Season in Strathglass Read Free

renovated and maintained by Historic Scotland – and happily, still functioning as built, still a working church. Historic Scotland is mostly about ruins.

4
    Gl-- Affric Hot -l.
    More letters are missing.
    A window's broken. But the door's ajar and Louise is at home.
    Louise appears in a padded jacket and ushers me in. It's cold inside. A large log cut from the trunk of a tree is an island in the centre of the lobby floor. There's a ruck of unopened letters scattered on a side table. Bills, perhaps? Louise says the electricity has been cut off.
    She takes me into the lounge where I sit on a distressed sofa beside a broken-tiled fireplace, circa 1950s, with the ashes of a dead fire in the grate. Two small curly-haired dogs rush at me barking and one leaps up and thrusts himself under my elbow.
    She tells me she bought the hotel with money her mother left her when she died and at first she considered running it jointly with a local man who wanted to offer accommodation to his fishing clients. But his plans didn't accord with her freewheeling vision, which tended more towards a community of souls than a commercial undertaking, and he pulled out. Louise admits that the hotel has been ‘a bit catastrophic’.
    But she seems remarkably untroubled. The money's gone but the magic lingers on. A woman who phoned asking for payment of a bill broke off in the middle of the call to say she could hear birdsong. Louise held her mobile to the open window so that she could listen. ‘Birds, trees – I just love it here,’ she says.
    Lying open on the table is a leather-bound book like an old-fashioned ledger, the pages covered in neat handwriting. ‘I write down my thoughts in this book,’ she says.
    Might I read her thoughts? A key to her soul? I'm too diffident to ask so Louise remains an enigma.

5
    I want to talk to a deerstalker.
    â€˜John MacLennan's your man,’ says Ian. ‘My neighbour.’
    So I go down the lane and cross the road to John's bungalow on the hillside above Comar Lodge, where we sit outside in the pale sunshine.
    John MacLennan has been stalking man and boy on the West Affric hills, hard country many miles away at the far end of the glen. According to the local custom he's Johnny Affric. His father Duncan, in whose footsteps he follows, was Dunky Affric (and John's wife is Cathy Affric). Billy MacLennan, his cousin, is the local builder and stalker at Fasnakyle but Billy's not an Affric – he's Billy Charm after his dad, who was called the Blue Charm. Strange name.
    John's a thickset man, sturdy and deeply bronzed. He wears a deerstalker hat, green jersey with shoulder pads and wellies – he's been gardening. Cathy appears with a tray of coffee, shortbread, sponge cake and scones warm from the oven. This is a treat. She's famous along the glen for her baking.
    West Affric, once a private estate, now belongs to the National Trust for Scotland which bans stalking for sport on its land. There's a twist to this. The trust needed to keep deer numbers down to encourage the ancient pinewood to regenerate and the group of sportsmen who used to shoot there volunteered to do the culling for them. So the trust kept its hands clean, the syndicate continued to stalk and John kept his job.
    John attended the discussion when they all sat round the table and the deal was struck – somewhat uneasily on the part of the trust. He was amused to hear the trust's man grudgingly admit, ‘I suppose the stalking's all right so long as you don't enjoy it.’ My question is this: can I go out on the hill with them? Not to shoot – just to watch, as an innocent observer.
    John gives me a hard look. ‘How fit are you?’ he asks. I must have passed muster. ‘Phone me in August,’ he says.

6
    Cannich. The caravan park again.
    I settle down to watch an old TV series, Weir's Way . I've been given the box set of DVDs.
    Tom Weir, mountaineer, writer and broadcaster, came to