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...

 

 

 

power lines, uprisings and cattle droving

'You'll maybe no be welcome in there now,' the driver said to me as I got out of his pickup at Laggan Stores. 'It’s Chief Anti Campaign Woman runs the shop’.

He was referring to the fact that ‘Balfour Beatty’ was emblazoned along the side of the vehicle in which I'd just hitched a lift – the company now installing a much resisted power line between Beauly and Denny. In fact, I knew ‘Chief Anti Campaign Woman’, and so I was welcome. But the BB boys had already told me how they were barred from certain B&Bs, pubs and even roads, because of their association with the project.

This had a familiar ring. I live in the heart of Scotland, where large-scale hydroelectric systems were installed as part of a socialist vision in the late Forties to give work to men returning from war and to modernise some of the glens of the Highlands still in the dark. Not everyone welcomed the large-scale engineering that poured concrete across crevices in the land, dammed and tunnelled and diverted water channels. Opposition was so fierce that in Pitlochry, where the village of Faskally was flooded, all but one of the local hotels refused hospitality to any workers associated with the scheme. The fear was the loss of tourism value of the area. Today 500,000 visitors a year flock to see the dam and fish ladder.

I had no idea when I decided to take the Corrieyairack pass from Laggan in the upper Spey valley 25 miles through the Monadhliath mountains to Fort Augustus, that my chief walking companions would be striding pylons and the BB boys. What attracted me was the history of cattle droving on this route, still common till the second half of the nineteenth century, and the paving of the way by General Wade in the early 18th-century as part of attempts to quell Jacobite uprisings. It’s a brave way, crossing a high mountain pass of nearly 800 metres and answered my attraction to old ways and through routes -- paths with a purpose. It was a link for me between East and West, offering a new mental map, altering geographies largely determined by the twin track references of the easterly A9 and westerly A82, which both stretch towards the north.

Having done little long distance walking recently, I also wanted peace, fresh air, mountain heights, the possibility of a last gasp of light before autumn set in. I hadn't expected BB to be slicing new roads along the glen for pylon construction access; to be accompanied by concrete mixers, bleeping diggers, the flash of fluorescent jackets along a parallel track to my north for the first six miles.

General Wade's roads are famous for the beauty of their stone bridges. Framed within one of the lovely double arches of Garva Bridge was a busy scene of contemporary bridge construction just half a mile away. I'm fascinated by engineering of any sort and would love to know what principles of construction and tools both Wade and Balfour Beatty had in common, and what has changed.

It seems to me that although we now revere Wade’s well-laid roads and stone bridges that have sunk and meshed themselves into the landscape, the disruption and mess and mass of men working might well have seemed intrusive at the time; an alien force moving north and west, demanding order from wild tracts of land. The drovers certainly resented them, claiming that the paving would harm their beasts’ feet, finally leading to the practice of shoeing cattle. The drovers were also hostile to enclosures and to the new dykes which restricted their movement in an effort to protect arable land. I was reminded of reading somewhere that dry stone dykes, when first laying out their great, straight intrusions with glittery bare stone, were considered an abomination on the landscape.

Enclosures. Wade. Balfour Beatty. Change. We don’t like it. I find the controversy over these giant pylons interesting. Ugly but necessary to link renewable installations to the grid and save us from climate change? Or an act of vandalism? Such thoughts kept my attitude to the BB work curious rather than hostile, as I ambled on alongside the march of the existing – more petite – pylon line. I’ve sometimes been appalled by their intrusion, but sometimes visually enjoyed the lines they make through a chaotic landscape, and sometimes thought how early on in the lighting up of the Highlands, they might have been seen as a symbol of great progress and modernisation by communities affected.

At Garva Bridge, I left Balfour Beatty behind and started to climb gently on a road of Roman straightness. Overhead ravens croaked and groups of geese flew against me, trailing sadnesses east. It felt like the real journey had begun, and all the usual pleasures of walking alone returned to me along with sore feet and the ache in my hips from carrying a full pack. As seems inevitable when you walk west, a wall of wetness awaited me somewhere ahead; lumpen masses of cloud brooding over the hills I was to cross.

Over a rise in the road, came the suggestion of a horn sounding, then over its brow poured a red-brown cavalcade of cattle, jostling hoof and horn, complaining gently as they were pushed forward by a dog, a Land Rover and its horn -- the modern day drover’s tools. The cattle passed me coyly, curiously, skittling off the road to leave me a wide berth, and then gradually quietening into the valley behind me.

On into the wide gentle strath, and some sunshine, I was definitely now alone with the pylons, the stone bridges, the cobbled road that then began leading up more steeply towards a rake of zig-zags to the summit of the pass. A rising wind rang in the power lines, making them sing out and growl above me. Views opened to the west – the spiky outlines of Knoydart’s peaks jammed up against each other, navy blue; a matching weight of sky seared with blizzards of white light.

I started to descend towards the wooded ravines of Glen Tarff, found a green bank on which to pitch my tent. Shivered as the wind lashed, and the wet weather encroached.

The next morning, I followed the silvery strip of wet road down to gentler climes, welcoming the return of colour in beds of heather and flashing rainbows, the muted reflections of Loch Ness. And I met Balfour Beatty again, climbing upwards with a similar clamour of engine, splattering mud, bleeping warnings on their road-cutting toward the other team. From Fort Augustus, I journeyed on to Moniack Mhor, where I was guest reader on a travel-writing course run by the fabulous pairing of Chris Stewart and Mairi Hedderwick. It was wonderful to arrive, windswept and dishevelled off the Great Glen Way, refreshed by the sort of travel that I love best.

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.

Review of 'Cleave' - New writing by women in Scotland, Scotsman 21st June 08

Walking the line

On a long walk it is surprising how quickly life becomes simplified into a line. It stretches behind from where you have come, and ahead, marking your intention. Life turns on decisions about where to stop for the night, what to eat and when, and slight variations on the route. The packing and unpacking of the rucksack takes on its own systematic ritual. The rhythms of the line give the walk its resonance and pleasure.

On my recent walk, following (in reverse) the ancient route used by drovers bringing cattle from Skye to Crieff, the line also linked places and people warm in my affection from a twenty-five year relationship with this part of Scotland. I was walking between memories of past climbs, paddles, pub nights, days spent with friends and lovers. I hadn’t planned the route around this, at least not knowingly.

As Thomas A Clark says in ‘In Praise of Walking’, ‘Walking is the human way of getting about.’ It is obvious, and yet worth reminding ourselves of this. For me, the pace became the thing. In ten to fifteen miles per day, the changes are of a human scale – the gradual handover from one land-shape to another, from one settlement and group of people to another. It is enough to adjust to, accommodate, enjoy. I wonder whether more than this can dull rather then enliven the mind, giving too much stimulation to digest. When the landlord of the Tomdoun Inn referred to Aberfeldy as ‘not far’, I looked at him in astonishment. For me it was ten days away.

‘I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind works only with my legs,’ said Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Ralph Waldo Emerson called walking, ‘gymnastics for the mind’. I know of few writers for whom the rhythms of walking (and possibly running, cycling) do not bring reflection and discovery that lead to creation. I like speed too. I ride motorbikes and sometimes skis, and like freewheeling downhill on my bicycle. But the purpose is thrill, and the practice of skill at speed. Such ways of getting about have an entirely different function.

Perhaps for everyone, whether they wish to be creative or not, walking as a refreshment, a pilgrimage which links special places or people, is something we should award ourselves annually? It is an intensifier of life, a celebration of crossing points and transitions, a getting-to-know ourselves. I came back a different person from this journey in ways I cannot yet explain. I was often surrounded by the pleasure of familiarity and revisit, there were challenges, an emotional threshold, a spiritual experience and a reassurance that my body still works. I carried what I needed in terms of shelter, food, warm clothes, the materials with which to read and write. And it was enough. This sufficiency makes me question the accumulating objects that seem to normally burden my life and travel, claiming to be ‘essential’.

The line of the walk is the string upon which, in memory, the jewels of special moments are held in lapidary brightness. A double rainbow arcing over my tent by a crag-framed lochside near Kinloch Hourn; late sunshine transforming a simple spectacle of water and grass into a miracle of colour; wind-walking a god’s path above Camasunary in a tumble of storm-cloud, sun-glare and the gnash of Cuillin pinnacles; the quiet smile of a man offering a cup of tea. The white gloss of bracken shimmering beneath dark stands of Scots Pine; the high mew of buzzards; honeyed heather scenting the path beside white-rock-tumble on the Water of Tulla. Hot water blasting onto cold, damp skin in a shower at the end of a hard day.

Leaving my line after fifteen days brought a bruise of loss. It also meant a return to a mobile signal, to emails, to the tyranny of my ‘to do’ lists at home. I longed to maintain the simplicity for a little longer, to keep walking, even to turn around and walk back again, arriving at my front door a month after I had left it. The trees I passed in Glen Lyon would then have been toasted and bronzed with the change of season rather then just golden and copper-crowned as they were.

It took me seven hours to reach home from Portree, even with the vagaries of buses and hitch-hiking. Less than thirty minutes for every day I had walked, and taking a route that echoed and had glimpses of my own way. It felt like a betrayal of the line and the sense of simplicity and intensity it had drawn.

Crossing points. Thresholds. Migration and pilgrimage. I am still counting and fingering the beads along my line.


Ends

Setting off after the dogs: Drove Road

‘We can walk between two places and in so doing establish a link between them, bring them into a warmth of contact, like introducing two friends.’ ‘In Praise of Walking’, Thomas A Clark.

The ancient purposefulness of a drove road seems at odds with its contemporary silence. The sense of a throng each September, of people, dogs and cattle, chattering and lowing their way from Skye to Crieff for the ‘Tryst’, is still palpable. Stories told, beer drunk, hooves scuttling and splashing mud. After the sales, whilst the men stayed drinking in the Inns of Crieff, or went further south to return to Scotland by boat, the dogs went home ahead of them, stopping to rest at the same inns or ‘stances’ where they had stopped and been fed on the way down. They had a curious discipline.

Partly to be contrary, and partly to follow an impulse which lures me west, I will take the drove road in the ‘wrong’ direction, following the dogs home. The route links two territories for me. The starting point is the place I have called home for the last twelve years - Highland Perthshire, with its statuesque mountains sedately separated by wide valleys. I have seen the architecture of the land from many angles - I have walked and run, cycled, paddled canoes, swum in pools, laughed amidst it, cried, got sunburnt, learnt its names and tales. At the other end of the route, the last point on the mainland, is where I might have made my home, had I chosen a different life a few years ago.

My walk will traverse these two territories, build a bridge between them perhaps, make sense of the emotional residues still caught between the seams of schist, or apparently forgotten between the leaves of a book.

Each time I get in a car, on a motorbike or bicycle and head west from home, I recognise the same exhilaration. My usual route goes high above Loch Tay. To my left the low hills roll towards Crieff. In Spring time, the steep green fields that drop to the loch are decorated with new lambs and calves, the dance of sheets on washing lines. At my right shoulder, the Ben Lawers range marks the start of the ‘real’ Highlands, and ahead the rise of Ben More and Stob Binnien, the alpine shape of Ben Lui spell excitement and anticipation. Somewhere before Killin, I cross an invisible line into the irreverent wild west.

There have been many times I’ve made this transition on wheels, but never, in earnest, on foot. The true start of this walk would be Crieff, but it feels right to start the walk this week from my own front door and join the dogs at Kenmore as they make their way up Glen Lyon. I will walk out of tame Perthshire into the west where the peaks are corrugated, the pubs loud with joke and tale and music, and eccentric off-beam lives are nurtured and accepted.

There will be time for careful observation, a gradual leaving of the familiar, to feel the rhythm of walking and how this effects thought and mood and words. It will take me two or even three days to reach places like Bridge of Balgie which might be a stop for tea and cake on a normal day trip from home. Then I will leave the comfort of the recognisable, head out along Loch Lyon, linking my mental map on a new route to Bridge of Orchy and beyond. From there a cross country route will take me to the Kingshouse Inn – site of countless pints and nights with midges before or after adventures in Glencoe.

From Kingshouse, a long stretch of ‘wilderness’ east of the Mamores and skirting Fort William, takes me through to the Grey Corries – where I did a glorious circuit in Alpine conditions one Easter weekend long ago – and on to Spean Bridge. This stretch will challenge my mental geography of the landscape or land-shape, which has been formed by the few iconic roads. This may be adjusted, reoriented, by straying into the hinterland between the A82 and A86.

In my map collection, the two most scuffed are the one on which I will start this journey – Landranger 51, ‘Loch Tay and surrounding area’ - and the one with Kinloch Hourn at its centre – Landranger 33, ‘Loch Alsh, Glen Shiel and surrounding area’. From Spean Bridge I cross into this ‘other’ territory. Here is the gateway into the craggy paradise of Knoydart which I have in the past traversed from all possible directions, using where possible the slow pony-paths that gentle you over passes with views to the crenulated summits, loch and islands.

This time I will stick to the north side of Loch Hourn, climbing the steep hill behind the ‘big hoose’ accompanied by the hum of its ancient turbine, towards Glenbeag, from where I used to walk the old paths and valleys, becoming familiar with hills and their names – Beinn Sgitheall and Ladhar Bheinn – guided by a map with its dense brown collections of contour lines showing the ferocious upward exuberance of this land, wearing at its folds till the paper hung in barely attached strips. I used to know which set of pylons marked which pass, where to ford the rivers, exactly how long it would take to shoulder Coire Chorsalain to reach Sheena’s tea room, the corrugated shack at Corran with a spectacular view of the Cuilin of Skye across the mouth of Loch Hourn. I hope that this soft tread around parallel possibilities, past lives, can bring a kind of joy in rediscovery, that my path will draw a line of healing.

From there, I will go a little further west - onto Glenelg to cross the ferocious narrow tidal strait at Kylerhea where the cattle were swum across in the slack of the high tide. And so to Skye.
The route has been well tested by streams of cattle over perhaps four centuries, and devised by drovers with their special qualities of head, heart and body. Their love of movement and adventure, their dipping into gossip and talk in different stopping places, I hope to share along my way.

My journey in a way still culminates in Crieff in early October as it would have done the drovers. The Tryst at Crieff was the great centre of the Highland cattle trade till the mid eighteenth century. Now transformed into a festival of walking, the Drovers’ Tryst is where I will run a workshop for walkers with an interest in writing, writers with an interest in walking, at the first lending library in Scotland, Innerpeffray Library, a place of history, books, words and gentle landscape on Wednesday 10th October.