Season in Strathglass Read Free Page A

Glen Affric to make the series 30 years or more ago but this is the first time I've had a chance to watch it.
    As the film opens, he strides down the back road above the still-functioning hotel at Cannich, in breeches and a bobble hat, with an old-fashioned sloppy rucksack on his back – a wee man with stocky legs and a wee round face and a blob of a nose. He looks over Cannich village as it was then in the early ’70s. The ground is bare beyond the shinty park, where there are bungalows now. This had been the site of a hutted encampment where 2,000 hydro workers lived when the dams in Glen Affric and Glen Cannich were being built.
    He stands on top of the Affric dam in a woody gorge (relatively secluded, unlike the dams at Mullardoch and Monar), explaining that at first it was planned to flood the whole glen, converting Loch Beinn a'Mheadhoin and Loch Affric into a single great loch, swamping the stretch of river that links them, along with picturesque stands of Caledonian woodland, and submerging Affric Lodge and the keeper's house next to it. Common sense prevailed, luckily.
    It's winter. He skips down snow-covered steps, followed less confidently by a dark-bearded man in a kilt – Finlay Macrae, then district officer for the Forestry Commission with Glen Affric in his beat. A visionary, a lover of the old trees, Finlay Macrae is a legend among foresters yet.
    Tom meets the MacLennan brothers, Donald and Duncan, both tall and trim and in their 60s. Duncan, stalker John's father, now in his 90s – the Old Duncan I heard of at the hotel – does most of the talking. He's been a stalker, a forest ranger and a shepherd in his time and now has been writing his reminiscences.
    Donald, also in his 90s, was a great fisherman in his day. People would ask him what fly he used. ‘Och, just the blue charm,’ he'd say, thus acquiring a nickname. He became ‘the Blue Charm’ or just ‘the Charm’.
    â€˜What do you do on holiday?’ asks Tom.
    â€˜A bit of fishing, a bit of shooting,’ the Charm replies. Work or play.
    Tom meets Duncan's wife and her younger son, another Duncan. Young Duncan, a bright lad, ruddy-faced and just out of his teens, says he doesn't fancy a desk job in town. Affric is where he wants to be, working in the open like his dad and his uncle. (Now he takes clients fishing on the loch. He has driven the school bus and, on occasion, he pulls pints in the pub.)
    Tom Weir climbed on Everest before Hillary and Tenzing got to the top. In a postscript to the film, shortly before his death, when he's aged and feebler, he's asked if he has any regrets. ‘I wish I was young again,’ he says. A wistful note to end the film.

7
    At the Spar shop, Cannich.
    Here comes the Charm in deerstalker hat, upright on a yellow bike, pedalling in stately fashion down the road past the hotel.
    He dismounts to buy milk and a loaf, a tall figure, erect, elderly, white moustached. I say hello and we talk a bit.
    â€˜Blethering again,’ says a man in passing.
    The Charm remembers Tom Weir in Affric. He showed him an eagle's nest and he admired the wee man's neat footwork on rock.
    Blethering . . . For no reason at all, he starts to reminisce about the war and how he was captured at St Valery, fighting with the Highland Division in the rearguard on the way to Dunkirk. It rankles still that they were left behind. How the Germans walked their prisoners all the way to Poland, where he worked in a coal mine deep underground for two years. After that, they were marched back again, on the road from January to March, their progress marked by a line of turds in the snow, mile after mile.
    As I leave the shop with the newspapers under my arm there's no sign of life at the sad hotel across the road. Nor at the distressed cottage in a field round the corner with sagging tin roof and flaking walls. It looks derelict but someone lives there and in the small caravan parked beside it all the