Author: davidbrown (Page 14 of 15)

I don’t know any geology, but I intuit that the Highlands’ glens and lochs were made by either violent seaward migration of glaciers or violent melting of them.  In any case, something carved linear vees into the land.  The lochs are more like fjords than North American lakes.  And in the rivers and burns–the name here for streams–the water runs ceaselessly.

For this day and all the first four it was impossible to put a foot down on a surface that was not just wet but saturated.  Super-saturated–the water pooling–in most cases.

We went up a ridge over Finiskaig River, where for a way there was a vertical drop to the right, one slip and it would have been over.  And it was already over for some of the previous travelers.

The trail leveled out as we entered Glen Dessarry, and the sun came out briefly too.  We were on a trail, which helped.  Then it was up over a pass and another watershed, the river on the other side flowing in the opposite direction from the one we’d been walking beside.

The ground was sphagnum moss on top of peat. which is sphagnum moss from eons past.  It was  boggy, lacking only the eye and underwater pond of a true bog.  It seemed impossible there could be such a thing on a 10-percent grade.  In places, the water appeared stopped, a gelid mass flowing but not moving.

When we got to the top of the pass it started to rain again.  There was still a fair way to go to Kinbreack Bothy, which is the building with the red roof in the distance.  It was a slog, everything getting heavier and the ground squelchier, as they say over here.

When we got to the bothy, Alan went inside and found to his surprise there was no one there.  Two tents were pitched about a hundred yards down the burn, undoubtedly when the sun was still out.  The burn itself was a  bit sketchy to cross.  I stumbled stepping from rock to rock; didn’t fall, but the tip of my trekking pole caught under a rock and cracked.

The bothy had been rehabilitated but still emanated the mysterious presence of previous inhabitants.  The downstairs was floored with rough cobbles from the stream, the place for the animals, with a room next to make use of the warmth from them (and provide some besides).  Up a new staircase was a single room with fireplace at one end.  There was a little wood, a long bench on each side for sitting and sleeping, and some emergency cans of beans on the mantel piece.

We settled in, Alan lit a fire, we hung up our socks in a vain attempt to dry them, and ate.  It finally got dark.  It was raining hard and we were very happy to be there and nowhere else. And then to our surprised we heard someone clumping up the stairs in the gloom at the other end of the room.

A man appeared and put down a pack.  He started taking off his drenched clothes and Alan exchanged a few sentences with him that I couldn’t understand.  But it became clear soon that the man had fallen into a burn–a stream–and rolled over, getting everything wet.  Whether it was the stream right outside the house wasn’t clear, although I suspect it was because the last one we’d had to ford was quite a way back.

The man spoke in a very low voice, moved slowly and was obviously not young.  He was, in fact, unsteady as the took things out of his pack and hung them up.  he then went over to a detached bench of take off his clothes.  Alan commented that he seemed a bit hypothermic.

I went over and asked him if he wanted a cup of tea.  Both Colin and I had our stoves out and running.

“No, thank you, I’ll just drink water.”

His accent was very thick.  Thinking perhaps he forswore stimulating beverages, I asked him if he wanted a hot meal.

“No.  I haven’t carried a stove for three or for years.  I eat only cold food.”

“Well maybe when you fall in the burn it’s the night to make an exception,” I suggested.

“I’ve fallen in a burn before.”

Okay.

After a while he walked over.  He had changed into drier clothes and a pair of new blue tennis sneakers.   Alan got up and invited him down next to the fire.  The man pulled out a bun filled with cheese encased in plastic wrap.  It was the only thing he ate.

Conversation began and someone asked him how many times he’d done the Challenge.  He said this would be his 20th.  Alan asked him is name.

“Jim Taylor,” he said.

“Jim Taylor.  We’ve met before.  A couple of years ago at Tarfside.”

Jim Taylor was a 91-year-old man, mentioned in the event newsletter, who was not only this year’s oldest walker but would set the record for the oldest crossing if he finished.

Earlier in the day, Alan had told the story of meeting him at Tarfside several years ago.  Tarfside is a choke-point on the hike a couple of days walk from the east coast where there are sometimes a hundred or more Challengers.

Jim Taylor was famous for fast crossings and that year had finished two days early.  Someone had driven him back to Tarfside to socialize.  At some point he met Alan, who mentioned in conversation that in 1999 he’d walked partway with Jack Griffiths, who held the record as the oldest crosser.

Jim Taylor, who was 89 at the time, was under the impression Griffiths had been 93 at the time, and commented that he thought he’d never catch him.  But Alan assured him that Griffiths was only 90 at that crossing, his last.

“You could see the expression on his face change as soon as I said that,” Alan had recalled.

It turns out everyone on this year’s walk has heard of Jim Taylor, admires him from a distance, and hopes to meet him.  And here he was in a bothy with us.

He did finally accept a “wee dram” of whisky from Alan’s stash and began to talk a bit about his life.  You’ll hear more about that later.

The rain continued.  At some point Alan went out to get water from the stream.  He took my bottle and  Colin’s too.  When he returned he said the water had risen dramatically.

“I don’t believe we could cross that burn now,” he said.

 

The computer problem has been “sorted” and I temporarily have wifi access, so expect some new posts soon .  .  .

I’ve had a major computer disaster.  IPad mini is disabled for unknown reasons , possibly because it was left on in the pack and jostling a simulated password attempts. Many posts waiting to be written or uploaded at wifi equipped towns. Possible disaster.  Please stand by.

Colin, who is 44, doesn’t want me to go into what he does or where he works because of sensitivities of his employer. But it’s perfectly honorable work.

Alan, who is 70, is willing to let me tell a bit of his story. I queried him about his family history, Scottish history, Knoydart demography, the Clearances, all sorts of things. He was a hillwalker par excellence. He has finished “the Munros,” which is the name for all the hills in Scotland over 3,000 feet. There are 282 of them, catalogued by and named after a man named Hugh Munro. He is almost finished with “the Corbetts,” which are hills between 2500 and 3,000 feet.  He’s gone trekking at 18,000 feet in Nepal, and in Moab, Utah, and many places in between.

We talked about how people survived out here 200, 300 years ago. He told me about crofters, the tenant farmers,  and lairds, the owners of the land.

Crofters grew vegetables, oats and barley on ground in which the soil, full of rocks, had been piled up in elevated furrows–the original raised-bed gardening. Cattle was a cash crop, and there were cattle drives out of the Highlands south to market. Rob Roy, an outlaw hero villain, ran a protection racket in which people paid to not have their cattle rustled on the way, according to Alan. You know the Chisolm Trail from Texas to Kansas? The father of Jesse Chisolm, for whom it was named, was a drover in the Scottish Highlands, Alan said.

Alan came from MacDonalds on both sides of his family.  They lived in a place called Glen Moidart before the Clearances, and then were forced to a place on the coast called Smirisary, a settlement of 15 to 20 buildings that still exists without a paved road.  One of his great grandmothers on his mother’s father’s side came down to Glasgow.  She never learned English, although her son had forgotten Gaelic by the time Alan knew him.

Alan used to go back to the Highlands for summer vacation, put on a train in Glasgow with his name and destination pinned to his jumper when he was as young as six.  From the train terminus he had to walk a mile to a ferry.  Somebody always looked after him, he said, and he doesn’t remember being afraid.

At one point I apologized, as a formality, for asking so many questions.

“I’m a journalist, so I made my living asking questions.”

“Well that’s good,” Colin said, “because he was a tour guide.”

Before that he’d been a sales representative for a tobacco company and an executive of the Youth Hostel Association.  For about five years before retiring he had a business in which he took clients on five-day car trips around Scotland,  narrating as he went.

I asked him if he’d been to Priesthill.   I said I had an ancestor who’d been martyred there, killed by a man named John Graham of Claverhouse.

“Oh, Claverhouse.  The story in my wife’s family is she is descended from a man killed by him, John Brown.  Shot him in front of his family.”

This, of course, was the John Brown who is one of my mother’s ancestors.

I asked him if he’d been out to the monument at Brown’s grave.  He said he had; his wife had wanted to see it.

“It’s way out on a moor.  If you go, bring a brush, as it’s mossy and hard to read.”

I turned to Colin and said,  “Well, I guess that makes us kin.”

“No, I’m afraid not,” he said.  “It’s his second wife.”

 

 

It was raining when I woke up, which was several hours before I got up. I had breakfast, the cooked-in-the-pouch porridge and coffee, with extra made for the thermos (which just made the cut at send-back time).

But before breakfast: three aspirin.

I managed to eat without spilling, the bottom half of my body in the sleeping bag, and then dress and pack everything inside the tent. Everything but the tent, of course. By the time it was time to pack it, the rain had stopped.

There was a “bothy” at this spot. A bothy is an old building that has been repurposed as accommodation for hikers. It is usually an old stone homestead; sometimes it is a former “beya,” or place for animals.

Most bothies (I am told) have room for six or eight comfortably, but in bad weather hold 16 or 18. I have know idea how many people had stayed in this one. When I arrived at the camping area (which a man named Mark, who I walked the last hour with, described as “about the size of a baseball pitch”) I went by the bothy to take a look. One man was eating and another one was talking to him. Across the pitch 14 tents were pitched.

This was all at the head of a “sea loch,” which is to say a long bay in from the sound. The water was the ocean; sea weed was rafted up on the stony beach. Just before I disappeared into my tent the previous night a man had walked up from the mudflats and paused in front of me. I said good evening and he said something, I forget what.

 

In a wee bit of conversation it emerged that he was out with his son, who worked in one of the Gulf States and was here on his first Challenge. (Whose idea it was is a matter of dispute).

The man’s name was Alan Mitchell and his son was Colin.   Alan was on his fifth crossing, but his wife, who was not in attendance, had done 10. And only one with Alan, which struck me as interesting.   I’m sure I said something about being heavily laden.

He had a pleasant face and blue eyes–a surprising number of blue eyes here–and white hair and a short beard. An outdoorsman he looked (and he is).  We said good night.  As I was heading out in the morning–only three tents were still up–I passed by the bothy.  He was standing in the door.

“You see you’re not the last,” he said.

I headed off up the glen (which is the name for a river valley) and soon enough they caught up with me. That was the beginning of a day and a half with Alan and Colin.

 

After a full Scottish breakfast–that’s bacon and sausage (I passed on the kippers) I headed out to mail a pair of shoes, two books and various outakes to the hotel in Montrose where the celebratory dinner takes place when it’s all over. An hour before the ferry departure people were already streaming to the dock with their stylishly light packs.

With a water bottle filled, mine felt as heavy as ever.  But no matter.

Mallaig is a town of stone buildings, steel boats and 800 people. I couldn’t find much about it in the guide book, but a man on the train said that it was once the center of a herring fishery that was valuable enough to extend the railroad to it. Mallaig is at the top of a peninsula; about 20 miles outside it the train stopped at a building that announced itself, on a sign, as the western-most train station in Britain.

The herring schools disappeared in the 1950s, my informant said. Mallaig has fishing boats in its harbor, but probably as many bed-and-breakfasts too.

Here is Mallaig, day and night.

It was sunny when we departed at 10.15 for the one-hour trip to Inverie, a village on another peninsula, called Knoydart. Roger Hoyle, my hiking mentor, had e-mailed two couples he knew were leaving from Mallaig and asked them to look for me on the ferry. Somehow they guessed right. Was it the size of the pack?

It’s a convivial group, heavily accented.

We all gathered at The Old Forge, the local pub, for an exiting pint. This is apparently part of the tradition. Drinking our ales–it was almost noon–out in the sun, I met Graham and Stephen, two Englishmen, and a man with many earrings whose name I missed. The conversation got around to Knoydart, which is a vast, nearly roadless area with almost no inhabitants. They were driven off in the 18th and 19th centuries in what is known as “the Clearances,” a Scottish trail of tears.

Virtually all the land was owned by aristocrats, many absent, who decided at some point the land was more productive with sheep on it than people. So they were forced to leave, in some cases (according to Graham) with their villages burned and the occupants herded to the coast, where they were put on ships for Canada and other places. There was great mortality. I thought this sort of thing only happened in Ireland, but apparently not.

Graham told the story of the Seven Men of Knoydart who, after returning from war decided to eke out a living in Inverie gathering seaweed. They were stopped by the owner of the estate and arrested. It became a cause celebre.

A few dozen yards down the lane on the village hall is a plaque commemorating the 10-year anniversary of the inhabitants buying the town. A little farther along is a beehive monument in stone to the seven men. In Gaelic and English.

Graham also told the story of an English Duke who signed up all his eligible male tenants for military service in one of the wars. Someone asked whether he went.

“Damn, I don’t think I can. I’ve got all these lobsters in the fridge,” Graham said, imagining the answer.

“And I have all these champagne lunches on the calendar,” said the man with the earrings.

We drained our glasses and headed out.

Soon we were out of town on a ridge, yellowish green and striped with rivulets tumbling down to the River Inverie. There were no trees and the clouds nipped the tops of the highest peaks. Behind us was the ocean, although not the open ocean, just one of many sounds with many islands beyond.

A couple of hours in the two-track trail came around a hill and revealed a huge beehive monument topped with a cross on the top of a hill. It looked to me like it might be a church, possibly the remains of a monastery or something.

At the foot of it was Stephen, who was waiting for Graham, who was scrambling up the hill around boulders and outcrops to see what it was.

“He thinks it’s a monument to the people sent off in the Clearances,” Stephen said.

Of course I took off my pack–didn’t need much of an excuse–and scrambled up to see for myself. I met Graham as he was coming down. It wasn’t a monument to the victims of the Clearances. It was the monument to an aristocrat, put up in the 1930s, a little late for that outrage, but probably not others.  Graham seemed to have heard of him.

“It’s worth seeing,” he said. “A son put it up for his father, thanking him and saying how great he was. And he was a perfect bastard.”

Hard to know.  I’ve never heard of the guy.  But you can be sure that his son didn’t carry the stones up the knoll himself.

By the time I got down, taking the less-steep opposite side, Graham and Stephen had gone and the road was empty.

I won’t give you all the bloody details (you see, it’s already sticking) but let’s just say there has been a lot of debate about what to take.

Some of the decisions were made back home.  Two pairs of pants, one tee shirt, no down vest, etc.  No camera except the iPhone’s.  But 4.5 pounds of electronics.  A Jetboil stove.  Etc.

But it adds up.

Last night it looked like this:

 

But that didn’t even include the food:

 

(This is a delivery to the hotel in Glasgow.  The proprietor, or I took him as that, through a window saw me taking the picture and asked what I was doing.  I explained the joke.  He thought I was from the health department.)

When I hefted it to go upstairs from my basement room this morning it seemed awfully heavy.  So I took out the binoculars, a symbolic offering to the gods of self-denial.  It seemed a bit lighter.

On the train station there were herds of gray-haired men and women with packs two-thirds my size.

 

On the train I sat next to a woman named Emma who was doing her fourth crossing.  Her “rucksack” was about 30 pounds.  Mine was that heavy in February.  A few hours into the five-hour trip I heard a man a couple seats ahead say his rucksack was “8.8 kilos.”  That’s less than 20 pounds.

I felt like saying, “Yeah, buddy, and I’m from America and mine’s 40 pounds.  And we don’t need no six weeks off in the summer either.”

It’s clear there’s some serious competitive minimalism going on here.

Is this one of the moral challenges?

Suffice it to say, when I got to Mallaig and picked up my actual food (four day’s worth, freeze-dried, sent from the supplier in London to the B&B) I shed the ceramic water filter (Emma said the water off the hills is good enough to drink), the sunglasses (there won’t be enough sun), and a few other items, one of which is a AAA battery.  I’m mailing them to the  terminus tomorrow morning before I leave.

It’s still heavy, but probably not 40 pounds.  I’ll carry it with pride and shame.  As Marley said, “We drag the chains we forged in life.”

 

 

I have Scottish ancestors.  This is no surprise; so do at least 30 million Americans.

Most are Scots-Irish, descended from people who emigrated from Western Scotland, especially the Lowlands, to Northern Ireland, after the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 when James VI of Scotland became James I of England, ruling both nations.  From Ireland many immigrated to America, especially Pennsylvania and Appalachia as far south as the Carolinas.  My sister Ellen recently spat in a tube and had her genome typed by ancestry.com.  It showed 29 percent of her ancestry, and mine, from Great Britain.  (And 2 percent from the Caucasus!)

As it turns out, I have an ancestor who was a Scots martyr, John Brown of Priesthill, Ayrshire, in the Lowlands.  He was a Covenanter, a Presbyterian who subscribed to two agreements (one drawn up in 1638, the other in 1643) resisting the establishment of the Episcopal church in Scotland.  They were persecuted mightily, as described in a book, “Matthew Brown, Ancestry and Descendants” (Brooklyn, N.Y.:  1900):

“Hunted down like wild beasts, tortured, imprisoned by the hundreds, hanged by the scores, exposed at one time to the license of the English soldiers, abandoned at another time to the mercy of bands of marauders from the highlands, they still stood at bay in a mood so savage that the boldest and mightiest oppressor could not but dread the audacity of their despair.”

” .  .  .  the audacity of their despair.”  This is different from “the audacity of hope.”  Interestingly, however, the sentence means pretty much the same thing with one substituted for the other.

John Brown was a pack-horse carrier who didn’t take part in Covenanter uprisings, according to the book.  Nevertheless, his martyrdom had been foretold.  At his wedding in 1682, the minister took his wife, Isabel, aside and told her:  “You have got a good husband, value him highly; keep linen for a winding sheet beside you .  .  .  He follows his Lord too fully to be passed over by those who drive the chariot of persecution so furiously over the length and breadth of poor, bleeding Scotland.”  (How this affected the honeymoon isn’t recorded).

On May 1, 1685, a band of soldiers led by John Graham of Claverhouse, a Scots nobleman, officer in the English  army and notorious enforcer, came to John Brown’s house.  Brown was asked why he didn’t attend the English church and if he would pray for the king.  His answers did not satisfy.  He knelt, prayed for his soul and then said goodbye to his pregnant wife and two children.  Graham ordered the soldiers to shoot him.  They refused, so he pulled out his pistol and did it himself.

“Turning to the newly-made widow he asked her what she then thought of her husband.  ‘I always thought much of him, but now far more than ever,’ was her brave reply.”

Isabel moved with her children to Ireland and married again.  Some of her descendants came to America.

I am descended from Jean Brown (b. 1770 in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania), Isabel and John’s great-granddaughter.  Curiously, this line of descent is through my mother, not my father.  (Consanguinity?  Does that explain anything?) There’s a monument to Brown’s martyrdom at his grave on a moor outside Priesthill.  A local man took my parents to it years ago when they visited Scotland.

In September, Scots will vote whether to separate from the United Kingdom and become a sovereign nation.  I guess this means I’m in favor of Scottish independence.

 

I’d have a flush.

 

At the Vodafone store today, where I bought various SIM cards, plug adapters and data plans, the tech guru Callum (who played “American football” in college), told me this:

 

“Do you know how to forecast the weather in Scotland?  If it’s raining it’s going to rain harder.  If it’s not raining it’s about to rain.”

 

While out today simultaneously gaining weight for my pack while shedding pounds, I stopped in the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, a couple blocks down the hill toward the River Clyde from my hotel.  As luck would have it, the librarian and archivist, Carol Parry, was at the reception desk when I arrived.  She kindly agreed to give me a tour.

Founded in 1599 by a man who had previously been surgeon to the King of France, it is both a licensing body and a professional society.  Its presidency alternates between surgeons and non-surgeons (which is to say, physicians).  In England there are separate royal societies for the two professions.

Scotland has been a distinguished center of medical research education for centuries.  It is, among other things, the place where many American Jews came when quotas kept them out of American medical schools.  The Royal College is full of history.

Joseph Lister (who went to University College London because as a Quaker he was denied entrance to Oxford or Cambridge) did his studies of the antimicrobial properties of carbolic acid at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary.  This ushered in antiseptic surgery.  There’s a meeting room named for him that includes a fireplace and heavily scarred table scavenged from his ward before it was torn down.  The papers of Ronald Ross, who described the connection between mosquitoes and malaria and won a Nobel Prize, are on display at the moment.  The portraits on the walls include David Livingstone of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume . . . ” fame, and Graham Teasdale, the neurosurgeon who co-designed the Glasgow Coma Scale.

One of the more interesting things, however, has nothing to do with medicine.

It is a volume of the “double elephant” folio of Audubon’s “Birds of America.”  The full set consists of four volumes; the college has two, bought for 40 guineas in 1841.  These books were rare when they were published from 1827 to 1838.  Most of the ones that survived have been cut up to for the sale of their prints.

 

Ms. Parry unhooded the display case to reveal an owl and the never-ending final moment of its squirrel prey.  The colors are as saturated as they were when the page was pulled off the plate.  Every few months she turns a page.

Off the reception area is a grimmer picture.

“Stretcher Bearers” is a dark painting that depicts helmeted men, many of them medical students. carrying casualties of the German bombing of Clydebank, a town up the river from Glasgow.  In the blitz of March 13 and 14, 1941, 528 people were killed and shipyards, armament plants and a Singer sewing machine factory were destroyed.