16

Walter on the phone – hard-of-hearing Walter. There's a shriek in the background. ‘It's the parrot,’ he says.

Did he say parrot? (My hearing's dodgy too.)

It is a parrot. Perched in its roomy cage, a bird with a hooked beak. Long John Silver comes to mind. Parrots are coloured like the rainbow, aren't they? But this one's drab. He makes a dart at the bars with fierce intent; he squalls and squawks with wordless fury.

Walter leads the way to his den where the bird is almost but not quite out of earshot. There's an occasional muffled volley from next door. Through the wide window are views of fields, woods and hill. The den is a mixture of ancient and modern, with a computer on the desk and other electronic gadgetry but also an African mask and carvings on the shelves and a flintlock musket with bayonet fixed hanging on the wall. Perhaps Walter was an old colonial with an interest in antique weaponry. But it seems not: ‘They're just decoration’.

Walter is tall, heavily built, has bushy eyebrows, walks stiffly and eases himself into the swivel chair at the desk. He's a leader of the community with a gruff way of expressing forthright opinions – scorning, for example, all professional environmentalists and conservationists, which is what the talk turns to. All this twaddle about protecting birds of prey . . . Ask the locals, he says, the locals know best. Ask the stalkers and the gillies. But, because country folk don't write down their lifetime experiences, nobody listens to them and they're dismissed as having nothing to contribute to the debate.

Take pine martens, says Walter. (Pine martens are furry, bright-eyed, mean little killers, harried almost to extinction by gamekeepers but now legally protected and proliferating.) Walter's wife, bringing the tea tray, agrees. A pine marten took their neighbour's rabbits the other day and, before that, another neighbour lost all her chickens.

We talk of the woodlands, the Forestry Commission, and Trees for Life, an organisation with an outstation in Plodda woods whose members have been helping the commission to plant native trees. Trees for Life aims to combine an alternative philosophy (it's linked with the Findhorn Foundation) with practical work literally at ground level. Their director is Alan Featherstone. ‘I call him Alan Featherbrain,’ says Walter.

‘You have to meet Stuart,’ says Walter. ‘I'll take you.’

We drive up a steep tree-shaded lane just before Tomich, past a derelict car, some builder's junk, an untidy pile of plastic bags and a stack of planks and arrive in a storybook.

There's a lawn with a winding path, a murmuring stream and a water-wheel, a well and a host of daffodils in flower. At the focus of view stands a tiny cottage with latticed peephole windows and a low oval doorway. It's a hobbit house out of Tolkien.

An elfin woman perched on top of a ladder is busy at some work under the eaves. Below her Stuart, equally short in stature, appears at the threshold with an invitation to come in. ‘Mind your head,’ he says – at five foot three he fits neatly within the door frame but anyone taller has to stoop. ‘Tina,’ he says, introducing the woman on the ladder, and we exchange vertical greetings.

The tiny low-ceilinged living-room-cum-kitchen is a surprise. It's cosy, snug as a nest, gleaming with polished wood, copper and chinaware, and there's hardly a straight line anywhere. A settle curves round an eccentric table – a piece of solid dark furniture fluted like the base of a cathedral pillar or the stump of some great forest tree – which it was. Stuart carved it by hand from the base of a cut-down yew.

It looks a dead weight, a brute to move, but not so. Yew, says Stuart, is so dense that it sinks in water but he hollowed it out and honeycombed it with miniature concealed drawers so that it glides on castors at a fingertip touch.

There are other curiosities. The fire in the hearth serves a double purpose, heating both the living room and also, by a curious sleight of hand, the stove in the adjacent kitchen area, where two shining copper hotplates serve as a poor man's Aga. The keyhole TV concealed behind panel doors pivots within the width of the wall to provide late-night viewing in the adjoining bedroom. Everywhere are inventive devices, all practical and most of them conceived of and crafted by Stuart. Before-and-after photographs show the stages in his conversion of the former derelict cottage and byre into this nursery-rhyme dwelling.

Stuart is a woodman by heart and by trade. His life has been spent working with timber, from tree-felling to carpentry. He once operated a sawmill in Australia. But he wears a hair shirt – working with hardwoods like oak or elm, the species of timber a craftsman prefers, triggers an irritating allergy due, he suspects, to some chemical in the wood. Softwoods like spruce and fir don't affect him in the same way but softwoods he disdains.

A narrow turning stair leads to Tina's bright bedroom under the attic roof. Halfway upstairs a door opens off the landing into the lavatory where the stately throne-like loo has been hollowed from the bole of another tree, a burr elm, beautifully figured. It's a joy to sit on. Perched there you may observe the garden through a small window (a loo with a view), meditate and listen to the birdsong. And from the adjoining shower cubicle you may step straight into the garden, robed if you wish, but, in any case, screened from view by the trees.

No one will pry. The cottage is sequestered, unseen, its very existence unsuspected from the road below.

One year later Stuart and I sit side by side on the settle with mugs of tea on the yew-tree table while Tina chops rhubarb in the galley kitchen. I feel like a character in a tale by Beatrix Potter – ‘The Tale of Nutshell Cottage’.

Stuart's inventive mind is crammed with theories – in this case, a long and baroque fantasy concerning Rosslyn Chapel and the Templars and a tantalising biblical code (but not The Da Vinci Code – it was before that phenomenon) which Stuart credits implicitly: gospel truth. He pulls a book from the hand-made shelf, a work written by a former journalist on the Washington Post. Influenced by the theories of a maverick mathematician, the writer argued that predictions about future events could be found embedded in the Old Testament and may be decoded from the text by computer analysis of word and letter patterns. By this means, it can be shown that the Kennedy assassination, Hiroshima, the Holocaust, 9/11 and many more disasters were all foretold in scripture.

I listen with hooded eyes. If only we had known.

What horrors lie ahead? – and can we change the script before it's too late?

I don't ask. Better to turn the conversation to safer topics, like his life story – his spell as a cane-cutter in Australia, his time as a national serviceman in Korea calculating the position of enemy gun emplacements from flashes in the night or his experiences on holidays in peacetime Vietnam, charmed by the kindness and friendliness of the people. He fishes out the tourist snaps – the places he and Tina saw, the people they met and, especially, their waif of a translator, whose name they struggled to pronounce until she asked them to call her Tweet. ‘Tweet's lovely,’ he says.

And he talks about his inventions, like his proposed device for heating water by the sun. Serious physics is involved though the preparatory work has been practical and simple. With a nail, a stake and a length of string, he traced an outline of the sun's shifting shadow throughout the daylight hours, giving him the pattern for a parabolic mirror which, when polished and fixed in position, would concentrate the sun's rays on a water tank, thus causing the water to boil.

He's in full flight when there's a knock on the door. Chance visitors from Holland have arrived, a tall man and a gangly wife who saw Stuart's house on Dutch TV and have come here to see for themselves. They've come unannounced but Stuart breaks off to give them the guided tour, upstairs and down. They coo and ooh and aah at his cabinet of delights and leave happy at what they've seen.

‘I'm not clever,’ says Stuart. ‘I just try harder. That's what Einstein said, by the way. But I'm not Einstein, I'm not much good at anything.’ (This is not true.)

Will his sun heater work? Perhaps he should patent it? No. This will be his gift to mankind. And he adds, ‘I'm trying to die penniless. I live simply. I don't need much. I can live on my pension. I can go to Vietnam – it doesn't cost the earth.’

He says any spare cash he gets helps to pay for small things for the people he meets in Vietnam, who have little. So, as I leave, my coins chink in the mug by the door.