The old ways, p.17
The Old Ways, page 17
The Lairig Ghru is the great glacier-gouged valley that divides the Cairngorm massif from north to south, and whose highest point – at over 2,600 feet – is higher than the summits of most British mountains. It is also among the most affecting places I know. Entering the Ghru from north or south, I have always had the feeling of crossing a portal or border. People have died in the Lairig Ghru, and more have died on the summits to either side of it. One of Shepherd’s own students perished in a blizzard, ‘far out of her path’, her body found months after her death – once the drifts had thawed – with abrasions to her knees and hands where she had crawled over rough granite boulders, battered to the ground by exhaustion, snow and wind.
Through the droving centuries, the Lairig Ghru was the main route across the massif, taking cattle down through Glen Lui and then on south to Braemar. Sheep coming from Skye would occasionally be driven across the pass, and its last recorded use as a drove route was in 1873. It posed problems to the drovers, however, in terms of distance, severity of weather and ground underfoot. Each winter brought fresh stone-fall from the surrounding crags, and the upper reaches of the pass became strewn with leg-breaking boulders, ill-suited to the hooves and long legs of cattle. So late each spring, men were sent up to the high pass to shift the boulders and open the path.
David and I entered the Lairig Ghru from the south, moving up and over the pink flat steps of granite down which the young River Dee split and tripped. We passed between the gatekeeper peaks of the valley: Devil’s Point to the west, with its diagonal flashings of scree, and the black flank of Carn a’ Mhaim to the east, down which a thin line of white water was crashing, thousands of feet above us. Both peaks loomed, close and intimidating, and I felt the signal prickle of entering a wild space.
Then we were over the border, and into the pass proper. On the valley floor flourished a fragrant and complex ground cover: bog myrtle, bog asphodel, juniper with its ginny scent, the creeping azalea, dwarf pine trees, saxifrages, bilberry and ling. I began to gather bunches of Cairngorm flora; one to place on my grandfather’s coffin, and one to burn on the summit pass. Where the river swung close to the path, we stopped and bathed our feet in its pools. The midges still smoked the air, still maddened us.
So it was up and on for another four or five miles, towards the high point of the Ghru, the pass itself. David walked ahead and, left alone, I was struck suddenly by a hammer blow of sadness. Looking west, I saw the snows of Braeriarch. In the shaded north-east-facing corries and crags of that great mountain, old snow often lies all year round, sintering slowly into ice, sitting in cold stagnancy, the snow breeding its own little ice age. It’s a reminder that winter never really leaves the Cairngorms, or rather that this is the point from which the cold musters itself again each year, and out of which it pours. A reminder, too, that the summit of the Lairig Ghru was, 12,000 years ago, not a watershed but an ice-shed: the point from which glaciers crept seawards to north and south, scouring out the shape of the Highland landscape we now know, scavenging into the granite.
Granite was my grandfather’s best-loved rock. He shared his liking of granite with one of his heroes, Goethe, to whose writing he had been introduced when studying at Oxford in the mid-1930s under Walter Ettinghausen, who later went on to found the Israeli Foreign Service. As a young man, Goethe wrote an essay entitled ‘Über der Granit’: an essay on (über, ‘concerning’) the subject of granite, but also an essay about literally being on (über, ‘over’) granite. Granite – that igneous rock of upsurges and plugs – satisfied Goethe for its connection to the earth’s hot core. Shepherd valued granite for similar reasons. One October night she slept out on the granite of the plateau in air that was as ‘bland as silk’, and while half asleep felt herself become stone-like, ‘rooted … in … immobility’. On a hot summer day she lay down and sensed under her ‘the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and snow – the total mountain’.
Over the course of his eighties, my grandfather got less and less often to the granite, felt less often the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun. He gave up the summits for the passes, then the passes for the valleys, and at last the valleys for the limestone land around the house. His mobility decreased, and his eyesight lessened. He could only walk in memory the routes in the Cairngorms that he knew so well underfoot. Balustrades were fixed on the path down to the gorge to prevent slips and falls. Stiles became difficult to negotiate. Even in his nineties, however, he was occasionally to be found on his old cross-country skis – long heavy wooden skis, made in Austria in the 1930s – sliding up and down the driveway. As his legs weakened and his sight failed, his desire for the hills – for the bend in the path, for the hill after this one – remained undiminished. Unable to reach the mountains himself, he began to live through stories told to him by his children and grandchildren, nourished on accounts of walks taken by others, or by the recollections of his own climbs and treks. Even in the furthest depths of his age, when he was increasingly mentally confused, brief periods of intense clarity would occur, lucid river-pools in the mind, and he would offer topographically accurate accounts of turns in certain Himalayan valleys, or the summits which were viewable from a particular Scottish peak.
We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places – retreated to most often when we are most remote from them – are among the most important landscapes we possess. Adam Nicolson has written of the ‘powerful absence[s]’ that remembered landscapes exert upon us, but they exist as powerful presences too, with which we maintain deep and abiding attachments. These, perhaps, are the landscapes in which we live the longest, warped though they are by time and abraded though they are by distance. The consolation of recollected places finds its expression frequently in the accounts of those – exiles, prisoners, the ill, the elderly – who can no longer physically reach the places that sustain them. When Edward Thomas travelled to fight on the Western Front, the memories of his ‘South Country’ were among the things he carried. ‘When standing at the entrance of his dugout,’ wrote his widow, Helen, after his death:
he looked north and saw, or dreamed he saw, Sussex, with her gentle downs scattered with sheeplike grey boulders, and thorn trees bent and wracked by the wind, and the sheltering folds where the wind never came; and Kent, the Weald of Kent, whose clay oaks and hops and apples love, whose copses the nightingale seeks; Hampshire, with her hangers of beech and yew, merry tree, and white beam, and the cottage at the foot of the hill.
Kenn, the young hero of Neil Gunn’s novel Highland River (1937), grows up by the side of the Dunbeath river in the Highland region of Caithness. He comes to know the river so well that when he is sent to the trenches to fight in the First World War he can ‘more readily picture the parts of it he knew than the trench systems he floundered amongst. In zero moments it could rise before him with the clearness of a chart showing the main current of his nervous system and its principal tributaries.’ John McGahern has written of how the Irishmen who were imprisoned by the British during the War of Independence fought off the boredoms and humiliations of jail by sharing their memories of the River Shannon, ‘walking together in their imagination up one bank of the Shannon in the morning, returning down the opposite bank in the evening, each man picking out what others had missed on the way.’ ‘They knew,’ concludes McGahern, ‘the river stretches like their own lives.’ When the painter John Nash was in the trenches of the Western Front with a Romany friend from Buckinghamshire, they discussed the old ways and green lanes of England, telling stories to each other that were guided by the paths they had walked, and they promised each other that, if they escaped the mud alive, they would travel them together.
As we approached the Lairig Ghru’s summit, the beaten-earth track narrowed to a slender thread and disappeared altogether into the wilderness of a boulder field. Then – as when Manus’s path became apparent in the glen of stones on Lewis – I suddenly learnt to see the path: now a faint line of rosy granite, scoured from the brown patina of the boulders by the passage of feet and crampons. Shepherd had noticed the same phenomenon of the granite ‘shin[ing] as red as new-made rock’ where feet had fallen.
We followed that track of new-made rock and it led us to the Pools of Dee, two tiny lochans whose water falls as rain and snow and is filtered by the granite of the pass. I have seen the Pools many times, and except once in winter when they were frozen solid, their water has always been miraculously limpid. To my mind the Pools possess a near-supernatural presence, recalling the dust-free mirrors of Buddhist symbolism or the ‘well at the world’s end’ in Neil Gunn’s novel of the same name, which contains water so clear that it is invisible to the eye but palpable to the hand.
That day, amid the confusion of boulders, the silver sheets of the Pools’ surfaces were a surprise, and the lucidity of their waters once more an astonishment. Transparent and reflective, they appeared like the mountain’s own eyes, gazing skywards. I stood by the edge of the first one. The stones in its shallows seemed set beneath glass. Green weed on its floor caught the light and sent it back. I stooped and dipped a hand through the mirror, the water binding cold to my fingers.
‘A mountain has an inside,’ Shepherd had written. It is a superbly counter-intuitive proposition, for we customarily imagine mountains in terms of their external surfaces and outward-facing forms: cliffs, plateaux, pinnacles, ridges and scarps. But mountains are also defined by their interiors: their corries, caves, hollows and valleys, and by the depths of their rivers, lochs and lochans. Once our eyes have learnt to see that mountains are composed of absent space as well as massy presence, then we might also come to imagine walking not ‘up’ a mountain but ‘into’ a mountain. Shepherd was always looking into the mountain landscape; again and again she pries through surfaces: into cracks in rocks, into the luminous interior of lochs or rivers. She stepped naked into the shallows of Loch Avon, she poked fingers down mouse-holes into the snowpack, and she recalled how as a child she would play in waterfall-pools by ‘pitching into them the tiniest white stones I can find, and watching through the appreciable time they take to sway downwards to the bottom’. ‘Into’, in The Living Mountain, is a preposition that gains – by means of repeated use – the power of a verb. She went into the mountains searching not for the great outdoors but instead for profound ‘interiors’, deep ‘recesses’.
On foot for hour after hour, wrote Shepherd, one ‘walks the flesh transparent’. ‘On the mountain,’ she remarks in the closing sentences of The Living Mountain, ‘I am beyond desire. It is not ecstasy … I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. That is the final grace accorded from the mountain.’ This was her version of Descartes’s cogito: I walk therefore I am. She celebrated the metaphysical rhythm of the pedestrian, the iamb of the ‘I am’, the beat of the placed and lifted foot.
The final half-mile up to the watershed. Heavy legs, slow feet. A blue dusk starting to haze the air. The terrain narrowing, funnelling down. Perception gradually squeezed, sightlines narrowed, vision diminished … and then suddenly the pass was reached and the world yawned open ahead, pine-forested northern lands spread out ahead and below us. I placed my handful of bog myrtle, azalea, juniper and dry heather on a natural ortholith of granite, and set them alight: a brief flare of orange in the dusk, a beacon-fire at the pass.
We walked on in the gathering gloom, down the great north slope of the massif, telling stories to each other to sustain ourselves, down through the vast pine forest of Rothiemurchus, which in that dusk had become a fairy-tale wood of shadows and toadstools, through which the path picked its way, moonlight shimmering off the pine needles and pooling in the tears of resin wept by the pines to either side, and in this way we made the descent to the north, the sky above us still blue and incredible, our legs tiring and our pace slowing.
Towards the very end of his life, even the walk down to the stream gorge became impossible for my grandfather. His legs – which had carried him so far over so many countries – lost their vigour, his centre of gravity rose and his stability diminished. Stride shortened to shuffle, shuffle to dodder, dodder to step. The walking sticks that he and my grandmother had for years kept by the back door, used for whacking down nettles or for pointing out landscape features, became crucial auxiliaries to movement.
During the same years that my grandfather was losing the ability to walk, my children – his two first great-grandchildren – were gaining it. Step lengthened to dodder, dodder to shuffle, shuffle to stride. Five days after my grandfather died, my three-year-old son and my five-year-old daughter reached the summit of their first true hill, Darling Fell, near Loweswater in the Lake District. The final slopes of that fell are sheep-cropped grass, into which previous walkers have imprinted a series of deep and distinct footmarks. My children went on ahead of me to climb that last slope, fitting their feet into the marks, following the invitation of the print-trail. I watched them go, and thought of having been one of those children myself, watched by my parents, and of my mother having been one of those children in turn, watched over in turn by my grandparents. When the summit had been reached, we all sat together, drank cups of sugary tea and looked across at the mountain ridges receding into the distance, too many to count.
My grandfather’s funeral occurred in the modest church in the village of Tomintoul. I stood with my brother and our cousins by the door. There were murmurs and handshakes with people we did not know, or knew but could not name. A procession of dark suits, respectful comments. The coffin-bearers wore black gloves on their thin arms, and reminded me of Mickey Mouse. The organist struck up. Mourners moved up the aisles and into the dark-wood pews. High in the north-east Cairngorms, the quartz of the granite shone in the light, and the mica of the granite flashed. Foam in the pools of the Avon, and alder leaves turning in eddies. I walked to the front of the church where the coffin was waiting, an arrangement of gentians, heather and delphiniums on its pine lid, and tucked a sprig of creeping azalea into the heart of the bouquet.
The service began. The minister said, ‘What will survive of us is love.’ Scree shifts slightly in Lurchers Gully in the Northern Corries of the Cairngorm. A stone falls and then comes to rest. ‘What will survive of Edward and Alison is love,’ said the minister. ‘Knowing another is endless,’ Shepherd had written; ‘The thing to be known grows with the knowing.’ I nearly cried, and could not tell why I did not.
As we filed out of the church, the organist struck up with ‘The Road to the Isles’. It’s a well-known Scottish folk song of nineteenth-century music-hall origin – rife with pseudo-Gaelicisms and tinged with remembered Jacobitism – about dreamed-of western landscapes, the open road that leads to them and the foot-travel by which they will be reached. It plays with the walk west to the Hebrides as a walk in the direction of loss, a journey towards the setting sun. My mother’s mother had sung it to her, and she in turn had sung it to me as a lullaby and as a walking song, in her high voice.
A far croonin’ is pullin’ me away
As take I wi’ my cromack to the road.
The far Coolins are puttin’ love on me
As step I wi’ the sunlight for my load.
The organist duffed note after note, but the song was still recognizable, and the old words ran through my head in time to the music. We moved onto the pavement and into the sunlight. More murmurs, more handshakes. Sunlight, pebbledash, car-noise, woodsmoke. People were bustling and talking, louder now, while the organist played boldly on. The hearse gleamed. The congregation was reflected in its polished side doors. The bearers emerged, wheeling the coffin on its carriage. A whispered one, two, three, heave and the coffin was off the carriage and into the back of the hearse. It shifted a few millimetres each way, nudging the rubber buffers which held it like a parent guarding a young child from harm.
Sure by Tummel and Loch Rannoch and Lochaber I will go
By heather tracks wi’ heaven in their wiles.
If it’s thinkin’ in your inner heart the braggart’s in my step,
You’ve never smelled the tangle o’ the Isles.
One of the coffin-bearers stepped into the middle of the road, and raised a flat hand to stop the traffic with all the authority vested in him by death and dark clothes. The cars slowed, stopped, began to back up into a queue. From inside the church the final verse of ‘The Road to the Isles’ drifted out.
The blue islands are pullin’ me away
Their laughter puts the leap upon the lame;
The blue islands from the Skerries to the Lewis
Wi’ heather honey taste upon each name.
The hearse starts off up the road, and in front of it, a few yards ahead of it, leading the way, clearing the path, goes the chief coffin-bearer, stepping slowly and measuredly up the road, a respectful stiffness to his gait and his body. Sun glints on the dark road, the hearse creeps forwards, the undertaker makes my grandfather’s final walk for him, his journey marked by the beat of each carefully placed and lifted foot.
Part III
ROAMING (ABROAD)
10
Limestone
Raja Shehadeh — Claustrophobia & conflict — The sarha — Walking as resistance — Depressions of the land, depressions of the spirit — Reaching Ramallah — The basketball match of the Martyrs — A strange pattern of lights — Down Wadi ’qda — Bullet-holes & bullet-casings — Natsch — Land-zones — Qasr & dog fox — A wadi path — ‘Encrustations of curses’, ‘bones of rock’ — The imam’s sermon — The Zalatimos — Taboun pebbles — Clemens Messerschmid — Preferential pathways — Chert eyes & amorous chameleons — Contact springs & generosity — Walk, Don’t Walk.
