The Seeing Eye

This is the story of a naturalist's struggle to establish a nature study centre in the Highlands of Scotland in 1970. It is a documentary punctuated with intimate observations of the wildlife which surrounded every day events, all set in striking mountain scenery of forests, lochs and glens around his home.

"...this book will make you want to go there and look around you with fresh, searching eyes."
Times Literary Supplement

"Utterly charming …. A captivating insight into one man’s private world of wildlife."
The Observer

Foreword

This book is about the Highlands of Scotland as I have seen this huge upland area from when I first came to live here in 1969, through a handful of years of change, and on into an uncertain future.  It is uncertain because, just as there have been past eras of grandeur and poverty, of injustice and bloodshed this is an era of development and a great opening up of Highland wilderness to the world at large.
Every once in a while, through our work, I have been able to look back and catch a glimpse of what it must have been like to live here when life was a simpler day to day matter of birth and death; when man was shaped by his environment, by the forest and the hill and the animals which lived out their days beside him under the tumbling wind and the sky.

Extracts from the Book

P143 - 145

A little way off stood another house, a holiday cottage lost in the jungle of its overgrown garden.  When I first saw it, it was alive with redwings and fieldfares, a dozen in every bush bickering and arguing over the booty of rose-hips and holly berries and the seed heads of currant bushes which dominated the whole jungle. The house stood silent and empty and posed no threat to the great valley: as far as I was concerned it was not there.  There was a sound of water away to the east, and only because I had crossed its little bridge on my way in did I know the exact whereabouts of the torrent which had served the Tweedmouth saw-mill.  The extant buildings of this old industry were visible against the fine beeches and oaks of the avenue; and although the mill had been out of service for many decades, the Forestry Commission used these old barns for the storage of their sweet-smelling larch posts and other fencing paraphernalia.

Distantly there was a more insistent roar from the river – at that moment in a mini-spate after heavy rain - two hundred yards away behind the Kennels and hidden by a line of wet-footed alders and planted poplar. Between the river and the house lay a low, wet meadow which, I later learned, belonged firmly to the river and became a broad extension of it at least twice a year.  The Kennels was built, it seems, at exactly that point beyond which the river had never been known to flood. Often the grey waters have risen to the garden fence, entered beneath its rails, stopped ten feet from the house and slunk away again in the night.

To the south the land rose dramatically in terraces to the moorland one and a half thousand feet above the house.  The first five hundred feet had been heavily planted with conifer by the Tweedmouth silviculturalist, and the trees, largely Scots pine and larch with some fine stands of Noble fir, were now in maturity, stretching into the sky and hiding the moorland mass behind. There were deer in these woods, and I could see from the slot-marks in the broad grass parkland in front of the house that they regularly came there to graze.  On a windy day the trees swayed back and forth like yachts at anchor and their supple crowns made a rhythmic swishing like a lullaby.  To lie awake at night and hear wind in trees belongs so profoundly to our distant origins that it has a sedative effect akin to a mother’s heartbeat to the child in the womb.

This, then, was to be my home.  The base I had sought and dreamed about, where I would live and move and have my being modelled by the forces of nature about me.  I hurried away to complete the purchase arrangements and to beg my neighbour at the farm, who was selling me the property, to let me move in and start work straight away.  No one could have been kinder or more helpful, and his enthusiasm made the whole business flow easily and painlessly forward.  The conveyancing of property is a sort of exclusive chess game lawyers play largely to their own advantage.  If permitted they can keep it up for years, but if the sponsors are worldly and know some of the rules of the game it can be little more than a brief exchange.  So it was with the Kennels and what brief intervening period there was we covered properly and justly by a flexible lease.  Within a week the key was mine.  A big, old, slightly rusty, heavy key with a tatty label.  It felt good in the hand and was cold and hard in the trouser pocket.  To own a key which turned a lock which opened a door into a house like the Kennels was as good as any lawyer’s deed and  I drove away proudly with it back to Glenurquhart and the loch and the past.  All that had gone before was suddenly unimportant and I could scarcely pack my possessions into boxes fast enough.

P194 - P196

During the night my air-bed collapsed and I was awoken by a deep numbing cold rising through my hip-bone.  I lay there for some minutes thinking about it and then came fully awake with the realization that when we had gone to bed there had been snow on the ground, but no frost or ice.  For the ground to have got this cold beneath a sleeping figure inside a tent, there must have been a pretty dramatic freeze.  I sat up and promptly grazed my head on the tent: clearly there had been a dramatic frost. The soft cotton of the inner tent was as stiff as a sheet of corrugated iron where the condensation had been gripped by the frozen air.  I shook Sorrel awake.  She agreed to share her air-bed, and as we shuffled to reorganise ourselves we became aware of a strong light shining through the tent.  I parted the entrance and we stared out on to a moonlit land as light as some English winter days.  We were beside a large lake. We knew there was water there because our headlamps had revealed it on arrival, but we had no idea how big it was.  We were in a forest of tall pines which went right to the water’s edge and there were two moons and two forests each one so perfect that a photograph would not have been able to reveal which was the reflection.  I reached for my camera but Sorrel stopped me saying “ Don’t bother.  You’ll be wasting your time. No photograph can ever do justice to that.  Let’s keep it for ourselves.”

At dawn everything was frozen.  The axe frozen to the ground, the kettle solid, the white kindling prepared the night before solid once again so that it had to be broken apart with the axe. After some time I managed to get a small fire going but the heat was so small and the cold so heavy upon it that the smoke drifted out from the fire sideways.  The thin layers broadened out across the camp so that I stood in a sea of smoke, my body and the ground invisible from the waist down; to pick something up from the ground I had to duck beneath the canopy of smoke to locate it.

By the time the others emerged from their tents, the smoke had risen to about eight feet from the ground and had spread right through the surrounding forest so that it gave the appearance of early morning mist.  Jean Fraser would not at first believe that it was smoke, and she wandered around the camp jumping up and down trying to sniff at pockets of it to satisfy herself. 

We all stood and watched the sun rise across that lake before pulling out and taking to the highway once again.  It was majestically beautiful in all that gripping cold and none of us had anything to say about it.  Weeks later, back at home, I was going through a sheaf of sketches Simon had made during the expedition and I came across one of a forest lake with two full, round moons.  I recognised it instantly and quizzed him on it.  Yes, he too had awoken and seen it and had chosen to say nothing to anyone about it.

Epilogue

Almost without noticing them five years had gone by.  They had been years of trial and error, of success and failure and a gradual process of evolution of what we thought to be the right way to run our business.

Courses came and went.  Some full, some slack, but there was always something new to see, something extra to record and enter in our precious log.  The duck pond now was so crowded with boisterous mallard that we had to encourage them to go wild and shoo them away.  Feeding in the morning brought a rush of wings from out in the river-fields as thirty ducks, all haggling loudly in the morning sky, wheeled in around us with a roar of vibrant pinions and planing feet on the water.

The Kennels was changing, too.  We had outgrown the office and our typist sat among cardboard boxes of files and correspondence piled high up the walls.  We had no work room or laboratory facilities, and the showing of slide lectures, now a part of every course, was hampered and made amateur by lack of space.  Warwick and a second employee to help Sorrel with the running of the house had removed two bedrooms from those available for guests.  It was difficult to envisage where we could build on.  It had become a very different dwelling from the deserted semi-ruin I had first walked into four years before.

One afternoon that summer our friend and annual visitor, Paul Johnson, came to see us at the Kennels.  He was working on a book in a cottage nearby and periodically emerged to re-vitalize his wits and engage in a little oral sparring with us.  We recounted our year to him and outlined the pressures we suffered at the Kennels.
“There’s a big house standing empty down near my cottage,’ he announced quite casually.
“Whereabouts?” We asked in unison.
“Only a few miles down the valley.  It’s in a beautiful position.”

For a moment, I relived the old dream of a large country-house in its own grounds: a vision of space and rooms especially designed for library, lecture room, laboratory and workshop, dining-room and sitting-room, in which we could house our groups in comfort and build up an atmosphere unhindered by our own living space and the restrictions of a young family.

That evening, against the setting sun, Sorrel and I drove down the valley to look at it.  Empty it certainly was: we had seen it from the road many times.  Its turrets and towers stood out against the flaming sky in a fairy-tale silhouette of Gothic architecture.  A young roe deer watched us attentively from a laurel shrubbery and swifts hawked and screamed round the towers above us.  I made a mental note that they must be nesting in the roof. 
As I write, more than a year later, after a long and desperate campaign to persuade the owners to sell it before neglect took too great a toll, we have won through.  The place is ours. Aigas it is called, and its pink sandstone silhouette gives little indication of the urgent work to be done,  In the meantime it is winter, and another year crowded with events and personalities has passed us by.  The Kennels is quiet now and Peter has gone off for a long deserved holiday and a rest.  Warwick and the dogs are playing in front of a huge crackling fire in the big drawing-room and I can hear the ducks arguing and bickering on the pond outside.  The wigeon nested this year in the rushes at the top of the enclosure and her six young are now fully fledged and flying.  They will leave us, I am sure, for the firth any day now, where tens of thousands of wigeon are congregating for the winter.  It will be a test for our birds in the spring, to see whether they migrate north with their wild companions or return to Guisachan to nest with us.  Yesterday a skein of whooper swans passed over the house, twenty birds in wide vee formation, and bugling loudly as they went.  I saw our wigeon fidgeting and they whistled loudly in response.  Perhaps tomorrow they will be gone when I go out to feed them in the half-light of morning.

We have had no snow yet, although it is nearly the end of November, and there are still some amber leaves left on the birches and geans which have added themselves to the planned silviculture of the Tweedmouth parkland,  Soon the hills above Affric will turn white and the deer will come down to the woods for shelter, and we shall find their slot-marks around the house where they have passed through the fields in the long night.  I must remember to try to photograph some for a slide lecture Peter has started on the year of the red deer.  The winter is good for such things because there is time and we can recharge our energies and plan for the move and the coming year.

Paperback, 272 pages.

Price: £10.00