#sharedstories ayearinthecairngorms

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To Walk Alone

by Val Hamilton

Walking alone in the hills is an indulgence. It is a selfish pursuit: it allows you to relax into your surroundings, appreciating the sharpness of the air in your lungs and on your face; smelling the pine, the heather, the damp earth, the snow; hearing your footsteps pounding against the forest track, pat-putting up the hill path, squeaking in the snow as you move at your own pace; noticing the elusive green juniper berries, the lichen-covered rock which twitches and turns into a ptarmigan, the strange mini-forests of alpine club-moss.  

There is the luxury of thinking of no-one but yourself and of nothing but the world around you. All decisions are your own: it is so easy when walking with others, especially those fitter than you, to plod behind, barely aware of the route, either in macro terms of where to turn off a path, or on the micro scale of where to put your feet crossing a boulder field or working out which innocuous-looking grass patch conceals a soggy bog.

Walking alone on the Cairngorm plateaus has particular significance, as the consequences of making a mistake can be so severe. This adds to the experience as you keep an eye on any clouds piling in from the west and try to identify and register the slightest landmark so always aiming to know where you are. And if the visibility does deteriorate, you have the test of walking on a bearing, counting your paces, checking your timings. Where’s the fun in using a GPS? You have to concentrate: it is no use knowing you have to walk for ten minutes if you don’t remember what time you started.

In theory, walking alone should give you precious thinking time and sometimes that happens on an easy path, although even then you must be ready to switch your awareness back on or you can find yourself “misplaced”. But often your head needs to be filled with the practicalities of the day and this in itself clears your cluttered mind of concerns and problems. Solo hill walkers have “lived in the moment” long before it became a trendy lifestyle mantra.

Although solitary walking has a strong anti-social element, there is pleasure to be found in chance encounters: the hill runner met on Creag an Leth-Choin with tales of summer snow-patch skiing; the older woman making steady progress up the Lairig Ghru path who told me she always left her family a note of her route so that if she didn’t return, they would know where to look for her bleached bones; the Frenchman who had run up to the summit of Cairngorm from the Glenmore campsite, stripping off his t-shirt to use it as a towel, while I approached dressed in fleece, cagoule and gloves and preparing to put on a hat; the three monosyllabic men on Bynack More, perhaps unhappy about being overtaken by a woman of a certain age. 

Walking with friends and family of course has its own pleasures but the sense of achievement from pushing your limits unaccompanied is incomparable. Solitude is so different from loneliness.  The sense of space, freedom and potential experienced alone on the high tops of the Cairngorms is one of the greatest privileges life can provide.

#sharedstories ayearinthecairngorms

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A wild night in the Cairngorms

by Murray Ferguson

I can remember sitting up in the dark, in my sleeping bag, in the bothy. Flames all around my head. Total confusion. The pain came later.

Our adventure started well – Christmas day, in 1982 I think. Eight hours of presents, Christmas TV and rich food was enough for three 19 year olds and we needed to escape. A borrowed Austin Allegro from a parent, and three pals were on their way to the Linn of Dee and the Cairngorms. And then to adventure.     It is dark, windy, very cold. It’s blizzardy flurries and spindrift all the way up to Hutchison Memorial Hut. We see no one at all once we leave the road and the sweeping beams of head torches and snowflakes make it so dramatic and exciting – just what we needed. And when we arrive in the small hours of Boxing Day the bothy is empty. Perfect. It all adds to the adventure and sense of wildness that we craved.

After brews, Christmas leftovers and drams from bottles pilfered from parents we bedded down on the concrete floor. With candles we read out the bothy book. There were some entries from folk we knew; some funny tales and quotes. At some point the candle had burnt down to a small stub. I do recall, as the chat became sparse and we drifted off to sleep, that my pal Diack said to blow it out. I didn’t; liking the warm flicker of candlelight on the tin roof. 

It must have been only minutes later that, now asleep, I rolled onto the lit candle, instantly setting fire to my beloved nylon and synthetic sleeping bag. The hood was drawn up round my head with drawstring and I remember sitting up and thrashing to get hands free, flames all round my head.    No chance of getting out of the bag – I didn’t even think of that, or of anything, as I beat at flames with bare hands. My two dozy pals had quite a sight – a burning, thrashing, nylon-coated mummy, they said.

I’d destroyed the top part of my sleeping bag – and melted the nylon onto my hands and upper body. I was incredibly lucky to have been wearing an old thick woollen simmet and the nylon had melted onto that, and not my shoulder and back. But my hands were bad. I had deep burns all round several fingers, my thumbs and the palms of both hands. I was bundled outside and I remember kneeling with hands stuck into snow drifts. Torches and a general stramash all around. There seemed to be more than the three of us. 

My two pals were fantastic, taking control immediately. Knowing to keep my hands as cold as possible, for as long as possible. Later, I remember them fetching ice to put in pans of water, my hands soaking to keep them cold. Then, as shock set in, they restrained me as I wanted to go outside again to get to the cold; me thinking that would ease the pain. 

Accidents happen! In wild places they happen quickly and seriously. No emergency services. The thing is that you do just cope. Because you have to. The rest of the night was waves of pain, easing in and out slowly. Fitful sleeps as we waited for first light.

The morning brought a full-on, Cairngorms blizzard – we’d hardly thought of checking the forecast, so keen were we to get our fix of adventure. Well we had it now. Conditions flipped between atrocious to challenging as we headed out, buffeted by wind, poor visibility all the way, shouting to each other, stumbling in drifts. Me, with crudely bandaged hands, needing help to put on gloves and rucsac; I felt like an Antarctic explorer. 

Many hours later, finally back at the car, I remember insisting that I would drive – it was my dad’s car and that must have been important. Thumbs hooked gingerly around the wheel while pals changed the gear. The car slid between ruts and drift all the way down Deeside. But we were invincible now!  

Nearly 40 years on, three things strike me. My daughters are just starting out on their own wild outdoor adventures. We’ve had a few scrapes with them in wild places already – some small falls scrambling; a stove accident and another bad burn; some tricky river crossings in spates. A stone-throwing, head-hitting incident – “Dad’s fault”. But that self-reliance and confidence, which time outdoors brings, is starting to shine through in them both. Makes me very proud. Second, this is what the Cairngorms mountains offer – a place to escape, to have fun and adventures, to learn. Wild, but close to home. I realise that I am just so, so lucky to have grown up near these mountains – and to live close by now.

Finally, I feel a need to reconnect with the old friends involved. Get them to tell the same story back to me. “You remember that time I set fire to myself in a sleeping bag in the Cairngorms?” Did it really happen like that?  Or at all? I’m old enough to know the tricks that memory plays. And anyway, maybe their version of the story is even better than mine.

#sharedstories ayearinthecairngorms

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Rinasluick

by Douglas Johnston

There are no ghosts at Rinasluick only deer grazing by the rubble from the granite walls.

Piping voices, echo in shrill delight filtered through archival detritus.

A small croft house, one story in height, slated and in good repair. Property of Colonel Farquharson of Invercauld.

Attested by the Revd's Middleton, Campbell & Smith. Of higher authority it seems than those who bide.

There were no deer at the rigs of Rinasluick when bairns ran the boundaries there.

#sharedstories #ayearinthecairngorms #poetry

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Seasons on the Mountain

by Kerry Dexter

In shadow up the mountain snow lies late in spring

In summer’s turn of season heather colours rise; daylight lingers then

With autumn’s breath a skein of geese unravels against greying sky

Silver brush of snowfall paints winter up the mountain Seasons turn again

#sharedstories #ayearinthecairngorms #poetry

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In High Trees

by Jen Cooper

Every time, you say, these high trees exceed your expectations. Your eye drawn up, and up again, to crescent goldcrest nests. We wait in the quiet moments, feel the air get light before their intermittent bursting out from cover to dart between trees in threes and fours – their sheer lightness – landing on pines whose bark shards dwarf kinglet bird, so plain except that yellow orange crest.

#sharedstories ayearinthecairngorms poetry

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So delighted to see Cairngorms Lyrics appearing on banners across the Park. Two are by Victoria and Catriona, participants at our Aviemore workshops. One is at the Cairngorms National Park Authority’s office in Grantown, and the other at the Coffee Bothy in Laggan. The final one is by Carolyn Robertson, winner of the Park Staff Away Day Cairngorms Lyric competition!

#sharedstories #ayearinthecairngorms #poetry #cairngormslyric

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I feel free As free as a bee The yerth is silent There is no violence The trees are green Where nobody has been The robins have health While they taste the wealth The smell of the fire Doesn’t dampen my desire To feel the breeze Around my knees

Unknown young poet at Forest Fest, Highland Folk Museum

#sharedstories #ayearinthecairngorms #poetry

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Capercaillie Acrostic

A poem from Thor Ball, age 7, who joined in the Caper and writing activities at the Cairngorms Nature Big Weekend in Carrbridge in May.

#SharedStories #AYearintheCairngorms #capercaillie #poetry

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Into the Mountain - Garbh Choire Mor

by Neil Reid

A dished out hollow of snow, sharp, granite scree rising steeply before me, disappearing into a cold grey void.

A crack, a clack, a rattle. Impossible to identify a direction, but it's not the first stone that has fallen while I've stood here, nor will be the last. I am alone. I feel alone. Uneasily so.

When Nan Shepherd talks of walking out of the body and into the mountain it's a metaphor for heightened focus and perception; here, in the furthest reaches of the Garbh Coire Mor I feel I have walked out of the world and into the mountain - literally.

The Cairngorms have many faces and I have loved - and do love - them all: the lush river banks, the birdsong-filled quiet of the pinewoods, the austere beauty of the wind-scoured desert plateau. I enjoy auld mannie naps on the hillsides in summer sun, have stood for an hour in contented contemplation in a winter white-out. The Cairngorms have been mine since I was a child, and I theirs.

But here is different. There is no welcome here, no comfort. To journey into the Garbh Coire Mor is, as truly as is possible, to journey into the mountain; a pilgrimage not into its heart, but into an open sore, unhealed, raw edges actively plucking at the smooth waves of plateau which are thus revealed to be surface rather than substance. Here is the interior exposed and it cradles not the crystal water of other corries, but cold, hard ice.

For the 'eternal snows' of the Garbh Coire Mor are no snows at all; they are pressed by weight of winter after winter, when snow may lie to a depth of a hundred feet, hardened by a thousand failed thaws. As insubstantial as snow feels when it drifts out of the skies, one year when the longest-lived snowpatch melted we put a time capsule in a plastic box in the bottom of the hollow it has created for itself high up at the foot of the cliffs. The following year, when the unthinkable happened again, the time capsule was recovered - crushed flat by the weight of just one winter's snows.

The pilgrimage here to see those snows of high summer, to stand truly inside the mountain, is a challenge in excess of reaching the tops of most mountains - the bowl of the inner corrie is over 1000 metres above sea level.  Leaving the steep-sided confines of Glen Dee, the mountains press in closer and steeper as you climb, channelled towards your goal,  the now pathless way becoming ever rougher. Temptation beckons in the spacious Garbh Choire Dhaidh, where the Dee Waterfall feeds a vein of life nourishing pools and lush grasses. But you resist, and persevere up bedrock and boulder into the bare bowl of  Garbh Choire Mor. On and on yet, for the boulders climb to an inner recess, a corrie within a corrie, ringed by fractured cliffs of grey and raw pink.

Labour up this slope and you're aware of another interior - beneath your feet. The voids between the massive grey boulders fall to unknown depths. It's common on such slopes to hear water running beneath, but here to the familiar rush is added echo, the sound of vast, subterranean cisterns. Can such things be? Climbing alone, upwards into this innermost maw of unfinished geology, you lose any assurance that it can't be and balance up, boulder to boulder, as though caverns lie below.

And you breast the lip of this innermost corrie into a dip. If the winter snows have gone from this cauldron then the rocks are covered in black moss. It has the feeling of a trap waiting to be sprung by an unwary footstep, so you do not linger but head on up the slopes of boulder, scree and grit, slipping as the ground steepens and moves beneath your feet. These are not rocks rounded by the millennia: they are sharp, freshly broken from the mountain, raw pink still, and gritty, loosely bound in a matrix of mossy sand and gravel. Feet slide, the slope feels dangerous, unstable.

When you reach your goal, that last fragment of snow, you realise it to be a chimera. That the snow has lasted through another summer is, obscurely, important to you, but the substance of it holds no magic; it's just dirty ice, dripping into ground that looks freshly bulldozed, stones on the surface a reminder that where you are, under the cliffs, is not safe. Up this close, foreshortening appears to rob the cliffs of their height and makes of them great, jagged teeth, but you are yet more than 500 feet below the surface of the plateau.

I have crawled between these teeth to escape upward, up through grit and scree, thick, dark moss that hides holds for hands and feet. I have carried on up the granulating scar of Pinnacles Gully,  fingers pushing, twisting, prising through moss and wet, red granite grit, seeking solidity in the shifting, unstable gully bed, to thrutch and scrape upward between granite jaws, watching and listening as another boulder slurps out of its mossy socket and cracks and bangs its way downward, bouncing from wall to wall, a smell of brimstone tracking its passage.

Release comes suddenly. A last chockstone, a widening of rubble and tenuous vegetation, then out from damp shadow to a sun-baked plateau stretching out in long, lazy waves of landscape. It's a liberation that lifts the heart, to be back on the surface after a journey inside the mountain.

Can I say I love even this most remote corner of the Cairngorms? It tests my devotion, this seeping wound gnawing at the edges of the plateau, in its near lifelessness, its damp chill, its raw unfinishedness. But it draws me. If I cannot yet love it I am fascinated by it and, even as my stride stretches out across the open plateau, I am plotting a return.

#sharedstories #ayearinthecairngorms #mountains

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Tree Fungus

by Susie Gunning

What is this.. protrusion from a tree? It grows there, just out of my reach. Sits silently upon the creaking timber.

A horse hoof ready for action, like galloping horses. Forever frozen on this ancient, static host.

The galloping ceases, Mid action. Its rounded smoothness ends in the flat bottom. Ready to connect with the earth below.

Sending vibrations through the grass to the tree roots. It hovers.. Ready to strike.

It sways.. In harmony with the trunk. As the wind gusts, the tiny leaves flutter like butterflies.

Its white bark, Strewn with small, Woolly green lichen. Embracing this strange, symbiotic species.

#sharedstories #ayearinthecairngorms poetry

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Blue Bird Day Climb

By Mike Wilkes

A burn meanders across the valley, swinging to and fro within the cradle of the glens parabolic walls. Buttery, yellow sunshine warms the bog and heather, raising drifts of Large Heath butterflies from the banks. The track steepens, the effort bringing on an eye-stinging, itchy-wool hotness. Exertion narrows focus to only the next foot fall. Boggy ground, the occasional purple butterwort, then coarse, dry heather, then Wooly Fringe Moss, now Creeping Azalea and rock. Now only shards of sandpaper-rough quarzite as the gradient eases slightly. The air at this height is rinsed by a chill breeze, as if from space, and it is menthol to the lungs. Then crack, the crest. Like plunging into a blue-black ocean that hangs above a sandy, mauve seabed. The ground falls away to the view of Munros - Cairn Toul, Braeriach, Ben Macdui and sky.

#sharedstories #ayearinthecairngorms

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Grantown Health Walk

Here are some wonderful images and #CairngormsLyrics from Eileen Sutherland, a member of the very popular Grantown Health Walk, who joined in the Shared Stories: A Year in the Cairngorms Project recently. What’s a Cairngorms Lyric? Find out here. Why not write one of your own and submit it to this blog, or share on social media?

#SharedStories AYearintheCairngorms CairngormsLyric

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What do you hear?

by Amy-Louise Hutchinson

Tweeting birds high up in the Scots pines, Tapping quickly, Shooting past to catch that beastie. Wood Ants upon the floor scuttling along for their food to give their Queen, Crackling fire, Boiling water, Time for a nice hot cuppa, Sitting here listening to what I can hear every other Friday under the watchful eye of the awesome rangers, Looking back at the footage from the camera traps, Young deer, A fox cub and a badger appear on the screen. Stop and listen what can you hear.

#sharedstories #ayearinthecairngorms

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Golden Eagle

Poem by Gillian Shearer

Golden Eagle Photo: Charlie Phillips https://www.charliephillipsimages.co.uk/

A red sun splays across the rise where siskin and lapwing soar,

heather in its purple cloak bows gently in the gloam, stippling the air with its sweet perfume,

across the glen our Lady’s Mantle tilts softly towards the light, as higher and higher, we roam.

There, amidst the reddening sun, we gather our thoughts – listen as the birlin wind ruffles the air,

somewhere, a lonely eagle glides, exciting the moor with its clarion cry, deathly, majestic, a spinning gyre – comes tumbling towards the earth.

#sharedstories ayearinthecairngorms poetry

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Rowan

by Antonia Kearton

I went out.

I went out walking, I walked the hours I reached the rock, scrambling, sky-reaching I walked the sky, the searching sky I swam the forest, the ferny depths Pines blue and green, tall straight and standing. In the blue greenness Stags stand roaring, roar running, By bracken bent breaking, brightening With autumn’s yellow yellowing.

I see you -

Right red upright, curly-toed, bold berried, marching leaves, rank on rank climbing upward, pioneer Cluster-trunk, berry-clump cliff-climbing, witch-warning, warn-witching, bold-berried.

You were what I found

I swim home through the evening, darkening, back to the start There are Rowans by my door.

https://www.antoniakearton.co.uk/

#sharedstories #ayearinthecairngorms poetry

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An acrostic poem about capercaillie by a young writer at the Cairngorms Nature Big Weekend.

#sharedstories #ayearinthecairngorms #kids #poetry