38

Back to Cougie, where the Pococks live in cheerful isolation. Cougie, way out west, is seven miles or more from Tomich and several from the nearest habitation. It's an isolated clearing in the woods – a few flat fields with a river running through and a huddle of low buildings, mainly timber, reached by a hard-packed forestry road badly in need of repair after winter damage. It's an oasis of open ground in the midst of dark forest.

A white-painted stone cottage, the only one of its kind, used to be the keeper's house for the neighbouring landowner, the Dutchman, Kwint. Mr Kwint had bad luck after the keeper left – later tenants did a moonlight flit and then squatters trashed the place – and he decided to sell. In the sales pitch, it sounded idyllic, but though potential buyers came in numbers they didn't buy. In the end, the Pococks made an offer and it was theirs.

The Pococks, father, mother and a vanload of family, had arrived one day out of the blue and stayed on as tenants and then owner-occupiers. There they sat tight, resisting all subsequent offers to buy them out from interested parties including the Forestry Commission whose trees surround them like a green ocean.

What brought them from the Welsh valleys to settle in this outpost? Val's husband John, stocky, grey-haired, sunk deep in a battered sofa in the living room, tells the story, with the occasional comment from wife in the kitchen, where she has venison sizzling in the pan.

They'd fallen in love with Scotland. Every year the family would head north in a Bedford work bus converted to seat a growing squad of children, chugging along narrow Highland roads in a cloud of exhaust fumes on the lookout for a site for their two bell tents. Camping holidays were fine but John, fretting at his office desk in the Welsh coalfields, wanted more. An offer of promotion felt like the first nail in his coffin and he decided to quit before the lid closed. A wild goose chase in the Bedford took father, mother and children rattling over to the remote Applecross peninsula in the north-west where he'd heard there were crofts for sale. They arrived to find . . . no crofts for sale in Applecross.

On the off chance, John walked into the Forestry Commission office in Inverness. In those days, it was the commission's policy to take on men to work part-time as foresters, with the enticement of a smallholding to supplement their wages off-season – a few acres and a cow or a pig for pioneering families.

John enquired.

‘Nothing doing,’ said the man behind the desk. On second thoughts: ‘There's a place called Cougie but you wouldn't be interested in that.’

‘Tell me about it,’ says John.

‘You wouldn't want it.’

‘Try me,’ says John.

The forestry man listed all the drawbacks. It was isolated, there was no water, it was damp . . .

‘Fine,’ says John.

Reluctantly, he was handed the keys and off they set cross-country again, past Tomich and heading into the unknown. Val pipes up from the kitchen: ‘Halfway along the road, before we'd even seen the place, I said this is it. This feels like home.’

They got to the wooden house in Cougie to find it in darkness with the windows boarded up and the previous occupants’ belongings still scattered about. But it still felt good.

‘We took it on the spot,’ says John.

After a spell as a forestry trapper armed with shotgun and rifle, shooting animals harmful to growing trees like rabbits and deer, he joined a Forestry Commission tree-planting squad. There's a line of trees on the skyline above the house, the fringe of a great plantation. ‘I planted those,’ says John. ‘I planted a million trees with this –’ and he takes up an old spade propped against the wall, the blade worn wafer thin with use.

Now John's trees have reached harvesting size and will soon be cut down. He dug them in on the bare moorland 40 years ago and soon he'll see them felled.