The Loch Insh Osprey

Photo: Duncan MacDonald

By Merryn Glover:

The ospreys have gone. I went away for a week and when I got back, the strath had slipped into autumn and the eyrie above Loch Insh was empty. On the same day, my two sons returned to university. Their courses will be online, but after five months of being back under parental wings they are ready to stretch their own again. They came back to our Highland home at the start of lockdown and two weeks later, the osprey arrived, flouting all restrictions in their 6,700 kilometre journey from west Africa.

The male came first and began to ready the nest, a large twiggy crater the size of a truck tyre. Balanced precariously at the top of a tree on a small island, it has commanding views of the Cairngorms to the south-east, the Monadhliaths to the north-west and the River Spey between. Their arrival always speaks to me of Mark, a wildlife guide friend who first told me their story on these shores five years ago; he was diagnosed the following April with a brain tumour and died in April two years later, leaving a wife and three sons. As he was lowered into the earth of Insh churchyard, the newly returned osprey soared above.

Most osprey pair for life, only coming together during the breeding season when they return to the same place. The female arrives a week or so after her mate and my diary note from April 16th says: ‘Both perched on the nest, looking at each other from time to time and touching beaks.’ As the female adds to the eyrie, the male woos her by delivering trout. One of the few birds of prey to live almost entirely on fish, osprey can see their underwater catch from 40 metres up and have reversible talons that help them grip. Working from home this year, I paid closer attention to my near neighbours. I saw the male perform his sky dance, crying out as he rose in sweeping circles above the nest with a long reed in his talons. The female sat on the spear tip of a dead tree nearby, motionless and haughty as Horus.

By the beginning of May, she had settled down in the nest, presumably won over and incubating eggs, and I watched and waited through the lengthening days and the greening of the strath. At last, in early June, tiny heads appeared above the twigs – one, two… three! A beautiful, bumper brood and the most an osprey is likely to hatch. I caught glimpses of the mother feeding them and the gradual rise of their small, fluttering bodies.

One evening, a large heron flew up the river towards the nest and the male osprey bore down on it with vicious shrieking and flapping of wings. To my astonishment, the heron did not beat a hasty retreat but kept circling, evading the ever-more strident attack. Finally after several minutes of this aerial dogfight, the heron – twice the size of its assailant - made its stately way off down the loch.

Summer swelled and the loch thickened with green rushes and the growing company of birds: curlews, oyster-catchers, martins, geese, ducks and swans, many trailing flotillas of young in their wake. Both my boys were summer babies and these long, light days remind me of that ecstatic, exhausted time. By mid-July the osprey chicks were stalking the rim of the eyrie, stretching their wings and lifting for moments into the air while the parents sat in nearby trees calling. To urge their young to fledge, osprey gradually reduce the fish they deliver, literally starving them off the nest. We have not resorted to such ploys but, like all parents, we know the push and pull of need and independence.

Who can know if they have witnessed the first flight of a bird? I cannot, but I thrilled to see them gradually take to the skies, their voices ringing in the amphitheatre of this hill-bordered loch. Who can hold onto life? It was at this time that our beloved friends, Mark’s family, moved away.

All five osprey were in the nest when I looked in late August, but within two weeks, they were gone. The mother goes first, travelling up to 400 kilometres a day till she is back in Senegal. The father follows and then the young, flying all the way down over the Sahara. They travel alone. No one has fathomed how they know the route or the destination or how, three years later, they know the way back. It is mystery and miracle. All I know is that in the great, thick hush of these five months, when my own dear ones came and left, the osprey’s journey has passed right through my heart.

***

Merryn Glover’s stories and plays have been broadcast on Radio Scotland and Radio 4, her first novel, A House Called Askival, was published in 2014 and a second, set in the Highlands, will be published in 2021. She was the first Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park and is currently writing a non-fiction book in response to Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain. Her features have appeared in The National, BBC Countryfile Magazine, Northwords Now, The Guardian Weekly and The Guardian.

Glen Banchor

Photo: Merryn Glover

By Merryn Glover:

I’d always heard about the forgotten glen round the back of Newtonmore, in the south-east corner of the Cairngorms National Park. There are ruins there and old, old stories. Someone said you could see eagles, and one of the Wildcat Trails goes that way. A long time ago, everyone went that way.

The locals pronounce it ‘Banachar’ but on the map it’s spelled Glen Banchor and arcs round the back of Creag Dhubh – Black Rock - the hump-backed hill that rises between the villages of Newtonmore and Laggan. Standing at the summit one freezing December, we looked down into the Glen, a span of silence with not a breath stirring the snow.

“Down there,” I said to my husband. “That’s where all the people lived.”

The following February we take mountain bikes into the Glen on a cold, breezy day. The sky is brooding and the Monadhliath mountains to the north form a dark wall. But where the sun breaks through, the fields glow and the raindrops in the bare trees turn to diamonds. Below us, the Calder makes the deep curve for which the glen is named: in Gaelic, a beannachar is a horn-shaped bend in the river. In the early days of Celtic Christianity, there was a monastic cell here dedicated to St Bridget of Kildare, and though nothing remains of the cell, the church in the village is called St Brides.

We cross Allt a’ Chaorainn burn at Shepherd’s Bridge and then Allt Fionndrigh, where we find the first of the abandoned dwellings. An old wooden barn and two stone houses, they were vacated recently enough to still look wounded and waiting. Like so many glens in the Highlands, this is a landscape of loss. At its peak in the late 18th century, between 300 and 400 people lived here in 14 ‘townships’, the cluster of dwellings that shared grazing. There was no bridge over the Spey then - the bigger, faster river in the wide strath on the other side of Creag Dhubh - so Glen Banchor was the major highway north for cattle, goods and travellers. 

It’s almost impossible to imagine that now, as the trail rapidly dwindles into muddy grass, leaving us to churn through bog. Much of the time we have to get off and push, or even carry, the bikes. Occasionally a path resurfaces, but then vanishes again or forks into sheep tracks that head in unpromising directions. We keep scouring the map and the landscape for the route we’ve missed, but conclude it has gradually disappeared, like the people.

This is the ghost story that haunts much of Scotland, where glens that were once populated - even in remote places - are now empty. There were usually several intersecting reasons for the departures: poverty, hardship and poor harvests; emigration to the cities and new colonies; changes in agriculture. But the most significant, and the most shameful, was the Clearances, where landowners removed subsistence farming peasants to make way for large flocks of sheep. A history well-known in Scotland, but very little beyond, it reached its peak in the early 19th century, and then gave way to the Victorian era and the rise of the Highland sporting estate when sheep were side-lined in favour of deer and game birds. But the people never came back.

If you know what to look for, you can see the ruins of their dwellings across the glen, most little more than stone foundations, others with bits of wall, or even a roof. High in the mountains, there are circles of overgrown rocks, the remains of the shieling huts where the women and children lived every summer, grazing their cattle and making cheese. And under the flooded ground and the blowing grasses you might detect the outlines of the old corn-lands and the ‘run rigs’, the raised crop beds that lie in dark ridges like the ribs of a buried giant.

It’s not just human life that is missing; north of the Calder there is barely a tree. This kind of barren sweep is so common in Scotland that many people see it as natural. Even beautiful. True, in certain lights there is a harsh beauty about these open reaches and the contours of heath and mountain. But it’s certainly not wilderness. Every inch of this landscape has been shaped by people for thousands of years and the reality is that most of it is damaged, with only a fraction of the plant and animal life it once had. It creates an environment that continues to degrade – the banks of the Calder are painfully eroded - and offers little livelihood for human or beast.

This impoverished state developed over time, influenced by climate change, timber extraction, agricultural shifts and the extinction of Scotland’s major predators - lynx, wolf and bear. But the major driver in the past two hundred years has been over-grazing by sheep and deer and the routine burning of heather to support grouse. Sheep numbers have dropped dramatically (as they are barely profitable, even with subsidies) but deer and grouse are maintained at artificially high numbers for field sports across large swathes of Scotland. These are hotly contested issues in a country struggling with multiple land challenges, not least the most unequal ownership pattern in Europe.

There’s no bridge or stepping stones over Allt a Bhallach, so we carry our bikes, ankle deep in freezing water, to a bothy on the far side. Desolate, its slate roof is giving way, its door and windows black; the sole room is full of sheep droppings and the back wall gapes onto the dark hills, half hidden in cloud.

We have muffins and a flask of coffee to warm us, then push on through the watery world. Within the great quiet there is the sustained rushing of the Calder and its tributaries, and the occasional gurgling of a startled grouse. Though only a few ragged patches of snow cling to the hills, the mountain hare bounding away over the moor is still pure white in its winter livery. I feel a shot of joy. Despite rare human traffic, wildlife here is scant. We don’t see an eagle and I doubt anyone would see a wildcat.

The clouds shift, one moment casting the whole glen in forbidding greys, then pouring sunlight through a gap and turning everything to gold. It reflects my feelings about this place: sad, yet also thankful for its solitude. Barely a crow-flying couple of miles from the A9, Scotland’s main arterial north, this is a valley of wind and wide spaces that opens the head.

We ford another two burns, the last one churning up to our shins, and by the time I heave my bike up the bank, my feet are stumps of ice. We are now at Dalnashallag bothy, a stone hut with rusting corrugated roof used as resting place for wanderers. The main room smells ashy and damp, the fireplace wall smeared with soot, the couches sagging; an incongruous strip of floral wallpaper runs faded and peeling round the window bay. But spare as it is, the bothy book gives testament to its welcome shelter. 

“Cycled from Balgowan with Andy and Islay the collie. Lovely evening for it. Just in time for tea.” Louise and Andy from Lancaster.

“It is beautiful,” write Molly & Sue. 

“Talifa from Samoa island and Kallo from the Netherlands.  Just passing by this warm house after a good walk in the hard lands.”

Yes, Glen Banchor is beautiful, but these are hard lands, and just as I hope its story is never lost under the grass, so too do I hope its story is not ended, but can be written in a new chapter, teeming with life.

***
Merryn Glover’s stories and plays have been broadcast on Radio Scotland and Radio 4, her first novel, A House Called Askival, was published in 2014 and a second, set in the Highlands, will be published in 2021. Last year she was the first Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park and has been commissioned to write a non-fiction book about the mountains. Her features have appeared in several publications including The National, BBC Countryfile Magazine, Northwords Now, The Guardian Weekly and The Guardian.