Flowerdale Forest
David Lintern heads into the remote hills north of Torridon
AS I SIT DOWN to write this, the lambing storms of April are upon us here in the Highlands. Outside my window, snowflakes scurry frantically in all directions and the occasional wave of spindrift launches itself from a neighbour’s roof. It’s Easter Monday. On Saturday it was ‘taps aff ’ – a day so warm we could smell the pine sap rising in the woods. And now we’re all emerging from Covid hibernation once more, uncertain what the weather will bring.
But I want to take you back to last summer, the last time we came out of hiding, when our senses came alive again and the sense of freedom and release had a scent and a taste. For those few months in between, I made hay while the sun shone and took myself north whenever I could – but this particular trip remains a personal highlight. The cracks are how the light gets in, reckoned Leonard Cohen; and as I look back, a powerful light from this small journey still shines through and sustains.
In my ongoing quest for Scottish ephemera, I planned to link three Corbetts over three short days on a potentially new line in the Flowerdale Forest. The big, bold characters of Torridon – Liathach, Beinn Eighe and Beinn Alligin – get all the plaudits, but while the ground to the north is not quite as tall and pointy, it does have the added allure of minimal footfall and a big splash of environmental history.
I’d had my eye on this for many years, having spied the potential from those more illustrious neighbours; but there were two big question marks on my proposed line and one crux.
Would it ‘go’? If it’s a foregone conclusion, then it’s not an adventure…
FLOWER POWER
I began at Red Stable (a wooden building that is actually green) and headed into Bad na Sgalaig native woodland. ‘Rewilding’ is capturing imaginations right now, but Gairloch Estate was twenty years ahead of the curve and planted over a million trees here during the late 1990s. There’s something of the Alps or the Pyrenees in character here, all youthful pines and green mossy flushes dotted between knolls and crags. It’s the adventure landscape of my dreams as a kid – a place for hide and seek, paddling and picnics.
I was out onto open moorland before the first of the weekend’s miracles took place. As I stopped for water, wondering exactly where I should peel off the path for the first top, the grey, humid fog that had hitherto ignored Met Office optimism began to thin out and separate. First I saw just the top of Baosbheinn – the evocatively named Wizard’s Hill – then the flanks of Beinn an Eoin (‘the hill of the bird’) emerged, flush with the reds and golds
of sunlight on deergrass.
With visibility and confidence restored and my bottle refreshed, over the peats I went. A path of sorts followed a burn to a gneiss terrace, dotted with glacial erratics. The mind contorts in interaction with these places, attempting to comprehend the timescales involved. Just how long had that particular stone been there? What constitutes a news cycle in these parts? Perhaps a spider crawled around it in the 14th Century. In geological time, that would be just yesterday. Why do so many of the stones appear to be placed so perfectly, as if by a Tao master? The colours and geometry never fail to work their magic, but the Highland midge soon broke me from my seance and sent me skyward. The air was still and now achingly hot, the sky blue and almost cloudless, with only a remnant inversion hanging motionless out to sea. Cresting the tailbone of Beinn an Eoin, its long back stretched out before me with all of Torridon curtained behind it, there was nowhere else on earth I’d rather have been. This is a world-class mountain landscape, self-evident and unarguable, and it was shaking me into the here and now.
MAGIC MOMENTS
To my right as I walked that broad ridge, the Wizard’s Hill took on the first of many guises I’d experience that weekend. Baosbheinn is a shape-shifter that changes character as you move around and across it. From there, the rock magician is at relative peace. From further north and west, though, he’s an unhappy, tormented changeling, frozen mid-transformation between one creature and another; a chaos of leaning limbs and uneasy angles defying gravity, his pointy hat askew. As I looked back on the final day after a loose, slightly sketchy downclimb, he switched gender altogether and summoned Dorothy’s nemesis – the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, with her terrifying, looping theme tune.
From that same spot I looked across the moor to Lochan a’ Chleirich – the Cleric’s Lochan – a significant settlement in a long distant past, perhaps a place of calm, a haven in the thrashing seas of boundless geological time. Perhaps it’s far-fetched, but to me these connections are the raw material of Gaelic Dreamtime, a belief system every bit equal to that of the Australian Aborigines or any other pre