The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Man tells how he was crushed in stampede
APerth hotel boss has told how he was almost trampled to death by a herd of stampeding cows.
Gordon Paterson said he is lucky to have survived the terrifying ordeal at a Perthshire beauty spot.
The 52-year-old manager of the Salutation Hotel – the oldest hotel in Scotland – was pulled to safety by a passing family-of-four, who had watched in horror as the cattle thundered over his body.
Gordon was airlifted to hospital for emergency surgery to fix a crushed elbow, and to reconnect his left arm.
The incident has left mental scars too. He told The Courier that, while recovering in hospital, he woke one night thinking his ward had been invaded by cows.
Now he is pursuing legal action against the cattle’s owner.
“It was horrific,” he said. “I just know I’m lucky to be alive.
“If I had fallen on to a rock, or if I had been knocked down in a different way, it could have been a very different outcome.”
He said: “The surgeons told me that there was one hoof mark that came down on my back, right next to my spinal cord. It was bad, but it could have easily have been much worse.”
Gordon was walking his black Labrador Bracken on a popular countryside trail near Dunkeld when the cows struck.
It happened on a sunny Sunday afternoon towards the end of September. “It’s a circular walk through the countryside,” he said. “We go this way quite often. It’s usually very popular.
“As I was walking along, I could see the cows in the distance, about 15 of them standing on the footpath.
“I thought I’d better stay clear of them, so we started to walk around them.”
He said: “That was when I felt the ground start to vibrate underneath me.
“I looked up and I saw the herd charging towards me. There was a cattle grid at the end of the path, but I thought there was no way I was going to make it there in time.
“Before I knew it, there was an almighty thud and I was on the ground. The impact of one of the cows striking me just knocked me right out.”
Gordon kept slipping in and out of consciousness as the cows trampled across him, leaving him covered in hoof prints.
“Luckily, I fell on a fairly soft part of ground. I remember that I just sort of, sank into it,” he said.
“My dog got off his lead and was growling at the cows, and I could hear this family-of-four who were nearby shouting and yelling. They were trying to scare the cows away from me.”
Gordon said his clothes were torn to shreds as the cows ran over him.
“I could feel a breeze on my body,” he said. “My glasses were smashed as well.
“The next thing I remember was the family dragging me over the cattle grid. I was really, really lucky they were there.
“They made the calls and kept talking to me, to keep me awake.
“If they weren’t there, things could have ended very differently. There was nobody else in the area, so I could have been left lying there for some time before someone found me.”
Emergency services swooped on the area, including a team of armed police who just happened to have been dealing with another incident nearby.
Gordon spent two weeks in Ninewells Hospital’s trauma ward. He required an ulnar collateral ligament operation to fix his right elbow, while metal plates were inserted to fix his left arm.
“That was the part that took the most impact from the cows,” he said. “I had a very badly bruised back and bashed left shoulder blade too.”
He said: “While I was in hospital, I was reading up on incidents like this and I spotted one from just a week or two earlier, where a 67-year-old was killed. Exactly the same thing had happened to him.”
He added: “While I was in hospital, I did have a few nightmares. I actually woke up one night thinking the ward was full of cows.”
Gordon, who is on a flexi-furlough scheme with the Salutation Hotel only opening for key workers and essential stays, said he is now very wary of walking anywhere that there might be cattle roaming.
More than four months on, he is still recovering.
“Every week I see a bit of an improvement,” he said. “My left arm is about 50% now, but it will be a few more weeks before it’s back to normal.”
Gordon is now trying to identify the cow’s owners as part of a compensation bid.
“Sadly, we have no indication of where they came from. There’s a farmhouse nearby, but someone tried there and they said it wasn’t their cows,” he said.
Mr Paterson’s lawyer, Eilish Lindsay, from Thompsons Solicitors, said: “The injuries suffered by my client were extremely serious and he is entitled to answers as to how this incident happened and to full compensation.”