilings, with people dwelling in turf and stone huts, and their cattle and hens transplanted from the glens to graze on new growth grasses fed by snow melt. Highland cows are not selective browsers – unlike sheep or deer, they don’t pick off the youngest, juiciest shoots. They also move seed around via their coats, trample and fertilise the hillside, all in all making a healthy ruckus for other species to exploit. Sheiling culture effectively created a landscape known as open pasture woodland (now a priority habitat for biodiversity). With succession to ‘full canopy’ forest kept in check by generalist grazing, each tree becomes a ‘veteran’ providing broad canopy shelter and then deadwood habitat for rare lichens, fungi and juniper, insects like the dark-bordered beauty moth and the aspen hoverfly, woodpeckers, flycatchers and wryneck, black grouse and red squirrel, bats, stoats and weasels. Were these trees, on the side of this old road, ‘veterans’ from the shieling system?
Reading further about this, it seems they might well be. The sheiling system was a highly organised affair, by clan and in some cases by something akin to parish (‘davoch’) – not just small family groups. Ironically, much of the ‘ancient Caledonian forest’ in places like Affric and Glenmore was grazed in this way and exists in its current condition partly due to the soil ‘improvement’ caused by seasonal migration. This symbiosis between human, animal and habitat is lauded all over the world as sustainable, but somehow our own history of transhumance has been neglected, at least until recently. Research has shown that improved soils and associated biodiversity also appear in the historical record at riverside stances on droving roads – just like the one I was on that morning.
I’m tired of hearing how humans are beating up on nature like it’s inevitable. We used to collaborate much more readily, and we can tell better stories again. And then I round the corner and stumble upon a pheasant feeding station, with its tell-tale blue drums. These non-native birds seem increasingly omnipresent in the eastern Highlands, as our climate gets warmer and wetter and the viability of large numbers of grouse for shooting is tested season by season.
Today’s landscape lesson was about to shift from environmental to geological… and with a few tips on winter safety thrown in for good measure. That deep cleft I was aiming for had by now hoved into view, it’s entrance adorned with more open pasture woodland, a quietly awe-full place on this subdued winter’s day. Dirc Mhòr is a granite bedrock gorge that cuts its way into and onto the higher Alder plateau. It’s thought to have developed over several glacial cycles, with meltwater from each cutting away the gorge under the ice, followed by rock wall collapse in the intervals between glacial periods.
As a result, it’s floor is littered with boulders, and today it made for treacherous going. A soft duvet of snow draped over gaps and appropriately enough, my own pace became glacial, as I tested each footing with my walking poles. I was repeatedly drawn out high onto the slopes seeking solid ground, only to meet rotten snow covered scree runouts. Becoming concerned about the remaining daylight, I began counting paces, which gave me some sense of control and a measure of progress back, but it was a timely reminder that beginning a winter walk at 10am – no matter how short it looks on the map – is really not a good idea. Poking around in here at nightfall would be intimidating. It took 3 hours to travel the length of the gorge – an average of 330m an hour – which gives a good sense of the terrain under soft snow. It was tiring!
The last, and thankfully simplest, piece of my landscape jigsaw remained. Snowshoes would have been useless in the gorge but are perfect for broad heathery slopes at this time of year, and I was soon labouring away on the last kilometre or so to the summit of The Fara. They really aid progress on soft snow and require no real technique, I was glad I’d carried them after all. The wind was strengthening as predicted, and as night began to fall, so did the temperature. Following an old fence line, the tracks of ptarmigan crossing with my own, I topped out at very last light, the A9 appearing as a fluid snake of ambers and reds in the inky black glen to my left.
I turned my back to the wind and headed down a broad, saddleback ridge. Better late than never. Lower down, I found the trails of deer that have so often steered me right and joined the braes above the burns that they and their human hunters have shared for millennia, trods that would lead me back to my drover’s road.
Just another hill day. Nothing too remarkable, but I was left with a renewed appreciation of the simple act of walking, thinking, and paying attention. It’s easy to take where we live for granted, but whether we like it or not our peculiar mix of nature and culture is rich and unique. The landscape culture war seems louder than ever, but land has probably always been contested, always been political. We can’t escape the ground under our feet, but the weather is changing, and we’ll have to make our peace with gravity, and each other, sooner or later. I hope we make it before dark.