Confessions of a Shooting Fishing Man by Laurence Catlow

Author:Laurence Catlow [Laurence Catlow]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906122744
Publisher: Merlin Unwin Books Limited
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

20 July

One of our party (a television journalist and so a man of hard and conquering determination) has badgered the head keeper of the Ben Alder estate into allowing us to take a Land Rover up the gated track to Culrah, and so we set off thither today and bounced up to Loch Pattack and on to Culrah. We left the Land Rover by the bothy, even as a bearded figure came out of it and stared at us in disapproval of our soft ways. And then we made off for Ben Alder.

Looking at the rocky outline of the sharp spur that runs down from the summit plateau, a spur known as the Long Leachas, I felt distinctly nervous, and thought with affection of the steep but undaunting slopes of the Howgills back at home. I do not like airy ridges. I like them wide and without vertiginous slopes directly beneath your boots. I suppose this pusillanimity is the result of being clean-shaven.

I was very happy when the television journalist suddenly announced that we had trekked too far up the burn and that it would be better now to leave Ben Alder for another day, and to climb the great mounds that rose to the west. And so we scrambled up the steepest and longest slope I have ever tackled and headed south west to Aonach Beg. It was an unwelcoming day, with a lowering sky and a cold wind, and there was little of beauty in the mountains. There was an impressive grimness about them. I did smoke on the summit of Aonach Beg, but it was not for long; then we plodded back, over a hump unsurprisingly called Geal Charn. Then it was down a narrow ridge, which was just tolerable, up to another summit, this one called Carn Dearg, and down through the heather to the bothy, which by this time was beginning to fill up with unwashed bodies and beards. I asked a pair of them about the Long Leachas and they pronounced it a piece of cake. I did not believe a word of it.

As we rumbled down the track to Dalwhinnie, there were droves of beards moving in the opposite direction to congregate in the Culrah bothy. I fell to wondering what could be driving them to spend a ghastly night in each others’ company, confined in a dank wooden hut in the middle of sodden moorland. There was a very gaunt beard who seemed in flight from a long sorrow. There was an obviously cheerful beard who looked as though stale sweat and baked beans and a damp sleeping bag were his idea of fun. There were two beards together, and I could not resist the impression that they had found love somewhere among the peat hags and were hoping that the long summer gloaming would find them the only occupants of the Culrah bothy. This was a dishonourable and doubtless false notion. I renounced further speculation upon such matters and spent the

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