The Herald - The Herald Magazine
A CURRENT AFFAIR
THIS WEDNESDAY THE CURTAIN RISES ON THE £1.35 BILLION QUEENSFERRY CROSSING. IN THE FIRST OF TWO STORIES MARKING THE HISTORIC EVENT TEDDY JAMIESON TRACES THE MEANDERING RIVER FORTH FROM ITS SOURCE TO WHERE IT MEETS THE SEA
Teddy Jamieson traces the River Forth back to the beginning
EVERY story, like every river, has a source. For once I’ve got a window seat. As the Ryanair jet climbs into the sky above Edinburgh I can see the Firth of Forth glitter and glint below. From this distance it is still, serene. All the energy that’s boiling away, the ebb and flow of tides and currents, is invisible from this distance. Through one window I can see Fife, through the other Leith. A boat pulls a white line of wake across the water. For a moment I imagine it’s a zip pulling the land back together again.
The plane begins to bank and I can see up the river to where my day began in Falkirk. The Kincardine and Clackmannanshire Bridges are visible, forming a scalene triangle with the riverbank. Beyond that the river wriggles north and west towards the Trossachs and it occurs to me I don’t know where it starts.
A few weeks later I decide to go and find out. WHERE does a river begin? The River Forth flows for 29 miles from the Trossachs through Stirling and down the Forth Valley before widening out into an estuary at Kincardine and then on to Edinburgh and the sea.
Loch Ard marks the official start of the Forth (though Loch Ard itself is fed by water from Loch Chon so questions of origin can be liquid) and I’m looking for the place where loch becomes river. But to do that I have to find the loch itself.
Truth is, I am hopeless outdoors. I can’t read maps, my sock keeps slipping below my heel in my walking boots and I think I might be lost. I am walking through denuded trees, past giant boulders and slate outcrops covered in soft moss. The photographer Albert Watson once told me that Scotland had the best moss. He would travel from New York for fashion shoots just so he could use it as his backdrop.
As I walk I am thinking of all the rivers I’ve lived near. As a baby, in army barracks in Germany, I was close to the Ruhr. As a boy I could see the River Bann from the playground in Northern Ireland. My Uncle Tommy would take me and my sisters to the shop, buy sweets which we would eat while we walked by the river. One day walking home from work he took an epileptic fit, fell in and drowned. I have a vivid memory of my mother grieving and angry. “I hate that river,” she screamed again and again and again.
I’ve lived by the River Carron in Denny, by the River Wear in Durham. But mostly I have lived close to the Forth. Now when I hear the word “river” I think of the suck of the marshy lands at low tide that stretch away either side of the Kincardine Bridge, the looping meanders of the river around Stirling, even the width of the water between the two Queensferrys.
But its beginning is eluding me. I climb up a hill through heather, birdsong and the plash of soft rain to try to get my bearings. But at the top the clouds meet the canopy and I can’t see anything.
This is getting ridiculous. How can you misplace a loch? I retrace my steps, go the other way, turn a corner and there is Loch Ard.
This morning it’s a place of silence and dripping rain. Sometimes Scotland, you are so beautiful. I walk along the bank trying to work out the point at which the loch ends and the river begins. There is a house called Lochend Cottage. That sounds hopeful. Behind it water tumbles over duck-covered stepping stones and under a wooden bridge. I walk over the latter. This must be the river’s first crossing, I think.
Back at the entrance to the cottage I feel that maybe I should check. I open the gate and knock on the door.
Susan Mitchell is in. She has lived here for the best part of four years. And yes, she says, the Forth starts in her back garden. “It literally starts in our boathouse.”
About three months ago, she says, she got a letter from an Australian couple addressed to the home owner, Lochend Cottage. The sender said his mother had been raised in the cottage and he asked if it would be OK to visit. “I had a lovely day with them showing them around. His mother had been born here in 1916. His mum had grown up at the source of the Forth.”
Outside, the river skips and dances away towards Aberfoyle.