Waffle and I go on an adventure

Isuppose it’s one way of relaxing your guests – send them on a half hour drive up a precipitous cliff-side track on the edge of a West Highland loch. By the time they get to the lodge they are so thankful to have survived that everything else – wind, rain, hail and snow – comes as blessed relief. Waffle and I had been asked to shoot somewhere between, as far as I could make out, Loch Etive and Glencoe, up said track and then another tortuous half hour inland.

It turned out to be men only, not because women were not invited, but because the owner’s wife flatly refuses to go anywhere near the place and has warned all other women to have nothing to do with it on the grounds of extreme discomfort. And probably the prospect of men talking bollocks. While men might love this sort of thing, a small stone-built stalking lodge with 1920s corrugated iron extensions, arm chairs that look as though they came out of a skip and blanked off pipes and wires hanging through the wood-lined ceilings, it is most women’s idea of hell. And the rain of course. It hasn’t stopped in Argyll since June. Yet we lived quite happily for four days on porridge, bacon and eggs, homemade frozen fish and cottage pies and oceans of alcohol.

And when we weren’t cooking we lurched around boggy bits beside the loch in search of pheasants, crept up on the wild duck on the river and engineered an exhausting flanking manoeuvre through sodden birch and alder to entrap the snipe, which had sensibly flown long before we got anywhere near them.

The sun came out, the wind dropped and the loch went glassy. Waffle excelled herself at long range retrieves. Even the keeper acknowledged she was one of the quickest doggies he had ever seen. Quickest mind; not necessarily best trained.

We had a driven day. Two golden eagles came to look and pushed off. The pheasants flew at stratospheric height from plantations either side of the glen. Waffle swam the raging river three times to retrieve birds.

And the next day we drove an hour and half to a neighbour over the hill where our host forgot, until after the first drive, to tell us we were limited to a total of 50 birds, i.e. seven each.

This meant that to keep to our limit we could fire only at “sporting birds” that is, the high and tricky, which was and is no bad thing. By lunchtime it was all over, which was terrific because there was no hurry to get back out. And there were grouse for dinner, brought by a fellow guest, which we plucked and cooked. Waffle has been asked next year. There is still a question mark over her master. n