The old ways, p.16
The Old Ways, page 16
When I got back to the house, following the little path down and out of the wilderness, it was six o’clock and nearly dark. It was too early for dinner, so Steve, Joan and I sat on the sofa together, drinking wine and watching Antiques Roadshow, while the Figure hung on in the workshop.
9
Granite
A ritual walk — My grandfather — ‘Interesting times’ — Miracle upon the water — The first crossing — Via viridis — Drovers & the streams of beasts — Britain’s Arctic — Hyper-ordered, chance-made — ‘A traffic of love’ — Onto the granite — The Lairig Ghru — Crossing a border, passing a portal — Permanent snows — Plutonic rock — Landscapes we carry with us — That the compass is not the index of the heart — Approaching the pass — The eyes of the mountain — Walking the flesh transparent — Fire at the watershed — Funeral — The final walk.
Since to follow a trail is to remember how it goes, making one’s way in the present is itself a recollection of the past … onward movement is itself a return.
Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst (2008)
It was a ritual walk across the Cairngorm massif from south to north, and these were the things we met with in its course: grey glacial erratics, river sand, siskins, pine cones, midges, white pebbles, the skeleton of a raven, footpaths, drove paths, deer paths, dead trees, sadness, rounded mountains and fire; and these were the many rock types over which we passed in its course: limestone, diorite, quartzite, granulite, granite, slate, phyolite and mica-schist. The fire? Oh, the fire came in the late-day gloom on the summit of the pass itself – an episode of combustion in the gathering dark – and the fire, like the walk, was made in memory of my grandfather who had died on the far side of the mountains, and to whose funeral I was walking as commemoration and as recollection, following the old ways up across a watershed, over the great pass of the Lairig Ghru, and then down through the pine forest on the northern slopes of the massif.
Wherever my grandfather had gone in his remarkable life, he had walked. He had been a diplomat and a mountaineer who spent fifty years travelling the world, and in every posting he had sought out high ground, open space and paths. In Bulgaria in 1940, only a few weeks before the country joined the Axis and banished its British diplomats, he was busy exploring the Rila mountains. In 1943 he and a climber-friend called Robin Hodgkin reached the summit of Demirkazik (12,323 feet) in the Turkish Ala Dag. They thought themselves the first summiteers – but then found a tattered swastika flag left there by an Austrian party several years earlier (ever alert to propaganda opportunities, my grandfather carried it down to prove to local villagers that the Nazis had plans to annex their mountain). The posting he longed for but never got was to Tehran: the politics of Iran fascinated him, but its mountains, rearing snowbound over the city, fascinated him even more. Politics and wild landscape were the two strands of his unusual life. Now he had died, only a few months after my grandmother, in a house at the foot of the mountain range they had both come to know better than anywhere else, and having walked from north to south across the Isles of Lewis and Harris, I was now setting out to walk from south to north across the inland-island of the Cairngorm massif.
My grandfather, whose name was Edward Peck, had a habit of turning up in history at what Eric Hobsbawm called ‘interesting times’. He was in Vienna for the Anschluss in March 1938 and saw Hitler being driven up Mariahilferstrasse in celebration of the union. He watched Jews in Leopoldstadt hurriedly packing suitcases before fleeing for the Czechoslovakian border at Bratislava. In the late spring of the same year, he saw the little figure of the Emperor Haile Selassie being escorted into the headquarters of the League of Nations to plead his case against Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. His first official posting was to Barcelona in the last months of the Civil War; he added Spanish to his languages, and Franco’s propaganda agents led him into torture chambers with blood-soaked walls which they claimed had been used by the Republicans, but which the Republicans claimed had been used by Franco’s men. In wartime Turkey he came very close to the so-called ‘Cicero Affair’, an espionage incident involving an ambassador’s valet; in Berlin he dealt with the arrest of Russian spies outside the zoo, and with the successful British and American ‘listening tunnels’ leading into East Germany (later betrayed by George Blake). In 1947 he was denounced as a ‘fascist dog’ by Pravda and blacklisted by the KGB from ever entering the Soviet Union, much to his relief. He picked up languages like stones and dropped them like feathers; they left him only slowly. I think that, at the height of his powers, he spoke twelve languages. He once advised me to learn Turkish because, he said, you get at least six other Turkic tongues almost for free if you do.*
He loved landscapes passionately, but he wasn’t a landscape mystic. His considerable analytical powers were directed outwards, to the explanation of geopolitics and historical tectonics. This was somewhere we differed; I have always been more interested in the relationship between landscape and individual lives, and how the places we inhabit shape the people we are. Certainly, my grandfather would have been hard pushed to express exactly why certain landscapes meant to him what they did. Not because he was incapable of such analysis, but because to him it was all so self-evident: the beauty of high country in particular; the companionship provoked by passage through certain landscapes; the fortifying power of hardship experienced at nature’s hands; and the dignified tradition of the scholar-mountaineer, to which he made a significant addition himself. He cherished wild country for all these reasons and wherever in the world he found it. He moved through mountains with the minimum of fuss, carrying with him an immense and weightless load of cultural-historical knowledge. He covered vast distances, his steady legs and his six-foot wooden skis taking him to summits in the Himalayas, the Alps, up Kilimanjaro and Kinabalu, and all over the British ranges.
After retirement, he and my grandmother settled in a former forestry cottage near the village of Tomintoul just to the north-east of the Cairngorms proper. The house – which they named Torrans – was set amid pine forestry above the River Avon, which has its source under the Cairngorms themselves. Until his last few years, when failing sight and lameness kept him from the mountains, he walked the paths that led around his home and through the mountains. On one wall of the house hung a large 1:50,000 map of the massif on which the footpaths were marked in Ordnance Survey candy-pink, whose lines we would trace with our fingertips while planning expeditions.* It was the influence of my grandfather and my parents which had drawn me to mountains as a child; it was my grandfather who had helped high country and wild places to cast their strong spells over me.
I started my crossing of the Cairngorms at Blair Atholl, an hour after dawn. Still air, hot and yellow, tepid with moisture. Dark rain-clouds to our north. David was with me again, and we walked together up the valley of Glen Tilt, which runs almost exactly due north-east, cutting up into the lower southern hills of the Cairngorms. The first miles were wooded; the River Tilt incised down into the rock, the path keeping well up the valley side. Siskins flashed yellow between the green. Small birds cheeped busily in the canopies. There was just enough wind to stir the loose skin on the pine trunks. Midges clouded the air, encouraging us onwards. The river was glimpsed through evergreens and birch. I saw a dipper in his pianist’s white bib hunting where water poured onto other water, heard the crash of rapids into plunge-pots. There were wide still pools where the water ran so deep that only the spin and glide of pine needles proved the current’s movement.
The sound of an engine behind us, then the honk of a horn: an estate Land Rover bounced past, hardly slowing to let us leave the track. The back of the vehicle was open but caged. Two glum-faced young men in flat caps gazed out at us without changing their expressions as they trundled on up the valley. Apprentice ghillies, I guessed, but they looked like inmates being transported between penitentiaries. A mile further on we passed the estate shooting lodge. Four men, presumably clients, stood talking a hundred yards away under a larch. I raised a hand, called a brief greeting. They paused their conversation, looked blankly at us, resumed talking. It felt as if we had stumbled into an episode of The Prisoner, and I was glad to get away from the estate roads and out onto the unmetalled footpaths and former drove paths of the upper Tilt.
We stopped to rest by a long river-pool among the dotted ruins of former shielings. A big salmon leapt from the water and flopped back with a splash like a dropped log. Another dipper whirred upstream from rock to rock, then dived, and I watched its dark form digging along underwater. David stripped and bathed in the pool, letting the river rinse away the morning’s miles. He swam out to a flat boulder that lay just beneath the water, and assumed the lotus position upon it, perched miraculously on the water’s surface like a yogi, grinning. But soon the midges moved us on. They were there in their thousands, and they rose like smoke from the heather as we passed: a robust encouragement to all-day walking.
So it was on again, the valley curling round to the north, over a rickety bridge past the vast Pools of Tarf, where a small plaque was raised in memory of a boy who had drowned there a century before. On north-north-east, and then after three further miles, suddenly we were into the open ground of a high flat pass, the first of the day’s two great watersheds. It was a wide valley of yellow moor grass through which wandered a footpath, following the route of the old drove road. Seen at distance, the colour of the mountains was generalized and subdued; the purples and greys of the heather, the bleached grass. But locally, at our feet, the moor was a carpet of colour: the gold of tormentil, the greens and pinks of sphagnum, bright stars of butterwort and sundew, the sage of bog myrtle.
That open ground would have been one of the ‘stances’ of the drovers: the resting places – not too far from water and on level ground – where the men could sleep and the cattle could graze. There are few Highland glens that were not used at one point as a route for the drovers, whose work was a major feature of Highland and Island life between the Act of Union in 1707 and the trade’s decline in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Illegal droving, mostly by reavers (cattle thieves) dated as far back as the sixteenth century, and charters from as early as the fourteenth century refer to via viridis, which seem to have been green roads wide and soft enough to move herds along, but it was the agricultural revolution and the subjugation of the Highlands by General Wade after the rebellion of 1715 that greatly extended the licensed droving industry. Cattle were the chief form of movable wealth in the Highlands, and they had to be transported from the grazing grounds of the Highlands and Islands down to the markets and purchasers in the Lowlands and the Borders. A complex network of tracks, paths and practices came into existence to enable this movement.
A. R. B. Haldane, in his classic work on the subject, The Drove Roads of Scotland (1952), describes how during the Second World War, intrigued by ‘a lonely grass-grown track crossing the hills’ behind his home in Perthshire, he became drawn into the history of the droving centuries. He determined to map the main drove-ways as best he could, even as they were disappearing, and set out to re-walk many of their routes, reading and pacing his way back into an understanding of the era. His book – though wary of nostalgia and rigorous in its historiography – has a finely managed tinge of elegy to it. In his account the drovers, while resilient in the face of hardship, were by no means impervious to beauty. They relished – some of them at least – what he called a ‘love of movement and adventure’, and they left behind them the landmarks of a fascinating age:
The brown sails of the cattle boats have gone from The Minch. On slipways and jetties from Skye to Kintyre, thrift grows undisturbed in the crannies of stones once smooth and polished with the tread of hooves. Lonely saltings where the Uist droves once grazed, and throughout the Highlands in hill pass and moorland, as in the minds of men, the passing years increasingly dim and obscure the mark and the memory of the men and beasts that once travelled the drove roads of Scotland.
The Cairngorms are a landscape on which both history and snow – perhaps the two substances my grandfather loved most – lay thickly. Climatically speaking, the Cairngorms are Britain’s Arctic. In winter, storm winds of up to 170 miles per hour rasp the upper shires of the range, and avalanches scour its lee slopes. My grandparents saw the tremble of the aurora borealis from the north windows of their house: billowing curtains of green or, more rarely, red light. In places on the summit plateaux of the massif, the wind blows so hard and insistently that vegetation exists in bonsai form: pine trees grow to just a few inches high; there are dwarf willows; and a miniature creeping azalea called Loiseleuria procumbens – which became one of my grandfather’s favourite alpine plants – forms mats barely an inch high among the pebbles, keeping its head down, staying prostrate (procumbens). The massif is a terrain shaped by what Nan Shepherd once called ‘the elementals’. Mountain landscapes appear chaotic in their jumbledness, but they are in fact ultra-logical landscapes, organized by the climatic extremes and severe expressions of gravity: so hyper-ordered as to seem chance-made.
Anna ‘Nan’ Shepherd was born in Aberdeen in 1893 and died there in 1981, and during her long life she, like my grandparents, spent hundreds of days and covered thousands of miles exploring the Cairngorms on foot. Her reputation as a writer rests on the three modernist novels she published between 1928 and 1933 (The Quarry Wood, The Weatherhouse, A Pass in the Grampians), but to my mind her most important work is her least known – an eighty-page prose meditation on the Cairngorms, and more generally on our relationship with landscape – called The Living Mountain, written in the 1940s but not published until 1977. It is a difficult work to characterize. A celebratory prose-poem? A geo-poetic quest? A philosophical enquiry into the nature of knowledge? None of these quite fits, though it is all of them in part. Shepherd herself called it ‘a traffic of love’ between herself and the mountains – with ‘traffic’ implying ‘exchange’ and ‘mutuality’ rather than ‘congestion’ or ‘blockage’.
The book’s prose is both exhilaratingly materialist – thrilled by the alterity of the Cairngorm granite, by a mountain-world which ‘does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself’ – and almost animist in its account of how mind and mountain interact. What Shepherd understood – like Edward Thomas, and like so many of the other people in this book – was that landscape has long offered us keen ways of figuring ourselves to ourselves, strong means of shaping memories and giving form to thought. Like Thomas, she thought topographically, and like Thomas she understood herself to be in some way thought by place. On the mountain, she wrote, moments occur at which ‘something moves between me and it. Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered. I cannot tell what this movement is except by recounting it.’
Better than anyone else I have read, Shepherd ‘recounted’ the power of the Highland landscape to draw people into intimacy with it, and showed how particular places might make possible particular thoughts. Slowly and effortfully, my grandparents acquired an intimacy with the Cairngorms. Torrans and its fields became a compact between the wildness of the uplands and the civilization of the valleys. Striking accommodations and compromises were often arrived at with the terrain. Where she encountered erratics so heavy they couldn’t be shifted, my grandmother built rock gardens around them and grew alpine succulents between them. They had an acre of land behind the house that ran up to the treeline of the forestry, and seventeen acres of rough marshy pasture. On one side the pasture sloped down to a stream gorge with three waterfalls, by the sides of which grew geans. On the other it fell to the banks of the River Avon itself, whose waters in spring spated with snow-melt from the Cairngorms, and in whose summer pools the salmon, following their migration routes up to the source, would hang and flicker. When the water was warm enough, which was almost never, my brother and I would float downstream, goggled and snorkelled, our heads under the water, looking for the shadows of the fish. On the shoulder of moor that faced Torrans from the south, gorse showed yellow and ling showed purple, and curlew would sometimes settle there in number, setting high curved cries adrift across the valley.
The house and the pasture stood on an unusual upsurge of Scottish limestone, which sits above the hard-wearing mica-schists of the Avon valley and beneath the great granite batholith of the Cairngorms themselves. The calcium in the soil made it fairly good grazing land, and so sheep and cattle were brought onto the pasture in summer. My grandparents also planted their land up with trees, both those native to Scotland, and exotics which stood in memory of the countries where they had lived. They planted willows, cherries, alders and birches in number, as well as special singletons: a Nothofagus antarctica, a Metasequoia glyptostroboides (the coelacanth of trees, thought long extinct, then discovered alive in China in 1950), a Western Hemlock, a Korean Fir, a Noble Fir, and a red-barked Tibetan Prunus. Gradually, they named their land into being: ‘The Torrans Burn’, ‘The Crocodile’, ‘Alison’s Folly’, ‘The Avon Express’. Small acts of verbal landscaping, a temporary habitation. It was, though, always a struggle to manage the incursions of the wild: the snow that drifted to ten feet against the sides of the house in deep winter, the deer and rabbits that ate the seedlings, the family of pine martens that one year nested in the roof and liked to play in my grandmother’s underwear drawer.
Somewhere on the moorland of the first watershed, we crossed over from the schists onto the Cairngorm granite proper: a medley of quartz, feldspar and tiny sheets of dark glinting mica, which weathers over time to a grey brown but which, when cracked open or scarred, reveals a rock the pinkish colour of flesh. It was on the granite that we entered the Lairig Ghru.
