92

No Name Hill, as I call it, is a small rounded heathery hill on the high ground between Glen Affric and Glen Cannich, anonymous on the map. There's no hurry. I'm walking by 12 o’ clock on a good rough stony track. I have a hazel rod picked up in the woods for a stick. It has a mossy tuft at the top and a kink that fits the hand nicely.

Big snowy hills come into view, the white bulk of Tom a’ Choinich (Hill of the Moss) filling the horizon ahead and the long ridge of Toll Creagach (Rocky Hollow) stretching to its right. They're not for today. Across the river gorge the ground is spattered with snow but here it seems like summer as a butterfly – a peacock – tempted by the sun rises from the verge and then another of a different kind which I can't identify. Catherine could if she were here.

Runnels of water cross the path, leaving puddles in which stones gleam reddish and blue under the surface. There's a sputtering in the water – two long-legged frogs in a clinch, tumbling over and over in tight embrace.

A little cairn of two or three stones marks where the track to the top turns upwards. Track? Where is it? It's clearly marked with zigzags on the map – a good stalker's path, you might guess – but on the ground it's shy to the point of invisibility. I press onwards between heathery banks. The ground is soft and yielding and there's much water. Somewhere nearby, an unseen trickle of a burn clatters noisily through peaty hollows.

Larger patches of soft snow streak the hillside. Deer, startled by my sudden appearance over a small crest, turn to stare with pricked ears before fleeing – eight in a row outlined against the sky as they canter over the ridge. In another season, this would anger stalking folk but, this being March, they're safe. A little later a dozen more deer resting in a hollow turn tail and scamper away.

Mica glints in the flat stones paving the mossy summit, good to walk on. At the top, I find a stone shelter, a rectangle of drystone walls four or five feet high with an opening in one side. I speculate on its use. Was it shelter for stalkers or watchmen stationed there on the lookout for poachers?

Tom a’ Choinich looms close. Two lochs are in view. Looking southwards into Glen Affric I see a long reach of Loch Beinn a'Mheadhoin with dark pinewoods reflected in the still water. A lochan sparkles on top of a bare ridge above the treeline. To the north, the last bends of the road in Glen Cannich are visible as it winds towards Loch Mullardoch – a hazy blue spread of water terminated by the grey bar of the dam. That ugliest of dams looks curiously small and fragile from this height.

I take a different line of descent, ignoring the few rickety little cairns which may or may not mark the line of the supposed zigzag path, picking my own way down. Water gurgles through a snow-filled gully, unseen for the most part except where dark holes reveal its winding course under the snow. At the bottom of one deep hole, I see where the small stream tumbles over a little stony fall. Suppose I fell through, unsuspecting? Up to the armpits, struggle to get out? I take it at a leap.

I eat my lunch seated on top of a boulder shaped like a wedge of cheese and watch a walker, coming from the Tom or the Toll perhaps, striding homewards along the track below, the only human I've seen. By the time I reach the track he's far ahead and we never meet.