The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Glenesk treasury of streams, meadows, rocks and haunts of immortal pleasure
Police – it’s the mnemonic for the glens of Angus – Prosen, Ogil, Lethnot, Isla, Clova and Esk. It’s one of the trivial pieces of information that this column thrives on. Although, having recently been taken to task by a fastidious reader for ending a sentence with a preposition, I suppose I should have written “... on which this column thrives”. I’m sure my mentor will forgive me if I suggest to him that he’s got too much time on his hands and he should get out into the countryside more.
Glenesk is the most easterly of the Angus glens, stretching into the hinterland almost to neighbouring Royal Deeside and many – me included, you’ll not be surprised to learn – say it is the loveliest of them all. It’s the Angus glen I know best and I’ve known it all my life.
The deeper you venture into the glen the more completely Highland it becomes. There’s history, atmosphere, wildlife, skies, rivers, lochs, castles, traditional shooting lodges, abandoned villages, wild beauty, red deer and red grouse, eagles, romance intrigue, murder, a whisky trail, a hermit’s cell, fugitive cave, heather-like spilt claret and, best of all, peace and escape from the tyranny of the mobile phone.
The headwaters of the River North Esk which flows through the glen rise in the East Grampians in Glen Mark, far above Loch Lee, starting life as the Water of Mark. It flows past Bonnymoon’s Cave with its romantic fugitive story. Follow the burn past remote Glenmark Cottage and the Queen’s Well with its granite, crownshaped monument familiar to generations of walkers who have climbed Mount Keen, the most easterly of the Munros – Scottish mountains higher than 3,000 feet.
Below the ancient tower of Invermark Castle, the Mark joins the Water of Lee flowing out of Loch Lee, and officially becomes the River North Esk. To locals it is known just as the Glen.
The Rev James Landreth, minister of Logie Pert Church (between Montrose and Laurencekirk) wrote in his Grampian Diary, which appeared in the Dundee Advertiser in wartime 1917, of “shady haunts of immortal pleasure, a perfect treasury of streams, rocks, and meadows, fringed with the wilful and sweet-scented birk. This great glen can challenge comparison with any other in the world. Even in these dire days of war, it strengthens and renews the heart thus to meet Nature quite face to face. The clear air, the long afternoons of lingering radiance, the vivid purple of bell-heather on the silent hills, the fragrance of the ghostly peat smoke stealing gently skywards, lift us for a while
out of the hurly-burly, and it is as if we were awaking in another world, when, on opening our eyes in the morning, we see a mountain looking in at the window”.
Pretty florid language for today’s reader, but it shows how the glen gets under your skin.
With the threat of another lockdown looming, the Doyenne and I took the opportunity to drive up the glen for a breath of clean air and to enjoy the familiar views we count ourselves so lucky to have practically on our doorstep.
If the rash of molehills we saw in some fields is anything to go by, it’s a bumper year for moles. It’s strange, though, that one field can be a battle zone of high mole activity and molehill eruptions, and the one next door is free of them.
Moles need to eat more than half their bodyweight of earthworms each day, so I suppose the explanation is that one field is
crawling with the wriggly critters and the next one isn’t.
Before humane mole traps, which are intended to instantaneously kill any mole unlucky enough to get itself caught in one, came on the market, methods were a deal worse in the past.
They say that moles cannot move backwards, so the old countryman’s method of control was to place two empty bottles end to end in mole runs, known as galleries, ensuring that whichever direction the mole came from it was bound to be trapped. Once in the jar the mole couldn’t reverse out and could be disposed of.
A crafty method to rid your garden of moles, if you’re squeamish about killing them, is to pour an eggcup-full of diesel into their run.
The oily earth gums up their soft fur and they will desert that run and move to the next door garden to cast up their molehills
– and irritate your neighbour instead. And half an onion or garlic bulbs pushed into a molehill was reckoned to be a surefire way to clear your garden of moles – and vampires too, no doubt.
And if you are an Irishman living in Ireland, you need never lose a night’s sleep over the little gentlemen in black velvet ruining your manicured lawn. An Irish girl told me there are no moles in Ireland.
Pretty florid language shows how the glen gets under your skin