54

The little yellow wooden café is gone. Not a trace of it today as I make my way south through Glen Urquhart.

It was long in the going.

Once, on my way home from walking in the pinewoods of Glen Strathfarrar, I stopped there and sat by a sunny window with a cup of coffee and a slice of home-made apple tart on a plate. I talked amiably with the couple behind the counter, a black-haired Englishman and his blonde wife, and made a mental resolution to return on my next visit to Strathglass. I never did. When I next passed that way, the yellow paint was flaking, I could see the chairs and tables stacked higgledy-piggledy inside and the café was closed, never to reopen.

A pile of paperbacks was stacked on the counter beside the cakes and scones. The cover showed a young fresh-faced, dark-haired man crouching on a hillside cradling a lamb, with his shepherd's stick across his knee and two collie dogs at his side. The title was Isolation Shepherd and the author Iain R. Thomson, a name I didn't know. According to the blurb, it told of the author's shepherding days at the far end of Glen Strathfarrar in the 1950s. I bought a copy and started to read.

It opened: ‘A south westerly gale and heavy showers swept down Loch Monar. It had been blowing and raining since the previous day. Though summer storms are not infrequent in the high hill country, this one was severe . . .’

Aboard a small boat on the choppy waters were Thomson, his wife Betty, their two-year-old daughter and week-old baby son, along with their household effects piled under a tarpaulin.

Head on she met the full force of the weather in the wider open waters. Her cargo that day was my family and flitting, destined for a new home, six and a half stormy miles westwards . . . cradled in remoteness and grandeur at the upper reaches of Glen Strathfarrar.

They reached their cottage safely, found the fire already lit and ablaze, hung their wet clothes to steam at the hearth and made a simple supper. Outside, the sky cleared – a cue for the author to turn lyrical: ‘That night we unrolled the mattress on the floor and lay listening. Only the note of the burn and the catching voice of the wind on Creag na Gaoith sang the last of a summer's storm.’

I took the book home and finished it at a sitting. Since then, it has fallen apart through frequent thumbing and I've bought a fresh copy – it's still in print. Over time I heard more about Iain Thomson – that he'd farmed cattle in Strathglass, that he'd turned his hand to writing, and above all that he'd featured in a film about his strath and these glens made for television years ago. Apparently it was made by a man called Mickleburgh who lives somewhere in the area. Clearly, it's a film I ought to see.

From the village of Drumnadrochit, hairpin bends wind up to the moorland above Loch Ness and here I find a low house, part old and part new, that rambles this way and that so confusingly that it's a puzzle to find the entrance. Lawns, trees and shrubs transform cottage garden into a miniature park.

In the kitchen Edwin Mickleburgh introduces the woman standing at the table as Sue. She has her coat on. ‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘I have to leave. There's lunch on the table’. And with that she goes.

‘Your wife?’

‘My third,’ says he.

On the sideboard, prepared by Mrs Mickleburgh III, are plates of cold ham, cheese and tomatoes and a bottle of Chablis, chilled and uncorked.

Lunch consumed and glasses drained, we settle in the lounge to watch the video. The title, An Element of Regret, appears on the screen, introducing a two-part film made for Central TV, one of the early television companies, long gone. Edwin says that the documentary changed course halfway through filming. It was conceived as a celebration of the Affric pinewoods until a chance meeting with Thomson in the bar of an Inverness hotel persuaded him that the former shepherd had a better story to tell. It was two years in the making, a generous schedule that wouldn't be feasible now.

The film opens moodily with shots of dark clouds sweeping over the hills and the play of many waters in the glens, with a slow, gravelly voice hymning the allure of wilderness places. Cut to a gentler scene – a sunlit stretch of loch cleft by the bow-wave of a launch. In the stern stands Iain Thomson in his prime – hawk-like features, tanned cheeks aglow, talking of the years he spent at the head of the loch a decade and a half before the film was made (so we're in a double time warp).

‘I turned my back on civilisation’, he says on screen. ‘I found myself there.’

There are cameo appearances by the locals. John MacLennan's father, in ruddy health, with the same wee deprecating smile I recognise in his son, talks about stag shooting and the importance of a swift despatch: ‘For the sake of the animal and for the sake of the gentleman, there's great satisfaction when you have a clean shot.’ Donnie, veteran stalker on the Culligran Estate, uneasily contemplating his boss's intention to farm deer like cattle: ‘I wouldn't like it,’ he says, imagining a slaughter of captive beasts.

Clips from the archive include a black-and-white Ministry of Information documentary made just after the war extolling the grand hydroelectric schemes then being planned or already under construction throughout the Highlands. Scenes from an unidentified location show huge mechanical diggers scooping out rock and earth to the accom paniment of an enthusiastic commentary. Cascading burns are dismissed as ‘running to waste’ or elicit breathless admiration: ‘See that spate of water – that's power!’

Iain Thomson has another take on it – that the coming of hydroelectricity wrote the final chapter of the Highland clearances. He and his few neighbours were displaced to make way for the rising waters. ‘The hills are sad for the old days and they won't return,’ he says. (A poetic fallacy – the hills are indifferent.) Shots of Iain's doomed croft house at Strathmore underline the message – stripped bare, surrounded by tilled fields beside a calm inlet of the old loch, it's an empty shell with flames leaping from the rafters.

Pait Lodge, once home to Iain's nearest neighbours half a mile across the loch and built on higher ground, still survives as a bolt-hole for a south-country laird and his guests. In the film, two elegant cars, one an open-top tourer, wind slowly along the narrow road towards the Monar Dam, where the occupants emerge, women in slacks, men in country casuals, chattering in cut-glass accents. It could be a picnic, with hampers and champers. The party sails down the loch before disembarking from the launch at Pait landing stage for their stay at the lodge. Hampers are unloaded. A lady hands a bunch of flowers for the gillie to hold while she steps ashore, to his clear embarrassment. Inside the lodge, the table is set, sparkling with crystal and silver, with napkins folded, glasses in place and candles lit.

‘It's a great place to relax,’ the gentleman says to camera.

Far from Pait Lodge and his personal wilderness in Glen Strathfarrar, Colin Stroyan resides for much of the time in an old house in rural Perthshire. There's a row of bells in the kitchen for summoning servants but those days are gone. His wife greets me at the garden gate with a trowel in one hand and a punnet in the other and takes me inside to Colin – a tall man, genial, heavily built and now a bit slow on his feet.

Stroyan is laird of West Monar and Pait, which together cover 35,000 acres of bare hill and moor straddling the top end of Loch Monar. He never saw the loch before the dam and likes it pretty well as it is. He bought the land not long after the great inundation, knowing that the family estate in Perthshire was destined to pass to his elder brother (Harrow and Eton, a judge on the English circuit, recreations field and country sports). As for himself, he spent a lifetime in legal circles in Edinburgh as a Writer to the Signet, a rather grand category of Scottish lawyers, acquiring a clutch of directorships on the way.

A painting on the wall shows a shooting party setting off for the day's sport against a backdrop of loch and blue hills – a lad in the forefront leading two ponies followed by younger versions of Stroyan and wife, tweed clad and striding out along the track beside a brawling burn, with stalker and gillie in the rear. In the background, Pait shooting box is screened behind a clump of trees.

The lodge and keeper's cottage beside it are all that remain of the former habitations that existed around the head of the natural loch. Stroyan had a causeway built to the lochside, demolished two outbuildings and made various improvements to the lodge but stopped short of putting in electricity – which is ironic, considering that the sole purpose of the dam was to provide hydro power. But dark nights are aglow in the soft lamplight. (A generator provides electricity for the keeper and his partner in their cottage.)

These days, Pait is a summer residence. Colin Stroyan sails up the loch to open it up in April and, from then until mid October, the family and friends enjoy country pursuits in comfortable isolation.

Deer stalking and fishing are his passion – his face lights up when he reminisces about sporting days. In his heyday, 12 hours on the hill kept him fit. What gives him his greatest pleasure now? His answer surprises – it's the vicarious thrill of seeing a novice get his (or her) first stag. He shot his first at the age of 11, more than 70 years ago, and he says that, even now, he could find the spot.

Colin Stroyan is not a fan of Iain Thomson, whose home was just across the bay from Pait. ‘He was only there a few years,’ he says but I guess shepherding at the far end of Loch Monar, with a wife and young family to provide for, might teach something about the nature of the place.

‘The book's a good read,’ say I.

‘Oh, yes, a good read . . .’