Thank goodness for my new wellies!
A NEW pair of wellies for £12 from the farmers’ shop must be my best purchase of the year.
In cold, driving rain with more than a hint of sleet I sloshed across the bleak Sutherland Flow Country from Rhifail in Strathnaver.
The poor sheep in the parks near the river, having to lamb in such conditions – and the farmer grimly driving round in his quad-bike and trailer! On the little top of Ben Rifa-gil, the wind was blowing a good force eight from the north-east.
A quad-bike route – I hesitate to use the term "track" – leads east to Loch Strathy, skirting dubh-lochans and diving through sphagnum bogs.
At least it saved the need for compass bearings as the sheeting rain lashed the hill slopes. I was well dressed for the conditions even if my waterproofs were a little on the cheap side, and could perversely enjoy the wild weather.
The loch appeared ahead and I turned north-east, into the wind, for a couple of miles across even rougher and wetter country to "my" bothy of Lochstrathy, at the end of the 12-mile track coming up from Strathy.
Here too are the vast Flow-Country plantations; I still can hardly believe the scale of destruction of this once unique landscape, simply because landowners and developers could make lots of money out of government subsidies and tax concessions – the slow growing trees are worthless.
As soon as the plug was pulled on the subsidies in the late 1980s the planting stopped overnight and folk soon realised what a mistake it had all been.
Of course, even more amazingly, the forests here are set to be turned into one of the world’s biggest onshore wind farms with turbines stretching almost all the way north to Strathy.
Now, as then, as back in the times of the Clearances, those with power and land get their way and democracy is given lip-service but mocked.
Once again, landowners and developers make buckets of money. Scotland will gain the most expensive and unreliable electricity in Europe, and when the subsidies are removed there will never be another turbine erected and the wind farms polluting the landscape will soon be recognised as the largely useless follies they are.
THE rain was dying out as I reached the bothy, still a place with an enormous quietude, so much so that some people find it quite unsettling. I always wonder if it will be my last visit – once the turbines start going up I’ll not be back.
The bothy was in good shape, having survived the winter storms. I lit the fire, swept and tided up, enjoyed some soup and sandwiches amid the peace of this remote setting then set off back through the bogs for Strathnaver, and a night in another bothy near Hope Lodge.
It can be said of our northern climate that any month of the year can give weather which could fit any other month. But this year things have gone really topsy-turvy.
In March, we had that amazing spell of heat, even sticky heat, more so than any equivalent few days in the whole of 2011.
Snow down to sea level at the end of April isn’t that unusual, but as I drove along Loch Eriboll through big white flakes with slush on the road I couldn’t help thinking of the heat in Wick on March 27 with people looking like lobsters in the most incongruous summer clothing.
I was heading for Strabeg, a couple of miles from the road where a Bothies Association work party was repairing the building.
There was to be a committee meeting the following evening. Those wellies saw good use again as I splashed through the bogs and rivers with a big white plastic chair strapped to the top of my pack.
A lost lamb, pathetically bleating in the sleet, started following this white object, its mum nowhere to be seen. Bothy work parties have enough to do without orphan lambs. Fortunately when I turned back two sheep appeared round the corner of the track and soon the lamb was suckling happily.
Much of the work had, in fact, already been completed by the time I arrived and there was a good complement of workers, mostly retired people in their sixties and seventies who at this stage in their lives could spare time to volunteer.
Where to erect the tent? "That’s a good spot," somebody said, "there was a tent there last night, you can see where the snow came off it."
Often it can be very hard work for a sedentary person like me at these occasions, once it took months for my tendons to recover after a whole day on a roof driving nails through ridge-irons. But this time without a lot of work to do I could manage a bit of hill-walking in the rugged and spectacular country around the head of Loch Eriboll.
THE weather slowly cleared in the afternoon and I found myself up on An Lean-charn, only 1700 feet high but well above the April snow line. Once again those wellies did sterling service in wet slush which would have given cold, soaking feet in any other footwear.
There were even drifts a foot or two deep, the higher hills emerging from cloud still whiter – where had the summer of a few weeks earlier gone?
This is country you cross at the rate of hours per mile, not miles per hour, the tangled rough nature of the terrain has to be experienced to be believed.
I came down by a tree-lined gully past roaring waterfalls of melting snow. The birches and alders were showing the first flushes of green, much as they had a month before, but this time an early cuckoo was calling. The meeting wasn’t till the evening of the next day, so there was also time for a short walk across the bare rock slabs of Cranstackie to Loch Dionard, under the immense crags of Foinaven.
First passed in the 1970s, my most memorable visit was in an August downpour when I was nearly cut off on the wrong side of the rapidly rising river — it was with hindsight a dangerous crossing, you should never cross fast-flowing water more than knee-deep in case you get a foot trapped between boulders — then you could fall over and drown.
Strabeg is little more than two hours from home for me, by car and on foot, but for most of the UK is one of the remotest of bothies. For those who live in more mundane places, going to a meeting there is something of an adventure.
I wonder what somebody, not knowing anything about bothies, would make of such a convocation of usually rather elderly people, mostly men, in such an out-of-the-way spot. Perhaps we were planning a coup d’etat against the SNP dictatorship and their doctrine of wind. (Wish we had been!)
There were people from Rannoch, South Uist, the Black Isle, central Scotland, Orkney, Penrith, Lairg, Preston... even a couple from London; he looks after the north-west Highland area of the MBA and his part of the meeting had to wait till he arrived on the dot of seven.
They had set off from London the day before and dossed in the car near Blair Atholl.
Strabeg is a real mountain bothy and an alluring destination for those more used to the bustle of one of the world’s biggest cities. Food was laid on, most of the catering had been done by the worthy chairman of the association — the only hierarchy at work parties is in one’s ability at practical skills.
We all sat round the bothy fire discussing bothies and policy and fire assessments as the snow-covered hills looked down on the quiet strath.
I had to get home for the next day, so after a delicious helping of spaghetti bolognese set out again into the evening sun to ford the river, just a few inches below the top of those wellies, and splash back through the bogs and pools of water which suffice as a path towards the end of the road.
Never has £12 been better spent!