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There's an email from Tim.

It's been very wet in the glen over the past few weeks and now serious flooding. My cattle got trapped on a very small island and I had to swim out to them with a bale of hay and lead them swimming back to dry land – very cold! If winters continue in this vein I'm not sure how habitable parts of the highlands will be in 10 to 15 years’ time.

All the same, I go.

There are flood warnings all the way north and water sluices over the road. Past Struy, where the River Glass swings close to the road, a sheet of water has swamped road, fields and riverbank, barring the way. I'm reluctant to drive through – how deep is it?

An approaching Land Rover and trailer churn slowly through the water, throwing up bow waves. The burly driver, a farmer by the look of him, comes over as I sit watching from the car. ‘You'll get through,’ he says. ‘Keep to the crown of the road. Canny as you go.’

Cannily I go.

The well-known surroundings are transformed. Strathglass is a different country, the riverbanks broken and submerged and the strath inundated here and there. Trees stick up from pools like tropical rainforest, islets speckle lagoons where there was only dry land before and newly formed burns pouring down from the high ground swill across the road.

My temporary home for the next few nights is a caravan in Cannich village. Rain drums on the van roof overnight and, in the morning, it's raining still, though with lessened force. I was cold in bed – three degrees. No newspapers in the shop – they didn't get through – and no post. The overside road is closed and the news is that the road down to Drumnadrochit is flooded just before the village. The Beauly road could be blocked if it gets worse. There might be no way out. Marooned!

Tim takes me to meet Sheena, who farms cattle in the glen, and we stand at the gate in our wellies, in a welter of mud. Tim admits he didn't actually swim, though it was touch and go. He waded out breast high towards his stranded animals holding a heavy bale of hay above his head while two of his daughters stood at the water's edge in case of emergency. After a good deal of cajoling, wheedling, calling the cattle by their names (he named them after the girls at the forestry office, though the girls don't know that yet), the hungry heifers edged off dry land into the water and followed him back to safety. Keeping his feet was a problem and several times he was in danger of lift-off.

Tim asks Sheena if she's noticed an increase in flooding since she's farmed here. She reflects a little – no, the waters haven't risen higher over the last 15 years or so, but probably floods have been more frequent.

Tim says that, between November and December, it rained for 46 days. That's biblical. Forty days and forty nights and then Noah pushed out the ark. It hasn't come to that yet.

‘I'm going on a castration course,’ Sheena remarks casually, ‘so that I know which bits to cut off.’

Oh. It makes you wince.

In the afternoon, I venture into Glen Cannich, where there are signs that the floodwaters are receding. The hills have disgorged themselves by now. A high tidemark of litter, branches, torn-up bracken and grass shows the extent of the flooding. Everything's still sopping wet. Big spreads of water fill the low ground and the swirling river brims under the causeway to Craskie – I shan't risk a crossing.

There's a dank mistiness in the air, a ghostly calm now that the wind has died and the rain almost stopped. Brightness comes and goes in this new world. Now and again the low sun edges through, gilds the snow-streaked hilltops and freshens all the colours of the earth – the birch groves, leafless and wine-dark, golden larch, conifer woodlands vivid green, swags of withered bracken brick-red on the hillsides. Old twisted birch stems coated with grey-green lichens dip their feet in unaccustomed pools. Then rain-mist closes the shutters again.