An Teallach – The Forge

We left Edinburgh at 3pm and made our way North. Heading up through Wester Ross late in the evening, through countryside that, while I’d never been there before, was very familiar from my childhood on the isle of Skye. Brown rock-studded heathland and moor, heather and spiked grass and pockets of bright green dells. Blocks of plantation pine awaiting harvesting, as above. Mountain ranges with a snowy topping – snow that we hadn’t expected this late in May.

Snow that would be up on the mountain we wanted to climb. An Teallach, the forge.

 

 

Never mind, save that worry for another day.

The bothy at Badrallach awaited.

 

A lovely place, basic – there are no beds, and no cooking stove – but with everything necessary to a good base for climbing. Hot showers! Board games! And the people who own it are charming.

 

The view from the bothy at 10pm, across Little Loch Broom

 

D, A and I played scrabble late into the night, making cup after cup of tea on the little camp stove we had brought with us. We slept up in the loft space on bare boards, with a couple of French walkers down in the main area of the bothy huddled in sleeping bags on the floor.

The morning came bright and cold.

The mountain waiting for us.

Telephone box, green grass, yellow gorse and the blue, blue loch and sky

 

 

After a short drive round the other side of the loch, we parked and walked back a little to the start of the trail.

Let’s begin the ascent, shall we?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Foiled by the ice and snow clinging to the sides of An Teallach, we decided to make the best of things, climb the easier bit of the mountain, and make a snowman. And so we did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We walked back, thinking ourselves successful. Somewhere in the valley of death, we met a couple of birds, scurrying and skittering along the ground. They moved ahead of us for about five minutes along the trail, the male (pictured below) in pursuit of the female, who lacked the red combs above the eyes and was a little bigger and more speckled. The male made a gentle rolled ‘trrrrr’ call, and fanned his black tail a few times. My thought was he was possibly a ptarmigan or some kind of grouse.

 

 

I sent my father, a keen birder, a picture to id, and he consulted a bird book – indeed a ptarmigan, in spring plumage (they are in winter all white bar the black around the eyes and tail, and of course, the lovely red combs).

 

 

They aren’t terribly common (with only 10,000 breeding pairs in Scotland), and Scottish Ptarmigan are only found in barren landscapes high up on mountains like this in the North West of the country. This pair really cheered us up with their antics when we were growing very weary.

 

 

Finally, after about seven and a half hours, we made it back to level ground. All of us a bit bruised, and in need of dinner, which we had at the Dundonnell Hotel, where we had parked our car. Mussels in whisky sauce, scallops, fish and chips, great satisfaction and happiness. You’ll be tired too, after all these pictures. Go off and have a tea, perhaps, and begin planning your own trip…

Taster – Down off the mountain

D, A and I are just back from Badrallach bothy and the An Teallach (pronounced An Challauch, the last ‘ch’ unvoiced as in ‘loch’) mountain range. A six hour or so drive up North to the dramatic and lovely region of Wester Ross, which is on, as you would imagine, the Western coast of the country (although Sutherland, a nearby region, is the very top of the country, the furthest North on the Scotland mainland). Seven and a half hours on the mountain yesterday, and another six hour drive back South to Edinburgh.

 

So just a taster of An Teallach, and the promise of more to come.

 

Endless Reads Review at PANK: Zazen by Vanessa Veselka + Another Book Spine Poem

Here’s my latest review over at PANK! As ever, let me know what you think of it (and if you like the sound of Zazen, which I hope you do after this) down in the comments, if you’d like.

Further, Paul Lamb of Lucky Rabbit’s Foot has sent in a lovely Book Spine Poem, one that I think fits the tone of the wonderful Zazen quite well:

Waiting for Aphrodite

Far from any coast

A great current running

the message to the planet

Hard Scrabble

Passage of Darkness

I’ll be away from Friday, up in the North West Highlands, staying in a luxury bothy (an old stone cottage for walkers), and spending time with D and my friend A, stomping around in the bogland and on mountainside, hopefully snapping away pictures of it all. Look out for a probably picture-swamped post later in the week.

The (semi) secret garden

 

Thanks to some crossed wires, D and I thought we would be viewing a flat off the Royal Mile today (turns out ‘next Monday’ was the Monday after next). It happened that the flat overlooks Dunbar’s Close Garden, a beautiful, peaceful courtyard modeled along a traditional 17th century Burghal design – somewhat Italianate, with herbs and hedges arranged in symmetry, surrounded on all sides by old town houses and walls. While we were walking, we noticed a few visitors, obviously locals, popping in to have their lunch, escaping the bustle of the Canongate outside.  They sneaked out as slyly as they arrived, glaring a little. Obviously intruders are rare beasts here.

 

We moved further into the garden, cold in the sun, the air full of the smell of sage, I think, or young rosemary.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I hope you’ll forgive me for flooding this post with images. And if you are a native Edinburgher, forgive me for giving this sort-of secret away. Perhaps you’d like more? If you’ve never heard of the garden and you are still more in need of images, Vivian Swift has a lovely post on Dunbar’s Close garden, and the site, Nothing to See Here gives a little more background of how this place came to be made.

 

We really hope that the flat near here works out (find out next Monday, all being well), although two more viewings, both in distinct parts of the city, have been added to the list. One, we struck off later in the afternoon – another damp ground floor flat to the South. Onwards though. It’s easy to keep our spirits up in Spring, with still more to see, more disappointments and small joys, ahead.

 

In keeping, one last sight today. Up a little way from Dunbar’s Close is a whisky shop. Walking home, we saw this old gent sunning himself by the malts:

 

 

He shuffled himself down on his four paws, quite ready for a good long snooze. And home it was for us, to rest (though sadly not to write, with my head fuzzy with a bad cold) and to plan.

Sunbreak, at last

Well, our mystery flat was a damp squib – literally. Beautiful otherwise, with its own patch of South-facing garden and lovely high ceilings, the windowsills were fringed with telltale black spots, and needing an portable dehumidifier to keep the air under control.  In Scotland, you’ll find that many ground floor flats suffer from a menagerie of moulds. Good for mushrooms in Autumn, poor for our respiratory health. Ah well.

 

The day, as the reports predicted, gave us glorious sunshine, and soon we were over our disappointment.

 

 

We walked up through nearby Holyrood park a while, discussing the pros and cons of the flat-that-wasn’t-there, and the other potential places on our list. All the while aware of how lucky we are when the weather is like this, the wind blowing fresh and sweet across the new grass. Lucky, too, that in the centre of Edinburgh there is this beautiful green space in the wake of Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags.

 

 

Nettles and dandelions – both of which are edible (though perhaps not if, as here, the place is commonly frequented by dogs).

 

 

Spring weather, gentle breezes, exploration, long and well-thought out talks on what it is we want from a home – a good day it is when you have all this time, all this greenery.  There is still much to arrange, to wait for, to plan. But right now our bodies are tired out, souls are patched up, and minds, as they greatly needed to be, refreshed.

 

The hardest part being the head and not the heart -

I wait on the shore, feeling as people often do by the shore, thought-stripped but full of feelings as fine as sand, raw as salt spray.

 

This is another way of saying, I’ve no news. There is never such a thing as a static position – I can see the waves churning, or gently drawing in and out like breathing, like the unseen moon making the sea loch above breathe. But I would wish for clearer weather-in two ways. Here it has been dreich, miserable, cold and wind and rainspattered, almost every day this week, more. Not amenable to jaunts at all, no gathering of sights nor finding greenspace and colour and light to enliven and make the waiting easier.

 

Tomorrow, though, tomorrow. For the simpler problem. D and I have found a good prospect for a flat – in Colony housing.  The name sounds strange, as if they were little villages off on their own, with societies that functioned under the rule of an oppressor. But the colonies of Edinburgh are all lovely two-floor flats with each flat having a garden leading up to a well-painted front door. They were built in the late 1800s and early 1900s as part of a philanthropic/co-operative movement to provide housing for skilled workers and artisans who would otherwise have to live in slums. My hope is that on our visit to the Abbeyhill colony, I’ll manage to get some shots of this fine part of town.

 

Already I am intrigued, because the street we are going to does not, on the face of things, appear to exist. Type it into Google maps, and the arrow shows where it should be, but the street name is wrong. We tried Yahoo and some independent sites. In each, the marker appears for the address we want, and the street name is different. Our street does not exist. But there is a photo of the flat we will visit, and Streetview reveals that it is there, on that wrong street (which is, simultaneously, the right place, according to all the information we could find). What does it mean? I like to think it’s something like platform 9 3/4, that we will have to run at the wall to make our way there. It might make receiving post a little tricky.

 

But a little magic, right now, would be just the thing.

Red Rowan

Late at night, editing to strange music choices – poppy hip hop from The Hairpin, a playlist of the music of Modest Mussorgsky, he of Night on Bald Mountain.

 

The text takes on strange shapes with the changing light, my eyelids growing heavy. But my fingers work almost independently, like little tailors, sewing up the gaps and ripping out the bad loops and snarls. I have to pull back before some witching hour comes. I set myself a placeholder, I embed a white rock in the ground, to know I can come back this way again, as many times as I need. Everything, I feel, should be form-and-function. Sometimes I’d like to write from ideas, to speak bolder, but the truth is, the text comes out this way, everything a fairytale and everything sharp and weighty as a hunk of flint. Perhaps the right material to spark, but not an overt flame, as the writers I look up to can manage.

 

Perhaps I have read too much of Virginia Woolf’s criticism to think out these sorts of things on my own terms.

 

Lastly, before bed, the Rowan of the title. A tiny one, but on its way. Rowans planted to keep out the fairy folk from houses, if not texts, to put a red bloom at the doorway. To mark and defy this liminal space.