One for Sorrow

"This compelling saga gives dramatic insight into the way we use and abuse the natural heritage of our hills and glens.  Stimulating, thought provoking, challenging and deeply felt, One for Sorrow is also a first-rate yarn.  It is a must for everyone who loves a good story and cares about the highlands."
Magnus Magnusson

Price: £10.00

Foreword

This Highland story is a blend of fact and fiction gleaned over twenty-five years of living in the heart of the Highlands and observing the ebb and flow of landownership and the sweeping systems which are applied to the land, so rarely to the benefit of the local people or the fragile rural economy.
 
Neither Glen Corran nor Ardvarnish Estate exist, although their position can readily be identified on the map. Nor, to my knowledge, has there ever been a blanket afforestation proposal in that place. Yet Glen Corran stands for many glens and Arvarnish for many estates right across the Highlands.

After a quarter of a century of living among these ancient mountains with their sighing corries and wide, whispering moors, and knowing and working with farmers and crofters in the long, narrow glens, I am forced to conclude that the continuing saga of the extractive land-use imposed upon this land and its people, is indeed, one for sorrow.

John Lister-Kaye
Aigas, 1994

Extracts from the book

P64

Rob dug like a dog with his hands, spraying the peat out, first to the left and then to the right. After a few minutes work, now immersed in a hole to the elbows, his hands touched something different, something coarse and fibrous. He pulled away the remaining peat to reveal a potato sack bulging with the uneven shape of something inside. Rob’s heart thumped almost audibly. The sack was bound with a short length of orange twine. Carefully he picked it up by the neck and eased it out of its grave. It was heavy. He shuddered at what he was about to find inside. Gingerly he lifted it up onto the dry peat and picked at the knot. 

He couldn't guess how long it had lain there. The bag was moist but not wet; anyway, he knew it would take years for anything to decompose in the sterile peat. Excluded from oxygen and flies, decomposition of whatever was in the bag would be extremely slow. He loosened the neck carefully. Picking up its bottom corner, he allowed the heavy corpses to roll shapelessly out into a heap at his feet where they lay in the pathos of their own destruction.

'You bastard! You miserable, criminal bastard!'

Rob was close to tears. He stood looking at the ragged corpses of two adult golden eagles and a raven. For all their tangled and crumpled appearance, they were untouched. Rob knew in  his bowels that all three were the victims of a scurrilous poisoned bait. The carcase of a rabbit, or a hare, or perhaps a deer or sheep, which had been laced with a lethal dose of strychnine or alphachlorolose or possibly phosdrin.

The great soaring wings lay stiff and twisted and the long pinion quills bent and broken. The gripping scaly feet, as yellow as the gorse flowers beside the Corran, were drawn together, black talons curled in upon each other in contortion. The soft feathers of the proud, golden mantle, the colour of a summer wheatfield, fluttered gently in the breeze above the hooded brow, the clouded sunken eyes,and the mighty curving bill. A silent scream issued from the gape of the second bird, its spiky tongue protruding to one side. The glossy blue-black raven lay beside them with its wrinkled jet eyes staring lifelessly at the sky.

P262

There were tears streaming down his face. She thought they were rain. 'Is it the hide?' she asked, her eyes wide and looking up into his. He nodded, unable to speak. He held his arms open to her.

'Oh my god!,' he said, drawing breath sharply through his running nose. He held her, trying to turn her away. She resisted, fighting him. 'What is it?! Mac!' There was panic in her voice now. 'Tell me!!' She broke free and stumbled accross the furrows to the huddle of men.

'Shiona! No! called Mac, running after her, 'no!' But it was too late. She was there, looking down at the crumpled figure in the heather. They were uncovering him from beneath the furrow, pulling the huge peaty turves back to reveal his broken body and twisted limbs. The heavy steel tracks had passed right over his head, smashing his glasses into his face as the life was crushed out of him. Beside him lay the tangled wreckage of the canvas hide, its torn edge fluttering in the down-draught. And at his side, squashed like a ripe fruit, lay the carcase of a hen-harrier chick.

A cry broke above the roar of the helicopter. It was a cry which contained the anguish and torment of this sad and lonely land, as poignant as the strains of the pibroch, echoing the voice of people long gone from this place. It was a cry which was to ring in the hearts and minds of all those who heard it, for the rest of their days.

Mac turned her gently and slowly away. The helicopter landed on a knoll and her father leapt clear, running to her. 'Shiona, my lassie, my own lassie,' he threw his arms around her as the tears welled into his own blurred vision.

Over the shoulder of Meall an Chollie a brown bird wafted on languid, gull-like wings. It seemed to hang there for a moment, reluctant to go despite all the activity. Its own long, thin cry was lost on the wind.