This Book, published by Clackmannan District Libraries in 1985 was reproduced from a series of articles which originally appeared in "The Alloa Advertiser" - August to September, 1957, and makes reference to several (usually mining) landmarks that existed around then. It should be noted that at the time this was written, Muckhart had not yet become part of Clackmannanshire (this happened in 1971). The County remapping which gave us Alva and ceded Cambuskenneth, Causewayhead and Abbey Craig to Stirlingshire was carried out in 1891.
Walking Round the Wee County
by Duncan Gillespie
Since I wrote the original series of articles on which this book is based, there have been many changes. Clackmannanshire has expanded to the north-east but has lost some of its local autonomy to the Central Region*. Most of the mines mentioned in the articles have long since disappeared. Alloa is no longer a port, nor a railway centre....
And, sadly, some of the people I met on my travels are gone.
But it is by no means only a tale of loss, for Clackmannanshire, despite reorganisation, retains an identity of its own.
The hills and the open countryside are still with us, to be enjoyed.
Re-reading the book has revived old memories, but not old energies. I'm still fit to repeat the circuit (plus the extra boundary-line beyond Muckhart). It's the impulse I lack.
I have enjoyed re-visiting the places along my old route, in imagination. I hope you enjoy it too. If you do, you have the lively local library service to thank for it.
Duncan Gillespie.
* Central Regional Council operated as one of twelve regional tier council authorities from 1975 to 1996. C.R.C. covered Clackmannanshire, Stirlingshire and Falkirk Areas.
CHAPTER I.
NO, NOT IN A DAY!
Somewhere I read (in a guide - book, I think) that you could walk right round the boundary of this county in a day. The man who wrote that had maybe got as far as measuring the length of the boundary - forty-three miles or thereby - but he never walked it in a day.
I was certain of that when I read the statement; I am even more certain now that I have walked round the county. And I don't think I'll ever call Clackmannanshire the Wee Coonty again.
Quarter to seven on a fine summer morning, and I was on my way, wearing a comfortable pair of heavy old shoes and a pair of thick hand-knitted socks. As for the rest of my clothes, I was wearing an outfit that had long been promoted to the garden - and just as well too, as it turned out, for I had even rougher country in front of me than I expected.
As I walked down off Lookabootye towards the Craigrie pit the sun was shining at my back. It made a silver halo round the head of my shadow on the dewy grass (and that's the nearest I ever expect to get to having a halo).
A hare went lolloping away without any great turn of speed; a covey of partridges exploded out of the grass at the side of the road. I seemed to be the only person about, until, just at the entrance to the Craigrie pit road, I met someone out exercising a pair of greyhounds on the leash. The only inhabitant of the pit was a young rabbit - the first of many that I saw during my walk.
The pithead buildings looked forlorn and deserted, and even the sunshine could not make them seem cheerful. The windows of the offices had been broken, and altogether it was hard to believe that it is only a year or two since the pit was in production.
The old road towards the river was overgrown with long grass, and each feathery head held many drops of cold dew. I had not gone more than a couple of hundred feet before I was wet to the knees. By the time I had walked (or waded) as far as the farm cottages the water had found its way inside the shoes, and my feet were never dry from then on. I can't say that I found that a discomfort. The initial wetting was the worst of it.
It was very quiet and still as I walked along the banks of the Devon. Once in a while a wild duck or a big curlew would rise and make off sounding the alarm, but otherwise there was not even as much stir in the river as make it gurgle against the banks, or move the bare Christmas tree that was moored by the mud.
The Happy Land
The Forth was just as still, lying like glass between me and Dunmore. I could see every detail of Dunmore across the river. It looked like a fairy-story village. Surely no gossip or malice were ever heard in these streets? Surely all the youngsters are happy, all the youths and the lasses are merry, and all the folk are contented in that peaceful place. But I doubt more than the width of the Forth separates us from any place like that . . .
Now strictly speaking the boundary of Clackmannanshire runs down the centre of the Forth. I have never tried walking on the water. It was done once, I know, but that was a Special Dispensation: and I thought you would excuse me if instead I stuck to the river-wall.
It was rather difficult walking. I could choose between long grass on top of the wall and sloping stones on the side of it. After a while of this I was quite glad to sit down and watch the tide coming in; a grey arrowhead of ruffled water with a patch of scum at its tip. pushing up steadily into the bulk of the blue river water. From the top of the wall I had a good view over the near parts of the Clackmannan carse, including the Inch of Ferryton farm.
The Scribe
Every time I see it I remember the farmer they called the Scribe; a host of stories are told about this old worthy, but I think the best one is the one about his boat. Apparently he was always insisting on a lower rent, and when his landlord would not agree his tenancy would be terminated. When prospective tenants came to see the place he would show them round and sing the praises of the farm, then take them into the farmyard. Here was a boat moored to an upstairs window. He was always asked what that was for, and he used to explain that while it was a fine farm there was one drawback - the sea wall was not safe; so he had the boat there, moored to his window. "One o' these nights the wa' will come in and I'll jist step intae the boat and row until I strike dry ground at the Lookabootye!" That didn't encourage the prospective tenants, and somehow or other the Scribe lingered on!
But the doings of the Scribe could be an article on their own. I wonder what he would have said if he had come, as I did, on men making a railway on the top of the wall. One of them told me, "This is the scenic railway. The helter-skelter will be along in a minute." In hard fact, the lines are being laid to take cement and ballast to fill in a weak bit in the wall. Walking past the place where the Forth had taken a bit out of the wall, I thought to myself that a big area of the richest part of the county does owe its safety to the river walls. Once these were breached by a high tide many hundreds of acres would be inundated. and the fish would swim above the fields under which the seashells of past invasions by the sea lie in layers.
Kennetpans has departed a long way from its old glory. In times past (so I've heard tell) the whisky from Kilbagie came by barge down the Canal and was loaded at Kennet Pans. There are still signs of the old quays, and the warehouses are still standing, though roofless and waist deep in elderberry bushes.
A quiet riverside spot, we might call it; a place to come and watch the wild birds in the reeds and the woods. But how would it look to a man who had known it when it was at its busiest? A man who remembered it when the place hummed with activity, when two tall ships lay alongside the quay and another waited in the bay to come to her moorings? It would have the effect on him that the sight of an Alloa Cross surrounded by ivy - covered ruins would have on us. It happened to Kennetpans; I suppose it could happen to Alloa Cross.
Departed Glory
Having crossed the creek that runs into the old harbour, I went further round the shore and sat on a flat, sun-warmed rock to eat a cake of chocolate. I got another sharp reminder of Kennetpans departed glories when I noticed at my feet pieces of chalk rock and chunks of black glossy flints. The last time I had seen these stones together had been in the south of England. Then I remembered that the mound at my back was supposed to have been formed from the discharged ballast from the ships which were loaded at the port. It would be a nice exercise for a geologist to sift through the lot and place the nation of origin of each stone in the heap. He would find many from England, and almost certainly others from America, Scandinavia, and the Low Countries.
Kennetpans has a rather amusing significance for me, for it was here that I found a boat which had been drawn up on the shore. I discovered that it had drifted into the pool after a storm, and was probably a punt used at Grangemouth docks. Anyway I bought it for thirty bob and used the best boards in it to make a shed; the rest made first-class kindling. When came to break it up I tore pounds of copper marine nails out of the wood, My thirty bob punt was bought with all the proper formalities through the Receiver of Wrecks, It was one of the best bargains I ever got.
The skyline below Kennetpans has changed entirely in the few short years since I bought my "wreck." The power station has risen since then and the skyline looks more like part of industrial Wigan or Manchester. But still to the left is the long flat span of Kincardine Bridge, a grand example of functional beauty.
After splashing along the edge of the mudflats where the ships used to lie in deep water I came to the Canal Burn which marks the line where Fife and Clackmannanshire meet.
I walked up the Clackmannanshire side until I came to the bridge that carries the Kincardine road, and there I crossed over. I would have walked under the bridge (it is high enough I suppose so that laden barges could pass under) but I was none too keen of taking a chance of falling into the burn. It isn't exactly crystal clear! In fact, at times I stopped and gazed fascinated at the mottled brown stream sliding to the Forth. The sun wasn't high enough to bring out the characteristic smell, thank heavens.
Open Drain
And yet, just above this filthy open drain. I came across a real find. Something (curiosity, I expect) made me push my way through the pollarded branches of a willow tree. A bird burst out the far side, and when I looked up on top of the stump of the original trunk (now screened by a dense growth of withies) I discovered two well-grown ducklings, grey youngsters with black beaks.
The well-kept bank of the Canal Burn made quite a pleasant walk until I branched off just before Kilbagie Papermill. "From Usquebaugh to Ledger-paper" might be a good title for a history of the buildings. When "best Kilbagie" was being distilled there, the draff was fed to the cattle in stalls, and the well-fattened beasts made an extra profit for the distillery. But there was this matter of tons upon tons of good manure in the stalls. So the distillers bought neighbouring farms and made such good use of the dung that their farming was a precept and a shining light to their neighbours. These other farmers brightened up their own ideas... it's a strange thought that the excellence of carse farming may be at least partly due to distillers wanting to get rid of a by-product that otherwise would accumulate embarrassingly.
There were some prime Irish bullocks in the field near the paper-mill as I passed it; but the distillers of a hundred years ago would have regarded them as on the small side, all beef and no fat. The boundary led me through the middle of a football game. It must have been break-time at the mill, and some young men were playing 'Kickabootie' (according to S.F.A. rules, naturally).
Not For Pedestrians
The boundary runs up under some fine beech trees to the main road, and follows that as far as the far side of Gartarry roundabout. This was one of the less enjoyable stents of the journey, for I discovered once again that a main road is not the place for a pedestrian who is out walking for pleasure. No, the next part was very much better. This was through the big plantation on the left-hand side of the Forestmill road just beyond the entrance to Brucefield pit. The boundary holds away left-handed there. I dived into the wood and pushed my way through the young trees, and if I hadn't a mental note to keep the sun over my right shoulder I would have been lost within a hundred yards of the road. Instead I came across a wide lane through the quiet firwood; it ran exactly along the boundary (indeed (it must have been left to mark the boundary) and it suited me fine. It was beautifully quiet in there, a perfect hush except for the sound of the brackens swishing as I pushed through them. No lorries coming charging down to miss me by inches: no cars apparently hell-bent on having an accident right under my nose.
Old Highway
At an iron gate out of the wood I paused for a minute again. The boundary here, as my map showed, ran parallel with the high road to Dunfermline. This meant a rough walk up a dyke-side to where the line crossed the old road that was once the main coach-road to Perth and the north. Passengers crossed the ferry at Kincardine and were carried in coaches along this route: now, for the part of it in this area, a very occasional tractor and trailer is the main traffic, and people travel on new roads in vehicles the old coachman would never have believed even if he had seen.
There seemed to be traces of an even older road along the boundary from there on for a mile or two. Here and there underfoot I felt indications of buried metalling and in places there seemed to be signs of shallow cuttings to keep the route level. However, the entire stretch was given over to me and the rabbits. Looking over Brucefield estate I could see the farms in the Forest - The Starton, Hazleyshaw.
The Forest, from which Forestmill takes its name, is not just a local name for this area. The Ordnance Survey designate a large area as The Forest. It was here or hereabouts that royalty and nobles from Clackmannan Tower used to come and hunt. The farms in The Forest in these days would be quite different, little clearings or 'garths' in the surrounding waste. The names of many farms indeed indicate that - Gartknowie, Gartfinnan, Gartlove, Gartmorn, Gartenkeir, Tulligarth - all these within a radius of a mile or two from the centre of the now diminished Forest.
Gartknowie might be translated, I suppose, the clearing where there's a wee hill; Gartfinnan is Fingon's garth. And further over into Fife is Muirmealing, the mailing or rented farm in the moor. (Mail means 'rent', so there is that much of a connection between Muirmealing and blackmail!)
Though I had been warned by the map, it was a surprise to come on a nice little cottage by the side of the road where it crossed the railway. I crossed the railway too, and followed the road for a couple of hundred yards until the boundary took to following a burn. That burn was to be my companion for an hour or two, for it is Clackmannanshire's eastern frontier for quite a long way. Its name is Bluther Burn (though it also is called the Devilla Burn), and it rises north of Dunfermline and swings round in a long elbow and runs into the Forth at Torry Bay.
The burn had obviously fed a mill at one time, for my road led across a hollow that was now a stackyard The farm (unnamed on my map) seemed very quiet: I half-thought it was deserted. However, I didn't stay to snoop about but followed the burn into the Bath Moor Plantation. On one side was a neat orderly and rather dull Forestry plantation: on the other (on our side) rough woodland of birch and alder.
As long as I could follow the boundary-fence of the plantation the going was easy. but, when the burn swung away and I had to swing with it, the going got rougher. Sometimes it was easier to walk on the gravel bars and shallows of the river bed (my feet, as I said. had been wet all along.) Sometimes that gentle flow of water almost hypnotised me. Gentle? Yes, but it had carved the valley in which I was walking; it had gnawed the limestone rock until it looked like the knuckle of a knap-bone.
Further upstream was more proof of its power, for here it came rushing between rocks - rocks which it had cut and shaped into a deep channel. Sometimes I was high up above the water, working along with a firm hand-hold on heather and blae-berry bushes; other times I was walking on sandbars with my head down to avoid the roofs of overhanging caves. A dramatic landscape un-guessed by ninety-nine out of a hundred Clackmannanshire folk.
Hearing rustlings in the bushes across the ravine I stood stock-still with one foot barely touching the ground. If I had waited till I got both feet firmly planted before I froze I would not have seen what I saw next. A young dog fox trotted out of the brush, investigated the crannies of a rock buttress, then came down the far bank directly towards me. He turned at the edge of the water, trotted further upstream, climbed further up the bank, then came back and crossed. At the nearest point I could have taken a penny from my pocket and flipped it on to his back; and what a shock he would have got, for though he looked straight at me several times he did not see me. If I had blinked ... well, he would have been a mile away in not much over four minutes, I'll bet.
He was in beautiful condition, his coat close and russet, his tail long and symmetrical and with a clean white tip. He trotted as if he went on springs.
After Brer Fox had gone to cover I crossed over to the Clackmannan bank and stood picking and eating blaeberries for a few minutes - they were bigger, riper and sweeter than on the Fife bank. Maybe it was because the Clackmannanshire ones were growing on the north bank and got what sun was going. A little further up, but back on the Fife side, I came on fox tracks in a patch of sand by the waterside. It was easy to see that the fox had waded the burn scratched a hole in the sand, and gone on through a gap between two rocks. I squeezed my way through the same place.
Cow Park
It was after scrambling along for a while that I noticed that the wild country on the north bank appeared to be opening up. Presently I crossed the water and climbed the bank, and found myself at the edge of a very large grass field. looking across at Gibsley farm, with the peaks of the Saline Hills sitting at its right shoulder.
The field was a pasture for a herd of beef cows - Highland, cross - Highland, Shorthorn and Galloway mostly - and there was an Aberdeen Angus bull among them. I took a short cut across a corner of the field so as to avoid following some kinks in the river, and I must confess that though I was not at all nervous of the bull (having proved in the past that I can run faster and dodge quicker than a ton of Aberdeen Angus bull) I kept a very close eye on these cows. Sometimes when you pass a cow and her calf the cow doesn't like it at all, and she has a much more nimble and intelligent way of going about things than a bull. For one thing (as I've been told many times) she keeps her eyes open as she charges: no use doing the bull-fighter's trick of standing back at the last moment.
Down in desert parts of France and Spain where they rear the beautiful fighting bulls they train their young men in "cow psychology" by setting them to fight cows that have learned the game. A man who can plant a rosette between the horns of a wily and angry cow can go ahead and learn the ritual of slaughtering the less intelligent male.
I was thinking of nothing so energetic as the corrida de toros a few minutes later: having crossed into Fife again, and crawled under a fence breached in the first place by a black-faced ewe to judge by the signs. I found a pleasant place under a young oak tree. I sat down on the grass and leaned back against the trunk, took out my book and my pack of dates, and settled for a brief read. But no. I found myself lying on the green turf watching the reflections of the water rippling across the leaves. I grew drowsier and drowsier. My conscience began to bother me, and I ate a few dates hurriedly and went on my way.
It was a warm plod up the side of the burn. Gibsley lay on my left, quiet now for it was dinner time - earlier I had heard tractors bustling about bringing in hay.
Double Frontier
Half a mile beyond Gibsley the frontier swings to the north-west, almost doubling back on itself. So I turned and left the Bluther Burn and did not follow it on past Cattle Moss and Kitchen Green, Standalane, and Langfauld, to its source above Dolly.
My road (if you can call it that) ran straight across Dun Moss. I turned into it with reluctance, for I foresaw a couple of miles of walking across peat bogs. It was not quite as bad as that. The line followed a fence, and alongside this, thanks to the dry spring. it was comparatively easy going. On one side was the flat open moss, fit for grazing at this time of year, and over the fence was a tangle of heather and old and young birch trees. Between, sluggishly, flowed a small ditch filled with peat - water the colour of watered treacle.
The trouble about following that part of the boundary was that I could never manage to take two steps the same length, in trying to avoid soft places and rough tussocks. I was ready for a drink of water by the time I came level with the Fearns farm.
Standing at the door drinking that very welcome glass of water, I mentioned that I had seen that fox, and the Man of the House, from inside, told me that he had been standing among some cattle over in that direction, and a vixen had trotted past himso close that he could have clapped it. He had no very high opinion of the fox's famous 'instinct'.
I went on my way with a warning about a boggy bit further towards the Devon, and indeed I was so taken on with keeping my balance among the trees along the ditch-side that I came on this broader and deeper ditch and was taken by surprise. What could that be? I looked at my map, and the 'ditch' came into focus. It was the River Devon, a smaller and infinitely cleaner stream than the one that runs under the Mary Bridge at Clackmannan. If that stream of sweet water could see what was coming to it, would it not turn and crawl back uphill towards the Saline Hills against the law of gravity?
Not In The Swim
The caller waters were too much for me I had a good look round, then stripped and waded in. But the swim stopped at a paddle. Though the air above was warm. the stream itself was icy cold. I enjoyed the paddle though, and the escapade gave my shirt and socks a wee bit time to dry. I ploutered upstream a bit among the swarms of minnows, then back down, slapping off an occasional cleg, then dressed and went on my way upstream.
This was one of the pleasantest parts of the whole walk. There was a fresh breeze blowing; the path was reasonably straight-forward: and it was grand to be able to keep up a reasonable speed. At first I walked through open meadows by the waterside, and was able to lean over and watch some fair-sized trout rising for flies that came drifting down a riffle round a bed of forget-me-nots; then climbed a paling and into a long wood.
It was here that I saw a rabbit take to the water for the first time. When it heard me coming it was into the river with two splashes and a sploosh and half-scrambled and half-swam to the safety of the Clackmannanshire shore.
At the corner where Clackmannanshire, Fife and Kinross-shire meet I must confess my map-reading went wrong and I got a little wandered. I found myself standing at the garden gate of Little Saline (which is in Fife) convinced that if I walked along the road I was on I would come to Dollar. Instead I would have come to grief (and ultimately to Saline, Carnock and Dunfermline).
However, when I turned round about and aligned the map with the Ochils and the Cleish Hills everything fell into place. I'm still not sure whether I left the frontier too soon or followed it too far...
There was no doubt where the boundary led from there. It ran alongside the road for a couple of miles, and I stuck to the road until I was just a couple of hundred yards short of the Ramshorn crossroads. The boundary slanted away to the right, and I walked beside it through the fields. Here the frontier was a small burn, and at Broom Farm near Blairingone it became an even smaller tributary of this burn - a glorified ditch, hardly more.
This line was cut by the main Kincardine - Kinross road just below Blairingone. Blairingone! I'll remember you kindly for the sake of the wee bottle of cold lemonade I bought in the shop there. It's true that I would have thought even more kindly of you if you had risen to a half-pint of cold beer, but the pub was shut; our benevolent licencing laws have decided that it's a criminal matter for a thirsty man to have a drink at half past three of a summer's afternoon. (But we must remember it's for OUR OWN GOOD!)
The boundary between Clackmannanshire and Kinross-shire runs down a hedge-side towards the Devon (the clear winding Devon this time) and from it I got a grand panoramic view along the Hillfoots. From there I could see something of the true shape of the country - a long shallow trough running east and west with the Ochils as a high side to the trough and the side on which Sheardale, Coalsnaughton, Fishcross, and Tullibody stand as the lower side of the trough.
Over the Sheardale road and on down the hedge, following a steep little path that finished at an old wash-boiler into which a spring of clear good water ran. I lifted the lid and had a good drink, not minding the fact that two or three earthworms had found their way into the bottom of the old boiler: I'm sure they were as healthy and hygienic things to have in your drinking - water as some of the things we drink - chlorine, for instance, necessary though chlorine undoubtedly is.
Over the railway and down the banking, and I came to the banks of the Devon. Beyond, Dollar did not look far away.
I sat for a moment on the bank watching idly as a heron flapped up and flew away and as, at my side, a daddy long-legs laid her eggs among the grass roots. Daddy long-legs doesn't look very appropriate in that context; I should have said "crane-fly."
As I forded the river I noticed that I was in a direct line between two castles - castle Campbell up in the throat of Dollar Glen and Dollarbeg up on high ground to my left.
I would like to draw a veil over the next half-hour if you don't mind. It would hardly be in the best of taste to describe how (attempting to find the Kelly Burn which marks the boundary from the Devon up to the Dollar road) I found myself lost in the sewage settling fields, and wading disconsolately through high nettles with the momentary prospect of going over the knees in grey streams of doubtful liquid. I want to forget it myself. However. I did find the Kelly Burn and it led me past several back gardens to the road, and there I left the frontier for the meantime, just on the eastern verge of Dollar burgh.
Chapter II
WITH MY HEAD IN THE CLOUDS
I expected it to be raining the next Friday. Folk said - "You'll be walking round the boundary on Friday if it's fair?" and I said "Wet or dry." Maybe you can't tempt Providence, but it looks as if you can tempt the Weather Clerk for that Friday morning it was coming down heaven's hard. Hard or not, it was the hills for me after all that boasting.
As I sat in the Dollar bus at Alloa bus station I listened to the rain drumming down on the roof and watched it running in streams down the corrugated asbestos of the station roof, and I thought to myself "Ah, well, it always looks worse from inside than it feels when you're out in it."
In the fat fields of Harviestoun estate the fine Aberdeen Angus cattle and the Shetland ponies were standing with coats as sleek as seals. In a garden on the outskirts of the town the gardener had put up red-painted bottles on canes to scare away woodpigeons, and the rain was dripping off them. The downpour slackened a little by the time I got off the bus, and it was in no more than a heavy drizzle that I walked up Muckhart Road towards the place where I had abandoned the Kelly Burn and the border-line.
When I had walked down that road a week before the afternoon air had been full of the burring of lawnmowers. The weather was rather different now, and so was the time of day. for it was still early in the morning and I met only one or two people. They passed with that kind of self-conscious courtesy which consists of acknowledging your existence by not looking near you . . .
A yard or two beyond the bridge over the burn and I had documentary evidence that I was in Perthshire - a bill advertising County Council elections. To try to avoid being too early soaked by wet grass and foliage I followed the main road for some distance and then doubled back on a side road. It's this sort of trick that turns forty-three miles on the map into fifty-three miles over the ground.
Once I was well set on the burnside I cheered up a little. It was, after all, only a stout heart to a succession of Stey braes. I would certainly get a wet skin, but once you're wet - it's the first seeping of rain under the collar, the first dribbles that reach searchingly inside the shirt as far as the waist that take the tholing.
At first the path passed along the headriggs of fields, and once just across the end of someone's drying-green, then it plunged deep into woodlands. Only now and again it became difficult to follow, but mostly it kept single-mindedly uphill beside the burn. I began to hit my stride, though with a groan or two in memory of last week's mileage.
The gurgles and ripples of the Kelly Burn and the patter of the rain on the leaves made little impression on the silence in the wood.
Here and there, at one time or another, a tree had blown down. One caught my eye in particular - dead straight and true and perhaps 80 feet from root cut to the beginning of the tip cut, it would have made a fine mast for a sailing-ship of the big days of sail. But she will probably lie till she spoils, and will never be one
"Who now of the white spray must take the veil
And for her songs the thunder of the sail."
But I suppose it is really sadder to see such a house as Hillfoots House standing in bleached ruin; I suppose these big mansions have as little place in this age as have masts for big sailing ships. And maybe if I regret the mansions and the ships it is because I never was either a skivvy black-leading endless grates in a mansion, or an apprentice furling t'gallants on a square - rigger clawing her way round Cape Horn, and weeping from torn finger-nails, weariness, salt-water hacks on hands and face, and the fear of a fall to the swinging deck.
With the ruin on my left I crossed a side-road and followed the burn up through cut-over woodland. Up here I came on a parked car beside some old sheds. There was somebody in it? There was indeed three people, They were so sound asleep that they looked as if they were sitting dead. There were posts and wire stacked ready for use further along, so I suppose the three men were fencers who had looked out at the weather from their digs on wheels and gone right back to sleep. I didn't try to waken them for they probably had more sense than I (they had at least the traditional amount of sense - to know when to come in out of the wet).
The rain grew heavier and heavier as I followed the boundary across the back road to Cowden Castle and turned my face to the hills. A group of stirks stood watching me steamily as I stood and surveyed the route up past the end of the garden of a small croft, and on up through the brackens and over the saddle between two hills. A squall hurtling out the east made me put my back against a beech tree and wait for it passing; a broken branch on the tree opposite me spouted like the end of a broken rhonepipe.
When it had steadied a bit I skirted the rows of potatoes and climbed steadily. The bracken had been cut, which made the climb that much easier. The wet wind came sweeping along Castleton Hill, and the weather - which in the town had been rather a drab disappointment - became an opponent that was a grim joy to face.
At last I left the tiny Kelly Burn behind: then I was over the hump of the saddle and began to walk quickly down the muddy sheep-track towards the Maiden's Well, at which point the boundary takes a sharp turn. The frontier of the county along that bit was a fence of iron posts and good fencing wire (a monument to a good landlord, as enduring as most monuments and more useful). Then a new stream, a stream whose waters ran north, began to accompany me downhill, and I began to think that I would come on the Maiden's Well any minute. I had further to go than the map seemed to indicate.
On the Prow
Then I crossed the new burn and climbed its far bank to get a better idea how the land lay: in a moment I found myself in a new dimension. I was standing, as it were, on the bow of a stationary ship. a bow formed by the ridge between two valleys. On my right was the little valley - I had come squelching down, and on my left was a larger and wider and nobler valley, a gorge in fact, with a broad track up its centre. Down the broad valley which ran from where the two met I could see the headwaters of Glenquey Reservoir, whose waters supply Dunfermline.
The hills beyond the Quey Burn formed a backcloth for a parade of the storm. By some freak I was standing in a calm spot on the bows of my ship, but on the left the rain went past. It came marching up Glenquey in high veils of water, stately and yet bleak. The man who ventures on to the hills in high summer sunshine has never seen them as they are, self-sufficient and ignoring humanity. A farmer can make ten acres of fat inby land his partner: a thousand acres of hill land, worked winter and summer, is oftener an opponent than a partner.
It was a while before I stopped watching these stately grey veils of stormy rain and walked towards them and into them. In doing so I missed the Maiden's Well by a yard or two, seemingly: I had been told to look for a big flat stone with water coming from under it. "You'll maybe find it by the picnic papers lying round it." But the wind had taken the papers off, and I was in a bit of a hurry to get my feet on that broad track up the glen, and I never saw the Maiden's Well.
My back was to the wind as I turned up the glen, on my right rose rocky crags, over which kestrels and ravens rode the wind; on my left the slope was gentler, up towards the crest of the hills I had just crossed. The track, I understand, is a favourite walk with the Dollar people, and I can well believe it. It is the ideal hill path, broad and sound under foot, with steady gradients and no 'traps'. A man with one leg who was handy with his crutches could manage that walk with pleasure.
The Pleasantest
The half-mile along which the boundary followed the track (or rather the burn alongside the track) was about the pleasantest of the morning; after being slapped about by the weather earlier, and well drenched in the process, I now had the weather at my back and a fine path at my feet. But it wasn't to last. A look at my rain-spotted map showed that the boundary swung right up a side-stream toward the high tops.
I followed the burn too. Swollen with the rain, it sprayed over the little cataracts and lipped the edges of its banks. There was quite a lot of wet finger-and-toe work involved in following the boundary up there, but effort and discomfort could not hide the beauty of that little stream, nameless on the map, as it vaulted down from Whitewisp Hill.
I had made a good deal of height with some effort up the hillside when I looked ahead and saw the mist coming down. Mist on the hills is clean and white, as unlike a yellow city fog as it can be. In a city the dirty fog means the chance of bronchitis, but on strange hills the white mist means the chance of the emerald - green bog - eye that swallows a man as if he had never been born; or a drop over a rocky scaur (not the Eigerwand, but high enough). A joke's a joke but anyone who knows the high tops knows that mist up there is no pantomime.
I stood looking, knowing that it was hopeless to look. I think there were black cattle up the fence a hundred feet or so from me, but I couldn't be sure - that was what the mist was like. So regretfully, I left the border-line and struck off down the hillside towards the track I had left, and Dollar.
The Cheerful Fisherman
I felt unreasonably as if I was running away, but it's only foolishness to persist in working your way across strange hills in a thick mist (especially if you're supposed to be writing a descriptive article about it).
I was not far along the track when I met a man coming from the direction of Dollar. He was going to fish near Glenquey Reservoir - he told me cheerfully that he did not think he had much chance of catching anything, the weather was against it. As we spoke the rain was running off him as he had been standing under a showerbath. I suppose he thought I was as daft to be out in that weather for pleasure.
And the rain grew heavier still as I went on; I don't remember that I ever was out in heavier rain. The path became a burn with tributaries wherever a sheep-track met it. A lark got up from behind a big stone and sang happily, hovering ten feet off the grass; it was as daft as the fisherman and myself, to be out in such weather - and enjoying himself like us.
If I had stuck on the track it would have led me straight down to Dollar, but instead I turned to Castle Campbell. which I had never visited before. Even approaching it from uphill it looked high and impressive. There was scaffolding here and there on its walls, and ladders and scaffold poles stacked against a big plane-tree looked like the gear of a besieging army which had sought shelter from the weather.
The Loggia
I splashed into the courtyard and looked around. Voices came from a small building in the corner - two of the workmen had been driven off the job of restoration by the rain. From the older I discovered that the castle was open; I paid my sixpence to the caretaker's wife, and she showed me the plan of the castle with its old central keep and its more recent additions. We were standing under the shelter of the 'loggia; she told me there was only one other in a Scottish castle, and that was at Falkland.
While she went away to make me a cup of tea I explored the castle block: the stone-floored great hall: the tiny dungeon in the wall, barely big enough for the prisoner (surely there was only one at a time?) to move in: the wooden-floored hall on the next floor: the lavatories with their simple plumbing - a chute through the wall and a long drop down the outside of the castle: and finally the roof.
I suppose in fine weather it's easy to imagine nobles and their ladies climbing that spiral staircase to walk in the sun and admire the prospect over the Devon valley: that Friday it was easier to imagine a disgruntled sentry slouching round the wall, looking first to the hills and then to the approaches up the valley, cursing the rain, the stiffness of his leather tunic, the weight of his steel helmet, the coldness of the wind: wishing it was time to get off duty; grumbling to himself that after his 'two on' he would have to spend his 'four off' on a makeshift bed in the guardroom. In fact, feeling like anybody on guard-duty in dirty weather before or since.
Maybe though when he was relieved he found the fire in the guardroom rid him of some of his grouses. I found the fire in the workmen's room just as cheering as, with a cup of tea in my hand, I sat and steamed in front of a British Queen stove (old fashioned but roaring cheerfully and nearly red hot). For a while we sat and talked about the bus strike, about hill walks round Edinburgh, about this and that, then I stood up feeling anew the clamminess of my soaked clothes, and went out into the rain again.
Dollar Glen
I had the best part of an hour to put past before I would get a bus, and, though I cursed that as I left the Castle. I was glad of it within a few minutes, for I discovered Dollar Glen. All right. you've seen it scores of times. Imagine then the effect of following the path on and on through the gorges on a day of wind and rain, with the Burn of Sorrow coming roaring down in spate - of seeing the glen for the first time in weather like that.
For years I have been a great admirer of Alva Glen and have sung its praises far and wide, but Dollar Glen, I must admit, is in a category apart. It is like something one could expect to find in the green foothills of Kashmir. Its gorge is the kind of gorge plant-hunters explore in danger of their lives, to come back triumphantly with a gentian or a new rhododendron.
As I walked along bridges that thrummed with the power of yeasty water racing below them; or looked down a hundred feet at the swirling torrent, or turned my face up to look through the high woods at the grey sky, I told myself that this was the greatest untapped tourist attraction I had ever seen. The folk of Dollar were missing their chances. Or were they? Were they not wiser to have made (at the cost of some ingenuity and skill) a place to come to with their families on a Sunday afternoon? By the time I had penetrated so far that I was opposite the tail of stone chippings thrown down into the glen from the castle high above, I decided that they were.
I had discovered the glen for myself; I had had it all to myself; I had seen in it in a way that I never could have seen it if it had been perpetually filled with a thrangity of enthusiastic trippers.
No Defeat
And so, as I hurried for my bus at a time when I should have been on the county's northern frontier, it was not with any sense of defeat, for I had captured two striking memories.
I had discovered the grand walk over to Glenquey; and I had discovered Dollar Glen.
The big stretch round the hill boundary was still to do - but surely these two discoveries were enough to be going on with. I have often thought of them since, these two so different places one a pass running straight and broad through the hills, and the other a ravine twisting among the rocks. They were well worth a soaking.
CHAPTER III
THE COUNTY'S NORTHERN SHORE
As it turned out, I was heartily glad that I gave up the attempt to walk round the northern boundary of the county in mist and rain; not because the terrain is dangerous but because the views on a clear day proved to be magnificent. It's not every day you can stand and look at Loch Leven at one side of Scotland and, later the same day, look over to Loch Lomond and the mountains beyond it.
And it's something to have stood beside the waters that lap Clackmannanshire's North Cape. You didn't know that the County had a northern seaboard? Read on and you'll find out that not only is Clackmannanshire bounded by water on the north but that - far beyond Tillicoultry - there is a little county colony.
It was a fine brisk morning as I started up Dollar Glen, retracing the path that I had followed in such different circumstances the week before - when I had come down off the hill defeated and with a pailful of rainwater about my person.
Up beyond the Castle I found four fencers already at work, and they were able to tell me quite a lot about what I should look for in the way of marking the boundary. They seemed quite taken with the idea of walking round it but looked on it as being rather too much of a walk - that from men whose work takes them out on the hills in all weathers.
I noticed that the wall beside which they were driving their stabs with pinch-bar and mell was a Galloway-dyke. That is, the bottom courses were solidly bonded, but the upper ones were set so that the daylight showed through in a lacy kind of pattern. This type of dyke looks as if it had been built by a tradesman and finished by an apprentice, but in actual fact the setting of the top stones requires a great deal of skill. They are set so that a wily old Blackface yowe won't jump on them for fear they fall on her - but so that in actual fact they will stand nearly for ever.
when I reached the watershed before the track runs down to Glenquey I turned right, and followed the burn upwards. It was a steep climb, beside the burn - a burn that, though it shone in the sun, was still swollen with the heavy rains of the day before.
Hard work climbing up there, but rewarded when I reached the shoulder of Whitewisp Hill and looked back.
Looking towards Dollar I could see a train just crossing the bridge over the Devon and heading for Kinross. At the end of its route could see Loch Leven lying cradled in hills and woods: round to my left, and I was looking at the reservoir in Glenquey which serves the folk of Dunfermline. Funny to think that the water in the burn running past me might ultimately be drunk by my opposite number on the "Dunfermline Press."
Round again, and I was looking at the blue hills away in the direction of Perth. You may judge the span of the view by the fact that Kincardine Power Station chimney seemed no great distance away. I was able with my map open on my knees, to trace the route I had followed on the first leg of my journey through the Forest. But it turned out I was to see other and far better views - it was a day of views.
The "Iron" Enters My Sole!
When you get to the top of Whitewisp Hill the route levels off and you follow the boundary westwards more or less along the watershed, guided by a substantial wall.
I had my first rest at the point on the ridge opposite the head-waters of the Burn of Sorrow, which runs down to Dollar. From there, there was a grand panorama north into Perthshire, and a rather more restricted one into Clackmannanshire. but I was too worried to appreciate it. You see, a small screwnail had started to work its way though the sole of my right boot and into my foot. Would I have to turn back again? I chiselled away with a piece of stone and with the edge of a Penny, but the screw would not come out of it, though it could be forced back a little. It looked as if I might have to hirple towards Dollar.
It was not courage but thrawn-ness that kept me following the thin black line on the map. Funny how a screw in the sole of the foot affects the eyesight - the sun didn't seem nearly so bright, and the view was much less impressive!
On Winged Boots!
I had stopped once and done a bit of rough cobbling, and was stopped again - sitting on a boulder and working away inside the boot - when suddenly the sun came out and the view improved: the screw had parted company with the boot.
As I strode round the north side of the Maddy Moss I felt as if I was wearing Hermes' winged shoes, just because that wee bit of brass was lying further back up the hill.
The Maddy Moss was a bit of a disappointment to me. I had expected some great bog, seamed with gaping cracks and blown over by a chill wind. True enough there were black peat-hags, and the ground was broken by many little burns not the kind of country you want to drive a score of blackface sheep across on a misty day but it wasn't the impressive place I had been led to expect.
Yet out of this moss rise three burns which join to form the head-waters of the Burn of Sorrow.
I was warm enough now, having come downhill off Tarmangie Hill at a good pace, and I was glad to drink the sparkling waters of a wee spring that rose just outside the county. Round it the grass was kept as close-clipped as a lawn by the sheep, fastidious eaters. They greatly prefer young tender grass, and leave the coarse grasses to grow unchecked. Beef cattle, on the other hand, eat what's before them. Sheep and cattle together on a hill keep the growth of the different grasses neatly balanced. There are just about enough sheep on our hills, and far too few cattle.
Rendezvous
Up there, two thousand feet above sea-level, I came on two ladybirds and two Red Admiral butterflies within a short distance of each other. It's a long way up for a ladybird to come to keep a date even with a Red Admiral.
My next encounter with wild life was a wee bit less amusing. I had skirted the Maddy Moss when I suddenly saw three large birds rise out of the tussocks of grass a hundred feet away. They looked something like curlews, I thought, until I realised that they were flying absolutely silently, then I looked closer. They were owls.
"Have they nested up here?" I wondered, and was just making up my mind to go and find out when they made up my mind for me. Two of them kept at a respectful distance, but the third and largest came much closer for a recce. It came sailing in on silent wings, had a look at me from these big eyes in the round face, then swung round and came back for a closer look.
I remembered that Eric Hosking, the bird photographer, lost an eye because of an unfriendly owl, and went on my way.
I had discovered one thing about owls - why they look wiser than other birds. Their eyes are set, looking forward, in a round face in much the same way as our own; other birds have an eye on each side of their head and have to keek sideways at anything they want to see clearly.
Nearly opposite Tillicoultry, but a couple of miles up in the hills, the boundary takes an abrupt swing nearly due North down the Broich Burn. The map says there is a path down the east side of the valley, but I failed to find it though I cast up and down. For the next couple of miles I walked steadily downhill along sheep tracks further and further into the Clackmannanshire that few people know is there.
Dollar, Tillicoultry, Alva and Menstrie lie roughly on the half-way line of the county. North of this equator is 20 square miles of hills and rough grazing.
When I came to the end of my downhill walk it was to find something the Ordnance Survey Map gave no hint of. Just where the boundary line runs off the map I found a house - Backhills House, Clackmannanshire's remotest outpost. And in front, shimmering in the sun and with that fragile loveliness that makes your heart rise in your mouth, was a loch I had never even heard about.
The Northern Shore
I had plenty of time to admire that loch. Mrs Hugh Munro asked me in for a cup of tea. I told her why I was there, and she thought I should see her husband when he came off the hill for his dinner. Meantime I drank tea, and ate soda scones and treacle scones and wholemeal scones, fresh made. The scent of them would have made Oliver Cromwell get up out of his grave - and he's been resting, whereas I had been walking for five hours across the hills. I laid in about them, I can tell you, and every time my tea went down in the cup it was refilled. Then Mr Munro came in, and we had a long talk about sheep and shepherding.
I found that the loch is a new reservoir at the head of Glen-devon, and that the nearest neighbour to Backhills is three miles down the Devon.
Here, in Clackmannanshire's northern and rather lonely colony, live Mr and Mrs Munro, their four sheepdogs, their cats - one of them, though blind, can find his way about quite happily - their cows, and their pigs. They have a wee car and they now have the telephone, but wild weather can still isolate such an outby place. Last winter was mild, but even so they were snowbound for weeks.
They are, however, well used to winter and rough weather, for they are natives of Scotland's far north, Sutherland. Sutherland got that name from the Norse-men who, sailing in their open longboats from up towards the Arctic Circle, thought the Southerly Land a fertile and friendly place. To the Munros, Backhills, though isolated, seems greener and less wild than their native county.
When I came to leave, I was told "You can't go away without another cup of tea!" and (though I was ashamed to be eating so much) I agreed. That refuelling meant that the four hours that were still before me were a pleasure instead of something of a burden.
The Greenhorn!
My road ran alongside the loch for a good mile, then it swung south-west at the Greenhorn Burn. The name couldn't have been more appropriate, for it was there that I made an elementary error in map reading. The basic rule of following a map is "Always believe the map, even when it looks wrong to you." I could see that the boundary crossed four burns in a couple of miles, but couldn't identify the burns at all. (This in spite of the fact that Mr Munro had said "Follow the Greenhorn until you come to a fence leading away from it,").
But that mistake was all in the future when I left Backhills House (a new house, by the way, the old one having been flooded by the dam) and strode out, fortified by tea, kipper and innumerable scones, along Clackmannanshire's northern seaboard. At one point a long peninsula runs out into the dam, and I made my way right to the tip of this. The thrill of standing on Clackmannanshire's North Cape and knowing that no more of the county lay to the north of me was added to by the fact that few people back in the inhabited part of the county know that that North Cape is there at all.
Lovely Corner
Over peat hags and rushy paths I went, to the fjord where the Greenhorn valley runs down into the loch. I would say that this is one of the loveliest corners of the county. You can see it for yourself by going to Alva and walking as straight as the ground will let you over the hills until you find a stream running towards the north - there are no less than twenty burns big enough to be shown on the map, any of which will lead you to the side of the dam.
When I had reached the head of the fjord with its deep drumlie waters I came on one of the mysteries of the journey. The burn is spanned by a fine concrete bridge, wide enough to take a lorry, but there is no road leading to it and no road leading away from it. By taking down a fence, you could (if you were a good enough driver) take a jeep in four-wheel drive across the bridge and up the far bank.
It was some time before I realised that I wasn't following the boundary exactly. The trouble was that the short distance between the dam and the place where the boundary swung away from the Greenhorn Burn just wasn't on the sheet of the Ordnance Survey map I had. I decided that the only way I could get back on course was to climb high and so see across country. I had toiled up five or six hundred feet when I consulted my map for the umpteenth time and still couldn't make sense of it. I scanned the gridiron of valleys that was spread out in front of me - and saw a hint of a fence crossing the skyline. In a second the map made sense. Glen Macduff and Finglen were tributaries of the Greenhorn, but joined it off the map!
Loch Turret
I was annoyed by the mistake, though it was natural enough, but as it turned out it was to my advantage. I followed the hill I was on until it more or less coincided with the fence. It meant a couple of miles of extra walking (in full view of the frontier, I must stress) but it also led me to a great view.
The Highland bens marched rank on rank along the west: the broad acres in between were smiling with corn near harvesting. Away to the north-west, in a gap between two mountain masses, I saw a gleam like a dam spanning the valley, and I wondered whether by any chance it could be Loch Turret (from which the county's water will come in the future). It was only after consulting the County Architect's department and the Water Engineer that I was able to confirm that the gleam was coming from the right direction. But it wasn't the new Loch Turret dam I saw, though it may have been the old one which supplies Crieff.
Crieff was lit by a strong shaft of sunlight out of the middle of a cloud. It would be fifteen miles away as the crow flies.
It was not long before I won to the boundary again, rather annoyed that I had not followed the map and Mr Munro's advice blindly instead of reasoning it out, and reasoning it out wrong. I suppose a theologian might very well say that that illustrates the fact that faith can take you safely home when reason would lead you astray.
The frontier from this point on is marked by a post and wire fence that runs as straight as a Roman road across country. I got a bit tired of following it, climbing occasionally into peat holes and out again. I took some relaxation (perhaps childish relaxation) when I found a place where a ridge of peat under the fence was damming back quite a big pond. I took off my jacket and scraped a tunnel through the peat, letting the water away. In no time I had a new burn running complete with waterfalls. Not content with that, I went further along and breached the peat bank again, making another and better stream that ran to join the other one. By the time I came away the level of the water had sunk a bit, but I could hear the burble of the waterfall I had made for quite a distance!
Visibility Good
I had seen some views earlier in the day, but the best yet was from the top of the next hill I came to - Blairdenon Hill. An idea of its extent can be given by the fact that I could see Loch Lomond reasonably clearly - and that was forty miles across country. I know that people talk casually about seeing things sixty, eighty, a hundred miles away, but you can take it as gospel that when you can see something (even as big as Inchmurrin in Loch Lomond) clearly at forty miles, visibility is pretty good.
From over two thousand feet up on Blairdennon you dive steeply down to the Old Wharry Burn, where Clackmannanshire, Perth and Stirling boundaries meet: then it's a long plain pull up the burn and over the rise, and from then on the route is reasonably straightforward, down the Second Inchna Burn and through Menstrie Glen. The labelling of the burns amused me; if you look at the map you see three burns running into Menstrie Burn. They are, travelling upstream, the First Inchna Burn, the Second Inchna Burn and the Third Inchna Burn. There seems no logical reason why the fourth burn, nameless on the map, should not be called with shining originality the Fourth Inchna Burn. It was a grand end to the long walk, striding down the path through Menstrie Glen, the sun shining, the trees overhead, and the water keeping me company down. The route was never straight but never difficult, and I kept on at a good pace.
When I got to Menstrie I felt as if I could have turned and gone back round the boundary again: but whether I could have managed it or not is another matter.
This final paragraph is not for teetotallers. Having twenty minutes to wait for a bus I went for a pint of heavy beer: and don't think it didn't run down well.
CHAPTER IV
TEN MILES BY TWO INCHES
What a grand feeling to have finished the circuit round the county. I wonder if anybody has done the complete round before? I have asked quite a number of people, and the general opinion seems to be "No - it would be a pretty pointless thing to do unless you wanted to write about it." Well, maybe so. But I know that I saw some lovely parts of the county that I would never have seen otherwise.
I don't believe that I will ever make the journey again, but I would hate to think that I would never visit some of out-of-the-way spots again.
The fourth leg of my journey was a short one. I started at Menstrie on Friday morning and climbed up the glen side until I reached the grassy road that runs along towards Blairlogie between the woods and the hillside. I was not long in digressing from this, and leaving the boundary a hundred yards or so below me, for I did want to see Lipney at closer quarters. Lipney is the small white cottage that you see on the brae face above Menstrie; because of its position it must be one of the best-known houses in the County.
It looked just as attractive from close to as it does from a distance, but the thing that had puzzled me still puzzled me - why should anyone have built a small farm up there? It was not far enough outby to be the cottage of a shepherd on an isolated hirsel (like Jerah round the back of Dumyat). Perhaps someone can tell me.
I've just said that Lipney is one of the best-known houses in the county, but when I think of it, it must just be in Stirlingshire!
It was grand walking along that grassy track by the wall-side. If the road round the county was all like that I would have had no difficulty in believing the anonymous man who thought the trip could be done in a day; forty-three miles on a track like that would be a good day's work, but perfectly possible.
The prospect up the face of sunlit Dumyat tempted me to trespass into Stirlingshire instead of skirting its boundary: indeed I sat down on the verge of the track and planned how I would climb it (a route with enough rock to be interesting but not enough to be foolhardy). But then I thought better of it, and I left the hill to the wheeling hawks and the songbirds and the sunshine and went on towards the next corner in the boundary.
You know that wee burn that runs down from the cleft in the of Dumyat? That burn becomes the boundary when it passes through the stone wall I had been following. I nearly gave the trek up for a bad job at this late date, for on the gate in the wall were three notices "W.D. No Entry," "Trespassers will be Prosecuted" and "Closed by the Authority of the Court of Session." The owner had invoked the Armed Forces and the Law: if he had added the threat of the Church (if for instance I had discovered I could go no further on pain of excommunication) that would have been that. But where the boundary ran I was obliged to walk, so I opened the gate and in some fear and trembling went quickly and quietly down the drive and out on to the main Hillfoots road. I saw no soldiers, nor the Judge Advocate General (nor for that matter a Bishop).
Down The Ditch
The burn ran under the road and into garden ground, past notices that proclaimed that this was the boundary - the first such notices that I had seen. My ingrained respect for the Big Hoose Gairden was too much for me, and I went round about and through a hayfield and met the ditch (it was hardly more) where it came out.
The ditch ran on and on through cornfields and grass pastures until it came out on the banks of the Devon a mile or so above the main Stirling - Tullibody road. The best part of that piece of the walk was the view behind me, for the hills loomed over the carse like a wave that was just ready to break. Looking at the nearest hill, Dumyat, with its impressive outline, I could understand why it is so widely believed that it loses its snow first because there is still some heat coming up from the embers of a volcano inside it (instead of just because it is a thousand feet lower than some of the hills behind it).
Open Sewer
At the Devon I crossed the ditch timidly on a fallen willow tree and waded through high weeds until I came on to the bank and could follow some sort of plain path. At first sight the river looked attractive, swinging round a corner under small pollarded willows. but on second thoughts it turned into what it is - an open sewer crawling across country until it plunges into the almost equally polluted Forth.
When I think how clean its waters were when I forded them on the boundary with Perth and Kinross-shire! Anyone there could drink from it with pleasure. But here? I wonder that the natives of the county have not long since thrown the people responsible for their filthy rivers into the sluttish streams of their own making. And, mind you, we are the people who criticise the inhabitants of old Edinburgh and Glasgow who used to tip their slops over the windowsill into the street: what else are we doing but tipping our industrial slops in the same hygienic way?
However, let me get off my hobby-horse and back on my two feet.
The bank of the Devon down to the road is well infested with rabbits - I counted sixteen burrows in one place, and I saw more rabbits in quarter of an hour than have seen for the last two years. I suppose it's an old story that five rabbits eat more than one sheep? But then, I can't be too critical - I came on a baby rabbit among the grass, and could have lifted my boot and sent it headlong into eternity. And yet I did not. Sentiment? Maybe - though I class rabbits with rats and other vermin. Anyway, the rabbit was away before I made up my mind. . .
My next stent was plain road walking, along the footpath beside the Alloa-Stirling road from the iron bridge (and from the old stone bridge beside it) The old Tullibody bridge is a beautiful piece of mason's-work. there's no doubt; but how long it will last is another thing. I noticed more stones down since the last time I passed, and I hear that Coal Board working are likely to undermine it to some extent.
Everybody knows that Black-grange Smithy is the boundary between Stirling and Clackmannan - there are big signs to say so - but what fewer people know is that the boundary just jouks across the road from the north side to the south side, and follows the south side of the road nearly as far as Manor Powis. Indeed, the small burn that is the boundary passes between the east end of the bing and the big standard that carries the bucket-chain.
New Line
Down the burn I went, prepared to turn the corner of the bing and find the stream running across and into the Forth as the Ordnance Map said. Instead I came on a new railway line. I went up on to it and found myself looking down into the Forth.
That line runs down the bank very conveniently for me, and I followed it until I came to the new mine it serves. Once a train of tubs drawn by a diesel engine passed me, but I remembered to keep the boundary in view; that was easy since it consisted of an imaginary line down the middle of the Forth.
At the new mine it was raining hard (the surface-men were going about their work in bright yellow oilskins) so I called it a day and walked up the farm roads to the main road and (after a long wait) a bus home.
A Leg By Boat
The next leg of the journey was made in a very different style. It seems that some of the men who enjoy "messing about in boats" had been discussing the earlier articles, and the upshot was that Mr Allan, the watchmaker, very kindly offered to take me round the part of the county that cannot conveniently be done on foot (since that part consists of two islands).
So Sunday afternoon saw me again on the banks of the Forth, this time getting into a neat little flatbottomed boat, the Coot. This boat (which is after the style of the dories from which the men on the Newfoundland banks fish cod, or the bateaux with which the rivers of America and Canada were opened up by the "metis") was built nearly twenty years ago in Mr Allan's back shop and launched through a window into Bank Street one Tuesday afternoon.
We launched out on the slack tide - it was nearly high water - and turned up-river. In a surprisingly short time Alloa began to fall away behind and presently the shore on the Clackmannanshire side (I won't be pedantic and call it our starboard quarter) was the wet pasture-land of the Rhind. That name has interested me since I first heard it, because down in Zomerzet (but perhaps not where the zyder apples grow) they call the litches across such river-meadows 'rhines,' and that again has a strong resemblance to the larger watercourse, the Rhine.
There was plenty to see on the river - including white birds with swallow-tails, which Mr Allen (a keen bird-watcher) told me were Arctic terns. I found the rowing (I had the stern pair of oars) more or less straightforward after I had taken off my coat which had been catching my thumbs as they came round.
Out under the railway bridge, the track high above us, I had better not say too much about the bridge, because the last time we mentioned that a destroyer had rammed the bridge after the 1st war we started a great discussion as to when it happened, how it happened, what nationality the destroyer was, and who deserves the honour of giving the alarm and taking the derelict craft away.
Tullibody Inch loomed ahead. "Could I land, just to say I had been on it?" Mr Allan ran the boat up to the bank, and I scrambled ashore. Once upon a time the island, well guarded by the sea-wall round it, was a valuable piece of grazing ground. Now, with the wall breached in several places, it is nothing but a ring of broken dyke with a marsh inside it.
From that marsh I counted a flock of fifteen herons rising and flying off. That is the biggest number of these birds that I ever remember seeing together in a flock.
We were setting off again when the midges struck and perhaps we moved pretty sharp to get out into open water, for in a matter of seconds they had struck up a scratch friendship with us.
As we rowed up past Tullibody House (standing deserted-looking a little way back from the bank) the wind was against us and we were getting no help from the current or the tide. It was quite hard work. But gradually we passed Cambus Pow, with the mason-work of its old quay nearly level with the surface of the water; then the mouth of the Devon. We turned away from Cambus now, round the long link of the river that encloses the Haugh. For a long time the gleaming white silos were over the stern, then we found we were rowing straight towards them again!
Towards the tip of the haugh we came on a sad sight. The tide had topped the river wall (not in the best of condition) and the brackish water was pouring over into the flat pastures below sea level; the water from the other side of the peninsula came rushing to meet it. By the time we began to round the end of the peninsula we could have rowed across the fields.
The Stirlingshire shore further up was in much the same state; the water of the Bannock Burn (which joins the Forth nearly opposite the new pit) seemed to be over the fields. At last, after five miles of rowing, we were ready to turn and follow the boundary down again. Some lads who were working about some boats near the Haugh Cottage demanded matches with a wealth of bad language. Neither Mr Allen nor I felt inclined to put ashore to respond to such ill-mannered requests, and the language grew worse when this became obvious. Two of the lads set out towards us in a great hurry and I lifted one oar out of a rowlock just in case they were going to do anything foolish. Whether ramming was in their mind or not, they ended up by asking civilly but with an ill grace for matches and they got them.
Turning down-river, we kept nearer to the foreign shore passing the lovely woods that once surrounded Polmaise House (now demolished and carted away); down past beech groves standing with their feet in the high tide; past the old lime kiln that looks like a ruined fort on the water's edge: past the reed-beds and the green willows and the iron railings and big buildings of the Throsk ammunition dump.
By this time the tide was ebbing fast and the water was broken into a rough jobble. The 'Coot' sometimes hammered a little as she came down off a wave, but she was a sturdy dry wee craft and I never felt anything else but safe even when the bank three or four yards away was slipping past at a good rate.
Whether Mr Allen would have felt the same if he had not had his back to me while he was rowing is another matter: it's a long-standing tradition with me to lose an oar when I'm out rowing, but the nearest I came to it on Sunday was to lift the oar out of the rowlock by accident so that the blade struck the water and swung the loom of it round against my chest.
We came down a great deal faster than we went up, sliding close past the pier at the Throsk then down the south side of Tullibody Inch.
The reeds in the reed-beds on the shore carried their long leaves out like pennants in the strong wind; they looked like reeds in a formal painting by an Oriental artist like Hokusai.
The Farm on the Inch
Out under the railway bridge, each of its pillars leaving a wake behind its cutwater as it split the running tide. I took a notion to land on Alloa Inch, so we rowed along to the jetty where a derelict iron landing craft and a far from derelict wooden landing craft lay.
The farm on the Inch. I found, has a solid steading and a solid house. There we found Mr and Mrs McGregor and their three-year old daughter.
Mr McGregor told me that the island runs to barely a hundred acres, of which over twenty is accounted for by the pasture between the river-wall and the hedge that bounds the arable land. He had just come in from the top end of the island, where a little water had found its way over the bank at the height of the tide.
As far as he knew, he said, the Island had never been flooded by the tide. In that case (I thought to myself) Sunday's tide must have been an exceptionally high one, for the water was only an inch or two from the top of the banks at several points on the river.
Mr McGregor walked with us to the jetty, along the road fringed with apple trees. With twenty head of cattle, which can find their grazing nearly all the year round on the island's shores and with 70 acres of arable, he has a good-sized farm.
We pushed the boat down to the water and set course for Alloa. I thought to myself how strange it was that the Munros at Backhills and the McGregors on the Inch, both living and working in isolated places (for you can only reach the Inch when the tide is right), should be obviously more contented than the average person you would meet within a hundred yards of Alloa Cross.
It was a hard row across the tide to the Alloa shore, where we lifted the Coot up on to dry land; Mr Allan had intended to take me right down to Clackmannan Pow and row back himself, but that was too much for me to ask - it would have been hard labour against wind and running tide.
Down to the Devon
I walked from Alloa down the back of the Black Shed (aerodrome hangers forty years ago) and out along the river bank. It was only there that I realised how strong the wind was. With it blustering at my back, I stumped on and on down the bank, past the Forthbank Mine bing, and the places where the water gnawing at the land had left long-buried oyster shells exposed. At last, after a straightforward and quite pleasant walk, I reached the point where the Devon runs into the Forth. The link was complete. Just to seal that link I took a penny out of my pocket and skied it across; the wind caught it and dropped it almost on the spot where I had stood a month before.
My trudge up the bank of the Devon does not really belong in the article (my tour being completed) but perhaps I could mention that I caught a salmon. Since it was lying very dead and abandoned by the tide, that is not as clever as it seems.
I crossed my tracks at the entrance to the Craigrie Pit, thus confirming the circuit.
That question - "Has it been done before? " - keeps bothering me. One thing sure, I would rather walk the present boundary than the old one. A map of the county in 1795 shows the frontiers roughly the same except for two surprising differences - an 'island' of Clackmannanshire taking in Cambuskenneth, Causewayhead and the Abbey Craig: and a long 'tongue' of Stirlingshire coming down the Balquharn burn, along the Devon and up the east side of Alva House (making, in fact, Alva and district part of Stirlingshire.)
I think you'll agree that Causewayhead and the Abbey Craig were well lost in return for Alva and the hills behind it? Did I hear somebody from Tillicoultry saying "Not a bit!" Maybe I'd better stop before an argument starts.
CHAPTER V
THROUGH THIRTEEN 'TOWNS'
My days of hiking round the county, I thought, were over - until it suddenly struck me to wonder whether it would be possible to walk to every town and village in the county in one day. I had shown what a big place Clackmannanshire really was by walking round it; could I now show what a small place it was by walking back and forward through it? I did a bit of totalling up on the map; the answer to the sum seemed to be about twenty-two miles. So it could just about be done.
I was speaking about this at home when my wife neatly hoisted my plan by pointing out that I had forgotten two large cities - Kennet and Cambus. There was no getting round it, they had to be included in the route too. So my line of march had to be re-cast to take them in.
About seven o'clock, well shod but not at all sure that I could last the distance, I set off from Clackmannan, across the field towards Kennet. It was a good start - short turf to walk on, a flock of peewits to watch, and a pleasant sun shining down.
Just into Kennet I turned into a stubble field and walked across it towards Brucefield pit.
This was the first time I had had the chance to see the back view of Kennet village: it looks more attractive from that side, with its big gardens - the long strips stretching down from the back of the houses look big enough to be a cross between an allotment and a smallholding.
I passed the rear of Brucefield pit offices; two men in one of them stared at me as if wondering whether to challenge my presence on Coal Board property. However, I nipped across the railway line and stared back at them as if I had every right to be there (which is questionable, I suppose). It's one of the chief assets of reporters that it takes a lot of nerve for a man to challenge somebody that looks as if he knows what he is doing and where he is going!
My route lay across country until it coincided with the main road through Forestmill north. The roadway made a nice change of walking, and the traffic was not heavy at that time of morning. I could stand and admire a field full of fifty bullocks without worrying whether I was going to be side-swiped by a truckload of fish from Aberdeen.
It was just before Forestmill Station that I came on a nice bit of consideration for other road users. Someone had had a puncture and had hauled a big copingstone off the top of the dyke and put it on the roadway to hold the axle up; then, with the puncture mended, they had driven away and left the stone just where it could be struck by a motor-cyclist driving close to the kerb. I set the boulder back in the cope, so perhaps I saved somebody's life (I'll never know and neither will the man who might have been the victim).
Beyond the railway bridge and up the hill I saw a skid-mark on the road - a single skid, but when I paced it out I discovered it was forty-eight yards long. Somebody must have stood on his anchors.
Long Cloud
The woodlands on both sides of the main road open out when you get on to the summit at Gartlove Farm, and the whole range of the Ochils lies along the north. On Friday there was a peculiar band of cloud on them. It started at Alva and lay, dead straight and level, for five miles or more to the east; the under-side of the bar of cloud was as horizontal as if it had been laid off with a ruler.
Down at Forestmill I discovered that the village had acquired a cafe since I had last been through, but it was too early to start thinking about cups of tea. I sat instead on the wall of the bridge over the Devon and watched the water slide out from under a screen of ash branches, over a bed of stone slabs and broken dishes.
A yard or two away is another watercourse: the lade that carries the water supply down to Gartmorn Dam. It wag running full and fast; funny to think that drouthy Alloa can make away with that flow of water.
Beyond Forestmill I turned off up the hill, leaving the main North road without marry regrets. It was the first time I had walked up this road, which goes up steeply on to the long flat ridge which runs down the centre of the county. Beyond the first crest I dropped down into a small 'secret' valley that even from the map I had not suspected. It would be rather good fun, if you won a couple of football pools, to take a valley like this and turn it into the perfect farm, a surprise to anyone who chanced on it. The weather had made it something less than perfect; a field of oats in it had been so severely laid by the wind and rain that they lay as sleek as the coat of a wet dog.
The mile or so over to Sheardale is not dramatic, but it is pleasant and quiet. I looked in vain for the ponds or small lochs that the map showed were near the houses at Sheardale, then I realised that they must have disappeared when the ground was restored after the opencast mining had finished. There was remarkably little sign that at one time the ground had been deeply gouged for coal.
The map showed a small field path down to the banks of the Devon, and I followed it more or less (one field had just been cut, and I was able to make my own more direct path between the stooks). The latter part of the path ran down the bank of a deep little glen that had been cut over for timber some time before, but was beginning to cover its nakedness with green.
It was a pleasant twisting little path, not very clearly to see; the sort of path a man might make if he was going two or three nights a week to court a lass in Dollar.
It was almost a surprise to come out on the bank of the Devon. What a beautifully clear stream it is up here, not too far from its childhood in the hills; when I thought of what it was like down towards Cambus - a thing of offence to the people who live along its banks - it made my gorge rise. I stood on the bridge where the road from Dollar to Dunfermline crosses the river, and I looked up to where the water creams over a cauld that used to dam back the water for a mill at the bridge, and I wished that somebody could do something. But what's the good of trotting my hobby-horse up and down the bed of the clear winding Devon, let alone that sludgy ditch of coal-coom, the Black Devon.
I was in Dollar at half-past nine, and out of it by about twenty to ten. I've often wanted to take the back road through Harviestoun, but somehow or other I never have had the time (or maybe I never have made the time). Anyway, now was my chance, and before quarter to ten I was climbing the hill behind the new bungalows beyond Dollar Academy.
The walk came fully up to my expectations (though here again I don't know if I am right in singing its praises because I don't know whether that road is private or public). I should imagine that it is public, because it follows the course of the old road of coaching days.
On I went through shelter-belts of woodland, fields with grazing cattle, or burns coming sparkling down from the hillside. I stopped at Dollarbank to speak to Mr Ian Cullen: two weeks before, when I walked the northern boundary of the county. I travelled for some miles along the march of his farm, He told me that at one time Dollarbank and Backhills were all part of one farm, more than 6,000 acres in extent. Six thousand acres is about the size of sixty in-by farms or perhaps six hundred smallholdings; but where the rent of carse-land runs to pounds per acre, the rent of such hill land is measured in shillings.
Devon is Heaven
Looking down from two hundred feet up on the hillside I was surprised to see how many links there were in the course of the Devon. A link of Forth is worth an earldom in the North. What is a link of Devon worth? Maybe a Hillfoots Nationalist would re-write the rhyme into - A link of Devon is worth a hundred years in Heaven.
Maybe.
Harviestoun estate, the kingdom of that noted veteran of cattle breeding, J. E. Kerr of Harviestoun, arries an unmistakeable hint of the old days of high farming. Maybe we've come a long way from the old days of
The rich man in his castle
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And order'd their estate.
But at its best it must have been a peaceful, orderly and efficient way of life. It's certain that these days will never come back; but it is nice, once in a while, to walk through farms where the roads and hedges are well kept, where the gates hang and the gaps are not filled in with bed ends, barbed wire and baling-wire.
Down past the Harviestoun mine, set on the edge of the woods: over the hill past the cemetery, and into Tillicoultry for a very welcome cup of coffee. I was lasting well - maybe I could manage the circuit in a day.
If I was asked what I remembered about passing Coalsnaughton I would say, 'A bed of show onions at the top of the right-of-way.' I stood and talked to the man who had grown them (I don't know his name) and learned a bit about growing onions successfully - something I have never managed to do myself.
Down the backbone of the county to Fishcross was one of the pleasantest stents: not, once again, that there is anything wildly exciting about it. You get a grand view of the hills, and for much of the time you pass between big areas of scrub-land that is pleasant to look at even if it isn't very useful.
I didn't go right into the shopping centre of Fishcross - I turned off before I reached the tramlines, and went down through the scheme where the temporary houses are being demolished. That job seems to have been going on for years. I was surprised to find that some of these houses were inhabited. I would pass a couple of ruins and come on a house with curtains in the window; then another three or four semi-demolished houses again.
Brisket
By the time I had reached the centre of Sauchie I was meeting people going for their dinner; and I began to feel rather peckish. The answer came in Fairfield, when I bought a quarter of brisket from the Co-op. van. It lasted nearly to the edge of the Number Nine woods.
I started a joke there that I suspect will still be going the rounds in Sauchie. Two lads were high up in a tree, and another was on the ground. One of the boys up aloft was wearing a lovely Davie Crocket hat, and I couldn't resist saying to the boy on the ground, "There's a fox up that tree and it's sitting on a boy's head!"
It was a couple of seconds before the penny dropped but as I walked on I could hear this joke being retailed to the others, including the one wearing the fox.
I hadn't lingered long in Fishcross, but I spent even less time in the thriving metropolis of Alloa; I came down from the woods and down Thorne Road for a few yards, then crossed the road and set off across country towards Cambus. This plan worked out splendidly (and I hope the members of Braehead Golf Course will excuse me crossing their course) except for one thing: there is a belt of woodland between the golf course and the road, and when I had crossed this I found that the hedge between the wood and the Alloa - Cambus road was pretty well manproof.
There were three choices - go back on to the golf course and find another way down; plough along through the rather marshy woodland until I found a gate; or push through the hedge. I found a place where the hedge seemed a bit thinner at the bottom, went down on my hands and knees and breenged through. A van driver, coming from the Stirling direction, nearly went through the opposite hedge when he suddenly saw a man materialising out of the ground at the side of the road.
I'm glad to report that to push through a hedge forwards is less drastic than to be pulled through a hedge backwards; even so, I felt the nettle stings on my hands for an hour or so, and it was a while before I picked the last of the wee twigs out of my hair.
The whistle on the brewery was blowing when I reached Cambus. "Dinnertime for them but not for me!" I thought - the memory of the brisket is wearing off. But I hadn't reckoned on the hospitality of Mrs Jessie Peat at the Post Office; I went for a small bottle of lemonade, and ended up drinking tea and eating egg and Chips!
Refreshed by this, Tullibody wasn't long in falling away behind me. As I started downhill towards Menstrie I had an excellent view to the west over "Lost Clackmannanshire" (Abbey Craig, Cambuskenneth and Causewayhead). What about starting a campaign to recover our lost territory? After all, news was made by similar attempts to recover the Sudatenland and the Italian Tyrol.
I Saved The Castle!
I had my small bottle of lemonade in the Cherry Tree café in Menstrie. Now that I had only a matter of a mile or two to complete my journey I was able to take things easy. Going out the back road towards Alva I thought to myself on what small chances events hang. I suppose you could say, without stretching the facts, that I am responsible for the preservation of Menstrie Castle. A little more than a year ago I wrote an article about Menstrie Castle and Windsor Castle, and the paragraph referring to their forthcoming destruction came to the notice of Mr Moultrie R. Kelsall. He really set things moving with an article in the 'Scotsman.' Maybe when the photograph of the opening ceremony at the rebuilt Menstrie Castle appears in this paper, Mr Kelsall and I will be bang in the middle of the platform party. Stranger things have happened (but not many).
To return to the realms of reality, that's a lovely walk along past the Myreton road end to Alva, with the hills on the left and the valley on the right. On a seat not far out of Menstrie "old men a'sunning sit" and I was tempted to join them for a rest and a wee blether, but I was getting on towards journey's end.
The quarry at Balquharn, from which the soil was taken to build the 'hump' in the new marshalling yard is certainly much bigger from close to than from the main road. I walked on to the floor of the hole, and I would guess that the depth of the artificial cliff is not less than sixty feet (you could put an ordinary two-storey house at the bottom of the hole and still drop a stone quite a distance into the chimney).
The good surface on that back road stopped suddenly on the outskirts of Alva; a pity, that, but maybe the Model Burgh have some plans for resurfacing it - as the surface is, nobody would be tempted to go along that road from the Alva end, and if they did not they would miss a grand walk.
I reached Alva under nine hours from the time that I left Clackmannan, so the total walking time (subtracting the time that I was eating at Cambus) was around eight hours. In that time I had visited, however briefly, every town and village in a whole county.
Maybe Clackmannanshire IS the Wee County after all.