The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Storms left damage but most of Angus is as Violet Jacob would have known it
I’m still getting used to a countryside devastated by Storm Arwen and Storm Barra which hit Scotland in quick succession last month leaving trails of destruction. It’s the woodland and the trees where the destruction is most evident.
Where once a fine wood grew, a gap has appeared in the skyline. It’s sad to see old warriors, many more than 200 years old, ignominiously uprooted and flung to the ground. The wind was so powerful some just snapped off leaving a jagged stump.
It brings back memories of the great storm of 1987, which readers who are a bit smooth in the tooth will remember was the storm that weatherman Michael Fish notoriously dismissed as not going to happen. But it did – with a vengeance.
More than 15 million trees were lost in 100+ mph winds.
For Scotland the storm of 1968 was probably the most severe. I remember it well – great swathes of woodland near our house were flattened and we lost an ancient yew in the garden which I was fond of.
It wasn’t lost totally, however, as an artist cousin who was also a talented wood carver took a lot of it for his carving.
More memorable for the rest of Scotland was that one of the 80ft tall turrets of the Scott Monument in Princes Street, Edinburgh, was blown off.
I’ve heard it will take months to clear the forest roads and woodland footpaths from this latest event.
And it could take as long as two years to clear the windfall timber – it’s such a tangled mess you’d need a drone to properly appreciate just how bad it is.
Dog walkers who had favourite woodland walks will be looking for new routes.
Some of the fallout will be predictable but we’ll just have to wait and see what the unforeseeable outcomes are.
Finding myself with a bit of time over the festive period, I took the opportunity to pick up a couple of books I hadn’t read for years.
Angus-born Violet Jacob has long been one of my favourite poets but she was also a wonderful novelist and storyteller who, in my view, is the equal of such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
Her novel The Interloper is based in the north-east of Scotland around Montrose and other parts I know.
Many of the houses and places are sufficiently well described to be recognised despite being renamed.
In the opening paragraphs of her novel she writes of a bridge of eight arches spanning the River North Esk, or the North Lour as she has it.
Tuesday, you’ll remember, was a bright, sunny morning, though the wind had a sharp edge to it.
You can’t afford to waste days like this so I jumped into the car and took myself off to the Lower Northwaterbridge to take another look at the old bridge.
Completed in 1775, it carries the A92 across the river from Angus to Kincardineshire.
Some years ago there were proposals to replace it but cost and problems of providing a temporary bridge until completion of the new one soon saw the idea dropped.
The midday sun warmed sandstone of the eight arches.
Running alongside it are the 12 arches of the disused railway viaduct, which carried the Montrose to Bervie line that closed in 1966.
At the north end, a ruined, octagonal toll house – originally you paid to cross – is now unrecognisable under a blanket of ivy.
It would have been criminal if the old the light bridge had been demolished. It fits into its setting so completely and is utterly in context.
Any replacement would, to misquote Prince Charles, have been a carbuncle on the landscape.
My home town of Montrose, renamed Kaims in the novel, is instantly recognisable from the description of the gable-end architecture which dominates the High Street and is a reflection of the historic trading ventures between the town and the Netherlands.
Two houses in the book take their names from two farms – Whanland and Morphie. Whanland Farm is near Brechin and I suspect gives its name to Gallery House, near Montrose.
Morphie Farm is in Kincardineshire, near Marykirk, and looks down over the North Esk river. Its name is given to Kinnaber House on the outskirts of Montrose.
A description of wallpaper in a bedroom with an immense pattern of birds and branches has got to be in Gallery House. The wallpaper was an early Chinese wallpaper I remember seeing as a youngster.
It was historic then and I hope is still on the walls as it must have been among the earliest wallpaper hung in Scotland.
The description of Morphie’s closeness to the great eight-spanned bridge, beech trees on the river bank and the ribbon of water winding out to sea, convince me this is Kinnaber.
Violet Jacob would have known them all.