64
White water explodes in the air, gushing in a halo of iridescence from the base of a little dam. Windborne spray pecks my face. Surrounded by hills of breath-taking grandeur, this miniature dam and its associated works are unspeakably ugly – grey concrete wall, grey windowless cube of a building, grey pipelines reaching up the hillsides on either side like the wings of an anorexic angel. Further upstream, there's another even smaller dam fed by a staircase of many little waterfalls.
Two Land Rovers have halted a little further up the glen. The driver of the foremost, a stalker in tweeds, has stopped to scan the hills through his telescope. His three passengers stare at me blankly as I speak.
‘Where are you shooting?’
The stalker points to the hill ahead, Meallan Odhar. Asks, ‘Where are you walking?’
‘Sgurr na Lapaich.’
‘Which way?’
‘By the corrie.’
‘Fine.’
That concludes the conversation. I shan't disturb their sport. It's been a taciturn exchange between stalker and walker, civil if not affable – not untypical.
This day I hope to climb the Sgurr, the great pyramid at the head of Glen Strathfarrar. Its towering presence has long dominated my thoughts, just as it dominates the upper reaches of the glen.
Steady walking on a good track brings me to the great high corrie under the great rampart of the hill, a waste of broken ground, trackless, cleft by a web of channels and peaty haggs. The last bastion of the hill looms in deep shadow backlit by the descending sun. The waters of two small lochans gleam under it.
As I breast the rim of the corrie, I'm startled by the noise of many voices. Today, at the height of the rut, the corrie is full of echoes as many stags give vent to their lust in testosterone-fuelled bedlam. Rare gulfs of silence are followed by new crescendos.
I'm uneasy, to say the least. Stags are large beasts and, in the rutting season, can be aggressive. Where are they? They're unseen though my ears tell me that they're all around. Sounds come from all quarters. I catch sight of a string of deer moving slowly along a distant ridge, hardly bigger to the naked eye than insects, too far away to count. The roaring ones are well camouflaged in the shadows, present in numbers but not visible to my eye, even with binoculars.
I feel uneasy, menaced. I loiter, lose heart. Do I really want to go on? I convince myself it's late in the day, it's a good hour still to the top, I won't be down before sunset – no. And then, half ashamed of my cowardice, I turn tail.
As I descend by high zigzags, the hills to the north glow in the late sunshine like old friends. I see the bleached shoreline of blue Loch Monar and the glinting thread of the Farrar River gliding sinuously down the glen into the distance. There's a muffled gunshot and then another and, shortly afterwards, I see a couple of figures disappearing round the shoulder of Meallan Odhar – no doubt they're part of the shooting party encountered earlier.
I leave the track to get closer to the burn (the Allt an Eas Bhain Mhoir, a large name for small waters) as it tumbles down by fits and starts, rattling along half-hidden between its banks before plunging abruptly into a narrow gorge. Above the gorge stands a tall aspen tree, the delicate tracery of its thinning autumn leaves illuminated by the sun. In a fortnight's time, it'll be bare. A hoard of small leaves bright as gold coins spilled on the ground lies at my feet.
As I descend I see the stalker's vehicle inching its way along the surfaced track. It crosses ahead of me before I reach the valley bottom and I catch sight of antler tines in the back as it passes – the day's kill.
At the upper dam, the lively burn loses itself, sinking underground in a man-made diversion and echoing from various grilles as it rushes along subterranean channels, leaving the river bed a rubble of dry boulders moistened here and there by a few still pools glazed in a petroly sheen by chemicals in the peat.
The saddest part is to come. I walk across the heath towards a gorge overhung by two small pine trees. I can imagine it as a beauty spot, once. Now it's dry. I walk dryshod over rocks and stones marbled grey and red that once formed the bed of a living river.
But there's to be a resurrection. The spume of water bursting from the mini-dam where I left the car returns the river to its natural course, which now, after its brief hiatus, resumes its course for eventual confluence with the Farrar. Here it's known as the Uisge Misgeach, the drunken water, which is ironic in the present circumstances – it was named long before the hydro engineers tamed it and channelled it underground.