Cameron’s Country
Taking a walk in the nature that lies close to home and appreciating the jewels there has been a revelation
Cameron McNeish finds the jewels of nature in a walk right from his doorstep
IT’S taken a pandemic to make me look at my village and its surroundings with fresh eyes, a world-wide contagion of catastrophic proportions to show me the natural wonders that lie immediately around me in my Badenoch home.
And I guess many folk will have had similar experiences, whether it’s noticing the array of bird life in your garden or, in the absence of city traffic noise, hearing and appreciating the dawn chorus for the first time. I should point out that I’m exceptionally fortunate. I live in a beautiful part of Scotland, have a large garden and I can even hike to a Munro or two, mountains of more than 914 metres (3000 feet), from my front door.
We have no shortage of local walks and bike rides but, even at that, with such an abundance of privilege, I initially found lockdown to be quite difficult.
Not as difficult as living in a city flat with no garden I hasten to add. I’ve no idea how I would have coped with that scenario and I have massive respect for those who do. But, there is a sense that familiarity breeds contempt and the grass is always that bit greener elsewhere. In short, my freedom to roam has been curtailed and I’ve struggled with that.
My family moved to Newtonmore in Badenoch, in the shadow of the Cairngorms and the Monadhliath, 32 years ago. We had been in the area since 1977, living in Aviemore and then the lovely village of Kincraig.
The road we now live on runs out to bare moorland at the foot of A’chailleach, one of four Munros in the Monadhliath, and I can see others from my bedroom.
As Highland villages go, Newtonmore perhaps isn’t the prettiest. It sprawls a bit from the main street that was, before we were bypassed by the A9, the main road to the north, but there is a vibrant sense of community with a
“My freedom to roam has been curtailed and, like many, I’ve struggled with that
population of about a thousand, its own school and church and a railway station with a sleeper service south.
Curiously, when I think back on the reasons for moving here, I was almost obsessed with the village’s geographical position, almost in the very centre of mainland Scotland. It was a great place to go elsewhere.
I could jump on a sleeper to the south, I could reach the west in just over an hour, Inverness and the far north in an hour or so and Highland Perthshire was just a stone’s throw across Drumochter.
I didn’t think a lot about spending much time in Newtonmore itself. Why should I? I had the whole of the world to explore, and I did.
Suddenly, just a few months ago on March 23, all that freedom to travel was taken away. Removed overnight. I could only leave the confines of my house and garden for an hour each day. It felt as though I had been given a prison sentence.
Fortunately, that lockdown coincided with a long spell of fine weather and the first thing I noticed was that despite pandemics, lockdowns, infections rates and deaths, the natural world goes on as before.
New life was appearing around us, the trees were beginning to bud and daffodils were blooming. Birds were building nests with a sense of urgency I’d never really noticed before and red squirrels were constant visitors. More and more I took to simply sitting in my garden watching, and hugely enjoying, the natural world developing around me.
I bought more feeders, fatballs, peanuts and bird
boxes and delighted in the increase of visitors, chaffinch, sparrows, blackbirds, thrushes, blue tits and great tits, coal tits and long-tailed tits, siskin and tree-creepers, a resident robin and a wren who nested in our wood-pile.
Earlier in lockdown, when we were only allowed an hour of exercise each day, our walks were centred on Loch Imrich, just off Newtonmore’s main street.
A lovely footpath encircles this secluded loch – a kettle-hole, the legacy of the glacier that covered this area during the last ice age. Herons nest here but in the past I’ve always been in too much of a hurry to sit and watch.
On the loch you often see mallard, coot and dabchicks, with goldeneye visiting in the winter. Many years ago, when winters were winters, the oft-frozen loch was used as a curling pond and the old wooden Newtonmore Curling Club hut, built from railway sleepers in 1930, still stands on the shore.
A footpath runs through the larches and birches that surround the loch and I’ve been amazed by the profusion of wild flowers that grow in the shadow of the trees, including bluebells, primroses, twinflower, wood anemone, flag irises, foxgloves, Alpine forget-me-knots, marsh trefoil and pink purslane – a kaleidoscope of brash colour that I must admit I’ve never really paid much attention to before. I haven’t suddenly become an expert botanist, but I have downloaded an excellent app for my phone that identifies plants. It’s called Picture This. It takes a little time to spot a plant, photograph it and have it identified but if there is one thing that the coronavirus lockdown has given me, it’s time – just as the poet William Henry Davies suggested:
“Herons nest here but in the past I’ve always been in too much of a hurry to sit and watch
A poor life this if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.
Unable to drive even the short distance to the Cairngorms, I’ve recently turned my attention to the Monadhliath, or I should say, the lower slopes and glens of the Monadhliath. This translates as the “grey rolling hills”, an interpretation of the Gaelic that offers an impression of drabness that is unreasonable and far from accurate.
They are in fact hills with much to offer, where, away from the more popular trade routes of the four Munros, you are unlikely to see another soul.
The Munros themselves, I admit, lack the structural dimensions of a Buachaille Etive Mor or an An Teallach and one of them, Carn Sgulain, lays legitimate claim to being the least exciting three-thousander in the land.
But, in a country where much of our mountain architecture makes hillwalkers drool with visual pleasure, the rolling plateau of the Monadhliath offers a subtler attraction, a more visceral allure that has much to do space, wide open skies and an abundance of wildlife.
Of no great height, a mere 716m (2350ft), Creag Dhubh is nonetheless the most striking and interesting of all the hills in the Monadhliath, especially its south-east flank. This presents an almost continuously steep, rocky face, with fine vertical cliffs rising above Lochain Uvie.
Three hundred years ago the warriors of the local Clan Chattan, to which the Macpherson and Macintosh clans belonged, used this hill’s name as a battle cry, a challenge which would have resounded through the hills and glens.
Such a cry was, if you like, a song of identification, the recognition of a common origin. Whether the song is one of jubilation, a song of triumph, or a song by which to be led into battle, such music surely has its foundation in an inherent love of the land and the undeniable fact that we were all indeed, born in its embrace.
Even though, at the time of writing, I can’t stand on the summits of the Monadhliaths, I can, more than ever, take solace from that song of identification and find encouragement from those things immediately around me – the birds, the loch, the glens and lower slopes and the promise of spring. Above all, hope for a better future.