The day we met Dream Angus

By Mary Cane:

Dreams to sell, fine dreams to sell,
Angus is here with dreams to sell. 
Hush now wee bairnie and sleep without fear,
For Angus will bring you a dream, my dear.             
– Scots Lullaby

Scotland had Dream Angus before Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant. Angus is the Celtic god of dreams who goes about the country with four birds flying around his head, delivering unsettling dreams of love. Most of us receive dreams that fly higher than our ability to wrestle them into reality. Leaving a rather large office and workroom-tidying job, we drove to Bennachie the other day for a spot of daytime dreaming. We hadn’t been there for a while. Normally as you know there is a breeze, at worst a cold driving drizzle but on that day we were lucky. 

There is a devotional aspect to a summit climb. On Mither Tap cloistered trees open up to a long pious walk. Then over the brow comes the reward of the high altar summit view. Then there is the submissive plod up the slope our heads bent in supplication. While I walked, I was thinking of a friend. From Australia, she came to stay with us along that well-trodden path of forbear searching. A keen reader at home, she like lots of other people, she had discovered the books by Nan Shepherd. She was captivated by those tales of grit and glitter up on the high plateau and dreamed of seeing the place where Nan Shepherd had walked and to feel in a poetic and lyrical way where she ‘entered into the hills’. When she arrived, our friend enjoyed seeing the new slippery five-pound note with Nan’s head on it, but that’s as close to Nan as she got. Knees that so enjoyed reading about the Cairngorms in Melbourne, were completely unable to climb any of the paths to the actual Cairngorms. She could not make her dream of Nan into a reality. Reaching the sanctuary of the barbican entrance to Mither Tap’s inner fortress, I looked back to the west. There was our home parish in the far distance, and if I squinted there were my overcrowded shelves and my worktable. The height gave a better perspective, so they didn’t look so cluttered from up there.  

Lately I have been outwitted by my own things. Travelling can muddle one’s memory and it can take a while to recalibrate. It’s hard to remember the location of the stapler/grater/leaf-blower or even recall what they look like after our long time away in America. This was witnessed by one of our children and I didn’t like the look I saw in his eyes, a mix of LOL and OMG as his mind jumped to a possible future unravelling all our stuff.

Maureen from the Balmedie library has found me a philosophy book where the ‘thingness’ of things is explained.  Things or ‘tings’ from the Scandinavian are what we can experience with our physical selves… a doorway we can go through, a spoon to be touched by hand and lip, or a Balmedie sand dune the grandchildren can slide down. Objects on the other hand, the book ever so quietly confided to me, are things that have ceased to be used. In my home surroundings, objects have accrued and accreted, on floors, on shelves and even in doorways. I leant closer to the book all the better to hear and understand. The ‘thing’ that once beckoned, the philosopher continued as an ‘object’ now blocks… Ah-ha. 

Sitting up there on the volcanic granite plug with tea and cake in the fresh air there was nothing that blocked.  

From that high vantage point none of the A.W.P.R. could be seen but there are stretches that are now linked into a curving pale gash across the county. On the way back down the Devil’s Causeway, I realised that we can be nourished by other people’s journeys so by Hosie’s Well I picked up a small stone to take with me to Melbourne next year. At that moment four black grouse whirred out of the heather, and that’s when we knew Dream Angus was near.

***

About Mary:

Sticks and stones have always held a poetic resonance for me. The first occasion I felt that cock's comb of interest we all have in our heads rise up, was when I was opening a gate. I was at home in Cornwall and helping to bring the cows in one afternoon. The prop I used was covered in dried accretions of small farm muck. 'That's a tine from your great grandfather's 'ay turner’. said Dad, 'It's made of Canadian Redwood’.  

'Goodness me' I thought to myself (or words to that effect) ‘things are not what they seem. They have history and character, a story even’. 

In a lifetime of creative work since, I have preferred the material to the flesh and blood…but shh, that’s a secret I don’t share with everyone. I am drawn to pathetic fallacy, to keeping things, to mending, to protecting the materiality of my world...  family things, tools, objects, furniture and their stories. Where was I? Ah yes the bio. Sixty years later, you find me living in Aberdeen, a PhD student at the Elphinstone Institute (Folklore and Ethnology) researching the part grandmothers play in the passing on of family story when their families live far away. That redwood tine back in Cornwall would be pleased.

On Place and Time

By Ian Grosz:

‘What am I doing here?’ I asked myself, emerging from the trees as the lady from the house whose grounds I was rummaging around in, politely pointed out that while under Scottish laws of trespass I’d every right to be there, I had parked on her lawn. She raised an accusing finger toward my camper van left on a patch of grass clear of what I took to be the entrance to her property and the narrow lane leading up to it. 

I had left the van beyond a large stone wall and gateway that looked to me like an obvious boundary. It’s true I had crossed that boundary on foot to gain access to a ruined mausoleum that lay in the trees just on the other side, and adjacent to the property, but I hadn’t thought the property extended to the mausoleum or the access road leading up to it. I apologised and told her as much by way of inadequate explanation, telling her I’d move the van. She nodded gruffly, turned, and began her long and dignified walk back to her large steel-framed house just visible beyond the trees. 

This was in the tiny farming hamlet of Bethelnie where I’d come to look for the visible traces of lost and half-forgotten histories, a pattern I was beginning to repeat at various places all over Aberdeenshire. Bethelnie, according to the Banffshire courier of December 1893, comes from the word bethnathalan, meaning house of Nathalan because of a church Saint Nathalan is supposed to have established here, after which, the parish of my home turf was once named. The mausoleum still extant houses the medieval remains of the Seton, Urquhart and Meldrum family lines, dynasties that once gave the area its identity and can still be found in its place names. 

All trace of Saint Nathalan’s church has long-since vanished, but his legacy is retained in local folk memory. In the village where I live, there was a public holiday dedicated to him celebrated until the late 19th Century. An ash tree marks the spot where Saint Nathalan is said to have collapsed and died, having become exhausted through ridding the area of a plague by making a circuit of the district’s bounds on his knees, praying to God to spare its inhabitants. Where his staff of ash went into the ground as he fell, a holy spring came forth and an ash tree grew. The tree is known as the Parcock Tree, the current tree planted in the 1990s and replacing a much older tree that was said to have stood for over three-hundred years in the same spot, itself arising from a lineage of trees going back to the time of Nathalan in the Seventh Century. 

The holy spring at the site of the Parcock tree is long-gone, with only the trickling outflow of a drainage pipe that carries the run-off from a small hill nearby in its place. This far from holy water passes under the modern bypass that borders the site of Nathalan’s alleged demise, unlikely to be of any assistance in the modern pandemic that is playing itself out across the world. But up until the mid-twentieth century, local children would go there to play, drawn, perhaps, by the tales of Saint Nathalan and the spring’s legendary healing power. 

Outside the ruined mausoleum, possibly built on the site of Nathalan’s church, erratic gravestones span the 12th through 19th Centuries: layers of time and burial, records of forgotten people with only a long-ago placed stone and a fading inscription to tell us they were once here. Among them is the sad and simple inscription for Isabella Gordon-Hunter who died at the age of three, joined by her parents many years later; the three children of Arthur Sangster and his wife Elizabeth Smith: George aged eighteen, Ann aged eleven and Robert aged just seven years, all dying in the year 1837, perhaps due to the influenza outbreak of that year. The earliest stones, stretching back into the 12th Century, are barely readable. 

Stood amongst the trees and the graves, I felt I was intruding on not only the privacy of the property owners, but on the silent, layered gathering of the dead. Their witness to time’s unstoppable cruelty felt pressing. How many lives have passed and never been known? How many absences are there in our histories? What is so compelling about these absences? Why is it that what is not there, what is not known, is more compelling than what is? Is it simply mystery: our innate curiosity that always seeks out a puzzle? Or is it something else? 

Perhaps it is simply the knowledge that something was but is no longer. Through living inside of time – constrained by it – comes a need to try to reach the past, to somehow gain a tangible sense of a larger and continual process of collective loss from the landscape. But what is it I hope to gain by visiting the ghost-sites of these places? Is there some secret message to be found in picking up on their atmosphere, their mood, their sense of place, as though the air or the ground, the trees, the crumbling walls, the grave stones, might be encoded with a form of language that, if not difficult to discern, is like the sighting of a ghost itself: quite probably just a figment of imagination? Is there some additional information available that cannot be gleaned from a map and google? 

Presence in absence - knowledge of what was - however that’s communicated, imbues the landscape through a combination of imagination and literal sense. But what is it that we sense? We sense the air, feel the breeze on our faces, see the same contours in the hills and fields that others now absent once did, and this connects us through imagination. We begin to sense that the past is somehow more present, as though almost coexisting alongside our own time. It is like standing on the far side of a precipice that we wish to cross, and find there is a half-standing bridge that, while it doesn’t allow us to cross fully to the other side, closes some of the gap, brings the two sides of the divide closer together. 

In the book Senses of Place, the philosopher Edward Casey tells us that ‘space and time come together in place,’ by which he means that places are defined by event. They are simultaneously the where and when of things, and in this way they draw space and time into them. Experiencing them brings us closer to those who went before. We see their absence, but we feel their presence. We begin to hear their voices across the precipice of their time and ours. Perhaps it is time itself that I am grappling with, finding its most poignant expression in place, the unstoppable forward motion through which we perceive the world leaving me with a feeling of wanting to hold on to time, to pause and to dwell outside of its relentless march. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and as well as previously featuring on Elsewhere, is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity.

High Water

By Fiona M Jones:

I am underwater, give or take four days or maybe five. I stand below the ever-breaking surface of a galloping umbrous river: the Teviot carrying meltwater, silt and detritus down from the Cheviot Hills to the Tweed. 

February, in Scotland, drops slow grey rain from low grey skies, then turns to sleet and stays there far too long. One night the distant hills turn white, the short grey daylight fails to break the frost, and snow finally advances down across the landscape. 

It lingered this time for almost a week, reclaiming trodden tracks and drifting again over roads. On a brighter afternoon it began its thaw, icicles crashing from eaves and roadways turning to slush. The wind veered south-westerly; the rain arrived. 

That’s when this happens: when rain and slush and sliding snow all hit the streams at the same time. The rivers rise, heavy with silt, heavier still with the debris they rip from their banks. Branches of deadwood and torn-up greenery/brownery. Charging like wild horses, the water loosens last year’s whitened reeds and sweeps them along until every obstacle gathers its own tangle of strawlike flotsam. 

When the river subsides and the riverside walks re-emerge from water to mud, it’s the high-flung heaps of dead river-reed that mark where the water was: beside you, in the undergrowth; across glades of greening snowdrops and wild garlic; and, here and there, in the trees above your head. The Teviot has fallen back to a sedater cantering pace, still murky with silt, still covering more than its usual bounds. You can see where in its haste it has stripped away ground from under its nearest trees. You can see the broken stems of last season’s river-reeds, half-overlaid with mud now, ready for this year’s new spikes to take their place. And you can see new gravel-banks and newly-lodged fallen trees—things that will either wash away once more next time the river rises, or will gather enough grasping plantlife to grow into islands. 

This high-water mark will fade out over the weeks, swamped not by water now but by new foliage; atrophied by decomposition; removed piecemeal by wind and nest-building birds. Only for now it sits above my path, in places higher than my head, a boast or maybe a threat: This is my river-bed, and I am not always quiet. Can you feel my speed and coldness flowing through you where you stand?

***
Fiona M Jones writes short/flash/micro fiction and CNF. One of her stories gained a star rating on Tangent Online's "Recommended Reading" list for 2020. Fiona's published work is linked through @FiiJ20 on Facebook and Twitter.

View from Bo'ness Harbour

By Andrew C. Kidd: 

Pink skies purple the hills.
The contrast of colours sharp-edge
to collage like clippings
cut out of a magazine.

Raggy strips from lighter pages
tear softly across
in three or four distinct
tincture lines:

lilac, peach, cream and soft yellow
smudge the down-curtaining day.
A faint thumbprint
of the moon is half-pressed

slowly bleeding into evening’s
blue hues, blending with water’s margin,
interrupted by
light-dot lattice and towers ahead

from where smoke ropes up
or down
depending on whether fire or sky-melt
pulls you in the hardest.

***

Andrew C. Kidd is an emerging writer. He is currently writing poetry that explores the intersection of the environment and industry.

In splendid isolation – the Loch Hotel

By Kenn Taylor:

Just how far out can you go in mainland Britain in terms of isolation? With a journey many miles down a long, empty, country road, an owl flying low at the windscreen at one point, and a long, single track road before you reach the destination, this place certainly felt like a candidate.

At the end of that private road there’s a luxury hotel. Not for the likes of you and me. I am here not as a real guest, but because a friend had bagged a job there.

Adjacent to a mighty loch, it is as rural a Scotland as you could possibly imagine. Scenery flowing off into the endless distance. Dramatic landscapes in every corner of your vision: mountains, forests, streams filled with huge glacial rocks. Orange highland cows. Even the multi-coloured moss seems dramatic.

In isolation, in a vast landscape, things seem to have greater visual power. A strikingly white solitary house. A lone, worn-out boat. A fallen tree. At this altitude, and with few buildings, the slightest change of light or shift in the clouds that touch the mountain tops is instantly noticeable. 

The hotel itself offers luxury in such seclusion. Old red leather chairs, worn but in the way that loos classy, not knackered. A roaring fire in a grate, the size of a small car, surrounded by dark wood and polished brass. A table lamp in the shape of a stag. The hotel itself looks ancient, but in reality is a fake. A Walter Scott image from the Victorian era.

What’s it like to live out here? I fear that the quiet and lack of stimulation would drive me mad. But there is plenty to do. Walk. Swim. Climb. Build. Read. There’s television and the internet but even then, my friend tells me, you do feel distant from everything. Terrible things happening on the news feel like dark fairy stories from far off lands, rather than things that will reach you here.

This has an allure, like some Arcadian fantasy of times past perhaps. But then this place is predicated on selling that. Charging an astronomical amount for the experience of ‘proper Scotland’. The staff, while they may also appreciate the fresh air and idyllic location, have to labour most of the time while those paying to be here can just enjoy it all. Hike the hills, fly in helicopters, drive fast cars, drink expensive whiskeys. Though labouring here is, my friend assures me, much better than some of the other places we had both laboured.

Of course, we can’t afford to even eat in the hotel. Instead we go over to the nearby inn for a pint, before driving the long way back to the nearest town to truly catch up. Nevertheless, I can see the attraction of this place, of going out to the furthest reaches. If you really have the money, you can pretend the world is not like it is. And forget, perhaps, the role you played in making it that way. 

***

Kenn Taylor is a writer and arts producer. He was born in Birkenhead and has lived and worked in Liverpool, London, Bradford, Hull and Leeds. His work has appeared in a range of outlets from The Guardian and CityMetric to The Crazy Oik and Liverpool University Press. Kenn’s website.

Winter in Den Wood

By Ian Grosz:

There is little light in northern Scotland in mid-winter, and as we entered a new lockdown, everything seemed to get that little bit darker. Like most people, the freedom of the daily walk once again took on new significance as our worlds shrank back. We had been living in our village for over ten years and felt we knew almost every inch of it, but looking online for new places we could explore locally, I happened on Den Wood. The only Woodland Trust managed site in the North East of Scotland, it is a humble patch of mixed ancient woodland stretching to just eighteen hectares, but hosts a diverse mix of trees including pine, oak, alder, ash, rowan, hawthorn, hazel, silver birch, lime and beech. A thriving habitat for insects, birds, foxes, red squirrels and roe deer, it also retains the almost extinct wych elm, on which the equally rare, white-letter hairstreak butterfly caterpillar relies. 

The wych elm has been decimated by Dutch elm disease, caused by the fungus Ophiostoma novo-ulmi and spread by the elm bark beetle. The fungus blocks the tree’s vascular system, causing wilt and eventual death. It first appeared in 1910, and quickly became an epidemic that spread across Europe, killing up to forty percent of the European elm population through the first half of the twentieth century. The disease abated by the 1940s, but a second epidemic beginning in the 1960s with a much more virulent outbreak was far more destructive. Arriving in the UK on imported elm logs from Canada, it killed tens of millions of trees, leaving the elm an endangered species on these islands. 

The Woodland Trust is the UK’s largest conservation organisation set up to restore and conserve Britain’s remaining ancient woodland, now covering just 2.4% of the landscape and fighting for survival against development, agriculture and the mono-cultures of forestry. Supporting a greater diversity of plants and animals, ancient woodland represents the living memory of our lost habitats and the visible reminder of our old relationships with nature, once characterised by sympathetic husbandry more in tune with the seasonal ebb and flow of the land and its life-cycles. We took care of the land and the land took care of us. Only now are we realising the benefits of smaller scale farming and the greater diversity it supports, the importance of mixed woodland management to our plant and animal ecologies. I was looking forward to experiencing Den Wood: what we would find there, how we might feel. 

We set out on a cold January Sunday, negotiating the ice-rink-like back roads. We eventually found the small car park that allows access to the wood, tucked away down a country lane amidst the dips and folds of the land. I wasn’t surprised that we’d missed it up to now. A notice board revealed a mix of short trails we could follow. The paths were muddy and icy, the trees bare, but still, it felt as though we were entering a special place as we made our way into the woodland through a narrow tunnel of comingling branches. 

The air was still. Our feet crunched noisily through the trail in the snow, the branches hanging over our heads and the weak morning sunlight beginning to brighten the slab grey of the sky. Though certainly a cold, bleak day, our spirits were immediately lifted as we trudged along the trail, here and there robins bobbing amongst the bare branches and blackbirds foraging amongst the still frozen leaf-litter. We met a couple walking their dog and stopped to chat when their young puppy jumped up on us. 

‘It’s a bit skitie today,’ the man said, meaning slippery. ‘But it’s a great place in the summer when the trees are full.’ 

He told us we could walk a circuit that would take us over a low bridge across a stream and then up onto a rise in the fields where we would get a good view of Bennachie, a popular hill which dominates the local landscape.

In a guide-book published in 1890, the locally born Scottish mountaineer and author Alexander McConnochie wrote that: 

There is no mountain in Aberdeenshire – or indeed in the north of Scotland – better known, or more visited that Bennachie. This is easily accounted for. Its graceful outline; its standing comparatively alone, and being thus discernible and prominent from all points; its magnificent mountain and lowland views to be obtained from its summits; and its easiness of access – all contribute to render Bennachie familiarly known even to those who are not given to mountain climbing. [1]  

This holds true as much today as it did in McConnochie’s time, and Bennachie remains, in many ways, the perfect mountain: accessible and easily climbed, yet giving that sense of elevation and escape that the high places bring. 

We thanked the couple and continued on along the track, soon finding the low bridge that forged the stream running through a shallow gulley, before climbing steeply over a knoll into more open ground filled with, surprisingly, newly flowering gorse. Eventually we climbed up into a grove of tall wych elm, beyond an old estate boundary wall covered in moss and lichens and slowly submerging into the land. Here the woods felt dead and still, almost sacred in its silence; the trees, with their dark silhouettes against the flat light of a cold sky, waiting to come back to life just as the world was. 

Staring up into the bare canopy of the elms with their ghoulish, finger-like branches knotted above us, it was difficult to imagine the woods in full bloom, filled with life and vibrancy. It spoke to us of the pause we all felt in life, somehow more poignant now in mid-winter than it had been in the summer. Then, many of us welcomed the change of pace in life, noticed the birds singing as though for the first time, appreciated our parks and gardens, felt that we were learning something of the importance of the simple things in life again. But now that stillness felt like purgatory, our lives shrinking with the light, the cold days and the inability to travel. Just at a time of year when we need human contact the most, it had been taken away. 

Yet these seemingly dead woods were only dormant, and would surely come to life again. It was simply a matter of time; something this little patch of ancient woodland held like sap in its branches: slow and viscous now, but soon to rise and flow freely. That first lockdown showed us that to be dormant for a time, to be still and to reflect, is a great gift, and the woods seemed to be reminding us of this.

As we crowned the low hill at the centre of the elms, we could see the distinctive shape of Bennachie rising up out of the landscape beyond the woodland boundary. Covered in snow, it seemed much larger than it normally appears, its boulder-strewn summits strung out like small volcanic archipelagos across its long back. Too far away for us to be able to travel to under the lockdown, it looked more inviting than ever; but we knew that it wasn’t going anywhere: that it would still be there, signalling home to us, whenever this virus had been beaten, and that like these woods, life would return in abundance. We turned to make our way back to the car, quiet but happy, and silently resolved to keep a sense of the promise of the dormant wych elms with us through the long months to come. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity. 

Notes:

[1]  Alex Inkson McConnochie, Bennachie, (1890, repr., Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire Classics Series, James, G. Bisset, 1985) p. 10

Jenny Sturgeon, Nan Shepherd and The Living Mountain

By Paul Scraton:

Sometime around 2011 or 2012 I was in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, browsing the shelves of the Grove Bookshop. There, in a section devoted to nature writing and the outdoors, I found a slender volume called The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. This book, written around the end of the Second World War and first published in 1977, has become a touchstone of landscape and place writing in the decade or so since Canongate published it in a new edition with an introduction from Robert Macfarlane. It has been translated into a number of different languages and its author, who died in 1981, now graces the Scottish five-pound note. Quite the result for a book that had sat, quietly in a drawer, for more than three decades after Shepherd wrote it.

In the Canongate edition, The Living Mountain is only just over a hundred pages long, and yet within that short space Shepherd creates a richly detailed portrait of a place that was so important to her throughout her life – the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. If I remember correctly, I read it in one evening at my mum’s house in Menston, and as so often happens with a book like this, it became connected in my imagination not only to the place it is actually about, but also the place where I read it.

I don’t know the Cairngorms very well. I have only been to that corner of Scotland a couple of times, both in childhood, and so I cannot be sure if my memories of the landscape are real, or based on other sources, not least Shepherd’s wonderfully descriptive prose. But picking up the book again this week, I found myself reminded not only of the Scottish landscapes I have known, but also the moors above my mum’s house and the walks we took during that visit nearly ten years ago, with Shepherd’s words still echoing around my head.

Indeed, it is perhaps the greatest compliment I can give to The Living Mountain is that a piece of writing so deeply connected to and rooted in a specific place, can have such resonance with someone who has nearly no personal experience of it. Perhaps it is because all of us who love the outdoors have our own version of what Shepherd felt when she walked out once more into the Cairngorms. For us it might be the Welsh hills or the Baltic coast, a Yorkshire moor or a Brandenburg forest, but we understand Shepherd’s depth of feeling because we feel it too. 

The cover artwork of ‘The Living Mountain’, the new album by Jenny Sturgeon, photo by Hannah Bailey

What is true of books is even more true of music. There are so many songs and albums that are connected in my brain to a certain moment, a time of my life and a particular place. A youth hostel room in Slovenia, the snow falling at the window. A border-crossing in Switzerland, in the middle of the night. A road trip through Spain and the volcanic landscapes of Cabo de Gata. Of course, these songs are not about those places, but they became forever linked with them in my imagination. So I was intrigued to see what happened when I listened to a new album by the singer-songwriter Jenny Sturgeon, who has written and recorded her own The Living Mountain, a collection of songs inspired by Nan Shepherd’s book.

As well as the album, released earlier this month, there will also be accompanying films by Shona Thomson which will be hopefully toured next year, and Sturgeon has also found time to record The Living Mountain Podcast, a series of conversations with artists, writers and ecologists about their own connections with the mountains, outdoor places and how they inspire and influence their work.

It often feels, with projects like this, that the great test of the work of art inspired by another is whether it can stand up on its own right. And while it is certainly true that, listening to Jenny Sturgeon’s songs with Nan Shepherd’s book at your elbow, it is easy to hear the conversation between them, the strength of The Living Mountain (the album) is that the songs work in and of themselves. It was a long time since I’d read the book when I first listened to Sturgeon’s album, and what I heard was something poetic, beautiful and haunting, and I think this would have been the case even if I had never read Shepherd’s work at all. 

At the end of Sturgeon’s podcast episodes she asks her guests if they have a piece of music that connects them to the landscapes and places they have been talking about in their conversation. The greatest compliment I can give The Living Mountain as an album is that I have continued to hear it, echoing in my head as Nan Shepherd’s prose did before, long after the album has finished and I’ve left the house to go for a walk by the river or in the woods. Something tells me that Sturgeon’s voice and songs will be with me for a long time, and will take me back to these autumn days in Berlin and Brandenburg, forever linked to this particular time and these particular places. It’s quite a way from the high plateau of the Cairngorms to the flatlands of northeastern Germany, but for this listener at least, they are now connected through the words and music of Jenny Sturgeon. 

***

You can find out more about Jenny Sturgeon and the Living Mountain project, including the podcast, on her website. The album was released in October 2020 by Hudson Records. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is published by Canongate. Order it through your local independent bookshop.

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019). His next book, In the Pines, is a novella about a lifelong connection to the forest and will be published by Influx Press in 2021.

The Loch Insh Osprey

Photo: Duncan MacDonald

By Merryn Glover:

The ospreys have gone. I went away for a week and when I got back, the strath had slipped into autumn and the eyrie above Loch Insh was empty. On the same day, my two sons returned to university. Their courses will be online, but after five months of being back under parental wings they are ready to stretch their own again. They came back to our Highland home at the start of lockdown and two weeks later, the osprey arrived, flouting all restrictions in their 6,700 kilometre journey from west Africa.

The male came first and began to ready the nest, a large twiggy crater the size of a truck tyre. Balanced precariously at the top of a tree on a small island, it has commanding views of the Cairngorms to the south-east, the Monadhliaths to the north-west and the River Spey between. Their arrival always speaks to me of Mark, a wildlife guide friend who first told me their story on these shores five years ago; he was diagnosed the following April with a brain tumour and died in April two years later, leaving a wife and three sons. As he was lowered into the earth of Insh churchyard, the newly returned osprey soared above.

Most osprey pair for life, only coming together during the breeding season when they return to the same place. The female arrives a week or so after her mate and my diary note from April 16th says: ‘Both perched on the nest, looking at each other from time to time and touching beaks.’ As the female adds to the eyrie, the male woos her by delivering trout. One of the few birds of prey to live almost entirely on fish, osprey can see their underwater catch from 40 metres up and have reversible talons that help them grip. Working from home this year, I paid closer attention to my near neighbours. I saw the male perform his sky dance, crying out as he rose in sweeping circles above the nest with a long reed in his talons. The female sat on the spear tip of a dead tree nearby, motionless and haughty as Horus.

By the beginning of May, she had settled down in the nest, presumably won over and incubating eggs, and I watched and waited through the lengthening days and the greening of the strath. At last, in early June, tiny heads appeared above the twigs – one, two… three! A beautiful, bumper brood and the most an osprey is likely to hatch. I caught glimpses of the mother feeding them and the gradual rise of their small, fluttering bodies.

One evening, a large heron flew up the river towards the nest and the male osprey bore down on it with vicious shrieking and flapping of wings. To my astonishment, the heron did not beat a hasty retreat but kept circling, evading the ever-more strident attack. Finally after several minutes of this aerial dogfight, the heron – twice the size of its assailant - made its stately way off down the loch.

Summer swelled and the loch thickened with green rushes and the growing company of birds: curlews, oyster-catchers, martins, geese, ducks and swans, many trailing flotillas of young in their wake. Both my boys were summer babies and these long, light days remind me of that ecstatic, exhausted time. By mid-July the osprey chicks were stalking the rim of the eyrie, stretching their wings and lifting for moments into the air while the parents sat in nearby trees calling. To urge their young to fledge, osprey gradually reduce the fish they deliver, literally starving them off the nest. We have not resorted to such ploys but, like all parents, we know the push and pull of need and independence.

Who can know if they have witnessed the first flight of a bird? I cannot, but I thrilled to see them gradually take to the skies, their voices ringing in the amphitheatre of this hill-bordered loch. Who can hold onto life? It was at this time that our beloved friends, Mark’s family, moved away.

All five osprey were in the nest when I looked in late August, but within two weeks, they were gone. The mother goes first, travelling up to 400 kilometres a day till she is back in Senegal. The father follows and then the young, flying all the way down over the Sahara. They travel alone. No one has fathomed how they know the route or the destination or how, three years later, they know the way back. It is mystery and miracle. All I know is that in the great, thick hush of these five months, when my own dear ones came and left, the osprey’s journey has passed right through my heart.

***

Merryn Glover’s stories and plays have been broadcast on Radio Scotland and Radio 4, her first novel, A House Called Askival, was published in 2014 and a second, set in the Highlands, will be published in 2021. She was the first Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park and is currently writing a non-fiction book in response to Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain. Her features have appeared in The National, BBC Countryfile Magazine, Northwords Now, The Guardian Weekly and The Guardian.