This book, published in 1985 by Clackmannan District Library, was written by Richard Bernard, a resident of Coalsnaughton.
Devon Valley Diary.
by Richard Bernard
Published 1985.
FOREWORD
Richard Bernard's first booklet, "Walks in the Ochils" which was published in 1984, has been an unqualified success, and I hope that this new booklet will meet with similar popularity. This part of Scotland, lying near the Ochils, is a hill walkers paradise. Despite this, tourists and hill walkers tend to miss out the Ochils, and if our little booklets go some way towards reversing this trend, then so much the better.
Richard Bernard was born in Devonside in 1912, and it was not until 1960 that he moved to his present home of Coalsnaughton. He served an apprenticeship in one of Tillicoultry's many mills, but always wanted to work in the open air. His next two jobs were to put this right. Firstly, he worked for a time as a "track walker" on the railway, where it was his daily duty to walk from Tillicoultry to Kinross! He was thus able to earn a living while at the same time satisfying his interest and enjoyment of nature. With the decline of the railways, he took a job as a road-section man with Clackmannan County Council which again allowed him to keep up his interest in the countryside. This job was to last for 25 years, the remainder of his working life.
After Richard Bernard retired, he answered an appeal for written contributions to his local Church magazine. This led him to penning a monthly review of his wanderings and impressions around the Hillfoots area, or sometimes further afield. Not a bad record at all for a man who thought that the first article would be a "one-off" effort !
I feel sure that readers will enjoy this little booklet, showing as it does Richard's obvious enjoyment of nature and his love for his own beloved Ochils and beyond.
D. HYND
District Librarian
January, 1985.
BY FARM, FIELD AND FOOTPATH
Buffeted by Shelley's "Wild West Wind" I trudged up through the barley stubble, the dry stems rustling with every stride. A halt then on the brae-head to look back o'er the Leigh Road I'd just left and across to the hills. I'd been on them twice this week. On the Monday I'd been chased off the top of King Seat by a threatening flurry of sleet, a cauld-rife hint o' the winter ahead. Wednesday was spent on the Wood-hill, a day of splendid isolation. In most woods on the level the eye is confined to its immediate surroundings but in this one, due to its almost vertical tilt, vision ranges unrestricted to the far distant merging of earth and sky. Seen from here its Autumn colouring was dulled by heavy cloud formations, but they broke now and then to allow flashes of sun to streak across its face like coloured search lights.
I was short of time and rejected the Dam Loan for a quick route through Farmer Bell's ground on to the rebuilt field road that leads from the south end of the Sink Wood to Longriggs Fam. They had seemingly made an excellent job of levelling, draining and resowing after the holocaust of the open-cast coal operations. The greensward swept all around concealing beneath its emerald coat the stone-riddled clay that had displaced the former generations-old, dung-enriched soil.
If the top soil itself couldn't be replaced in its former state they were at least making certain that the hedges were returned, for doubles lines of fencing a yard or so apart enclosed the young hawthorn and beech plants, ensuring survival from the omnivorous appetites of the near-by sheep. Farmer Bell has a sympathetic leaning towards hedges. This one, when nature, he says, "Will provide a shelter for my kye frae the cauld north winds", and he likes "Tae see a mavis or green-lintie nesting in them come the spring, Wi' a paitrick or twa in the haidge - bottom". A contrasting attitude to that of another farmer barely a mile away who'd ripped his hedges out, regardless, in the sacred interests of farming efficiency. This meticulous attention to detail concerning the hedges hasn't extended itself to the restoration of the old right-o-way that ran from the village to Longriggs Farm by way of a path through the Sink Wood. A pleasant and not too arduous excursion for villagers up in years is obviously an insignificant item for todays centralised authorities.
There was then the passing of the big new barn at the fam and onto the road towards Dawson's Mine, to the owner of which much thanks must be given for the tidy condition of an old right-o-way which will, as shair as daith, when the mine closes, revert to nature. The stunted growth of a field of rape indicated that the environmental upheaval of the open cast hadn't been to their liking.
There was escape from the blustery wind on the final brae to the mine with the black bulk of the Gartmorn-hill Wood providing an oasis of quiet and warmth. Fallen birch leaves edged the road with gold, and the oak, birk and beech lining the wood were in colourful contrast to the dark gloom of the conifers. In the open a recent frost had softened and dimmed the brummles but, sheltered here, there were still a few with the gloss of health. They were eaten now with heightened appreciation knowing that many a long month would hae tae pass ere the brummle time was back again. Round a corner, yards from the mine, a guelder-rose's berries hung in bunches among almost leafless branch hemmed in by hardy hawthorns whose darker, firmer, berries will feed the birds long after the turn of the year. There arose here once again that intriguing, unanswerable, question as to the reason behind nature's infinite variety. Why have the fruit of the guelder a translucent pink, and pulpy when pressed, with a oval shaped seed, and have the hawberry a darker red with firm flesh and a big round seed?
I went on towards Gartenkier. I'd make for the Long Loan whose wind tossed fringe of trees broke the skyline above the farm. A gate opposite the road to Shurry-yairds is ideally suited for a lean and a long leisurely look at the hills. Brought up as I was in the valley, with a restrictive and fore-shortened view of them, I can mind fine as a laddie, getting my first sighting from the heightened view-point of the Sheardale Road, and being awed by their sheer bulk and extent. I turned away now reluctantly for, despite the succeeding years bringing more renowned and spectacular hills within my scope, I can look at the familiar outlines of the Law, King Seat, or Craigleith with a wee trace of the wonderment inspired in that distant laddie.
Further ahead a young road-side willow was already fore-casting spring with bright green buds tipped with red. Up the bit brae towards the farm, some person, with a sense of the fitness of things, had built a rough, but strong, wooden seat adjacent to the old quarry. I tried it out for size and found that it gave an excellent view dam-wards, and would be a boon to elderly limbs. As my own no' sae spry limbs levered me up from the seat, I discovered I'd left my stick ahint at one of my many halts to study natural phenomena. I've a built-in propensity for doing this. When I retired one of my first tasks was the cutting and shaping of a sturdy ash stick. Despite it becoming, with constant use, like an extension of my arm, and an essential adjunct to up and down hill travel, I kept leaving it behind, and adding repetitive miles to my journeyings. One boiling hot day I made a double ascent of the Tillicoultry hill to retrieve it from the wicket at the hill-foot. Another day I was in the Maddy Moss when a sense of loss sent me back an undulating couple of miles to where it was resting patiently on the Indicator Cairn of Ben Cleuch. We finally parted when I got into a car at Glenfinglas in the Trossachs, leaving it at the roadside, and minded about it when we were half-ways home. I hope it found a good owner for it was gone a few days later. There's some consolation for the loss when I glance reminiscently through "snaps" of hill-tramping epics and see my old ash-plant figuring prominently.
The path leading to the Long Loan right-o-way had been ploughed over making a mucky start to the wood-land walk. Rape in the next field dwarfed the crop I'd passed earlier, and the sheep that were nibbling fastidiously at the tender top leaves now would be glad of the kalerunts in the hard days ahead. In the wood the strong wind thrashed the top-most branches of the oaks and ash trees, and had whipped a copse of rowans bare, spraying the berries like drops of blood on the dark leafmouldy ground. The stiff-leaved holly trees, numerous here, ignored the wind's violence and would flaunt their glossy green-ness in the months to come among their stricken, bare-branched neighbours. The top half of the wood, before it slants down-hill towards the Cast and Black Devon is drier, and suits a more varied selection of broad-leaved trees than the lower, wetter, section in which the birches proliferate. The monotony of their denuded trunks was broken at intervals by towering, ancient beeches islanded clear of the sphagnum-mossed areas, and each with that no-man's-land of rich, leafy soil beneath their canopy in which nothing seems to grow. I've seen it mentioned that the density of leaf-shade under beech trees inhibits growth but I noticed here that bracken, trying to extend its sphere of influence, was a death-like yellow, which prompted the thought that there could be a chemical element in the beech soil inimical to growth, for there are definitely other deciduous trees with as dense a foliage.
The path swung towards a field where a dozen cattle, variegated in colour, were scattered, grazing. Their heads rose as I cracked a twig, and they converged to form a circle facing me with a big dun beast slightly ahead, the leader.
Here, despite a thousand and more years of domestication was an instance of their wild ancestry surfacing. When wolves and such like predators were rife they'd formed similar defensive formations, and despite the lack of need, they acted on old-far off instincts. Similarly present, day civilised man still acts on defensive instincts, but has honed and refined them with his inventive brains so that the end result has been - Cruise and Trident, a truly remarkable end result to a million years of evolution!
Birds had been scarce on this trip. There were the customary clatterings of cushies ahead of me, and a covey of a dozen paitricks had hedge-hopped in close formation. A field's length away a tractor ploughing was obscured by a white, swirling cloud of gulls, and when I reached the Cast side a blackie with the flesh-coloured beak of immaturity was never-the-less gobbling down haws with the dexterity of an old hand at the game.
Huge, glowering clouds out of the west were bringing darkness and a spitting rain now, and I quickened pace past Shurry-yairds farm house, the freshly whitened walls and new red tiles prominent in the gloom. I hugged the sheltering sides of wood and hedge until a final brae-climb saw the bright lit windows of Longriggs lying below me. I passed the farm with the thought that the "Cottar's Saturday Night" was spent a bit differently now from that of Burns's day. "The big ha' Bible", if still extant, would be ousted in favour of the ubiquituous "Telly", the religion, nowadays, of the masses. Change there might be, but there still remains the unalterable need for shelter and warmth on a cauld wet nicht, and I scudded on towards it.
TILLY HOUSE AND SANDPIT
The November of 1983 was unique weatherwise. I can't remember a time when October failed to see snow whiting our hills, so that for November to enter and depart without the high tops donning their mantle of the frozen stuff was a definite phenomenon, Phenomenal too were some of the grand days mid-way through that month, and I describe one of which the impression lingers on.
The two previous days I'd been on both King's Seat and Wood Hill, and the locomotive parts of ageing frame were protesting against further exploitation. So I was having an easy day, confining myself to a leisurely perambulation nearer sea-level. On the Drummie Knowes, from a temporarily unvandalized seat, I could scan the valley end to end, from where Dumyat swept down towards a dark-edged Wallace Monument, to the distant tree-silhouetted heights around Rumbling Brig.
This scene attracts at all seasons, but the most colourful must be the autumnal splendour of leaf decay exalted and enhanced today by the warm flood of sunlight. As I descended into the valley there was colour everywhere. A black-bird gulping down haws was conspicuous among the blood red berries, as was the gold of the birches sprinkled among the dark firs of the Mellock. The rounded bings of the old mine had the birch-gold too, against a forest of the perennially green broom, whose yellow June splendour had bequeathed a legacy of countless pea-pods.
On the bridge a peaceful contemplation of the Devon's leaf-swirling waters was broken by a pair of lads on motor bikes. They'd be heading for an ear-shattering, rough-riding session on the heighes and howes of the bing area, and a race-tracking spell on the forestry road through the Mellock.
Public roads, whose use was once the perogative of the foot-traveller, are now private to the car, and few foot-paths, or unbeaten tracks, are free from the insensate rattle of the petrol engine, with which most, of this younger generation seem to be held in thrall. I moved to distance myself from the distracting explosions.
The cemetery man was redding up beneath the steep bank of Rhododendrons, and there was the appealing tang of wood-smoke from his fire near the burn. Next door, in the Dutchman's field, part was brown after the tattie lifting, and part a dark green where two lads, more usefully employed than the bike fanatics were sprinkling white fertiliser by hand on an extensive crop of leeks. A field-length on and I scrambled into a hawthorn dotted park where flocks of felties, disturbed at their feeding, yattered in Scandinavian and fled ahead of me. Lush grass concealed the field's former status as that of a swampy back-water of the Devon, and later a coup. The hidden past was uncovered when I peered down a rabbit burrow to see what might have been a piece of the best Wedgewood lodged at stick-length ben, with fragments of 'cheeny' scattered at the entrance.
On the Hillfoots road, at the foot of what was once called the Sand-pit Brae, I took what little of life that remains to me in my hands and crossed fornent the snarling stream of traffic. I was on to the former, now disused, Mains Farm Road made redundant after the influx of the adjoining housing scheme. Where sned, neat hedge-rows once bordered a broad, tidy, lane I had difficulty now in moving unscathed along a narrow path o'er hung with unkempt grass brambles, 'sticky wullie' , thistles, and the grasping tentacles of a hedge that had grown tree-high. The sun-less and cramped looking bits of back gardens glimpsed through the thorn barrier gave to the immense orchard wall of the one-time estate. These colossal stone built erections are the sole reminder of the various 'Big Hooses' that once ranged proudly along the Hillfoots, monumental memorials to a different life style, which fewer and fewer people now living can recall.
I made a leisurely circuit of the big stone barrier passing on my right a new bungalow stuck anachronistically into the edge of the Blue-bell Wood, part of the thickly wooded lower end of the Kirk Glen, where in past springtimes I'd find, near the burnside, the first snowdrops and primroses of the year. I resented this intrusion into the once secluded glen, but at the same time envious of the owner living in such close proximity to the sights and sounds of nature.
The ground had been rising imperceptibly on this shaded north side of the wall so that when I reached the old graveyard I was able to peer over the broad coping steeply down into the former garden and orchard area, now jammed tight with a rash of bungalows. There were houses cluttered too on the other sides, some built in the site of the old mansion house, the owners probably ignorant of this fact, for a few 'incomers' I've passed the time of day with in the area unaware that their houses were literally built on sand, where the quarry once was. This is the oldest burial ground to be seen in what was formerly the Parish of Tillicoultry, which in earlier times included the hamlets of Easterton, westerton, and Coalsnaughton. It was probably sited here, along with the first kirk, to be equidistant from all three communities and near enough it is when viewed from Elliestoun Craigs ahint Harviestoun. Westerton or Cairnton as it whiles got, was the present much expanded Tillicoultry, the old name still to the fore in the shape of the Westerton Farm close by the Glen.
Coalsnaughton to the south was approachable by a ford and a wooden footbridge widened for vehicular traffic in 1820. Back in the 17th century Easterton was two hamlets split by the Harviestoun Burn, Elliestoun on the west bank, below what are still known as the Elliestoun Craigs, and Harviestoun on the other side near where the Home Farm is now. Easterton still existed when Burns visited Harviestoun in 1787, but by 1820 it was gone due to a bit of empire building by the Tait family who bought and cleared the village to make way for walled gardens and landscaped grounds.
As I said, this small plot, 25 yards square, is the oldest known graveyard in the locality but, since the dawn of tine, there must have been a considerable number of local deceased who couldn't have found a final resting place in this small corner. Where were they buried? You'd have thought traces of them would have turned up sometime with all the ploughing, quarrying, mining, draining, building etc., that's gone on in recent times, or did they go in for cremation, disposing of their remains in a less detectable form, ensuring that the 'rich earth a richer dust concealed'?
I scraped the moss off one of the few standing stones, the sun warm on my back. The inscription, chiselled in the free and easy spelling of that period, held a note of resigned fatalism, and read 'I am laid in this cold bed. - And my cvring over my is spead'. The earliest decipherable stone was dated 1622 but scattered around were a dozen and more prostrate stones of indeterminable age, most scribed with the signs of their profession such as mallets, knives, chisels and so on. A six foot hog-backed monument, with a sword cut along its length, is reckoned to be of the 12th century and will have seen a puckle changes in its time, the most pronounced in the last few decades.
Out into the rabbit warren of streets it was an effort to visualise the pre-housing landscape. An aid to orientation was the remnant rim of the long mound of sand known geologically as the Cunninghar Ridge, part of which had been a sand quarry. I suspect this was left as a natural distinction mark between the private and the council housing. Glacial action is reputed to have been the main factor in the forming of this unique sand barrier which once spanned the valley from the hill-foot to the heights of Drummie before enormous flood waters breached it, leaving the thin ribbon of the Devon to mark the event.
The encroachment of the housing effectively wiped out the largest colony of sandmartins in the county, as old as the quarry which was worked at the turn of the 17th century. I was now on part of a right-o-way which ran, when I was a laddie, from the Dollar Road, skirting the sand-pit, to turn west through a long oak avenue, and finish at the top of Hill Street, the limit then of Tilly's expansion. A few yards more and I'd exchanged the sun for the shade of the Clowe Knowes, the clump of trees opposite the cemetery.
The records claim that a Druidical circle once stood here 130 feet in diameter, with stones 5 1/2 feet high. They've been long gone, probably used for drains or gate posts - no hindrance from conservationists then! In the distant past the locals would invest this mysterious site with Satanic connections, for Clowe is a shortened version of the original Clowden or Cloven which have 'Auld Nick' connotations. The fact that stone urns or cists containing human bones were also found here would tend to thicken the atmosphere of superstition.
It seemed a pleasant enough place, though, on this fine November day as I sat on the dry turf, back comfortably against an oak tree, and gazed across a mile of sunlit space to where the isolated south end of cunninghar Ridge took the shape of the Target Braes and the Drummie Knowes. I'd be sprauchling up there later on, but there was no hurry.
OF CAVES AND BOBBIN' CRAWS
I had a go at the fishing the other day, starting at the Haugh Brig this side of Dollar, and plying the rod round the old familiar bends of the river to Devonside. The fishing wasn't a success as far as a fry goes. Plenty of rises to the fly, a couple of guid fish hooked and lost, and the ones I did land were smouts which were mercifully reprieved. But no day can be termed a failure when we have walked by sun-sparkled streams escorted by scooting sand-pipers, beds of gleaming marsh-marigolds and vivid patches of pink campion, and watched a plump water-vole cruise unconcernedly up-stream, and mallard ducklings dive and vanish beneath a sprawling willow. It had been a day, but no better than many I'd spent in the merry May month.
My adjourned search for a dipper's nest was resumed, and continued with brief breaks throughout that month, and had me tramping many a burnside without success, though there were side issues that helped ease the vexation of failure. While doing the Daiglen I had the notion to explore more thoroughly the old copper-mine that lies not far from that burn's junction with the Gannel, and had brought a more powerful torch than I'd had on a previous visit two summers back.
It was known to us laddies as Rantin' Rennies cave. The tale went that the said Rantin', being a dispenser of illicitly distilled liquor, retreated to hide-out when the excisemen were hard on his trail. Any association the bold Rennie had with this cavern occurred from the latter half of the 18th century onwards, for a mine was opened here in 1740 and was wrought for 10 years. Around 50 men were employed, and were housed in dwellings up on the hill-top, long gone without trace. Ores of copper, silver and cobalt had been found.
The mine mouth is a few feet up from the burn, and once the shallow entrance is stooped through there's plenty of head-room and a fairly dry floor. But then comes the snag. A few yards in, when darkness takes over, there's this 10 foot chasm cutting across the tunnel's width, effectively guarding the inner recesses of the mine. Water glints from it feet below, but the depth is purely a matter for conjecture. Fortunately for intrepid explorers there was this narrow plank spanning the void, a slim drawbridge to a formidable moat.
On my first visit I'd inched my way across it with a substantial amount of apprehension regarding its stability, my trusty stick prodding the damp wall to sustain a precarious balance, the torch putting up feeble resistance to the surrounding blackness. Once over this Rubicon the rest was straight-forward. The main tunnel led roughly 50 yards into the hill, and there were two side passages of lesser extent branching off right and left. At the end of one of them was a pile of dead bracken, as though some one had bedded down for the night. Apparently not a claustrophobiac.
I obviously reached day-light again safely on that earlier occasion and was back now bracing myself for a repeat performance of my Blondin act, which would lack the sustaining comfort of an audience.
I got in, back on the low entrance (the years hadn't favoured my joints), but when I reached the chasm I saw, admitting, to a wee tinge of relief, that the vandals, to whom no place however remote is sacrosanct, had struck again. The bridge that had possibly taken Rantin' Rennie's weight, and that of more down the years, lay in fragments in the depths. So I renewed my search up the burn for the elusive domicile of the bobbin' craw.
This enterprise was pursued at intervals through-out the whole of May, broken only by minor excursions here and there in the valley, and one major one, foreign ground was trodden with a strenuous day on the Cobbler over Loch Lomond way. As I said before, my ramblings by burn and hill were high-lighted by happenings incidental to my search. There was this hoodie-craw's nest in this remote site at the head of the Broich burn, easy to climb and ideal for a close-up photo, unlike others I'd had to snap at long range. The young lay hunched-up in their couch of sheep's wool, an unphotogenic quartet, until I gave what must have been a passable imitation of a crow's croak, and four scarlet mouths were reared eagerly.
Then the day I'd travelled over the Ben and down the Green-horn to Frandy Loch, and was disappointed again to find a ringed-plover's nest without eggs. Three seasons without success and the birds always near the nests. I have a sneaky feeling that the gull colony here do a bit of egg-snatching, for the plovers are no match for them in size. I was consoled a bit when later, on the moor, a hill-pipit flitted off an artfully concealed nest at the base of a grassy divot. So it was camera out to film the eggs quickly and let the cheeping bird back on.
Ground nests are most often found by pure accident when the area is extensive as on the hills. If the birds kept tight, and didn't panic, they'd rarely be discovered. Well into May I flushed a sand-piper off a nest and eggs at the wheel-aboot, an old backwater of the Devon opposite Tait's Tomb. The bird went into the distraction act some have, wing fluttering along the ground to draw one from the nest, which clearly indicated that a nest, or young, was near-by. I returned two days later to find the nest herried and torn out. The bird had drawn the attention of a water-side wanderer with considerably less scruples than I had.
One more instance of the susceptibility of a bird to the human presence was on the last day of May when I followed the Alva Glen back into the Moss, that peat-hagged wild place in the heart of the hills. The white flowers of the ground-hugging cloud-berry, found only in this part of the Ochils, were not as large or numerous as in other years, and this could be attributed to the unusually early dry spell of the spring.
I was clear of the Moss, and plodding up the north-west flank of the Cleuch when I heard a rustle ahint me. I turned, and practically at my feet was this golden plover's nest with four marvellously brown-blotched eggs, a sight that has stirred me since the time I was a laddie. The plover, which was peeping from a distant knowe, had risen after I'd passed it, creating for the puir bird a delayed action dilemma. I had no close-up lens with me, so I marked the place with a bit of fence wire stuck in the ground some yards off, and returned nearly a week later, the weather having broken meantime.
It took me a good fifteen minutes to re-find it despite having marked the spot practically with an X, which indicates how safe these nests are if the birds would remain still.
Destination Dipper, which had led me on a month-long meandering along nearly a dozen hill-burns ended two days previous to the plover find. The bird had the last laugh. I'd been following it for miles in acknowledged dipper country and finally ran it to ground beneath the wee brig serving the Backhill Hoose. It was on a second trip to the Frandy. Impulse gaured me crawl beneath when I heard cheeping and there was this big ball of moss and stuff with a side entrance to it. I was poised to investigate further when there was an explosion, and a half-dozen partially feathered bobbin' craws battered by me and scattered haphazardly up and down the burn. I poked my hand into what I thought was an empty nest. Whether it had been in a deep slumber or whether, when the alarm call went, it had been trampled by the frenzied feet of those in the van is hard to say, but the last ain oot gave ma fingers a guid scart and gaured the auld hert loup a bit mair than was guid for it. Still, May was a memorable month.
THE ASCENT OF BEN VORLICH DURING A TRAMP FROM LOCH EARN TO CALLANDER
It was the time of the long drooth back in July when a body could sally forth towards far horizons with the of rain a minimal consideration. So, utilising that national asset, the bus service, I was transported publicly, and with such a degree of efficient zeal, as to deposit me at my destination around 10.00 a.m. of a sunlit Saturday morning a mere 2 hours later than the same service provided a decade ago. A grand example of the present day trend towards backward progression.
Anyway the blue waters of Loch Earn shone on left as I took the south shore road past the Auld Kirk, and I was sniffing the unforgettable ascent of the bog myrtle again, assuring me that I had a foot planted (be it not as firmly as of yore) within the door-step o' the Heilands. I had this whole glorious day ahead of me ere I caught the 6 o'clock bus from Callander, and I rued only the loss of the 2 precious hours which meant that a leisurely stroll in the mid-day sun would have to be speeded up to compensate, and that a couple of 3,000 foot pimples on the earth's exterior, namely Ben Vorlich and Stue - a Chroin, weren't obstacles to be rushed at in the prevailing weather conditions.
An eastward mile on the quiet shore road and I'd reach the entrance to Glen Ample, a hill pass heading south in the direction of Callander a good 10 miles away by bee-line or crow-flight, but considerably more by the circuitous switch-back route involving the hill climbs. To save time I left the road and headed across the moorland to hit Glen Ample in its upper reaches, a meritorious enough intention until I reached the 10 foot high barrier of newly erected deer fence. Hidden reserves of soopleness were summoned up enabling me to surmount this obstacle and alight on the rough, stony track leading to the abandoned hill farm of Glen Ample. The Ample Burn fringed with alders, hugged the road-side, and provided patches of welcome shade in the rising heat. The needle notes of tits and the drawn out pipe of a green finch sounded above the muted ripple of the drought-dried bum, and it was with a wee shade of that I left its comparative coolness ahint when the track spanned the water at a ford and emerged on to the exposed hill-foot.
swallows circled as I neared the vacant farm-house. Preceding generations would have built beneath the eaves with the place echoing then with the sound of the activity of the elders, but there was now only the twittering of the birds on their ceaseless flight around the steading. A lean on a gate and a look around brought to mind the time when a day on Ben More a tramp down Balquidder Glen had ended in the gloaming not far from here. Up from the burn, on a deep bed of bracken, I'd lain through the warm August night with nothing abune me but the star strewn sky.
Forty years and more haven't dimmed the impression left by that night, and a fragment of a poem by Hodgson has caught it nicely :-
"I lay upon that silent hill
And stared into the sky until
My eyes were filled with stars and still
I stared into the sky".
Cutting short this nostalgic brush with the past I applied myself to the present problem of conveying a reluctant body up a 2 mile gradient to a point 3,000 odd ft. above sea-level when its inclination was to lie back on the scented hill turf and stew gently in the heat. There was no need as in former years to plot a course towards the summit for a broad track had been bull-dozed into the hillside, and undulated upwards as rock strewn, in parts, as the bed of a burn where storm floods had ripped it to the core. Its stony surface trapped the sun's heat, and progression was slowed to the absolute minimum short of a stand-still. Dehydration and the resultant cramp was a danger. I topped up my liquid contents back at the burn and swallowed a couple of cramp pills, and was lippening now on anterin springs and gushets from the hill's interior. There were two blessed interludes in the torrid ascent where crystal streamlets spouted from the high bank so that I need only lean in open mouthed relief to imbibe the liquid coolness, with yellow saxifrage, cluster hanging in the spray, an added refreshment.
For some time I'd noticed ahead of me a ruck-sacked figure on which I was slowly gaining, until I reached him where he'd halted on a promontory, a middle aged grey haired man scanning the rugged scene through glasses. Conversational ice is easily broken when solo hill walkers meet, for rarely have I encountered the monosyllabic introvert at a fair height above sea level, so we blethered away good style for a good ten minutes, staving off the inevitable return to the masochistic treadmill. The track petered out not far from where I left him, and I was on to ground conditions that have probably altered little since the last ice age. Deer grass, heather, sphagnum moss, rushes, blae berry and cowberry, bog myrtle and, more recently, the spreading bracken which fortunately, I'd left behind on the lower slopes. I noticed the Alpine Ladies Mantle. I picked a piece a wheen o' years back around here and it's still thriving rampantly in my bit rock garden back home.
There was a break for another refreshment where ferns had to be parted to scoop up the crystal clear life giving drops, then came the final assault on Vorlich. The last few hundred feet was a slow, sweaty and patient subdual of the near vertical rocky cone with the legs and lungs in constant protest. The emergence on to the flat topped summit would at one time have been accomplished with the arrogant confidence of youth, but, now-a-days, with the Biblical life-span round the corner, relief tinged the feeling of achievement and the eyes swept the landscape knowing that this could possibly be a final visit to a familiar portion of the earth' s surface.
Nourishment was then consumed on a patch of carpet-like turf. but, perched magnificently as I was on this sun-washed island in the sky, with a background defying description, something more fitting than a couple of hard boiled eggs should have graced the occasion. Nevertheless they did the job and I was shortly descending into the rock strewn dip separating the twin peaks. Hereabouts ptarmigan could once be seen but a blank was drawn on this occasion. Come September red deer stags bellow challenges beneath these cliff faces, though the pre-war herds that I've seen in their hundreds have dwindled.
I'd intended by-passing the steep north face of Stuc-a-Chroin, age bringing discretion, but the sight of a brightly clad party nearing the top fired me with reckless ambition, and set off in their wake. A half hour elapsed - a long one, and I plunked down on a handy slab yards from the top to wipe sweat and savour that sweet feeling of relief felt when a hairy situation has been left ahint. In climbing terms the rock face would likely be labelled "an easy scramble", but I'd twice strayed into situations requiring the resurrection of a vanished agility, and my nerves were a bit the worse for wear.
To relax a bit I went through the tedious procedure of setting up the camera for a picture of Vorlich with myself in it. The actual release of the shutter is simplified in these modern cameras, but I mind a long while back being on top of Vorlich with an old 'Brownie' box camera and achieving a surprisingly good picture with the help of lashings of string and an extended fishing rod! That over, I stood at the cliff edge and gazed down into Glen Artney close on 2,000 ft., below. The deer were there, seen only when they moved against the brown of the peat hags. From here this hidden valley, ringed by high hills, was a magnificent example of the wilderness places that exist in Scotland within an hour or two's walk from a main road.
A glance at my watch gaured me move into action. This was where the loss of the 2 hours was vital. The attempt to catch that bus over the last long miles leaves an impression of haste under a hot sun when a leisurely stroll was called for. The long ridge walk with Glen Artney beneath, the interminable descent through fly-infested brackeny hillsides to the lone sheiling of Arivaricardoch, the endless high hill road, with the snatched drinks from trickling burns, and the final shambling run down the steep descent into Callander in time to catch the waiting bus. Then there was the reflection, when comfortably seated in that handy vehicle, that though it had been a necessary adjunct to the start and finish of a grand day, there were, thankfully, still places accessible only to a man on foot.
AT "THE BRUMMLES" IN HARVIESTOUN
Rain descends with that remorseless persistence presaging it "oan fur the day". Big-beaded drops beat races down the pane. Rooftops glisten, and the town and the hills ahead hide behind a grey wall of rain. This has been the wettest back-end for a gey long while, a time for grabbing thankfully at the fleeting breaks in the depressive dampness - breaks enhanced and heightened by their scarcity value. Sitting here I count them as a miser does his coins, bringing them to mind with renewed greed as the weather worsens.
There was the day in mid-September when we tramped Ben lawers' stony ridges in shirt sleeve weather.
Threatening clouds lurked far to the north and south of us, but for one whole miraculous day there was nothing above us but a big blue sky full of the sun. The sole reminder of the recent rains was on the long descent towards a Glen-Lyon-running burn with the air full of the sound of innumerable o'er brimming bits o' springs and gushets singing their way valleywards. By the burnside we paused for a half hour to master our forces for the final part of the ridge walk, towering a steep, crowberry-clad, 2,000 feet above us. Seated on sun warmed rocks, aching feet gratefully immersed, we imbibed sustenance, and absorbed for future regurgitation the impressive backdrop of corrie and hill crest up towards the southern sky. An unforgettable day !
Then there was the day at the brummles, another brief but bright interlude in the sad and sodden saga of this September. Keats, that eloquent describer of the "back-end" scene would have been in his element that day. The fading summer had drawn fully on her by now depleted store of wares, and as I plodded steadily upwards through the Harviestoun Estate by cart track and wood strip to reach the rough pastures bordering the hill I was besieged on all sides, and even from above, by nature's multifarious manifestations.
Some days you can tramp for miles with neither hilt nor hair to be seen of wild life but this wasn't one of them. Creatures large and small seemed stirred into a common activity by the congenial conditions. Twice I saw deer. Once, in the woods, there was the glimpse of a white scutted hint-end, and three more, gazing openly in a field, turned inquiring heads towards the sound of me within the trees and were off, unhurriedly, towards the glen. Hares, rabbits, squirrels, lolloped through fields, scudded through bracken, spiralled up trees, and by the hillfoot dyke the biggest stoat I've seen for ages galumphed daftly around a fallen stone until, when conscious of the menacing presence of the erect two-legged animal, it shot up a tree with all the speed of a squirrel, but lacking that elfin creature's weightless grace, and stuck a beady-eyed head round the trunk matching me stare for stare, until a flap of my rms had it skelping up into the leafy recesses of the big lime tree.
Overhead, cushie-doos which could have remained secure in their tree-top sanctuary, blittered their way into the open to bite the dust, metaphorically, as I cocked my bramble stick at them. A more sophisticated green woodpecker scolded from the screen of trees behind the gardener's old house and retreated unseen, as is their fashion, which prompted the alteration of a line of Wordsworth's to read:-
Woodpecker shall I call thee bird,
Or but a wandering voice.
To reach bramble territory there was the crossing of that portion of Harviestoun Glen lying between the farm steading and the hillfoot, always a satisfying experience. Today the fine grassed turf beneath the beeches was colourful with fungi of all descriptions and the shining pillars of the trees towered branchless for most of their height. At the top end, where it assumes canyon like depths, a narrow deer walk hugs the glenside and reaches the white watered burn by a slanting descent over years-old rotting tree remains and through the leaf fall of a wheen of winters.
The far side had a more lenient slope, but it was fine to draw breath on a fresh fallen limb, have a bite, and take note of the harebells and Herb Robert, and the mouselike meanderings of a cutty wren among a pile of dead branches.
Through the remaining bit wood and over a crumbling boundary dyke and I was into fields that hadn't seen a plough in my time. It's a bramble and whin-strewn area riven by tiny glens bearing clear spring water from the massive King Seat hill abune. In early summer the gold of the flowering whins could be seen prominently from the far side of the valley, but it was replaced now by masses of yellow ragwort, a plant which, given scouth for a couple of years, can take over as efficiently as that pink pest the willow herb, or the thistle tribe, all having the ground covering capacity of the wind dispersing seed head. It is known variously as Stinking Willie, Beeweed, Bindweed and Ragweed, Burns favouring the last version when he had warlocks and witches:-
"Skin the muirs and dizzy crags on ragweed nags".
To skim the muirs on that prickly customer Rubus Fruiticosis, or the brummle plant, would require a warlock with a hardened hide. On my excursions into odd and out-of-the-way corners of the district there have at times been forced from me expletives of a mild nature when encountering the restraining attentions of the brummle. But all is forgiven when the luscious fruits appear, and it was a sight to gladden the heart to see the bushes blackened with the berries. Black diamonds they are, for the round segments composing the whole berry hold each a sparkle of light akin to the shining facets of a well-cut stone. A slight diminution of this sparkle indicates a berry which is over the hill, and is probably host to a maggot. This posed no problems to a person I knew back in the thirties, when work was scarce and the pu'in of brummles for financial gain could eke out a meagre living. I referred questioningly one day to the maggots clearly visible in his basket and got the reply "They'll hiv beef wi' thur jam"! An answer which, if not logical, was lucid.
Nowadays, when a modest quantity of fruit suffices our needs, I can afford to be choosy and make peripatetic progress, butterfly fashion, among the scattered bushes picking only the cream of the crop, and seeing that the maggots fulfil their pre-ordained purpose in life and don't end up in our jeely pan.
There was time too, when the back ached a bit, to sit away down and, from this vantage point, cast a wandering eye over the familiar woods and fields. The sun, a comfort to venerable bones, was again, by the nature of things, on the back-gaun for another year. There was a yellowing tinge to the leaves of birch and beech already, and an autumnal patchwork of ley, plough and stubble fields stretched the eye. Swallows swooped around the farm below. Soon there'd be no trace of them save for the dried shells of their nests on the barn rafters.
That other improbable-seeming migrant, the butterfly, was out in numbers, working a bit overtime to allow for the many days the sun had been on strike. On a clump of eye-bright a small copper shone like a jewel. Tortoise-shells, or "Scoatch Butterflees", were everywhere, along with cabbage white, whose voracious progeny have made a braw mess o' my sprouts. Then there was the majestic fly-past of a Red Admiral conscious, seemingly, of its superior size, the light glinting off the white splurges on its wing-tips.
By now my basket was o'er brimmed with "swart blackberries". It was time to go. A last look round at, a sun-washed Keatsian scene and I was off downhill through woodland and field :-
"While barred clouds bloomed the soft dying day,
And touched the stubble plains with rosy hue".
TAITS TOMB
It was the merry month of May. Ahead lay the hills snow-clad to their feet and the air, as I cycled down Coalsnaughton Glen, sliced through me like a frozen knife, so that the dumping of the bike at Devonside thwarted by minutes the deadly onslaught of hypothermia. The rejected parting advice concerning gloves was painfully recalled as I stuffed the swollen members into pockets. "Who at sea-level in May would go around like a big Jessie"? I'd replied, and never were words so quickly and regretfully eaten!
Climbing the stile on to the Drummie right-o-way the blood was still nipped and the ways were now foul. Gone was the time of the dry spell at the hinder end of April when stoor-reek rose from the farm roads and muck was as firm as a store pie-crust. I was back discreetly to the winter foot-wear and splashed confidently through runnels that were non-existent a week by. The grass, as though impatient on its mark, had shot up over-night after the long-awaited rains, and sodden trails marked my progress through the greenness. In the adjacent Greig's Park a half-hundred pied ruminants were keeping the lush growth within bounds - big healthy kye that would o'er brim a puckle milk bottles.
At the water-side it seemed a bit queer to see large flight formations of swallows and sand-martins wheeling and manoeuvering against a back-ground of snow-bound hills, and it must be a hardy strain of insect that would venture forth in these conditions to provide a life-saving meal for the hirundines. The Devon was swollen with snaw-brae and I made a cautious navigation of a slippery path by its edge. On left was a fair-sized triangular piece of uncultivated ground. It was once railway property, and I can mind it being scythed in long ago summers by railway employees for fair crops of hay. Nowadays it is a for-all scene of contention between varied assortments of herbage. There is a rush by early flowering plants to enjoy their brief spell of lebensraum ere later, taller, growths deny them light. Ramsons, celandines, and stitchwort were having their brief spell of glory. Meadow-sweet and willow-herb would be waist high in a week or so, and already the red campion had a job keeping its head clear of the cow-parsley whose pungent smell, as I tramped through it, hung in the damp air. We called it dog's flourish. Whether this had an olfactory connection with that animal's indiscriminate urinary habits is conjectural. Dandelions on the old railway-bank extended this frame of thought. The pulling of them when we were young was said to presage a damp bed for the puller, and I
notice that as far afield as Somerset the local name is "wet-a-bed", though our term was a bit more explicit.
A cold drizzle was falling now and even the golden blooms of marsh marigolds by the cemetery burn couldn't lighten the gloom as I trudged the whin-chipped surface of the "Devon Way". This is supposed to be a Nature Trail where wild life, both animal and bird, is to be observed, yet they surface it with material that relays a warning hundreds of yards ahead as you crunch along. The Public Park perception is evident here.
They started off by tidying up the banks and verges, hacking down hawthorns and hip-bushes that provide winter feeding, shelter and nesting sites for our avian friends. At frequent intervals they built mounds of earth at, the track's edge and planted them with bedding roses and garden shrubs that introduce a false note to what is intended to be a wilderness walk. When I mentioned this to one of the many "Rangers" he didn't seem to grasp my argument, though he did see my point when I indicated the unnecessary expense involved in the initial planting out and the subsequent upkeep of the superfluous excrescences.
My attention was drawn to a narrow strip of ground a hundred or so yards in extent separating the road from the railway. It appeared to have suffered a recent bombing with craters and heaved-up soil along its length. The Devon once threw its curves nearer the Dollar Road, and this had been one of the isolated backwaters left when the railway engineers altered the curves to obviate the building of bridges, and give a straight run to Dollar. These reedy haunts of coot and heron were set by the local councils to serve a more useful function as rubbish dumps, and it was a familiar sight in those far-off, machineless, days to see the horse-drawn coup-cart make its leisurely daily pilgrimage from Dollar. The burrowing of rabbits must have brought to the surface bits of old china and stuff and revealed to some discerning passer-by the potential value of this century old dump. Ironically, coup-rakers consist at one tine of the lower strata of society, but I've seen expensive cars drawn up here, and the respectable looking owners delving diligently through the dirt for the discarded junk of other times.
Beyond this the main Harviestoun burn is conveyed beneath the track through a culvert, a resting place this for sea-trout at the back-end, and where poachers once plied their nefarious trade by netting one end and splashing at the other. Further on, where the road swings away from the line, diminishing the irritating roar of the traffic, a fresh playground for vandals has been constructed. From an adjacent lay-by on the road, access to the Devon-way could have been had by a simple path through the intervening bit ground, but once more the Public Park syndrome exerted itself in an elaborate lay-out of paths and beds of shrubbery with, in the centre, a big wooden erection with a map of some of the rights-o-way in the area. I could have pencilled in a dozen that have disappeared, or been neglected, since the formation of this expensive and, in the main, unnecessary, Countryside Commission which took over the duties of the old parish Councils.
A field-length away from this probably transitory sample of modern workmanship stands the walled and wooded enclosure long known as Tait's Tomb, which has endured close on a couple of centuries of winter storms. A crossing of yet another of Harviestoun's many burns and a plod through the soaked grass saw me before a heavy iron gate set in the massive 10 foot wall. Inside, the half dozen head-stones, all around 7 feet tall, were grouped in a small area at the north end where the sun would reach most. Today it was a dreich scene. There was a dripping back-ground of the cemetery type cypress, cedar, and juniper, and a dismal thicket of yew encroached on the farthest off stone. The withered
foliage of hypericum shrubs and fern-clumps fringed the graves, and ages-old moss obscured the stone-chiselled eulogies to the far-off dead.
When, in 1880, John Tait, the founder of Harviestoun, had his wish to be laid near the waters of his beloved Devon, it lapped these walls, and un-interrupted woodland lay all around, for today's Hillfoot Road didn't then exist.
But time saw the Devon retreat before the railway, and traffic thunder within yards to the north. Yet there is a sense still of peace and isolation within these sheltering walls, and sunshine, blossom and bird-song will, at times, ease today's gloom.
John Tait's only son, Crawfurd, is buried here with his wife. Crawfurd had 9 children and the eldest, John, who was Sheriff of Perth, is also buried here. The youngest son, an Archbishop of Canterbury, has a memorial stone here but was buried in Aldington, Surrey. Corners in foreign fields claim too the rest of the family, though there is a stone here to Colonel Thomas Tait, who commanded in India the 3rd Bengal Irregular Cavalry, known as Tait's Horse, in the period 1840-1851... a Bengal lancer! A smaller stone, to the right as you enter, marks the burial here of the only non-Taits. These were two loyal servants, house-keeper and governess, who spent their lives with the family, and must have been well-regarded to have been accorded this singular honour.
A cold hour later, I watched, from the Drurmmie knowes, a ray of sun pierce the glowering clouds, and gleam on the snow high on King Seat. Better days lay ahead.
WHITE STANE OF TAM BAIRD
There's a large rock high up on the hillside a bit west of Dollar called "The White Stane of Tam Baird". Like Burns' Hole, Helen's Muir or Andra Gannel Hill, it poses a question of origin that has so far eluded me. It has had sufficient significance, however, to merit being marked on maps of the district from the late 18th century right through to the present Ordnance Survey one-inchers. So I though I'd make "Tam's Stane" an exploratory objective not, perhaps, as significant as the finding of the source of the Zambesi, but a grand enough excuse for a tramp through a sunlit countryside.
Chaffinches serenaded me from the roadside plantings beyond Muircot, and I left my rusty steed at Harry's to face the majestic Ochil frontage from the Devonknowes Farm road. Snow glittered on the far back hills and it seemed a lot longer than yesterday that I'd been boot-deep in drifts on the stretch from the Cleuch to Kingseat Hill. There had been no birdsong up there where winter is sweired to leave, so I could more appreciate the ringing notes of the great tit in the Bessie Glen wood. Woodsmoke and saw sound came from the Target Brae strip where they'd been busy felling diseased elm for the past week. A haw bush on the Braeside had precocious buds, and I chewed a few as we'd done as boys, their taste resembling the fruits they'd bear in the months ahead.
At the waterside green stuff formed a carpet under the trees, much of it celandine, which would wax golden later this month. Sauch branches swung in the river as, swollen with rains and snaw brae, it tugged at their ends. A mild obstacle course of fences and gates, and the usual hazardous crossing of the Dollar Road, saw me into the extensively wooded Harviestoun Estate. There were signs here of the violent winds of three days ago. A huge limb lay in a field, branches and litter covered the old drive, and by the stone bridge near the Castle ruins a shattered ash was blocking the roadway.
Across the estate road and into a fir plantation and I was on a short, but favourite, walk of mine on a path edging the Harviestoun Burn.
There's a kind of peaceful isolation here with just the low sound of the burn, the faint rustle of pine needles, and the cooing of pigeons in the deep parts of the wood. A pool of sunlight heightened the whiteness of a colony of snowdrops. Additional skeps had been added to the long line of beehives lining the path since my last visit. A cautious inspection showed no activity as yet from the occupants, but. surveying the scene from the path's end, it could well be that, in the warm days ahead, It would aptly illustrate the Irish poet's "bee-loud glade" where "Peace comes dropping slow".
There was a steady brae climb then through a wide beech and oak strip with the glen deepening and the burn surging and foaming in a rocky bed. Leaf mouldy tractor ruts scarred the woodland floor where victims of the October gales had been removed, and neat piles of sawn smaller limbs lay here and there - no shortage of fuel in Harviestoun! Below the dyke at the hillfoot I crossed an iron pipe which, curving snake-like round a chiselled rockface from the burn higher up, is the source of supply for most of the farms and dwellings on the estate, and must be one of the few private water systems of extensive size left in Scotland.
There came then a pleasurable mile and more of a hillfoot stroll which, at this height above the valley, gave an embracing view of the bends of the river, the patchwork of fields, some stubble tanned, some a chocolaty plough shade, and others with the fresh green of reviving grass. The sombre conifer green of the long bulk of the Mellock was lightened here and there by intrusive patches of birch and larch. High up on left the winter snows had topped up the sub-terranean reservoirs and the surplus bubbled from the hillside, sparkling in the sun down runnels, sheuchs, and gullets so that there was the continuous music of running water. I had negotiated one more of these melodious path splitters when a flash of white checked my stride. A whitrick! A head and beady eyes poked through the dry stane dyke at me around 25 yards off. Would it bide still till the camera functioned? What, if anything, was passing through that tiny brain as it watched me fiddle with the lens? It certainly had one human attribute - curiosity. At the shutters click it vanished. I made a hissing hoping to attract it out for a better shot, and it came like a streak, a big stoat in winter white, to tear up the hillside and be lost in the dead bracken with the camera's click a bad second ahint it!
Off again, passing the "Dry Glen", a misnomer now with the snaw brae sluicing through its heathery cleft. Time now for the ascent to the region of the fabled stone. A quarter mile ahead was the glen of the Bank Burn, whose source, high on the south east slopes of King Seat would be in the general area of its location. A broad track slanted across the hill-easing the severity of the climb. These paths, hewn manually out of the resisting hill faces, proliferate along the Ochil fronts, and as little seems to be known of their origin as that of the Roman remnants of a thousand years earlier. By July this route would be impassable with head-high bracken and I thanked the providence that ensures the dying of this annual pest as I crunched steadily upwards on the deep carpet of dried stems. A halt for a breather after a final lung testing few yards brought me to where the burn fell into a deep rock gorge, the damp walls draped with ferns and sprawling ivy. The trees filling the glen finished abruptly here. A few carrion crows, ever wary, circled on seeing me, then settled further down on some storm battered pines.
From the map, the stone appeared to be on or around the 1,400 foot contour so I had a bit to climb yet. I crossed the burn a few yards further up and began a circumnavigation of the heichs and howes of the extensive area. Sheep, as is their wont, watched me from skyline vantage points like Indian scouts sizing up the wagon train below, and at times I'd mistake their distant outlines for the elusive stone. It was a pleasant change from the muck and mire and horse churned by-roads of the valley to be treading the cropped, wind dried, hill turf up here, and to have an occasional seat on the large blae-berried patches that generations of sheep had gnawed carpet bare.
There a sudden end to search when I rounded a knoll and saw this huge stone squatting prominently in a stretch of bleached moor grass not far off. Brimfull of achievement I took a verifying snap with a portion of Dollar in the background. I turned from this satisfying task to glance in the direction I'd come from and was mortified to see a monolith of similar proportions on the far hillside. It had been above and hidden when I left the burn and my back had been to it as I climbed. Was this the real stone?
A half hour later and I was stretched at ease beside it on a heathery bed. Across the valley cushie-doos flickered in the sun on the Sheardale Braes. There was the nagging thought that neither of the stones had been white, but why worry? It had been interesting journey on a day when winter had relaxed her grip to give a preview of spring, and fully justified the indeterminate end to the search.
THE RAILWAY TO RUMBLING BRIDGE
As I write, wet, sleety snow is driving, almost horizontally, past the window and the hills are hidden in mist - a right wintry scene. Two days ago it was different. I was cycling the Sheardale road against a frosty east wind with an early morning sun streaming down from a cloudless sky, an ideal day for a long tramp in the countryside. My intention was to retrace on foot a journey I had made many years back on the last train to travel up the Devon valley to Rumbling Bridge.
I left my bike at the cottage on Dollarbeg brae and in a few minutes had crossed the main thoroughfare and was on to the pot-holed, but traffic-free, Blashie-burn Road. To start my walk at Dollar was ruled out by the wanton destruction of that magnificent railway bridge which once spanned the Devon east of the station. So I descended a long, sloping field, and climbed a fence (the first of many to come) to land on the former railway track on the right side of the bridge. I was pleasantly surprised. I'd expected to be walking on ankle-twisting slag, but had under-estimated the speed with which nature can take-over, given a free rein. Where steaming monsters had chuffed their way up the long gradient there was now a grassy, moss-grown avenue merging with the sloping banks on either hand. The turf was shorn, browsed by sheep and cattle as their droppings testified. The adjoining farmers had obviously taken over for I was coming on gates and fences portioning off bits of the track, and roadways bulldozed across where it had once separated fields.
Tue illusion that I was to travel foot-loose and fancy free for the next two miles or so was rudely dispelled when I neared Arndean. Conditions were now more or less battle-course-like, what with removed bridges, making tricky descents and ascents on slippery mud, gates and barbed-wire fences to clamber over, and tractor churned ground to negotiate.
At one part I climbed the bank to escape a sea of mud and found myself trapped on the 12 foot wall of a cutting, forced by tree and bramble growth to edge along its rim for what seemed an endless hundred yards. I found time to notice large, shale bings up on the right where ironstone been mined before the coming of the railways, and was laboriously transported by horse and cart to the iron works at Devon.
An easier stretch then occurred, prior to reaching the high bridge over the Gairney Burn which hails from Powmill direction and descends through a deep, wooded gorge before entering the Devon below Blairhill. The bridge was fenced off at each end, and the no-man's-land in the centre was a thicket of young birch trees. I threaded my way through them and halted halfway across to peer far below at the sun-lit burn. There was movement in a pool and the glasses revealed a mallard drake in its finery of glossy green head and chestnut front drifting lazily around with its modestly garbed spouse eyeing him quietly from the bank. Long tailed tits, too, in the branches below, were easily watched from this vantage point. In a cutting beyond the bridge I thought for a moment that I had strayed off the track for I was confronted by a high, grassy, barrier edged with a fence, which turned out to be a road bridging the filled in cutting. Ahead, the line is carried on a circling, mile-long embankment till it reaches Rumbling Bridge station.
I decided to miss this section, and alter my itinerary by making a detour to visit the famous Cauldron Linn which lies a half mile below the hotel, so I branched left here, crossing two stubble fields and intervening dykes, to reach the spot where the Devon precipitates itself into a rocky cleft and descends in stages to a wooded valley a few hundred feet below. The first stage was the "Cauldron", a huge circular bowl scoured out of the solid rock by centuries of perpetual erosion, and an awesome spectacle when the Devon is in spate. Intervening trees prevented me getting a 'snap' from my stance on the brink, so I grasped a branch, stuck the camera out at arms length, and hoped for the best. I retreated cautiously, for there had been a few drownings here, and set off by the riverside towards Rumbling Bridge. A heron, ducks and dippers enlivened my journey, though the old path which once led Hotel guests to the falls was gone, and the going was fairly rough. Approaching the Hotel the land rises steeply, forming another spectacular gorge spanned by the old brig. On a jutting, sunlit shelf partway up, I stopped for my "piece" and can seldom have eaten it in finer surroundings.
A steep path crept round the gorge-side, dangerous in parts, and landed on the roadway to face the more unpredictable danger of fast-moving traffic. I passed the Hotel, ignoring the signs hung at its entrance exhorting famished travellers to sample their bills of fare, paused for a look at the old smiddy with its boarded-up windows, and set off homewards on what is indubitably one of the finest walks in the Devon Valley. I was on an old, untarred, and stony estate road which climbed steadily through the hazy, winter sunshine to drop gently past an isolated, tree fringed cottage with masses of gleaming snowdrops at its entrance. There was then a steepish, winding bit through overgrown beech hedges where finches and tits frisked cheerily in the unseasonable warmth. The ground levelled off and a wall hove into view, one of those massive, 8 foot, stone built, privacy preservers which were raised around residences in the vanished days when labour and material was cheap. This was Blairhill. I passed a white-washed cottage with chained dogs barking threats, and reached the end of the long wall where a group of farm buildings stood silent in the sun.
Beyond them the track rose again. Down on the left the site of an old sand quarry had been levelled to make an ideal schooling area for horses. At this end of the valley vast quantities of sand have been deposited, back in early geological times, whether by sea or glacier action is a matter for conjecture, but it's beyond doubt that the rabbits up here have fine, clean burrows.
On again, past freshly-dug ditches, till the brae-top was reached and the valley stretched below and beyond as far as the eye could see. The early frost and the warm sun had combined to produce a faint haze over the distant hills and woods, but it was a grand winter day and I enjoyed the descent towards Muckhart Mill with ploughed land glistening in the sun, and a missel-thrush's high-pitched song echoing around. The mill lies in a dip, with the Devon, its banks tree-clad, sweeping round beneath it into a wide, rippling pool - a picturesque scene. It's a dwelling-house now, and there's only the rusted skeleton of the once powerful water-wheel, clinging to a gable-end, to lend substance to its place-name. I left this quiet spot with reluctance and descended in time, by way of a high-banked lane, to the Vicar's Bridge. I wondered what Thomas Forrest, Vicar of Dollar, who built the original stone bridge in the 16th century, would have thought of the steel and concrete structure which has replaced it.
A few more minutes saw me part-way up the Blairingone road and back on to the railway in the dying afternoon to the finish of a memorable day's tramp.
HIGH SUMMER. BURNS'S HOLE
It was an untypical summer's day, hot, dry and sunny, the air full of insect life and the stoor thick on the Devonknowe's Farm road where for long enough, a circuitous passage has had to be made through rain puddles both large and small. In the ditch sides, the glossy black of the first of the brambles was dulled by the dust. It was seed time and harvest. The fading willow herb was sending its colonizing seeds abroad and, to quote from an old herbalist, they are, "Full of downie matter which flieth away with the wind". This could apply equally to the thistles where their down whitened the grass on the Drummie Knowe - a pest to the farm folk, but a boon to the gold finches. There was gold too in the field of ripened corn rustling faintly in the light wind. A lean on the fence was called for to make a leisurely appreciation of the contrasting hues of the yellow grain and the bracken green hills sweeping up towards the heat hazed blue of the sky.
It was an idyllic day marred only by the vital flaw of high summer - the lack of bird song. With the nesting season over and the need for vocal procuration of territorial rights no longer pressing, with birds moulting, and others like cuckoos and swifts already off to their winter resorts, the countryside has lost a bit of its magic. To qualify that statement there shot out from the hedge side a pair of partridges with that nerve shattering squawk of theirs, from the Bessie Glen wood came the faint cooing of cushies, and then the harsh croak of "huddy craw", none of which, however, by a stretch of the imagination, could be termed bird song. Many a cold and dreich day will intervene ere the woods fields will echo again to the spring songs of the thrushes, whaups, and peewips.
On the short, rabbit-gnawed turf of the Target Braes, overlooking Bessie Glen, the hill type flowers of tormentil, mouse-ear hawk weed, and eye bright were sprinkled. Below me lay a fair example of how natural growth can prevail if given free rein.
Where we once sledged in far off days the whole of the brae, save for a central gulley, was a thicket of thorn, elderberry and bramble. I expect that at the time when myxomatosis had virtually extinguished the rabbit population the seedling trees would have gained a footing. Similarly the series of bings in the mine area were clothed, almost to obscurity, by the fast-growing birch, willow, and broom, only the whale-backe simmit of the main bing being as yet visible. At first thought a slag bing seems an uncongenial site for any sort of vegetation but given a start, a surprising amount of plant life can survive on it and even thrive and, from where I sat, the spot seemed a veritable jungle of growth.
Reluctantly, I left this viewpoint, which displayed to advantage the wide expanse of thickly wooded valley stretching to the distant heights around Rumbling Bridge. The far end of the Target Brae, where it slopes steeply to the Devon, has a portion of mature woodland, some of it centuries old. A few leafless trees the yellow paint nark on their trunks indicating elm disease. This could be a debatable assumption, for the majority of the trees had already been ring barked by hungry horses wintered on the lower ground, a happening all too common in the countryside with the indiscriminate grazing of the equine species in every field. Trees planted in the past by a more caring generation should at least be allowed to live out their time, and enhance a countryside which is being rapidly depleted of their presence. A pitiful sight, the other day, was a magnificent towering
sycamore with its base reduced by fire to a charred shell. It is sad that a few minutes mindless vandalism can cancel out something that has endured for generations.
At the wood's foot I passed the fallen tree where, in the spring, a mallard duck had nested cunningly in its hollow end, the ten eggs cushioned in down plucked from its breast. It was then through a herd of Friesian cattle on to the waterside where, also back in the spring, I'd paused to watch a wild mink clamber out on to alder roots, peer around for a second or two, then splash in. They have been seen frequently by fishers on this stretch of water and, being voracious killers, pose one more threat to the precarious existence of the birds of the waterside such as moor-hens, sand-pipers and oyster-catchers. They could even stretch their deadly paws ben sand martins' nesting holes. Like the grey squirrel, it's another introduction we could have done without.
There was the customary lean through the railings of what was once known as the Black Brig, now a rusty red, to scan the depths below. The sun shone through the mirror clear water reflecting the surface ripples off the sandy bottom. Here and there portions of silted over junk protruded. There was a part of a bogie wheel, possibly from the one we youngsters would set off on from the mine, with the blasphemous vocal admonitions from the pit-head men growing fainter behind us as we sped happily downhill towards the distant coal lie! A fish splashed at the insect swarms hovering close to the big willow sprawled across the upstream bend. The unusual, sultry, heat had set off a big hatch of flies and, down stream, the surface of the alder shaded water was so thickly dotted with rising fish as to give the appearance of rain. The hayfield adjoining the river was now an emerald green, the lush growth replacing the shorn, dried yellow look of a week or so ago, and plump, black and white members of the bovine family were patiently converting it into beef. By the time I reached the bank opposite the cemetery I knew it wasn't to be a day for the ten league boots, so I sat myself down on the high bank at Burns's Hole, let my legs dangle comfortably over the six foot drop to the smooth flowing stream, and relaxed.
The humid heat was tempered a bit by the flow of air that is usually over water. Swallows skimmed the surface competing with trout for the fly swarms. Across from me a long island had been formed from the accumulated sand and debris swept down by winter floods, and now occupied the deep hole that had shortened the life span of the mythical Burns. In winter, this island is a stretch of mud, bereft of vegetation save for the bare, twisted limbs of willows sprawled along its length. Looked at now, with the summer sum warming my back, it was transformed! Nature, the original landscaper, had created from her bounteous store of plant life, a subtly blended herbaceous border. In front, at the water's edge, the blue of water forget-me-not, the red of bistort, and tall, white sprays of water plantain, interspersed with the lance like stems of wild iris, flowerless now, and soaring clumps of reed mace. Behind were groups of yellow mimulus, or monkey flower, then a long hedge of Himalayan balsam in varying colours from pink to purple. Willows, of which there were three varieties in differing shades of green, filled the background to perfection, as did the clear, sun sparkling stream in the foreground. I was in no hurry to move, but let the warmth soak into my bones, and hoped that a recollection of this scene would remain to comfort me in the bleaker days of winter.
