Walking with animals

My article below has recently appeared in The Geographer, the newsletter of the very wonderful Royal Scottish Geographical Society who helped organise this July 2012 journey in partnership with Speygrian. Any observations on walking with animals very welcome.

 

 

A Love Affair and a Dirty Right Arm       

 ‘If this is Montana,’ Vyv said, ‘What I want to know is, where’s Robert Redford?’

We were in the southern reaches of the Cairngorms, at Kirkmichael, and our two and four-legged cavalcade had just carved its way through the hills from Newtonmore via Blair Atholl, taking five days to cover 60 miles. The journey itself over rivers, through forests and valleys sculpted by ice, had seemed so much longer, made us feel so much smaller than the miles implied. Obviously, we were in Montana.

Our group – a sort of mobile conference of teachers, artists, writers, ecologists, pony enthusiasts, geographers – grew and shrank, transforming across the week. At our communal heart was a fascination with journey, as well as individual motivations such as a wish to walk with animals, explore and draw inspiration from the landscape, follow old ways and keep traditions alive.

Through glens and over passes we followed routes which had once forged lively connections between places. On the second day, we climbed high out of Glen Feshie, into smirr, onto Meall an Uilt Chreagaich. From there, a steep and slippery traverse south west over Leathad an Tobhair, would join us to the Minigaig Pass, the summit of a once important north-south road, and a possible route for drovers from Speyside to the cattle sales in Crieff or Falkirk. After Wade built the military road over Drumochter in 1729, it was used by many more drovers to avoid paying tolls.

The difficult, trackless section had challenged us, unsettled our steady progress. Laughter had hushed. Then, processing across a high plateau with banks of cloud rolling at our side, and perhaps in one of the remotest places in Britain, a large lump of white quartz gleamed against the dark heather, out of mist.

‘Here we are,’ said Ruaridh.

A further glint of white ahead, and another, more mistily beyond that, confirmed we were re-treading an ancient way as hooves and boots struck into soft peat on our gradual descent into Glen Bruar. As the first party to take animals this way for 100 years, we drew confidence from our forebears.

We only had cattle with us on the first day, but our Highland ponies, provided by Newtonmore Riding Centre, came all the way. They were sturdy and yet spirited, descended from mares owned in the early nineteenth century by a famous Lochaber drover. I’m sure those of us who had not travelled with pack animals before anticipated an easier hike without the burden of a heavy rucksack.

However, handling the ponies needed constant communication and concentration, not least in an effort to keep our feet from under theirs. With one hand on the rein we sought a trusting connection. Too long and she might trip on it or sense a lack of guidance; too short and her freedom to jump obstacles on rough ground or find the surest way was compromised. All other tasks – sandwich eating, rearrangements of pannier or rucksack – had to be carried out with one hand. The clothing of our leading arms was gradually rubbed dark against sweaty necks, grassy mouths.

Our steps soon rhymed with theirs. With their heads nodding, breathing softly next to us, they clip-clopped their way into our hearts. Their names rang in our mouths like a poem: Torr, Zino, Bean, Blue, Breagh, Alice, Ailsa, Micky, Mack, and Marigold. The rhythms of any camping journey – pitching tents; cooking; sleeping; were extended by looking after the ponies’ needs – untacking; turning them out; finding water. At night they grazed close to our tents, their snorts oddly comforting; hooves drumming through our dreams. In the mornings they gathered at the fence, watching us, apparently curious.

Despite our often remote location, and the sense at times of a haunted, abandoned landscape, each night we had extra company of some sort; folk joining us with songs or stories, or hosting us in their fields and steadings. At Bruar Lodge, three girls welcomed our tetchy arrival with smiles, and carrots for the ponies. At Newtonmore and Blair Atholl, ‘Meet the Drovers’ events gathered local people and tourists to pat the ponies and ask about the journey. We drew local families after us in a carnivalesque wake for the sunny miles down Glen Fearnate and into Kirkmichael before our final event there. It was clear a nerve had been tingled by our quirky procession; a way of life suggested; a landscape looked at in a new light.

For this drover at least, my walk across Montana was enriched by rekindling a teenage love affair. I never did see anyone resembling Robert Redford. But, ah, the ponies and their dear sweet ears...

 

 

 

Creative Journeys

Last week, the Times Educational Supplement covered an unusual project I was involved with at Kingussie High School in September. About twenty facilitators -- artists, writers, natural historians, craftspeople -- with a particular interest in outdoor learning, converged for two days, and took the entire second year on a 'creative journey'. With 100 pupils and 10 teachers, this was quite a logistical feat. The first day was a journey in the outdoors for each small group, somewhere in the Cairngorms National Park within which the school sits, and the second day extended this journey through reflection into making, thinking, writing, doing, back in the school.

My particular journey was with a small group of pupils and adults on ponies up Glen Banchor, a now depopulated Glen to the north-west of Newtonmore which is rich with rubbly remains of crofting townships, ancient hill forts, and stories whispered from past generations. This includes the tale of a cursed mill whose failure to flourish almost certainly contributed to the allure of the new town built on the Spey (Newtonmore), which sucked families out of the Glen, leaving the houses empty.




Before taking a group to a new place, I always like to go myself, to see what creative responses it prompts in me. I visited the Highland Folk Museum (pictured above) which was a wonderful way to bring the old cruck-framed turf houses of this area to life in my imagination, to smell the bannocks cooking on the fire, and to think of 15-20 people inhabiting such a smoke-filled space. And I walked up the empty glen stretching flat and green up to Glenballoch where the lights finally went out, the hearth went cold in the last inhabited house.



I loved the weathered door of the steading, and invented reasons for the grooves worn by an old latch, now hanging useless.One winter night, I decided, a terrible storm kicked the latch from the door, as if with the hind hooves of a huge black horse. One of the children in the house heard the door burst open. The next day her father replaced the latch in a slightly different place but the memory of the terrible night remained in the markings on the door.

On the opposite side of the burn from Glenballoch, little remained of the crofting township except piles of stones from the house footings. As witnesses to past lives, I had to appeal to two ancient rowans that guarded the homes from evil. I asked questions of them, and later experimented with writing these questions onto their images in photographs (see below).


Afterwards, I walked up into the hills, following Glen Fionndrigh, and camped overnight at the sheilings where women and children would have taken cattle for summer pasture. It was a sheltered spot by a burn, and a steep hill above me flowed with deer on my approach.

I'd wanted the pupils to come here to observe, to interrogate the things remaining, to imagine, to feel the warm inhabited bustle of former lives and then to have a go at some of the creative exercises I gave myself. But in the event, the day was wet and windy, riding a challenge for some, and we inevitably concentrated more on ourselves. What came up in the writing we did on the second day were the sounds of movement and companionable chatter, the horses warm beneath us and moving rhythmically, the sensual details of the journey up the glen and down again. And it was this that led us to write a group poem with a sequence of verses like this:

Up Glen Banchor, down Glen Banchor
Ponies mutter, girls clutter
Up Glen Banchor, down Glen Banchor
The curse shadows the glen

Up Glen Banchor, down Glen Banchor
Wind whistling, trees bristling
Up Glen Banchor, down Glen Banchor
The sky glares down


I didn't regret this change of plan. Horses were so much part of the past life of the glen, that this way of travelling in the outdoors and the desire for the pupils to dwell on it was quite appropriate.


The school took a brave departure from conventional settings for learning with this project run by SpeyGrian. It would be interesting to know how the journeys influence the pupils' lives and attitudes to landscape and the great outdoors in a year or so's time.

Rosie, the 'fastest dog in Scotland', who accompanied us, using her own legs sometimes, from Newtonmore Riding Centre.

Drove activities cancelled

Just in case any readers were intending to join us drovers along the route next week, I'm afraid to say that because of some sad circumstances, the journey has had to be postponed.

More news will follow in due course.

A-droving we will go

I'm off soon on a trip following some old roads through the Cairngorms with various others including pack ponies, and at least at first, some Highland cattle. The creative journey is undertaken under the aegis of 'Speygrian', a network of outdoor educators, artists and writers, whose inaugural journey I was part of on the Spey. I'm hoping that this one will be a bit dryer!

Come and meet us at public events featuring droving history at our starting point at Ruthven Barracks, Kingussie from 2pm on Saturday 3rd July, and at the Atholl Country Life Museum, Blair Atholl, 12-2pm Wednesday 7th July.

The Speygrian website describes our latest undertaking as:

The core group of the SpeyGrian network first came together in 2000 for a journey by open canoe from Ruthven Barracks to Spey Bay. To celebrate our 10th birthday, we are taking another journey from Ruthven Barracks which involves a diverse group of professional and amateur artists, ecologists, storytellers, historians and educators including two from the United States and two who currently work with Dartmoor National Park. Some of the participants will be local and the others drawn from the SpeyGrian network.

The group will travel by pony on the Minigaig Pass (an ancient drove road connecting Speyside to Atholl) and the Shinigaig Pass (a coffin road connecting Blair Atholl and Glen Brerachan). The theme of this 'mobile conference' will be exploring how a road is more than a line of communication between two places, but has a life of its own, with unique stories to tell, linking people, places and journeys over time.

Ponies and cattle will be provided by Ruaraidh Ormiston from Newtonmore who will be accompanying us on our journey - which we believe will be the first drove to travel on the Minigaig Pass for over 100 years! Ruaridh’s family have bred ponies and cattle in Speyside for several generations and have some fascinating links with the drovers.

It's not the first time I've been involved in a droving adventure, but was also very interested to read that Vyv Wood Gee is setting off on the same drove route I took three years ago, from the Isle of Skye, but going a bit beyond the Scottish cattle markets, all the way to Smithfield on her pony! You can find out more about her journey across Britain and her search for the significance of droving history here.