12

Breakfast at Comar Lodge, Ian at the Aga with the frying pan in his hand (‘One egg or two?’).

Where's a good short walk in the neighbourhood? – ‘The Hill Lochs,’ says he. ‘Start at Tomich.’

Tomich, three miles upstream from Cannich, looks a village out of place and time. It's a row of neat stone cottages all built to the same pattern, with latticed attic windows and flower baskets at the doors. There's more to it than that, but not much. These doll's-house cottages survive more or less as built, though gentrified now, along with a small hotel and a tiny Post Office – a wooden chalet painted blue with fretwork eaves, open for business six hours a week. At the roadside stands a memorial drinking trough, with fountain (now dry) in a shell-like recess from which, in another climate, I fancy Venus might emerge naked. But it's springtime in Tomich with a frost on the ground and a nip in the air.

The fountain bears medallion portraits of the Tweedmouths, lord and lady, in low relief. All the land for miles around belonged to the Tweedmouths and Tomich was their model village.

Tall iron ornamental gates stand permanently open at a wonky angle. At the top of the drive a stable block, unseen from the road, comes suddenly into view. This is no ordinary stable block but a rather grand affair, a handsome steading in pink stone designed to impress, with a clock tower above the archway. It has been converted into tourist accommodation but this is the slack season and there's no one about except for a man in a tractor digging in the field.

Not far from this elegant stable block is a villa in the same pink sandstone, which used to be the home farm for the Guisachan Estate in the Tweedmouths’ day. Here lives Donald Fraser, once a farmer in a gentlemanly sort of way, amateur sailor and owner of the remains of the estate.

The track leads up past the stable block to open moorland, a heather-darkened landscape of hollows and hillocks. Ahead there's a glint of water – Loch a'Ghreidlein, the first of the Hill Lochs. A low hill above it is topped by what might be, as seen from a distance, a slender obelisk, a needle outlined against the sky. In spite of its name, Beinn Mhor (Big Hill), it is only 401 metres high but the climb is stiff enough to cause me to break sweat. At the top, I find the heather burned off and green shoots already poking through the tangle of charred stems. They crunch pleasantly underfoot.

The monument turns out to be a Celtic cross engraved with the names Edward, Lord Tweedmouth (died 1909) and Fanny, his lady (1904), erected – it says – by the grateful tenants of Guisachan Estate. (Grateful for what?)

Tweedmouth? It sounds familiar. But I'm thinking John Buchan of The Thirty-Nine Steps and other ‘shockers’ as he called them, later a grand public servant and consequently Lord Tweedsmuir. Tweedmouth was obviously quite another fellow.

There are five Hill Lochs but from the top of Beinn Mhor I see only two. The three smallest lochans in the chain are hidden by a shoulder of the hill and by dips and rises in the land below. This is a Lakeland in miniature, the lochs diminishing in size to the smallest only 30 or 40 metres across. Even that pool has a name – Loch na Gobhlaig. Southwards from my viewpoint lies a swathe of dark conifer woodland with pale patches of larch showing through. In the days of the Tweedmouths, this was open moorland. Towards the west rises the knobbly brow and steep scarp of the little hill Beinn nan Sparra (Hill of the Spars), shaggy with scattered pine trees. A string of pylons punctuates the middle distance. In the far west, the high hills of Affric and Kintail stretch across the horizon streaked with snow. Through half-closed eyes – I squint against the wind – they have the look of distant Alps.

It's chilly, winter barely gone. I look around briefly, take it all in, then hasten down.

Perched over the water's edge at Loch a'Ghreidlein is a wooden boathouse and, close by it, a beehive-shaped cairn of grouted stones blotched with golden lichens, ‘in memory of a lover of this countryside’ – a fisherman no doubt. At the foot of the cairn is the bone of a small animal, picked clean by hoodie crow or some hook-billed bird.

In the shallows further round the lochan, just under the surface, there lurks ghostly debris – blanched branches and tree stumps embedded in the peat. No trees grow round the Hill Lochs now.