LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

the Duke of Atholl’s ghillies. The result: Professor Balfour brought a lawsuit, the aim of which was to establish firmly the public’s right to use the route. The Duke of Atholl was having none of it. A couple of years later, it was students from Cambridge – botanists again – who took up the Glen Tilt challenge, resulting in yet another skirmish with ghillies. This led to even more court action, to seek the protection of this and other routes throughout the Highlands. The Duke of Atholl remained stoutly unrepentant, and the practice of establishing gates across old roads was subsequently picked up by neighbouring landowners. It took an Edinburgh lawyer called Thomas Gillies to come up with an idea that even the most recaltricant landowner would find it difficult to argue with: calling for shepherds and drovers to attest in court that these roads had an established history of public use.³

      The Royal Family must shoulder some more of the blame for the increasing inaccessibility of the Highlands during this era. Thanks to Queen Victoria’s sojourns at Balmoral, the craze for hunting, shooting and fishing – not merely among landowners, but also wealthy mercantile figures – took hold. It was not just old Scottish aristocratic families eating up the land, thousands of acres were also being bought up by American millionaires who fancied that somewhere down the line, they had some form of Scottish ancestry.

      Indeed, in 1884, it took a Scotsman to present the first effort in Westminster to allow walkers full access to moor and mountain. James Bryce – an MP with an extremely colourful hinterland – made valiant efforts to push through an Access to Mountains Bill. What made this striking was that at that time, Bryce was the Liberal Member of Parliament for Tower Hamlets – one of the very poorest districts in London, encompassing St Katharine’s Docks, Limehouse and Whitechapel. His constituents – from the stevedores to the prostitutes – were extremely unlikely to catch any views of any sort of countryside. Despite this, his concern was for them, and all men and women who lived in conditions of horrific urban poverty. Bryce understood the restorative power of wilderness.

      He also was a keen climber and, on one occasion, he had scrambled up Mount Ararat. When, at the summit, he found a fragment of old timber, this was a source of huge excitement to him. He was convinced that it was a tiny part of Noah’s Ark. Back in London’s East End, he was instrumental in setting up the charitable foundation Toynbee Hall.

      His Access to Mountains Bill failed to get a second reading. But he and his brother, Annan, fought on, though. They tried to push the Bill through the Commons repeatedly. And there were also attempts – not merely through Parliamentary means, but also through speeches and articles – to establish the idea that the open Highlands should be available to all, and not just the very rich.

      Even as Bryce’s political career rocketed ever higher, and he was sent to the US as ambassador, he never lost sight of the walking movement. And now, in the twenty-first century, Bryce’s view that every man should have unhindered access to all parts of the Highlands has prevailed.

      Over the last few years, Scotland has become increasingly adept at turning its landscape into a sort of commodity, not just for hard-core walkers (incredibly lucrative and important though this is) but also more casual visitors. In the 1996 film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, Renton, Begbie and Sickboy very briefly leave their squalid needle-filled Edinburgh lives and come to Rannoch Moor for a ‘healthy hike’. The images are now replicated on specialised walking websites recommending Rannoch to visitors from around the world.

      Meanwhile, simple wilderness is nominated as a ‘Site of Scientific Interest’ and vast tranches of land are signposted as ‘Nature Reserves’. It is one of the ways a nation feels good about itself. Walkers are invited to discover a pre-lapsarian organic purity. But then, for many ramblers, Scotland has always carried that lofty sense of somehow being a purer, less spoilt place than England. Even in John Buchan’s 1915 thriller The Thirty Nine Steps, gung-ho hero Richard Hannay, on the run for a murder he did not commit, finds the time to have a quick revel in its beauty. Despite the desperation of his circumstances, Hannay acquires a sort of exultation as he makes his way out into Scottish open country:

      Over a long ridge of moorland I took my road, skirting the side of a high hill which the herd had called Cairnsmore of Fleet. Nesting curlews and plovers were crying everywhere, and the links of green pasture by the streams were dotted with young lambs. All the slackness of the past months was slipping from my bones, and I stepped out like a four-year-old.

      When it comes to igniting that sense of child-like delight, sometimes a cheesy touristy label actually does do the trick. About a mile from Rannoch station is the start of a simple track heading northwards called ‘The Road to the Isles’. One can almost imagine this road name being set to music and sung by Sir Kenneth McKellar, dressed in shortbread-tin tartan. But even if that is the lure, ‘The Road to the Isles’ really is rather gratifying, especially if, like me, you are fortunate enough to find yourself caught on it in the middle of a howling tempest. The track makes a steady climb into the quietly forbidding hills, northwards, towards Corrour. With me on this walk – deceptively blue-skied in its opening stages – are Richard, a land management expert who lives in the Orkneys, and his dog Bramble. Our various mutual friends (we are all based at the Rannoch Station Hotel) have turned back quite early on in the expedition at a swollen river. They did not wish to face the delicate tip-toeing across slippery rocks that could end in soaking disaster. Richard and I are a little more insouciant about it, however, and Bramble the labrador – after some thought – seems happy to swim across.

      Having negotiated the river, we rise higher and higher. Before us, the stern aspect of brown hills; behind us, the great peaks that shoulder Glencoe. The most striking thing, this many miles into the wilderness, is the depth of the silence. There is not an animal to be heard anywhere. No rabbits, no hares, nothing. There are large buzzards wheeling and floating, tasting the air, but they too are soundless. Apart from the strengthening wind in our ears, and the sound of our conversation, there is nothing else out here at all in this world of dark brown land and blue sky. Richard is a keen, experienced walker, who has travelled all over Scotland in search of beauty like this. At one point, we see the blackened wood that is often found buried in the peat around here. Some argue that such submerged wood proves that, centuries ago, this land was once covered with great forests which were gradually cut down and destroyed by man. However, a different view is taken by the eminent natural historian Professor Oliver Rackham; that such fragments of wood on Rannoch Moor have blackened naturally as a result of their contact with the peat. My companion Richard goes with the first theory. In an extension of his line of thought, there are very few vistas, at least in Britain, that have not been affected in some way by man’s influence. So in some ways, there are very few genuinely natural landcapes left in the British Isles; the rest are the results of tinkering, whether intentional or not. From this angle, Rannoch is not an authentic wilderness.

      It is local landowner Lord Pearson’s belief – now shared by some other conservationists all over Scotland – that countless years of sheep and deer grazing in the area of Rannoch inflicted a grievous wound on the landscape, and in effect reduced it to acidic peat bog, whereas once it had flourished with a variety of different species. In short, they believe, this was a landscape created as a direct result of the Clearances. ‘Rannoch Moor is dotted with derelict crofts,’ said Lord Pearson in an interview. ‘Around these would have been fields for wintering the cattle.’ Added to this, he said, ‘in a three year spell from 1837, an adjacent estate listed the killing of 246 pine martens, 15 golden eagles, 27 sea eagles, 18 ospreys, 98 peregrines, 275 kites, 63 goshawks, 83 hen harriers, and hundreds of stoats, weasels, otters, badgers and crows – all in the name of increasing grouse numbers.’⁴ Where once were trees and a wide variety of flora, man’s activities left us with the desolation we see now. It might be attractive desolation, but it was not strictly nature’s intention.

      Experienced walker or not, Richard has somehow failed entirely to notice what is coming towards us. So have I. Some 10 miles to the west, there is silvery cloud obscuring the hills, and what looks like a mist. It sweeps over quickly and the first heavy drops tell us that this is rather more than a little light rolling fog. The ensuing storm is so spectacular that it made all the newspapers the next day. In the area

Скачать книгу