John Lister-Kaye
House of Aigas
1
The Lie of the Land
Nature knows nothing of landscape. For nature scenery is the natural habitat, while our landscape is the habitat manipulated by man for his own uses. If either man or the habitat changes then so inevitably must the landscape.
– Nan Fairbrother, New Lives, New Landscapes
The word ‘glen’ is sensuous. Like ‘mountain’, with which it is irredeemably paired, it stirs the spirit. When, quite unthinking, the word pops into my sentence as it’s always bound to when I’m talking about my home, I see strangers’ eyes brighten; eyebrows lift as though some inner book has been opened at a well-loved passage. That’s what Highland glens have always done: stir spirits and arouse passions in a country that spawned the word from its own language. In the Gaelic tongue glean is a mountain valley, almost always with a river, a burn or a loch. It gives itself away.
All Scottish glens were carved by ice; the yawning, glacial troughs left as bare as a canvas for nature to paint afresh, scoured and desolate. For several thousand years after the ice melted away nature took over; it laid down primitive soils and, welcoming all comers, ultimately created great forests of pine, birch and oak. Stone Age, and later Bronze and Iron Age man hunted through a land rich in game where wolves howled at the stars and brown bears foraged for bilberries in the beneficent shade of the forest. Bronze Age farmers were the first to create clearings for their crops. Cultivation and the teeth of their grazing animals ensured the trees could not return.
When, fifteen hundred years ago, Celtic tribes from Ireland known by the Romans as the Scottii came rampaging into this land they called Caledonia, running the prevailing winds across the sixteen miles of petulant sea between Antrim and the Mull of Kintyre, their furious and warring invasion was certain to award it a new name – the land of the Scots. The Gaelic-speaking Scottii created a desolation and a deception of their own; the mountains became strongholds from which to raid and counter-raid, pillage and burn. From turf and boulders they constructed lowly hovels for their families and formidable stone towers and keeps rose up for their chieftains; on the flood plains they nurtured their meagre crops. In summer they looked to the high grazing of the mountains and moors for their cattle, sheep and goats, a transhumance which, unwittingly, was gradually creating a landscape of open vistas and bare hills. All those centuries ago mankind was busy taming this land, shaping it to his immediate needs, the needs we all share, for food, security and a home, without any inkling of the long-term consequences of his actions. With a relentless urgency to extract a living from the fragile soils, the forest wilderness was pushed back and another land began to emerge, a land that is immeasurably changed, but which still clings to that essential quality of wildness today.
My home sits in a bowl with one side broken away. As the glacier melted back, so the steep side of the valley washed out along a fault line, the friable conglomerate rock collapsing and flushing away to the sea. This hollow awards us shelter and a cascade of gravel terraces – now upland pasture – absent elsewhere in the glen. This geomorphological and glacio-fluvial legacy enabled people to farm the land long before the wild Gaels came barracking in and took over. It was the Bronze Age farmers who first created permanent settlements here, forging the lie, as they broke into our precious Highland soils some five thousand years ago – the lie that is deeply rooted in the romantic mythology of the Highlands, that the moors and hills are naturally bare and have always been that way.
Long before the first smoke curled from the thatched roofs of those early settlements, the glacier sculpted its U-shaped trough which gouges back into the mountains to the south and west for twenty miles. No ice creaks out of those high corries now, but every winter and spring the rain and melting mountain snows keep the brown spate waters of the river pulsing through, a seasonal flare of elemental spleen far beyond the control of mankind, and now the glen’s most uplifting feature.
This half-tamed land of sheep pasture and forest is foothill country solemnly lifting to a spine of mountains beyond the immediate horizon, a luminous presence felt but unseen until much higher up. The valley sides are steep and rocky, swerving upwards to a cloud edge a thousand feet above sea level. Birch trees cling on between crags and scree slopes too dry and loose for roots. From afar the trees merge to a cloud of pastel softness, but when, breathless, you clamber up the rocks to their feet the sky has levered them apart and invited a spiny scrub of gorse and broom to share their thin mineral soils.
Far above the glen high, boggy moorland soothes the eye back into the mountains. On a clear winter day from the hill behind my home I can see the Affric Mountains’ snowy peaks framing my wider world, alluring and mysterious, promising the adventure of real wildness beyond – a view and a promise always accompanied by a singing heart and an ascending spiral of the spirit.
This famous landscape of craggy peaks and purple moors is gripped in passionate affection by the Gaelic Highlanders – ‘Ye bonny banks and braes’ – revered and celebrated in folklore, ballad and verse, and loved by free spirits the world over. Yet the notion of wilderness this landscape evokes is the lie – the deep-rooted and fundamental deception that nature alone has shaped this land. To many visitors it is an unpalatable truth that, for all its uplifting qualities and romantic associations, it is man who has imposed his will on this desolate upland scenery by systematically removing the forests and exhausting the frail fertility of its soils.
To the east, across the river – the far rim of the bowl – woodland and dark conifer plantation on a high ridge of moraine bars the way to the sea and another world, a world to which inured glen dwellers like me do not really belong. Only five miles away the Beauly River is tidal. An east wind brings the tang of salt flats and the broad firth beyond like a ghost of the herring and sprats once so abundant in these coastal waters, a bounty that drew many people to settle there. On the Black Isle, the island that isn’t an island, trapped between the Cromarty and the Beauly firths, pink sandstone towns and former fishing villages cluster the shore of a much more fertile coastal plain which, for many centuries, sent Highland folk to their beds with full bellies. Their narrow streets and picturesque fishermen’s cottages lining the shore also belie the stark and largely ignored truth that those inshore waters can no longer sustain the folk for whom these villages were built. Now they house holidaymakers, commuters to Inverness and the retired.
Across the Beauly Firth, some fifteen miles away, the Highland capital is now a bustling city, said at the turn of the millennium to be one of the most rapidly expanding communities in Europe. Beyond the horizon its amber lights glow on dark nights as if the forest is on fire. Horizons are what contain us every day. If you live in a bowl you sleep with dim horizons of darkness and rise with new light from beyond in the dawn. You dream in their cupped hands.
I have always wanted to live with wildness. In another age I fancy I might have chosen to be a pioneer settler on the very frontier of real wilderness. Oh! To have felt the earth tremble beneath those massed millions of buffalo hooves thundering across the American plains, and to have heard the night howls of the thousands of wolves in constant pursuit. Oh! To have known the unknown – like Meriwether Lewis and William Clark – a grizzly bear or an Indian camp around the next twist in the creek.
At times the Highland hills come close to the wilderness they seem to evoke, alluring echoes of their wilder, not so very distant past. I have never regretted migrating north from my English ancestral homeland. In the context of wider Britain this muscular upland landscape still elicits the notion of true wildness; is still physically and emotionally demanding in ways we have forgotten across most of the rest of the country. Its rocks and its moors and its excoriating seven-month winters purge the soul like hyssop. We take them for granted at our peril.
The road that winds up the wooded rim heading out, away from the glen, leads within a few miles to the tangled world of city life – housing estates, shops, supermarkets, cars and warehouses. I go there when I have to, only grudgingly acknowledging my dependence. When I leave Inverness heading for home, I pass quickly through a farmed landscape of wide, arable fields of pasture, crops and plough, and the euphemistic,