The Land of Many Names
“There was a deep breath
and then the mountain stood there
then the mountains stood there
and that’s how the mountains stand there
and stoop downwards
and downwards
into themselves
and hold their breath
while heaven and sea
stroke and beat
the mountain holds its breath.”
Jon Fosse
These are the stories of the Land, which are written by the mighty flow of the river Time. Everything in this book happened, and it is all still happening now. The story is going on all the time; every part of it. You can never swim out of its current. But you can paddle your own life like a canoe, to seek those currents and ways that seem best.
So I’ll tell you about this place, whose story I have joined for a while. Enough has been written about it to make any physical description of it unnecessary. The area of the forest, the height of the hills, the names of things, the geography… all is better recorded elsewhere, and all is largely irrelevant to this work anyway. This is not a book of strict facts but of memories, thoughts, and feelings. A book of threads that drew themselves together like the roots of a tree. It’s a story of becoming, but these words are not the story; they’re just words. They only point the way.
My land is a huge swell of mountain, forest and water that dominates the geographic middle of the Highlands. My mountains are not sharp like the peaks of childhood drawings, Romanticist painters and marketing departments, but are snub and blunted. There are no symmetrical triangles to be found here, but rather stacked layers of flowing light and shadow which rise into the sky and scintillate on the horizon. They reveal themselves to be made of stone, wood, water, and light only on the closest inspection. Only once you get close enough to hold a piece do you finally see it as ‘rock’ instead of ‘mountain’. Mysteriously, my mountains grow in size and stature the further away you get from them, and shrink into the ground beneath you when you approach. It’s a trick to bring you closer.
Their old Gaelic name was Am Monadh Ruadh – or The Red High Moorland. Now they are known as the Cairngorms. The name Carn Gorm in fact means Blue Hill, or more exactly Blue Rocky Mountain, but it was not widely applied to the range as a whole until Victorian times. Perhaps this happened because there were two tops named Cairngorm, one at the north of the central plateau, and one at the south. Hence, to walk there was to venture out amongst the ‘Cairngorms’ – plural. This is quite well known, but what is less well known is just how appropriate it seems that these hills should bear multiple names, for their mood and their appearance changes incessantly. The name Red High Moorland may come from the redness of the granite from which they are formed (contrasted with the darker schists of The Grey High Moorland or Am Monadh Liath on the opposite side of the River Spey), but anyone who knows them will tell you with awe how the entire range flames red in the last light of the setting sun on a clear summer evening. Yet they have many other colours to show.
In winter the hills are pure white, and the winds drive the snow into the air so there is no distinction at all between sky and ground. Or the very same effect of the summer sunset will bathe the hills in purple, crowned with storm clouds below a sky of blue as deep as ocean trenches. I have chased that colour into the snowy hills and watched it taunt me from the next mountain over, while the snow beneath my feet flashed with the light of a thousand glittering diamonds. Maybe in this season we ought to call them the ‘Cairn Bans’.
On a spring morning from a distance the layers of hill are stacked up on each other by the world’s bent back, and they fade into infinite blue distance, like waves of the sea. Yet walk in again, and I find that they are the most vivid green that can be imagined, dappled with splashes of brown. This too is right, for although Gorm means blue, it means green when speaking of plants. And the life of all things that live in those high places give their own stories to the mountains.
In late summer the heather blooms across both hill and glen, and the land is drenched in colour. So radiant beneath the sideways light of an August sunset that the mind is overwhelmed, and all that can be done is to sit and watch – to let the soul drown in an ocean of colour. And yet there is no peak – no maximum of colour nor of beauty. It is their constant change that drives me back to see it again and again, and which makes my body scream in delight at its presence. So after the purple of the heather comes the intensity of autumn. The mountains gleam darkly in bronze armour, gold shining from the shadows, their slopes as sleek and toned as the muscled flank of a deer. The deer grass begins to turn; red at the stems with orange tips so that they look like flames adorning the mountain slopes, fanned by the west wind.
If you look at the water of the Cairngorms, you will find it to have no colour at all in its many streams and springs. ‘Elemental transparency’ is how Nan Shepherd described that clear water of the streams that rise on the plateau, setting it among the primal ingredients of the universe, alongside her other ‘elementals’ – ice, wind, stone, heat, light, life. There is appeal in such thinking – that the Cairngorms are not made of some precise mixture of minerals, but rather an ever changing blend of pure, living force. But there is more than just appeal – there is truth. That is how they are.
So call them the Red Hills, or the Blue Hills, however you like. Call them green and brown and golden and black and white and purple; each and all are true. But be aware that names are only things we assign to places to pin them down in our own minds, to vainly try and take charge of them. At best we might describe well enough to convey how we feel about them. There is no pinning them down in reality. They will do what they always do and change, twisting out from under the names we give them. Putting names to things grants us a false sense of authority and knowledge over them, but we have none over the mountains, and deserve none. Actually, for a man writing a book about nature I admit I know only a few names for the birds, insects and plants I see around me. But would I really know anything more about them if I did? If I see a bird I do not know, I will not learn anything meaningful by looking up the name others call it by. I wonder what name they would give themselves? Now there would be a thing worth knowing. The only way to discover it, and what they truly are, is through patience and devoted watching. I think have found the answer, but maybe I am not ready to tell it yet, for the knowing has less meaning than the finding out.
The Cairngorms are mercurial; as changeable in their mood as they are in their colours. As steadfast as they are fickle, as implacable as they are ephemeral. The very first time I went there the winter wind blew at 120 miles per hour and flattened me on the ground. In summer I have seen a spider spin threads of sunlight between two summit boulders, and listened to ravens call from a mile away. My hills are welcoming, but they are deadly. They are beautiful, but they are barren. They are wild, but are draped with human names and stories. If you would know them, you must let them know you.
Perhaps their greatest mystery of all, their greatest wonder, is that they are always there – always utterly present and real. If my travels take me away to some other place they seem to diminish to mere memory and imagination. But no, they are quite matter of factly still there, at every moment (including this one) sitting in their utter solidness, just being. Light shines on them, the wind blows against them and life makes a home upon them. Their story continues. The grass waves in the breeze and the water splashes on the rocks. They never do anything else but be, have done so since long before me and will continue long after. When a tree falls in this forest, or a boulder slips on the moraine, the universe hears, and takes note in the ledger of eternity. I am a momentary curiosity in their long story. They are.
At all seasons and all levels of the mountains life is found. The sculpted domes of the high tops are an arctic tundra, with height in place of latitude, but halfway down the slopes the forest begins, and this book happens as much in the woods as it does on the hills, if not more. The woods that shelter on the skirts of the Cairngorms are the largest remaining fragment of Caledonian Forest in Scotland. The Caledonian Forest is a cousin to the great Boreal Forest that envelops the north of the world across Russia, Scandinavia and North America, but it is distinct, and in my opinion more beautiful. Much of the Boreal forest is dominated by pointed spruce trees, evolved to shed the vast snowfalls of the continental winter, but the chieftain of the Caledonian Forest is the eponymous Caledonian Pine, or Scots Pine.
To describe a pine is as difficult as describing the mountains. Green needles, red branches, yes – but just as many colours as the mountains if not more. They are as sharp as needles and as soft as clouds. Starting as young cones they grow swiftly, sometimes adding more than a foot every year. They generally mature into elegant, rounded canopies of spreading needles and artistically contorted branches. Where the Boreal Forest often presents a harsh, saw toothed edge to the sky, the Caledonian Forest is gentler and more welcoming.
Here in the Cairngorms you can find old-growth forest; surviving patches of primeval woodland, where many of the living trees were young when wolves last roamed the Highlands. It is not like your typical countryside wood. There is a deeper, darker and more primal beauty here, if you have the patience to see it. It is my favourite place in all the world.
On the mountain slopes the trees are small, low and spread out, save perhaps for rare ancient champions of survival that watch over the glens like sentinels. They are wonderful, but difficult to find. Some became well known to previous human generations – waymarkers of both the landscape and of legend. In old accounts of the area many such trees have names and stories. Some of those trees, or their descendents, are still there today. Others have vanished along with their legends and the people who lived them. More still grow in secret high in the hills, rarely encountering human life. They are not waiting to be found, but I am waiting to find them.
As you descend the slopes the forest thickens gradually both around you and underfoot. You descend into lushness. The heather lengthens until it forms great bouncy hags of plant, festooned with green shrubs. A quiet riot of growth, breathing with the seasons. Old sticks and branches lie about, scraggy bits of lichen dangle from branches and squeeze themselves into cracks in rock and bark. Here the lichen is a like a beard – there it is like a curtain. Water runs down tree trunks and bubbles beneath the trees as it forms streams. The trees dapple the wood with shadows and glow at their edges when the sun shines on them. The ground is soft and quiet.
The main characters of the woods are the Silver Birch, the Rowan, Aspen, Alder, Willow and of course Scots Pine. The Pine was once known as Scots Fir. Technically it’s not a fir, pine is indeed correct; but it’s pedantic and I like the old name. There is something soft and gentle about it, and while the mountains may be mercurial, the trees are always friends, always an ally. That is not to say it is an easy place, but among the woods I have never felt a sense of threat. Birch is the tree of renewal, changing not just with the season but by the second as the wind blows on it, the rain scatters on its leaves and the light glances from its many colours. Rowan is rich in magic, steeped in history and a welcome friend. In late summer it decorates itself with lipstick red berries to stand out from the crowd. Aspen. Ah, Aspen… the tree that gives voice to the sky, its leaves shimmering and dancing, singing in the breeze. I wish there were more of them to be found. And Willow. Quiet, unassuming Willow, the tree of water.
Above the treeline the mountains catch and play with the clouds. They carelessly throw weather and light around like magicians onto the wooded stage below. Light in the forests of the Cairngorms is in a constant state of flux, and the trees are the perfect instrument to catch and hold it. One day, a silver birch may live up to its name, as melting frost clings to its branches and blazes in the morning sun. Then in a few turns of the world it is delicate green, heavy in bud and glowing in the dawn light of spring. An Aspen shimmers with gentle green in summer, but in autumn is a glowing beacon of colour in a darkening season. Every tree has its moment in the spotlight.
In the lochs and pools of water that dot the woods and hills, a silver canvas is stretched out to mirror the sky. Yet one loch is not like another. I swear in some the water is a darker grey, in another it is physically softer and gentler. One is home to storms and another home to only the softest breeze. And even if the water at first appears smooth, closer inspection will reveal it is full of motion and edges.
Nothing ever stays the same, yet in these forests and mountains there is a sense of something eternal. Or, if not eternal, then of a rhythm deep and long, set to music we can but dimly hear, for it is always in our ears. Until that is, we stop to listen and to feel. Here is the danger; for once you listen you can’t help but be caught up by it. Like the Highland tales of old, you’ll be spellbound by the faerie music and pulled into the dance. There’s no telling when that moment will come or what it will be that casts the spell. It might be in the crunch of snow at the summit of the mountain; or the falling of ice crystals from a pine branch through a beam of light; the sound of the river rushing in the night; or maybe your destiny will arrive in the glance of a young deer. For me, it was all these things and more, and especially in the atomic silence of the quiet places. Then, one day, you’ll realise that you’ve been dancing to the music for decades, though it feels like only a moment has gone by.
If there is such a thing as magic then it is strong here, and if the spell is cast on you it will not be broken. The place will call you back forever. Take care, for you will forever be restless to seek the presence of your forests and hills. Your heartstrings will be braided into ropes, and tied around mountains.
