A LIFE LESS ORDINARY
At 82, Gillian Pattinson may be the oldest stalker in the Highlands, but this remarkable Highlander is also a noted artist and conservationist, discovers
Gillian Pattinson may be 82, but there is no let up in her busy schedule as a Highland stalker and noted artist
On New Year’s Day, Gillian Pattinson was sitting comfortably in her living room in the West Highlands a metaphorical stone’s throw from Applecross, when she received a telephone call. A dog walker had come across a stag in terrible distress on her land, with its antlers stuck in a deer fence and its body wedged against a ruined wall.
Gillian left immediately but by the time she arrived it was clear that the stag was beyond help so she set about doing the necessary. She dispatched the beast with her rifle, gralloched it, winched it onto her argocat, drove it across rutted country to the deer larder and prepared it for the game dealer. As anyone who has done this single-handedly knows, it’s a tiring process for even the hardiest stalker.
Yet at 82 it was all in a day’s work for Gillian, who has been stalking for almost sixty years and doesn’t plan on giving up any time soon. Certainly, in mid-January, the last time I spoke to her, she was already planning the next day’s stalking excursion to a far-flung plantation in search of any marauding hinds as the end of the season approaches.
‘I’ll carry on for as long as I’m enjoying it, and I have great fun going out with friends and members of the family, especially my four children and the grandchildren,’ she said. ‘My husband’s nephew is a pilot and hasn’t had much work during Covid so I’ve been taking him out to clear the deer out of the plantations. He’s been so taken with it all that he wants to do a stalking course, which really pleased me. This is what life’s all about.’
Certainly it’s part of what Gillian’s life is all about. There is a certain type of formidable countrywoman – in my mind’s eye I picture that legendary Victorian female stalker, the Marchioness of Breadalbane – that many of us encounter from time to time, and of whom Gillian is absolutely typical. Field sports are a large part of their life, but then so are their gardens, their family, their community.
Whether it’s Gillian’s manically active outdoors life – which includes everything from rewilding the land, skiing at Aonach Mòr, skating on Loch Loin last month, tying her own flies and fishing on Loch Damph or the Balgy, and keeping a flock of soay sheep plus geese and hens – or the art classes which bring tutors and
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A sprightly 82, Gillian has now been stalking for almost sixty years
aspiring painters from all over the world to her studio, she never stops. I’m nearly thirty years younger than her and think of myself as a ridiculously busy soul, but even I need a sit down after hearing how much she fits into the average day, if her life ever includes such a thing.
Talking to her about her family background, her own sang-froid about her lifestyle becomes a little easier to understand. Her war hero father, Colonel Sir William Mather, spent much of the war with either Monty or the Desert Rats, and one of her fondest memories is of her father retelling the story of his part in the last cavalry charge of the war, in France in 1944, before demonstrating how to wield a sword from a horse.
Whether it’s nature or nurture, his example rubbed off. Gillian’s family are extraordinarily intrepid, with her sister Jennifer the best example. Aged sixty, Jennifer and her husband – a former French legionnaire turned senior banker – bought a Robinson R44 helicopter on a whim, with Jennifer loving it so much that, still in her sixties, she became the first woman to fly a chopper solo around the world.
Gillian’s life also turned on such decisions. She had shot and fished as a girl, but it was only when she met her future husband, Mark Pattinson, in her early twenties and he took her to the family-owned Lochcarron Estate, between Lochcarron and Shieldaig, that her life took a different turn.
‘I shot my first stag at Couldoran aged 24,’ she said. ‘Something just clicked and I have loved being up on the hill ever since. We were lucky enough to move to a cottage on Loch Damph in 1980, and soon afterwards the old stalker died. Mark and I ended up doing the stalking for a year, shooting 20 stags and 18 hinds a year, and I became very interested in it then.
‘I love watching the deer and seeing how they’re doing. We started taking paying guests when we moved to Couldoran in 1980, but they had to understand that we didn’t do trophy shooting, it was all for the management of the herd. I was very much interested in doing it right.’
Making sure that she was ‘doing it right’ meant immersing herself in that world. She became secretary of the South West Ross Deer Management Group when it started and briefly a Regional Representative of the Association of Deer Management Groups. But, more importantly, it led on to a wider appreciation of how to manage the estate. Gillian was responsible for enclosing an area of endangered birch trees on limestone rock, and for planting three plantations of Scots pine and native woodlands. In all, she has planted almost a million trees across six thousand acres of Wester Ross.
As well as the plantations, before she moved out of the big house in 2003 she also restored Couldoran’s 14-acre woodland garden, which was planted by Charles and Elizabeth Murray in the 1920s using many seedlings from Osgood Mackenzie. By the time she got her hands on it, it was a windblown and impenetrable mass of verbiage, but with help from Peter Clough, the brother of football legend Brian and also head keeper at Inverewe Gardens – ‘he was tiny, had this incredibly long white beard, walked so fast no-one could keep up with him, and played the harp wonderfully’ – the jungle became manageable.
‘It was very popular to have rhodendrons in the gardens of big houses, and there were over 100 different varieties of hybrid rhododendrons at Couldoran, many of which we couldn’t identify,’ she said. ‘But instead of the large purple ponticum, there were these beautiful small more unusual pink flowers.’
As if Gillian didn’t have enough to do, they became integral to another sphere of her life: she’s an artist who painted 25 of the flowers. She studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London as a youngster, and art was in the family: her mother was an artist, all three siblings paint, her oldest daughter Fiona is an art teacher and a granddaughter is studying to be one.
After raising her children, Gillian went back to art. ‘I gave up for many years while I had children and it wasn’t until I came here that I had time to paint again,’ she says. ‘The scenery is just so fabulous, and my office at Couldoran looked straight down to the sea so one day I just had to paint. I got out my old sketchbook and paintbox and was appalled by the results, but kept at it.’
After doing a course on Mull she got a tutor to come and teach her and a group of friends at her home, which is how the North West Highlands Art Courses she now runs started. That was twenty years ago, and she’s been doing it ever since, as well as selling art online and from the gallery behind her house. For anyone wanting to study art it’s difficult to imagine a more beautiful backdrop, with views of Loch Kishorn, the Bealach Na Bà, Ben Damph and across Loch Carron to Skye. ‘I love anywhere with hills and water,’ she says. ‘I specialise in vigorous landscapes.’
It is, I muse, a dreamlike – if insanely busy – life, and she agrees. ‘I certainly never get bored, there’s always something to do,’ she laughs. ‘But then that’s just how I like it.’
“She has planted almost a million trees in this corner of Wester Ross