LITMIR.BIZ

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the water lilies; or, ballerina en pointe, a roe doe tiptoes down to drink, and, every once in a while, an osprey crash-dives right in front of the hut. I jump up, concentration shattered like a brick through a window, to watch it lift off again with a brown trout writhing in its long, black talons – death and glory intertwined, the death of necessity and the glory of life eternal. My neck cranes to catch the last silhouetted image as it levers out of sight above the trees. I catch my breath. It’s a drama I have witnessed hundreds of times, but I still emerge swaying, dazzled, blanked, my work suddenly lost and meaningless. Such stark, irrepressible images have been etching themselves into my soul for more years than I care to remember.

      I was there recently, supposed to be roughing out an article on Scottish wildcats. A lazy June afternoon of bright, backlit cumulus and sun shafts burning through the vitreous brilliance of spring leaf, dressing the birches and willows as precious gifts. Our spring has kept us on tenterhooks this year, it arrived, fled and came again, twice hijacked by a relentless northeasterly from somewhere above Russia. In May I lit the log stove in sunshine as sharp as chilled vodka. And it was there, in this vibrant corner of our little Highland world, emerging from the cold sun shimmer on the loch, that a familiar notion came rollicking in as it has done many times before. Yet this time it was strangely different, punching in with power and pizzazz, the way that a sun-burst spotlights something that you’d really never noticed before and forces you to look again.

      It wasn’t exactly a surprise. It was a notion that had been there long enough, decades in fact, loitering, like something I’d been meaning to do for ages but kept forgetting. So I never pursued it. But the seed was set; as the years passed, slowly and silently it grew, becoming something altogether rounder and fatter than just a fanciful notion – yes, pressing and personal – more like a hunger, that signal shift from an ache to a pain, but much more urgent, refusing to go away, until I could ignore it no longer.

      For forty years now, I have run a field studies centre from my home at Aigas, in Strathglass, one of northern Scotland’s wildest glens. Folk come from all over the world to learn about the ancient natural and cultural history of the Highlands and Islands. Our environmental education work for local schools serves thousands of youngsters every year, helping them to value and enjoy nature as well as grasp the essential ecological processes for human survival. It has never palled. I still get a buzz from the lectures reeled out by our dedicated young staff, or from our visitors raving about the acrobatics of the pine martens they watched from a hide last night. Seeing youngsters pond dipping for newts and dragonfly larvae in the shallows always makes me smile. It spins me back – back to the story of my own, not-so-lost-and-forgotten childhood all those decades ago.

      It was Gavin Maxwell – one of Britain’s most celebrated non-fiction writers of the ’60s – who brought me, still in my twenties, to the Highlands of Scotland, a land so very different from the rest of Britain. In 1969 I headed north to work with him on a rocky lighthouse island in the straits between the Isle of Skye and the mainland – it could not have been a more extreme shift from my own English pastoral background and my unhappy job on the heavily polluted coastline of industrial South Wales.

      The Highlands was a shock, a shock of joy and freedom, the heady thrill of escape, the tang of fresher air, new rock beneath my feet and the surging wave of the spirit. It was a rebirth, a release wholly intoxicating. I felt alive again for the first time since childhood. But such elation would be disastrously short-lived. When Gavin suddenly and unexpectedly died that September it seemed that my entire world had crashed in ruins around me. I was out of a job and a home. But the drug that is the magic of the Highlands had curved deep like the osprey’s talons, and was not about to let go. So I elected to stay and try to make a go of being a naturalist and a writer, to put down roots and find a home here – a tough call, but one I have never regretted.

      On a crisp January day a few years later I discovered Aigas, an unloved, abandoned and faintly ridiculous Victorian mansion, all battlements, cannon spouts and spiky candle-snuffered turrets, arrestingly sited on a hillside overlooking the River Beauly – and condemned, within a month of being torn down, totally demolished. The roof leaked where thieves had ripped out the leadwork, windows were broken and plaster ceilings had come crashing down. When I first entered the house, snow had piled in through collapsed skylights and blanketed the hall floor. A car was parked outside, the front door wide open. I followed yeti-footprints through the snow and up the main staircase, on up a spiral stair and out onto the roof with no idea of whom or what I might find. A man in huge boots was standing there with a clipboard, assessing the scrap value of the building before demolition. ‘Who are you?’ he challenged. ‘I’m a prospective buyer,’ I said. The words just tumbled out. But it was a half-truth, and not the first time such a thought had entered my head. I had long nurtured the idea of starting a field studies centre somewhere. This time it had the ring of truth.

      A sleepless night. The Victorian building wasn’t even a hundred years old. I loved its wild woods and fields; the tangle of its long-forsaken gardens and its shimmering loch tucked into a fold in the hills all seemed to be calling out to me. Its position overlooking the glen was magnificent and, besides, I’d seen swifts’ nests in the tower and a roe deer had frolicked away into the rhododendrons as I departed down the drive.

      I had no idea what it would cost to restore the house and grounds or how to set about it, and if anyone had given me even the sniff of a clue, I would have walked away and never given it another thought. But they didn’t. Hotheaded youth can be a handy set of blinkers when you don’t really want to grasp reality. You can gloss over problems that would frighten the heck out of wiser folk. And yet, oddly, its very desolation invoked piquancy, an added romantic allure. I loved it. Not the dottily turreted house, but the whole Aigas place. It had somehow entered my blood – a Shangri-La, a personal Lake Isle of Innisfree – and I heard it ‘in the deep heart’s core’.

      So a few days later I bought it. Impulsively and without a second thought I borrowed the money and bought it for a home and a place where I could create a field studies centre for the Highlands – an unheard-of notion back then, and one people laughed at with mockery in their voices. To me it presented what many said was an impossible challenge, and to such I have always risen like a greedy trout to a fly.

      So, yes, forty years now, family all fledged and flown, and somehow we have survived. More folk than I can count or remember have come to slough off the stresses of hectic lives, to learn about the bloody tribalism of the Highland clans, to witness our splendid wildlife and unwind among the mountains and glens of our glorious upland scenery. I have never tired of it, never regretted that youthful impulse despite the scorn and the multifarious trials heaped upon us down the years.

      To have been a working naturalist; to have striven to fill the unforgiving minute, and to have shared the joy of these mountains, lochs and glens with so many other people has been its own reward. I have never doubted that it was the right move, the right place to be, but after so many years you begin to wonder just how on earth it all happened. When did it all start? Long before I’d even heard of Gavin Maxwell. Where did this predilection for wild nature come from? Was it genetic – nature or nurture? Who handed me the chalice? And whence the faith that spurred the ‘sixty seconds’ worth of distance run’? From whom, precisely, more than fifty years ago, did the precious mantle of conviction come? Suddenly I needed answers, to tie them down, get them straight in my head. That was it. That was the irrepressible notion – more than a notion, it felt like a summons, a gauntlet hurled at my feet by the colliding forces of time and joy – that finally gripped me at the Illicit Still and refused to let go.

      John Lister-Kaye,

      House of Aigas

      April 2017

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      Wildcats and wilderness

      The Scottish wildcat isn’t just any old cat, it’s special – no, way more than special. It’s unique, and unique in so many different ways, bad and good. It’s Britain’s most endangered mammal – that’s bad, capital BAD. And it’s wild, wild, WILD, with its own marque of spitting, feline wildness – that’s far beyond good, it’s brilliant.

      From the sort of glimpse you might

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