At this point you face the sinister dark and swift waters flowing east. At your back is the attractive cottage with its blue door and green hinged garden gate. The smooth rushing torrent worries at the white painted, half rusty, drowned girders pointing blasphemously at the sky from the deep channel. The inky liquid is unfathomable, dreadful and animate. It writhes. By the cottage a track rises steeply on tree clad rocky slopes. A goldeneye scurries out of the narrows and in the distance whooper swans bob serenely on the wind agitated waters. The wind is determined and mercilessly cold. The eyes are wet with winter tears. (17/2/18)
At this point you stand on riven rock, its surface smooth but deeply grooved with curvaceous chasms plunging darkly down. The widening pupils suck in the light to sense the flowers that shelter in the gloomy gryke below. They shelter from wind and rain and sheep and deer. Looking south there is a broad mountainous scree-strewn flank. The fairy is overweight here. Another aspect is needed to reveal its matchless grace. Look west from your knoll and see where the ice came from - huge, scouring, deadly, all powerful. Look North over farmland and farm and film set and woodland and river to the dip in the horizon where the ice spilled into the next glen. Look east and there's the reedy lochan nestling by the scrub bordered road that winds capriciously from our remoteness to that rumoured outside world. The sun shines briefly and is followed by rain. Rain with a mission that knows what it is doing. Rain driven east from its Atlantic home. It’s here. It followed the heralding wind. It delivers its blow. It soaks and is gone. The rocks glint with mischievous mica in renewed sparkling sunshine that leaves the grey calcium carbonate crystals still somber and passive. Rock roses, those buttercups on steroids, display flirtatiously in the grass and heather. A bumblebee drones past on impossibly small wings, an effortless miracle. Predatory purple butterwort plants feed on hapless insects caught in their slippery amoral leaf rosettes. Tiny purple, lilac and white milkworts shine like LEDs. Here it is acid but there it is alkaline. Each to his own. The sheep and deer trim everything they can lay enamel on. Only the rock protected and the distasteful escape the gnashing teeth. Woodland refugees like the wood anemone, wood sorrel and ivy cling on, sometimes literally, in rocky refuges.
Below and to the north west, there is water, much shallow water and beyond a rocky promontory capped by a chaos of trees like bent old men clinging precariously by their root tips to the gale afflicted summit. The ice went through the ridge like a hot knife through butter and a spur was born from the carnage. Swivel your gaze west and there the glimmering finger of Loch Rannoch points accusingly towards Glencoe where treachery stained the earth and history and mankind. (18/2/18)
At this point the ice encrusts the summit cairn making it look like a giant sculptured rugose candle. Slightly to the north west the trig point is similarly adorned. Look north and you stare into the awesome Cairngorms, the southern plateau slashed by the Gaick Pass, Glen Bruar and Glen Tilt. Look north west and yes, you CAN see Ben Nevis - upturned boat-shaped with its angry cliffs bitten into the flank. En route is the formidable Ben Alder, its Corrie (the second largest in Scotland) guards the huge plateau where clouds gather until the winds that can blow you off your feet defeat them. Look east past Moulin Moor (home to world orienteering completions and adders, an uneasy mix) to the furrow of Glen Errochty leading to Calvine. Look south and the asymmetrical outline of the fairy mountain looms, a massive white silhouette backed by the bluest blue on the blue planet. In the valley below are trees and fields - green contrasting white. Look south west to Craig Varr and Loch Rannoch. Life is sparse on the summit in the winter but rugged creatures are to be found - mountain hares, ptarmigans and snow buntings. Look up and Hugin and Munin gambol, lest we cease to think and to remember. (19/2/18)