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THE ROAD TO CAMBAN
Copyright (c) Hugh Noble, January 2001
A sky of clear blue. Grass and trees frosted white. Day after day a deathly stillness sat on the land
like a shadow. I told my wife I could stand it no longer. I had to go.
"Right!"
A casual nod and a bright smile. After days of fretting, watching the forecasts,
watching the hoar accumulate to look like snow and wondering how to put the idea to her,
I was not quite sure if I wanted it to be THAT easy.
Brow furrowed, I sat with an armful of maps and planned a few days of solitude. Smallish scale maps.
You have to see the whole area, to see great
amber slabs of mountains (map) like panes of stained glass
in a leaded lattice of roads. There. Right in the middle. The eye was drawn to it. Bigger than the rest.
Lochs, mountains, glens. A tangled complexity with no roads and almost completely devoid of human habitation.
A few black dots indicated the presence of upstanding walls. But black dots do not prove that there are walls
which rise more than a foot above sodden turf or that a roof exists, let alone permanent residents.
This had happened before. Twenty five years ago my map-roving eye had been riveted, as now,
by the Kintail-Affric wilderness.
I had walked from Cluanie to Achnashellach. Four days by glen and over mountain summits.
Taking a chance I'd slept on the open hillsides with bag alone. No tent. It was mid-summer and in
mid-summer darkness tip-toes over the land in a twilit dream-state and scarcely lays foot.
I walked and slept and walked again without regard to clocks, schedules or planned routes.
Luck was with me. A continuous breeze banished the midges.
Once I woke high on a mountain to find myself in the middle of a herd of browsing deer.
The rain held off too - most of the time. Only once did it rain seriously and then, with the same good luck,
I stumbled on a small isolated bothy. And that was how, driven by approaching rain clouds and seeking
a dry alternative to the open hillside, I first came upon it. The warm glow of that unexpected discovery
still burned my memory. It was time, I decided, to fulfil a twenty-five-year-old promise.
It was time to return to Camban.
This time, however, it would be very different, for this was mid-January.
Darkness ruled the land and it was the daylight which behaved like a furtive interloper.
Two hours it took, from first idea to turning the ignition key. That was an hour too long -
but there were extenuating circumstances. My gear had been unused for some time and it had, by a process
of diffusion, distributed itself around the house and into garden sheds. Everything was there.
It just had to be found. Some items were practically unused - like my sleeping bag, bought too
expensively in a fit of determination to "do it properly the next time" after a miserable night
of shivering. The next time ... the promise seemed to have receded like a rainbow's end into the future.
Wait no more. Do it now.
Fort William is not my favourite town,
It carries too great a burden of incongruous industrial development for that.
Great pipes slide down the flanks of Ben Nevis bringing power to the defunct aluminium smelter.
But there is no doubt that the town's people have solved the problem of summer traffic and summer
visitors in a way that some other Highland towns should envy. Ample car parking (which is free in winter)
lies within a few steps of the pedestrianised shopping centre. And the shops are good - adapted to the
needs of outdoor people. I stopped long enough to stock up on camping-stove gas and to buy the one item
I lacked - a folding plastic water bottle. Then, in gathering darkness, I drove North.
The thickness of the hoar frost increased as I passed Invergarry.
As I drove up the long hill road which crosses over to Glen Moriston,
the car thermometer dived still further. And as I crossed the saddle point and began the descent,
I passed, at a windswept point overlooking a wide expanse of hill and water, a low mound of stones.
And then another.
They look like something ancient - iron-age burial chambers, reminders of a famous battle perhaps
or a sad relic of people departed.
They are not ancient, but they are sad. They stand in memory of
Willie McRae. Even the fact that there are two cairns is sad, for there is a dispute about exactly where the memorial should stand. The smaller and more northern of the two has a plaque which bears the words "The Struggle Goes on". Someone has tried to deface it. The other cairn contains a random assortment of stones including bricks.
A campaigning lawyer,
scourge of government officialdom, impetuous, incautious, hard drinker and political maverick Willie McRae's death
on the 6th of April 1985 generated as many outlandish conspiracy theories as did the assassination of
President Kennedy. And with some justification. 'Cuiridh mi clach air do charn-sa' as they say in Gaelic.
The literal translation is 'I will put a stone in your cairn'
but what it really means is `I will not forget you'."
Every mile of the road to Camban carries memories.
Straddling the glen at the point where broad Glen Moriston narrows to become Glen Shiel,
is the Cluanie Dam which I know as the Mitchell Dam because that was the name of the company that built it. As I turned left towards it,
I was turning my back on the place where I had spent a summer walking a recalcitrant
horse across the moor. My task that year was the recovery of the carcasses of stags
shot by a blood-thirsty family of hunters who had rented the area for their summer sport.
For me it was work - distasteful perhaps but no more in principle than eating steak.
Deer need to be culled. Without natural predators they multiply, destroy the grassland
and eat themselves into starvation. I remain mystified, nevertheless, how anyone can kill
them for recreation. I'd as soon spend a holiday in an abattoir.
The Cluanie Dam forms a loch which flooded the old road. I mean the VERY OLD ROAD.
There was another OLD ROAD which was built as a NEW ROAD to replace the VERY OLD ROAD as the waters of the loch rose
to cover it. And that OLD/NEW road was in turn replaced by a NEW/NEW ROAD. I know about the OLD/NEW ROAD because
I helped to build it. Track builder extraordinary. See me and John Henry!
I was eighteen. I got a job working for a company called International-something-or-other.
I was a member of a gang of six. We broke stones with sledge hammers and laid them on the levelled soil,
wedging them so that they locked together. It was called "pitching". The scene was like something out of a Steve McQueen chain-gang
film but there were no guards with rifles, only mountains to watch our labours. A lorry delivered the rocks.
It tipped them on to ground in a roaring avalanche and then drove off again, leaving us in a settling cloud
of rock dust, with our hammers and with the midges.
One member of the gang - his name was Jim Morris - took me under his wing - at least that's
probably how he saw it. I tried to distance myself. A burley little man he was. Neck and head were set
in a straight line with his back which was permanently stooped forwards as though he was preparing to
lift a heavy weight. "Just watch me lad", he said gruffly. He stood close and rolled up his sleeves to
reveal a luridly pornographic tattoo, "Just watch me. I learned this job the hard way - eight months
in Pe'erheid" (Peterhead Prison). He'd done time for wife beating. This was no secret you understand. He was extremely
proud of it. And it seemed he did not reserve his favours for women only. He touched me up the backside
once. I whirled to glare at him. In those days I was quite slim and I never have been very heavily
muscled so I can't have been a very threatening sight. But it must have worked because he never did it again.
Our gang was just one of several working at different points along the line of the intended road.
We navvies slept in a camp with army-style Nissan huts. Old concrete plinths are still there at the roadside to prove it. We ate disgusting food in a canteen served up by
a slovenly team of employees who had never heard of hygiene. One evening everyone (except me) went off,
in a lorry, to a dance in a village hall some thirty miles away. They returned at about three in the morning.
All drunk. The two oldest men in the camp had been fighting a running battle all the way. One had broken a
whisky bottle belonging to the other, or had cut in on him on the dance floor or something like that.
The others were enjoying the fight enormously. When they got back to the camp they burst into the
hut where I slept and pulled beds aside - including mine. I was in it. I had blankets over my head. They formed an
arena in the middle of the hut and sat on the beds to watch. The two fighters, however, had had enough.
"Yer no worth fighting!" said a quavering voice.
"A' ... A' wouldnae ... de ... demean ma'sel" said another.
A loud confident Irish voice interrupted ... "Funish it off with hammers!"
Roars of approval.
Before I left to join the stag-carcass retrieval job in Glen Moriston, I got my own back on Jim Morris.
I wrote a "poem" and pinned it (anonymously) to the canteen wall.
It was back in '54
There were six or us and more
Pitching on a five mile stretch of road
But to whom it brought the fame,
Surely Morris was his name
His fantastic speed of pitching never slowed.
For though the rocks he broke were large
A fourteen pounder was his charge
Which up above his head he raised on high
He just never took a rest
But just bared his mighty chest
And at the stubborn rocks he would let fly
As they crumbled 'neath the blow
His strength was there to show
The muscles on his arms were long and lean
He swung his hammer, not the lead
And one day a workmate said
He is the hardest man I've ever seen ....
And more in that vein.
It caused some amusement. One ganger, with a wide smile on his face and a slow shake of his head,
told me I was cruel. I had, he said, destroyed the Morris man for ever. But the funniest thing was
Jim Morris' reaction. He was tremendously flattered. He took the paper from the wall and carried it
with him to show to people in pubs. Everyone else knew who had done it of course, but he remained mystified.
He went about asking the question. "Do you know anyone who knows about history?" It seems that poetry
(ie anything which rhymed) was for him something from long long ago and therefore synonymous with history.
Memories of Jim Morris brought me to Shiel Bridge, then Loch Duich where I found,
in black darkness, the Loch Duich View B&B. Small and inexpensive, it was comfortable and well
appointed. My hosts were an helpful elderly man and an efficient, cheerful young girl with a nose ring.
The bed was firm and the breakfast was excellent.
Next morning I dallied - trying to time my trip so that I would reach my destination at dusk. That, I calculated, would give me enough light to set up home and get the stove burning, but would avoid leaving me with hours of daylight to kill in a freezing environment with nowhere to sit in comfort. I wanted to sleep through the hours of darkness and be off again at first light. That's one disadvantage of travelling to a bothy alone. A large group can share the load and carry enough firewood to heat the place for a night and tell exaggerated stories round a blaze. The solo traveller has no such luxury. It was cold stone and darkness for me.
All the better, I told myself, for soul searching.
So I dallied and drove about looking for a general store to buy sandwiches.
I went a short distance along to road to Ratagan to take photographs of the Five Sisters.
The narrow single track to Ratagan leaves the main road at Shiel Bridge and runs along
the South shore of Loch Duich before climbing, in zig-zags, over the high pass of Bealach
Ratagan and thence to Glenelg. I got a nice shot of the hills
with Ratagan Hostel in the foreground.
A frost smoke was rising in pink willow-the-wisps from the polished steel surface of the loch.
Glenelg is a place of flat fields in the midst of steep rocks and heather.
It is also a place which carries a weight of history on its shoulders. A couple of miles
beyond it lies the fertile Glen Beag where there are two of the finest examples of
Pictish Brochs -
the best examples, in fact, on the Scottish mainland. They are surpassed only by the Mousa and
Clickhimin Brochs in Shetland. There are chambered cairns too.
In the old days Kylerhea near Glenelg was the favoured crossing place between Skye and the mainland. Here the drovers brought herds of cattle across the water and thence to Glen Shiel. Glen Shiel and Glen Moriston together form a huge corridor through the hills to the Great Glen which splits Scotland diagonally. This route was, therefore, a natural one for cattle herds heading South to the markets of Falkirk. Kylerhea now has a ferry in the summer months which runs in competition with the Bridge (the most expensive toll bridge in Europe - pound per mile).
Watching the cattle swim from Skye to the mainland must have been exciting. It had to be well timed. The tide there runs impressively fast and when it's running you can watch it from the excellent public footpath which goes north from the ferry carpark along the shore. Flat wrinkled pans of dark turbulent water surge through the narrows in a moving matrix of froth streaks.
Glenelg then, has been a place of human habitation for a very long time indeed. In an age when roads were few and transport by sea was the convenient choice, Glenelg, by the Sound of Sleat, sheltered as it is, by the hills of Skye, was what estate agents would call, "conveniently placed for transport services". Today, in an age of concrete bridges, fly-overs and smooth two-lane trunk roads which sweep through the countryside, it is a forgotten corner, where it sleeps with its ancient stones for a pillow.
And so back to Kintail.
At Loch Duich, the well sign-posted countryside centre lies about a mile or so beyond the head of the loch, on the old road. That is the road which carried all the traffic to Skye in the days before the new causeway was built. It's quite hard now to remember what a long journey that used to be. I left a note of my intended route in the centre, and would liked to have spent more time there. It had interesting stuff pinned to the walls about the
battle of Glen Shiel. But the place was as cold as a morgue - a bone-piercing cold that forbad delay. At eleven o'clock, I set off up Glen Licht.
Twenty five years ago, I had come to Camban from the south, from the Cluanie Inn in Glen Shiel. Now I was coming at it form the West. A ten mile walk - a nice length for a winter's afternoon, I thought.
The big surprise was the volume of
ice on the path. It covered the broad jeep-track in bulging grey terraces like solidified mucous. Often I had to divert on to the flat bog-land alongside. Fortunately the conditions which had made the path unwalkable, had turned the oozing bog of summer into brown concrete. There was ice on the moor too, but the coating of grass gave grip. Here and there, the ice lay like dark puddles of frog spawn. Bright green leaves were frozen in, like decorations in a glass paper weight.
Soul searching and remembering ... Remembering that other Camban visit.
The day after I my stay at the bothy I had climbed Mam Sodhail by a hillside populated with birds which sat on rocks and emitted high musical flute-like notes. I slept high on the shoulder of the mountain. The ability to stop and sleep where you are gives a wonderful sense of freedom. No need to be anywhere by any particular time. No constraint.
I have mixed feelings about leaving written notes about an intended journey. Walking and climbing are freedom sports. Though having taken part in a search for someone who was not in fact lost I see the need, I know the frustration. And yet ... leaving word also has dangers. Not only does it rob the walker of that much loved sense of freedom, it curbs decision-making based on the prevailing conditions. It is not always possible to think of all the possibilities in advance. Pressing on with a declared intention can lead to trouble.
I had brought ski-sticks. These days, plagued as I am by fragile cartilage-jumping knees, ski-sticks have become a permanent feature of my walking equipment. I cannot recommend the practice too highly. But it has to be a pair of sticks. One is no use at all. Two sticks lower the angle of a hillside by ten degrees, they lighten the weight of a rucksack by the weight of two arms and they shorten every mile by a furlong. In the last resort two sticks, if you twist an ankle, they will get you home. And when steps have to be picked with great care, as on the ice covered paths of Glen Licht, two sticks are indispensable. They stabilise. They test the ground ahead ...
I poked. The stick skittered away from me, like ball bearings poured on to a sheet of steel.
Soul search and remembering ... and speculating ...
What it would be like to have no memory? I mean none at all. Not even lasting a millisecond. Impossible to function. It takes longer than that simply to become aware of all the sensory input. So what if we were allow a few milliseconds of memory? That would allow a response to ... whatever was available right now. But not a few seconds ago, not to anything which may have happened in the past. Then you are an automaton responding by automatic pre-programmed reflex. Would you be a person? Would you be aware of yourself, as a thing having continuity from moment to moment? How much memory do you need to have a consciousness of self? Does the principle extend all the way backwards into history?
At the top of Glen Licht and about halfway to Camban, there is a black dot on the map which carries the name "Glen Licht Ho". It is an imposing name but I didn't know what to expect. It could have been a huge estate building. It was a small cottage, a traditional two up and two down, sound of roof with barred windows and a securely padlocked door. It carries a small plaque to tell the world that it belongs to the Edinburgh University Mountaineering Club. A radio mast rises from the roof. Later, I scanned McKenzie's History of the Clearances to see if the house gets a mention. It is obviously more recent than that, but the location was probably a homestead further back. There are ruins nearby which suggest exactly that. Nothing. The present house looks to me like a relic from the Victorian age of grand estate development. A keeper's house perhaps or a fishing lodge.
Beyond the house, the glen comes to an end and the path degenerates to a narrow track. The ground rises and as it steepened I found that the ice, which covered the path, had become much more than an inconvenience. It had become lethal. A false step would have produce a long downhill slithering which would have ended only in the gaping gorges below. I wished I had brought an ice-axe and crampons. But then again, the ice was not continuous. Fiddling with frozen fingers to fit crampons to boots is a thankless task and one to be avoided. The idea of doing it repeatedly - on, off, on, off again - in the space of a few minutes is not one that appeals. So, poking the ground tentatively with my sticks, I made detours, sometimes quite long detours, to avoid the ice, treading carefully on rocks and grass tufts like stepping stones across a torrent.
In every other way the path is excellent. Two bridges span gorges that would otherwise be difficult to cross. It is well maintained and winds upwards though splendidly rugged scenery with waterfalls. On that day they were ice-falls.
Solitary walking allows the mind as well as the feet to wander. That's the joy of it ...
To Willie McRae again. I'm a paranoid conspiracy theorist - I know that because my friends tell me so. Harold Wilson once said "Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me." Cock-up versus conspiracy? When the authorities put their hand on their collective heart (if they have one) and admit that it was a cock-up ... well that's when you can be dead certain it was a conspiracy.
The ice was slug white and shining like wet marble. My cautious detours to avoid it, were making the trip longer than the four hours I had planned. At one point my progress was blocked completely. The path rose steeply between crags and had turned into an ice-climb. The rock slabs on either side which before, the freezing weather arrived, had caught the spray from tumbling water, now glistened with black ice. I turned and went down a long way. I passed under the cliff and came up again by a shallow grassy gully which had only patches of ice. Even there, it was safer and easier to ascend one of the easy-angled ribs of rock which framed the gully.
I crossed the bealach at the head of Glen Licht and entered Glen Affric at dusk. A fringe of crimson sunlight was slipping off the snowy peaks and the valley was filling with a lilac shadow. Several times in the half-light I thought I saw the building but when approached it became a dark rock.
Camban was not as I remembered. It seemed smaller and the roof was different. Or was it? The interior was a near blackness. Realising that the light would soon be gone completely I struggled hard with frozen fingers to undo my rucksack and extract that precious folding plastic water-bottle. All streams nearby were frozen. The only source of the liquid stuff was the main river some distance away. The sound of it filled the glen with a quiet hush.
More struggles with frozen fingers. The patent tap-bung on the bottle was tight and would not pull out of the bottle to allow it to be filled. The plastic had stiffened in the cold and become unyielding. I attacked it with a pocket knife and at last got the thing out. Then in dwindling light, ran to the river.
Clear cold water running under clear cold ice. I smashed away the fringe of ice with a ski-stick and bailed the water into the bag with a mug. Back to the bothy. Hands once again frozen. Torch. Candles. Light first. Then pots and pans. Then the stove. The stove generated a tiny heat which was instantly sucked away by the solid stone walls. Water to boil.
Then and only then, look about ... explore ... and remember.
The interior was divided by a wall.
I'm sure that wall was not there twenty five years ago.
And someone had put granite blocks the size of gravestones round the fireplace like an array of easy chairs.
I sat on one and found I could not stand up. The seat of my pants, slightly damp from the water fetching episode,
had frozen to its surface. With a tearing noise I broke free and placed my camping bed-mat as a seat insulator.
Order and method now - to help conserve torch battery strength.
I laid food packets on the bench for ease of finding in the dark. I blew on my fingers.
Clouds of frosted breath mingled in the candlelight with water vapour from the pan.
I paused to flap my arms to the count of fifty. Poured water into a cup with chocolate powder.
The hot fluid coursed down my throat like lava. That was better. Next, hot food.
Just keep adding dry packets of stuff to the pan of water. Veggie-burger mix and potato powder stirred
to a glutinous pog. Another pan and more water to boil for more drink and for cleaning the first pot.
I put the torch out. In a candlelit near-darkness I sat nonchalantly trying not to shiver,
on my insulated granite chair and spooned invisible hot veggie burger gruel. Another hot drink.
I gulped it down, swilled the pan in hot water and groped my way outside to throw the dishwater away ....
Why is a black night sky filled with sharp bright stars is always so completely unexpected and
so utterly breath-taking? It has something to do with the sudden change - from the enclosed world defined
by a feeble torch beam and the vast space which appears above you when you switch it off. It's a kind of vertigo.
It's like stepping through a door and finding yourself hanging by its handle on the face of a cliff.
Coldness reached into my lungs as I stared upward. When did the stars last shine like that? I was twelve.
Maybe it is not just a trick of memory. Maybe the atmosphere is not as clear as it used to be.
It's all that pollution and global warming. With chattering teeth I blamed the global warming.
I prepared my bed with care and with as much insulation as I could muster.
The sleeping quarters were on the upper floor which was reached by ladder.
Since I was alone, I considered remaining downstairs and sleeping on the stone floor.
But it was just possible that someone else would arrive in the night, and besides, wood is better
insulation than stone.
So I climbed the ladder and laid out my bedding.
A self-inflating under-mat, my magnificent new sleeping bag, five layers of clothing, two pairs of stockings
and a furry hat with ear-flaps. That lot produced a temperature which was just comfortable.
But half an hour later I sat up. A sound. ....?
Nothing. No footsteps. No voices. ...
Again. ....?
And again - Bloody mice!
Cursing myself for a fool I shot down the ladder, gathered up my carefully arranged food packets,
stuffed them into plastic shopping bags and hung them from a rafter.
Back in my multi-layered down-filled cocoon I listened in the dark to the mouse boldly exploring downstairs.
It made quite a racket. I rolled over and shone a torch through a hole in the floor boards and saw two bright
sparks of eyes staring back at me.
"Goanie no dae that," said those eyes.
I slept and left it to its work.
I rose at six. It was still black dark. But twelve hours, more or less, horizontal in my bag was as much as I
could take. The water in my plastic bag had grown ice-bergs. Food was needed.
Simple stuff again. Hot water poured by torchlight into a packet. Hot chocolate again.
Stand in the dark and flap arms fifty times. Soup. Another fifty. Powdered scrambled eggs.
Stamp the feet fifty times. Tea. Blow on fingers. Flap and stamp fifty times.
More memories ....
Of sitting up in a tent on an Antarctic ice-cap and nearly knocking myself out on the tent roof
because the condensation of breath had frozen into a layer of hard ice half an inch thick.
Of crouching over frozen mukluks, normally the same shape and size as Wellington boots but
converted overnight into hard crumpled knots of canvas. Of taking them inside my sleeping bag
to thaw them, before easing them, a millimetre at a time, with numbed hands on to numbed feet.
Why does such cold discomfort have such a warm place in the memory?
Two hours later I was outside the bothy lacing my boots in the early light of dawn.
I hefted the rucksack on my back and set off on the return journey. The plan had been to go
back by the northern route over the Bealach an Sgairne but I abandoned that idea.
The northern route was higher, steeper and more narrow than the one I had crossed
the day before and I thought it likely that the ice-layers I had encountered might be even more extensive on the northern route. If I reached a point where
the ice was continuous and because of its steepness and narrowness there was no alternative way to go,
then, having no ice-axe or crampons, I would be forced late in the day into a long retreat. And the blackness of night
would be approaching. Walking on that surface in the dark would not be amusing. (see A Note on the Ice Conditions).
Promises were the way out of such problems. Making yet more promises to return another day, I went as I had come,
by Glen Licht. My reward for such prudence (or was it cowardice?) was a splendid view of the snow covered
peaks of the
Five Sisters in the high sunlight of a brilliant morning.
