The river roars with the voice of an angry ghost in a long-severed Celtic head. There are places that carry their own chill on the brightest day, where, when rain darkens the hills and the mists hang low, one’s eye half catches stealthy movement, one’s ears hear a soft footfall. Go, if you dare, to Glen Orchy when the spates are out; stand back, for any sake, from the banks, for this is a greedy river that takes a life as readily as it tears away a rock or a tree. Stand back, the ground trembling under your feet, and you may yet see, crossing the riven flanks of the braes above the pines, the wraiths of the Children of the Mist, and hear the baying of Glenorchy’s black hounds.
– Marion Campbell, Argyll: The Enduring Heartland
THE RIVER ORCHY is as short-lived as it is greedy, as it is beautiful. It springs into life fully formed from the womb of Loch Tulla, and succumbs fifteen eventful miles later into the north end of Loch Awe. No yard of its dark and wilful surge south-west through Glen Orchy and Strath Orchy is dull. In spate, as Marion Campbell observes, it carelessly plucks hapless alders from its banks and hurls them into oblivion, yet there are always miles of bank-lining alders, always new recruits to thicken the ranks. It whitens over rapids and sprawling waterfalls that present long-rather-than-high-jump challenges for salmon hell-bent on the spawning burns, and for white-faced downstream canoeists. It is unfailing friend to dipper, kingfisher, goosander, heron, otter and, increasingly, to ospreys – the fish-eating tribes.
And to me. I have known it, tramped its glen, camped on its banks, cooled off in its pools after long days on Glen Orchy’s hills, for forty years. The commercial forestry industry has done some of its most thoughtless work in Glen Orchy, flinging dull green, one-dimensional forests over miles and miles of hillsides and brutally clear-felling in a landscape that deserves so much better, for Glen Orchy was a hearthstone of Scotland’s historic native forest, and from here to the furthest north-east corner of Rannoch was one of the greatest flourishes of the so-called Great Wood of Caledon. Whenever and wherever nature can snatch half a chance to fight back in today’s glen, it does so with alder on the low ground by the river and far up the mountain burns, with birch, hazel, aspen, willow, whitebeam, rowan, ash, oak and Scots pine.
Glen Orchy is also something of a watershed in the history of the Highland clans and right at the very heart of the unfolding events that made Scotland, the nation. A dear old friend, the late Marion Campbell of Kilberry, wrote a moving and highly personal interpretation of those times up to the very day when James VI turned his back on Scotland forever, in her timeless book Argyll: The Enduring Heartland (Turnstone Press, 1977):
This was MacGregor country. They trace their descent from King Gerig or Griogar, grandson of Alpin and nephew of that Kenneth who united Picts and Scots. Their arms display a fallen pine with a crown in its branches… From these mountains they preyed upon newer clans with parchment titles to Clan Alpin’s hunting grounds. Out of this wilderness they were hunted, driven to change their name and find surety for good conduct, or else hang. Their women’s faces were branded, their children herded into camps run by their enemies. These children could be flogged and branded for trying to escape; a second attempt (or one if they were over eighteen) was punishable by death.
This bestial business was King James’s “parting gift to Scotland”, in the words of the editor of the Privy Council Register. All chiefs with lands bordering the MacGregor country from Perthshire to Loch Lomond took part in the policy, but the experts were Argyll and his kinsman, Glenorchy. For many ghastly years the name of MacGregor was proscribed, until at last there remained twelve men who had neither bought safety nor changed their name. They were saved by a dispute between King and Earl over sharing the proceeds of fining those who dared help “the clan that is nameless by day”.
The wonder is that any of them survived, but they did, much as their language survived the Act of 1616 for establishing schools “that the vulgar Inglische tongue be universallie plantit and the Irische language, quilk is ane of the chief and principall causis of the continewance of barbaritie… abolisheit and removit”.
So much for the tongue in which Columba preached. The MacGregors were not the only victims of royal policy; the King in his wisdom had found a Hitlerish solution to several bothersome problems…
The River Orchy itself, its nurturing hills, a handful of the oldest trees… these are all that remain that also bore witness to all that. The river is the lifeblood of all Glen Orchy’s eras these last ten thousand years since the Rannoch ice cap’s benevolence gave it life. Its setting and its place in the hearts and minds of the people of the Highland west deserve rather better than it has been accorded by my own generation.
Glen Orchy is, of course, an eagle glen. Golden eagles often hunt ptarmigan and white hares over the plateau summit of my favourite mountain hereabouts, which is to say one of my favourite mountains anywhere. The views reach from Jura and Mull in the west to Rannoch in the east and Ben Nevis in the north, and back to Stob Binnein and Ben More, those Siamese twin mountains that straddle the divide between Balquhidder and Glen Dochart. Eagles have connected all this land forever. The golden eagles of Glen Orchy have never left. The sea eagles of Glen Orchy went the way of all their tribe, in much the same way that the MacGregors were eliminated, and by the same kind of people and for the same reason – they simply disapproved of their right to occupy the land. (How did you put it, Marion, “a Hitlerish solution”?) As yet I am uncertain of whether sea eagles ever nested in the glen, although I can’t think why not, and I do know now that historically they nested on the islands of Loch Ba and Loch Tulla to the north-east, and of Loch Awe to the south-west, which means that for thousands of years Glen Orchy was at the very least a lifeline between sea eagle territories, and its river and open forest and hills were hunting terrain for nesting birds from all three lochs. And as the coast-to-coast eagle highway evolves through the early decades of the twenty-first century, the glen begins once more to resemble its historic past in this regard – that prospecting sea eagles from the east coast and the west are finding their way by accident or design to their historic homelands at both ends of the glen, and there they will find in Glen Orchy the familiar company of golden eagles and ospreys, and the wraiths of the Children of the Mist.
I never met the wraiths, despite many mist-bound days in the glen, but I had often met the golden eagles on the hill high above their nesting corrie. And once, after a long, hot September day in the hills I was slaking my thirst in the lower reaches of the Allt Ghamhnain and cooling off in one of its dark pools when three golden eagles appeared together gliding down the open flank of the corrie and almost wingtip-to-wingtip-to-wingtip, two adults and their offspring of that year. Floating on my back in the water I raised a hand in greeting and gratitude, for their appearance was like a seal of approval or a blessing. “I do believe in God,” said the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, “but I spell it Nature.” And amen to that, say I. And once I saw those eagles’ kin from the neighbouring territory somewhere beyond the far side of the glen slashing a contour across the autumn-yellow hillsides and banking one after the other into a side glen, which they sped through at a climbing angle until they burst from shadow into sunlight again, pulled back on nature’s joystick (or however nature effects such things) and climbed vertically, shining copper and gold, until they dwindled to black motes of dust, and if you pushed me I would guess they were about five thousand feet up by that time.
The River Orchy is almost serene where it emerges from Glen Orchy and curves west into the wider, quieter plain of Strath Orchy, its havoc wreaked, its turbulent youth far behind it, likewise the roar of the “angry ghost in a long-severed Celtic head”. Ahead is the steely Loch Awe that the river greets with a last left-handed swerve to the south. Loch Awe lies on the land like an uncoiled snake, its jaws agape and clamped round the landmark mountain massif of Ben Cruachan. Its tail is twenty miles away in the south-west, and no more than a few minutes of eagle flight from the sea at Loch Craignish; and beyond, a cluster of small Hebridean islands – Shuna, Luing, Lunga, Scarba – whose skies are dominated by the more robust glories of Jura and Islay. Loch Awe brings all that finally within the grasp of a young sea eagle that took its first faltering flight among the distant, gentle greenery of north Fife where it crossed a low ridge, saw the Tay estuary for the first time and recognised both a source of food and a highway west.
Loch Awe has been a mainland haunt of wandering young sea eagles from Mull from the very earliest days of the whole sea eagle adventure, and historically it was part of their heartlands, and now, it opens up the west for birds from the east. But westering birds that decline the loch’s south-west diversion hold to Cruachan’s southern flank above the open jaws of the water snake, thread the defile of the Pass of Brander and emerge into the bright new world of Loch Etive, and it too is an arm of the highway, for some of its headwaters gather in the hills above Loch Tulla. The final link in the chain is in sight, for there, sprawling across the western sky are the heaped mountains of Mull, and beyond the mighty Sound of Mull, the treasures of Sunart and Ardnamurchan.
West of the Corran Ferry, south of Ardgour, and east of the Ardnamurchan Peninsula, lie the hallowed lands of Sunart. Hallowed, for there you will find astounding vestiges of the coastal oakwoods that once shielded much of Europe’s western edge against the slings and arrows of Atlantic storms. The Sunart oakwoods are glorious, their survival is miraculous, and their future is guaranteed thanks to enlightened management by today’s human natives, management that embraces conservation, careful timber extraction, a new generation of workers-in-wood, and tourism with a refreshingly light touch. All that has a name, a millennium project called the Sunart Oakwood Initiative. In a chapter about these woods in an earlier book, The Great Wood (Birlinn, 2011), I wrote:
Nature of course, had been working the woods for rather longer, and changes wrought by climate, fire, storm and flood, all manipulated a forest like this, discouraging some species, washing up new ones, readjusting the ground cover, the insects, the birds, the mammals. The oakwood I walked in on the first day of spring is a much-tampered-with piece of ground, for all its aura of timelessness, and the tampering goes on to this day, although ours is arguably the first of all this wood’s eras to approach it in a mindset of healing.
The mindset of healing is infectious. I found myself involuntarily slowing my footsteps and commanding them to soften their sound and their imprint, evolving an exaggerated gait that suddenly reminded me of a Tom and Jerry cartoon in which one or the other is trying to sneak past the sleeping brute of a guard dog. So I told myself to relax and walk properly, but softly and lightly, naturally.
Loch Teacuis is an arm of the Atlantic that cuts deep into these woods, and opens into their main artery, Loch Sunart. I prowled the woods and the open shore near the loch’s narrowest point where the sea fairly rumbles inland on a rising tide. A falling tide is generally better for otters, but “generally” does not take into account the possibilities offered by that other crucial element – luck.
Mostly, I have acquired my personal store of knowledge by repeatedly reworking the same set of circumstances until something close to intimacy begins to enter the equation and I begin to feel more like a part of the landscape than an occasional visitor. But from time to time, all is superseded just by the fluke of being in the right place at the right time. Such a day is part of my personal anthology of the Sunart oakwoods. I had a vague plan to walk through the woods to where Loch Teacuis melts into Loch Sunart, then return by the shore of Loch Teacuis to the place where I was staying. A good oakwood – a good wood of any kind – mixes different densities of trees with clearings, water both static and on the move, bogs, low-lying glens and dens and high vantage points, airiness and brightness with cloister gloom. If such a wood throws in occasional glimpses of mountains and the scent and sound of the ocean, it is fair to say that I will be that wood’s happiest bunny.
One of the vantage points that day was a grassy and almost treeless mound that rose seventy or eighty feet above the woodland floor. It offered a sightline into a particularly dense copse of youngish trees fringing an older core where the trees were dark and thick of girth but not too tall. Ever since I saw a goshawk a few days before and only a few miles away, I took time to inspect every change in the terrain with binoculars before I plunged in. A formless fretwork of branches belonging to a hundred different trees takes time to inspect, but I had time. So I sat down and worked the glasses from canopy to floor and from east to west, examining everything that caught my eye, covering the most promising stretches more than once to make sure. Finally the glasses came to rest on something bright pink.
Such a shade is not an obvious one to stumble across in an oakwood on the first day of spring. It puzzled me at once, and I could make nothing of it. It also annoyed me, for I had already decided that anything pink and inanimate in an oakwood must be litter, yet these are the kind of woods where there is no litter at all. I stared at the thing with a “What the…?” frown furrowing my forehead. So it was pink, and small, no more than a few inches across, and roughly triangular but it was also partly obscured by branches, so not necessarily triangular at all. It was deep in the copse and high up among the branches of one of the bigger trees. Then it moved. It became blurred for a moment then resumed its place, as if a gust of wind had bowed the branch where it had snagged (I was still thinking “litter”) then blown on by, so that the branch also resumed its position. But there had been no gust.
I picked out a tree on the edge of the copse in a direct line with the pink thing and set off downhill. When I reached the tree there was no pink in sight, so I headed into the copse along the same line, looking up. Then, as I neared the biggest trees, it reappeared straight ahead and about thirty feet up, and this time it was very clear what it was – a pink plastic wing-tag, and it was attached to the wing of a very large sea eagle indeed. At the precise moment I made my diagnosis, all I could see of the bird was most of one wing, most of the tail (no white, so a young bird, probably last year’s chick from a Mull eyrie on an away day to the mainland), and one foot that had apparently been clumsily strung with fish hooks instead of fitted with regular-sized talons at birth. But then nothing about a sea eagle is regular-sized. Then a shudder went through the bird that burst open folded wings and pushed the head forward so that it now showed beyond an intervening oak limb, and I saw in profile the hook of an oversized bill and that hooded eye, which even in the deep shade of the copse seemed to be lit from within.
And of course that eye saw mine in the same instant, and I was unmasked at twenty yards. The eagle leaned back and was erect again, and for a moment the wing-tag was back where it had been a few seconds before. Then there was a new convulsion and the bird was suddenly airborne, except that there was almost as much wood as air in that unfathomable weave of twigs, branches and limbs. Unfathomable to human eyes, but fathomable enough even for the most juvenile of eagles, for it made a tight turn with its wings almost vertical for a moment so that it looked briefly like an oak tree itself, then the whole edifice righted itself in a single, impressively fluid glide and slid smoothly down to a yard above the woodland floor, and bore clear out of the trees below the level of every encumbering branch. The woodland confines magnified the bird and the huge gestures of its wings, and dignified the accomplishment of its short flight through the copse.
Out in the clear air, the eagle climbed steeply above the bank of trees that lay between the mound and the hidden shore, then I saw it veer away up the loch. For no reason that makes any sense to me now, several years after the event, I ran after it with what little speed was available to an earth-bound mortal over such terrain – out of the copse, across the clearing, up the slope of the bank of trees, across its wide crown, then steeply down the far side until I burst out of the oaks and onto the rocks and mud of the shore of Loch Teacuis where I stopped long enough to recover my breath and the shards of my composure, and to look up the loch for the eagle. There was, naturally enough, no eagle in sight, but only because I was looking in the wrong place.
I had scanned miles of empty high-tide shore in both directions and on both sides of Loch Teacuis. I looked for the eagle, for any eagle at all. Finding none, I looked for otters (fat chance at such a high tide), for sometimes sea eagles try and rob otters of fish they have caught and brought ashore. Finding none, I looked for crows displaying their “eagle-alert” behaviour, which in my experience in landscapes like this is indistinguishable from their “otter-alert” behaviour except that sometimes altitude is involved. Finding none, I fell back on my well-practised ritual for situations like this when something rare and extraordinary has happened and been superseded by nothing at all: I find a flat rock and sit down.
Having sat, I tried to come to terms with a niggling sense of unfinished business. Sometimes this happens. Sometimes, when it does, I respond to an internal command that I should sit still and wait, in expectation of more to come. Logic plays no part in the process. Instead, I start to scrutinise the circumstances I have just gatecrashed, in this case my slightly absurd pursuit of inexplicable pink. That scrutiny concludes – no, it does not conclude, it inclines towards a possibility – that the scene I encountered was but a moment in an unfolding sequence of events that had yet to run its course. There is no common ground and no pattern to the occasions when the phenomenon arises, and sometimes it is well founded and others not, in which case I feel like an idiot after a fruitlessly expectant hour of sitting and waiting and seeing nothing at all. But it all has to do with trusting that particular instinct which is a kind of shorthand in my writing life for all the years of watching and wandering and tracking nature’s spoor and coming to conclusions about what I find and then trying to write them down. So I sat.
I sat because I heeded the command which I have come to think of as nature speaking to me directly, and when I can contrive nothing at all in response to nature’s urging I tend to think that the failure is mine, that the quality of the waiting and the watching is lacking. I do not like to disappoint nature so I try harder, sit longer, wondering “what next?”
So once again, I was sitting and painstakingly scouring all the ways I think an eagle might have flown from its perch in the oakwoods, and I was finding nothing because I was looking in the wrong place. Across the loch and further inland from the narrows and away to my left, the dark wall of hills relented and leaned back and climbed less steeply, so that it had a more open, brighter aspect. A buttress of black rock guarded the near corner of that brighter land. Suddenly the airspace beyond the buttress was smothered in sunlight, crammed with sunbeams aslant, a moment so startling, so vivid, so golden, that I stared at its sorcery. But there was something else up there, a new movement among the shifting, translucent diagonals of sunlight. That yellow-gold air was violently astir with eagle wings, with the wings of no less than four sea eagles. An aerial ballet was in mid-performance, a thing of fluid grace and beauty executed by birds which until that moment I had never suspected of possessing such possibilities. Overlapping wings curved and filled like sails in a rising wind, and the four birds rose and fell, turned on vertically held wings, touched talons, and finally (in a gesture that reminded me at once of the Glen Orchy golden eagle family) formed a level, gliding line that drifted away west over the hills and far beyond that outpouring of sunlight. For perhaps ten minutes more the sun blazed down on an empty stage, then the beams faded and they left behind a still, grey hillside.
One last glimpse of the birds showed them high and dark and heading line astern across the Sound of Mull.
Ardnamurchan is out-on-a-limb Highlands, more like an island with a land bridge than an oceanic thrust of the mainland. It was the childhood home of a great friend, the nature writer and wildlife photographer of distinction, Polly Pullar. It is a place to which she still returns often for its particular savours of wildness, for its sustenance, and – in the manner of all true migrations – for its sense of destination and home. She has an awareness of and empathy for the needs of nature, from ecosystems to individual creatures, and a gift for healing nature’s casualties of which I am deeply envious, for I have not a trace of it. Wherever I have paid tribute in these pages to the benevolence of “the grapevine”, it is as likely to mean Polly as anyone else. She was the third of the four friends I went to for an account of their first sea eagle encounters. This is what she wrote:
Many wildlife moments are stored in the annals of my mind in a file marked “epic”. My first sea eagle sighting is certainly in that special place. I was sitting on the shore at Achateny beach in Ardnamurchan, a wild and windswept bay overlooking Rum, Eigg and Muck. Fleeting rainbows danced over Rum’s high peaks as a grey-splodged rain fell fizz-like on a sea of pewter. I had been watching a pair of otters on a barnacle-crusted rock, tugging at a butterfish, emitting their shrill, whistling contact calls to one another. I was fascinated by the way the water ran off their pelts, and the sound of sharp teeth through fish bones, accompanied by the melancholy cries of a curlew. The bladderwrack swayed gently, engulfing the two lithe creatures and they vanished, but I sat a while letting the lovely sighting live on a little longer. I was quietly basking in my reveries when a movement on the shore caught my attention.
There was something large hunched over the remains of a dead sheep. At first I thought it was a golden eagle but it seemed so much bigger. Its almost lazy appearance had the air of a huge vulture. I could only see its back through my binoculars as it pulled vigorously on the carcase. A hooded crow appeared and dive-bombed it cheekily. I was struck by how tiny the hoodie seemed in comparison. The big bird kept feeding but was clearly irritated as it ducked its head and tried to avoid the unwanted intrusion. Then it suddenly roused its feathers, sending beads of moisture off in a spray, and effortlessly lifted off the sand. The sight of massive talons made me gasp. It was a sea eagle.
It skimmed across the sea, great wings outstretched in a stupendous eternal glide. Within minutes it was almost at the vertiginous sea cliffs skirting Rum, then lost to view through my rain-fogged vignette. It appeared so integral to this magical island seascape, so much at one with the setting that I almost cried. I had that lump in the throat that perhaps only a nature watcher truly understands.
It was then that I noticed the tide was about to engulf me. I wandered euphorically up the beach to the birch woods where I sat down again with my back to a wind-sculpted stump. The sea eagle was back where it belonged and I was ecstatic.