Covid Dreams 11: The granite layers

There’s something hard and unforgiving about this view across the grain of the central Cairngorms.

In a land where one thinks mainly in terms of plateaux riven by great glens and nibbled at the edges by corries the view this day was ridge after ridge, tiered all the way back to the horizon. Carn a Mhaim in front, with that great slab of The Palette providing the colour scheme. Over the spine of Carn a Mhaim is Sron Riach of Ben Macdui, parallelled by the stepped rise of Derry Cairngorm beyond. Beinn Bhreac shines silver on the right, then the broad mass of Beinn a Bhuird provides the the skyline – hard, grey granite from front to back.

Once you look for a moment there is green between the scree and slab, but it is restricted to strips and patches, while the pink of the unweathered granite and sand serve less to jollify the scene than to emphasise the grey austerity of a landscape that is more about the bold line than the picturesque detail.

Some landscapes invite you in. This one – all barriers – does not care. I want to be there.

A series of Covid dreams. Just a photo or two from the archives and a few words: memories of the Cairngorms to stay in the heart while we’re kept away from the hills.

Covid Dreams 10: A sense of scale

As ever, in the Cairngorms, where the glens splitting the great plateaux can become almost invisible, it’s the sense of space and of scale that overwhelms.

This was the day I did the five four-thousand feet mountains of the Cairngorms. I’d started from Corrour Bothy and done the western hills under heavy cloud and blustering wind. But as I climbed back out of the Lairig Ghru to head out to Cairngorm, the cloud lifted and the wind moderated. This view, on the return from Cairngorm summit stopped me in my tracks. I’d been watching the sky and delighting in the number and quality of lenticular clouds morphing their way across a clear blue sky, when I suddenly became aware of that sense of scale. Those three hills on the skyline, seeming so distant, were the hills I’d stood on that morning – Cairn Toul, Sgor an Lochain Uaine and Braeriach. And there, away to the left, was to be my final hill of the day, Bein Macdui, with my home for the night nestled in the cleft of Glen Dee, between first hill and last.

The distances just seemed so unlikely and, though I had come far and still had far to go, I was filled with a huge, bubbling elation that all these hills were mine. And looking at the photograph again, they still are.

If you’re sufficiently bored, a full account of my five summits day, with more pictures, can be seen here.

A series of Covid dreams. Just a photo or two from the archives and a few words: memories of the Cairngorms to stay in the heart while we’re kept away from the hills.

Covid Dreams 9: The gap in the curtain

Looking at this I can still feel the snell wind that blew that day, and would wish myself back there, looking up Glen Dee from the illusory shelter of the hilltop outcrops on Carn Fiaclach.

It wasn’t a promising day. Overnight snow, heavy for May, had quickly melted from the glen floor and back up the hillsides, but there was still a cold that went through you, low cloud and squally snow showers that reduced visibility to a few feet at times. The going was heavy underfoot in the pathless trudge up into the Coire Garbh-Uillt, heading for Carn Cloich-mhuilinn. From there a freakish gap in the cloud gave a brief vision of impossibly small climbers moving toward the snowy summit of Beinn Bhrotain. There was an air of unreality about the image, of a window to a distant, harder, colder land, and I briefly entertained, then abandoned, thoughts of the bigger hill.

It was on the descent that the day came to life. The wind was finally tearing up the lowest layer of cloud and views were opening up to the hills further up the glen. The Devil’s Point was coming and going, fragments of Carn a Mhaim and Ben Macdui were being revealed, and the day was brightening, with blue sky appearing above.

I started taking photographs as I descended, but stopped at the outcrops at the top of Carn Fiaclach, which gave me a good foreground, lining up with the parallel cliff-lines of Beinn Bhrotain and Devil’s Point. The wind still blew though, and views were fleetingly unveiled then hidden again.  I loitered an hour or more in rapt fascination, capturing that one image above, at least, which came close to conveying the atmosphere. The moment which sealed the day in my memory.

An earlier shot. Loved the juxtaposition of the Beinn Bhrotain cliffs and the Devil’s Point, but it wasn’t quite there yet.

Afternoon saw the cloud disappear and clear air. Devil’s Point is always majestic from this viewpoint in the glen, but lacks the charisma lent by the wind-torn veils of cloud

A series of Covid dreams. Just a photo or two from the archives and a few words: memories of the Cairngorms to stay in the heart while we’re kept away from the hills.

Covid dreams 8: Regeneration

Regeneration

Loused fae the darg:
sunrise on weel kent hills,
new trees keekin ower the heather.

The picture above was what I had in mind when I wrote these lines, the title referring  both to the personal regeneration of getting away from work (“loused fae the darg”) and away up to my “weel kent hills” around Bob Scott’s Bothy, and to the actual regeneration of the forest there, with the culling of deer at last giving new seedlings a chance to grow.

The photo was taken not long after sunrise on an autumn day that wasn’t intended, but turned out to be all about trees, and although the leaves were turning, regeneration of both sorts was very much on my mind that day. There are some more photographs from the day here.

The words came much later, at the instigation of the Cairngorms Writer in Residence, Merryn Glover, who urged me to write a Cairngorm Lyric, a type of poem devised by her and inspired by the Japanese Haiku. The Cairngorm Lyric is made up of 15 words; an element of nature from the Cairngorms, and at least one word or name of non-English origin (including Pictish, Scots or Gaelic placenames). I’ve written a few since, finding the discipline of getting across what I want to say within the 15-word limit a challenge that occasionally satisfies.  Whether this one entirely works I’m still not decided, but that’s the nature of writing: whether you can ever adequately describe the world is a moot point, but brief flashes delight like a sunlit mountain glimpsed through breaking mist, so we keep trying.

Covid dreams 7: Coming home

For me this has to be one of the most evocative of images. You’ve parked at the Linn o’ Dee and walked up the track to the Black Bridge. You turn the corner and there the wide, flat meadowland opens up ahead of you, pastoral setting for Carn Crom rising above the Derry woods and, beyond that, Carn a Mhaim’s blunt pyramid, its two blunt ridges thrusting forward to form an armchair or, in more Freudian moods, like great swelling, comforting breasts.

How many times did I come on this scene as a youth and think only of the distance still to go to the bothy or to the hills I was aiming for? Then one day, when I had been away from these hills for several years, I turned the corner and as the scene opened up to me my heart opened up to the scene and I knew that I loved these mountains and this country.

So many times since I’ve travelled this road, under summer sun with heather purpling the hills and knee deep through blanketing snow; by the light of a full moon illuming the snow and under a luminous mist of stars arching between black silhouetted hills. I’ve wandered over Carn Crom and Carn a Mhaim, explored the flanking hillsides right and left, and followed the course of the Lui Burn from which the road is invisible, giving the whole glen a different air. And all those days are in this view still, and it can do nothing other than lift my heart.

A series of Covid dreams. Just a photo or two from the archives and a few words: memories of the Cairngorms to stay in the heart while we’re kept away from the hills.

Covid dreams 6: The plateau

The Cairngorms can disappoint those who are thirled to pointed peaks and sharp ridges, but that’s to miss the point… so to speak. The view here is all about size and scale: the expanse of the high plateau, the sense of space and distance, the awareness of altitude. The summit cairn on the skyline – the north top of Beinn  a Bhuird – seems almost an irrelevance, while the slow, rolling rise and fall of sparsely clad landscape makes a feature of featurelessness. The group of people in the middle ground, scarcely visible at the distance, underline the scale of the plateau.

This is not a mountain for smash-and-grab list tickers, but for stravaigers; a mountain to be wandered over rather than conquered. That great rolling plateau edged with sudden cliffs and their open, stony  corries, that great arctic desert falling away to bulging slopes riven by streams and cascades. Beinn a Bhuird is a mountain to be explored over years not climbed in a few hours.

No hiding place on the plateau? This ptarmigan ‘s mate remained so well hidden that I almost stepped on it before it flew up in my face, nearly giving me a heart attack but succeeding in diverting my feet from her eggs.

A series of Covid dreams. Just a photo or two from the archives and a few words: memories of the Cairngorms to stay in the heart while we’re kept away from the hills.

Covid dreams 5: Mar Lodge in the 1970s

This takes me back to my childhood and early teenage years, to the late ’60s and early ’70s and the heydays of the public bar at Mar Lodge. With a free campsite a couple of miles up the road, Saturday nights through the summer were never quiet.

The bar was in a wing at the back courtyard, a long, narrow room with a tall, copper bar at one end and that great open fire with the massive copper hood at the far end. On wet weekends you could hardly see the fire for campers’ wet clothes laid around the edges, steam hiding the roaring blaze which would have whole sections of tree trunk blazing away. I remember one evening of heavy rain seeing sodden campers hidden at the tables behind the fire, cooking their dinner on a Primus stove.

It was a bar where songs and music were common and sometimes when the grille came down over the bar at 10pm the head barman, Bill Loban, would come round the front and play tunes on his accordion, while drinks continued to be served round the side. Once I remember all the tables being cleared to make room for an eightsome reel. It was a bar full of fun but safe for families, and children were treated with kindness and endless tolerance. Christie Moore sings a song, lines of which take me right back there with a tear in my eyes: “They were magic nights in the Lobby Bar… …We were children, our mothers were young, and fathers were tall and kind.”

A series of Covid dreams. Just a photo or two from the archives and a few words: memories of the Cairngorms to stay in the heart while we’re kept away from the hills.

Covid dreams 4: Perfect day

There’s something so relaxed and relaxing about this photo of Neil Findlay and Alfie descending from Sgor Dubh to Luibeg Cottage. June sunshine dominates, with the occasional cloud-shadow drifting across the hillsides but to wind to speak of. As I take the photograph I’m looking towards Carn a Mhaim, which is flanked on one side by the sunlit Devil’s Point and on the other by the black cliffs of distant Braeriach. In front of us as we descend, we’re looking across the Luibeg and Derry Woods to Carn Crom and the beautiful lower part of Glen Derry, the glen of the woods. It’s a view that has a bit of everything: mountain and glen, woods and moorland, cliff and rolling heather-clad hillsides – and that blue, white-fluffed sky.

I have no real recollection of this particular day but it encapsulates the perfection of a summer stravaig in the hills: no particular goal, no schedule to keep to, no rush, no path to constrain you from following whims in this direction or that. The sort of day when you can sit on the heather dry-douped, lean back against a boulder and blether about anything or nothing, soaking in the sunshine and gazing out at everything and nothing. If you’re on your own you might allow your eyelids to droop and your mind to drift. You might nap for five minutes or for an hour, waking easily, your eyes opening again to the same view and your mind, refreshed and calmed, easing gradually into a relaxed wakefulness that stays with you even when you rise. Summer in the high Cairngorms.

A series of Covid dreams. Just a photo or two from the archives and a few words: memories of the Cairngorms to stay in the heart while we’re kept away from the hills.

 

 

Covid dreams 3: Cold winter

These images speak of the harshness and violence of winter in the Cairngorms. And of the beauty.

The weak sunlight flaring through a gap in the wind-torn clouds to light a ridgeline almost scoured of that dry, cold snow that has never felt temperatures above zero. The landscape is a colourless place where life has withdrawn into itself and takes on the same dead black as the rock. Yet I remember stopping to take this photograph; to take it and to stand for long minutes, buffeted by the wind but stilled by the awareness of an austere and intense beauty that touched me to my heart.

This was a day when travel in the glens was arduous; knee-deep, sometimes thigh-deep snow baffling movement. At Luibeg ford I gave up and took to the steep western slopes of Carn Crom, blown near bare of snow by the tearing wind. Spindrift smoked across the hillside in abrasive, stinging clouds.

I looked to my feet at the ground-hugging heath, every interstice blast-filled with thin, cold snow, making of it black, vermicelli snakes glued to gravel which itself was frozen into the hardness of the granite from which it once crumbled. Looking at that I knew the relentlessness of cold, bitter winter and felt how tenuous, yet obdurate, was life’s hold on these hills.

But this season of harshness and violence created as well as destroyed. Snow falls and all winter is moved around – scoured from here, laid down there – and in one drift I studied how this tearing, battering force of wind had wrought the most delicate sculpture, picking out unsuspected layers in the drift to expose the contours of previous storms.

A series of Covid dreams. Just a photo or two from the archives and a few words: memories of the Cairngorms to stay in the heart while we’re kept away from the hills.

Covid Dreams 2: The chairs

It’s never been just about the hills. It’s also about the people: the sharing, the craic, the daft ploys and laughs.

We were heading in to Corrour Bothy to do some work and taking in a couple of replacement chairs, and the easiest way to carry them was strapped to the back of a couple of the guys’ rucksacks. So when we crossed the Luibeg at the ford, it only made sense to make use of the chairs – without even having to detach them from the rucksacks – and it tickled us to have such ‘civilisation’ in the middle of nowhere.

This was back in 2011, with Neil Findlay, ‘Lithgae’ Jim Wright, Walt Black and ‘Stornoway’ Bill Glass, all part of the regular crew at that time.

A series of Covid dreams: just a photo from the archives and a few words, memories of the Cairngorms to stay in the heart while we’re kept away from the hills.