Wild Land News no 60, Spring 2004

COMMENT Article

The wild land is full of noises

We go into the wild places for peace and quiet, but we don't expect complete silence. The sounds of the wilds are few and mostly familiar - especially the wind and the water. Then there is the wild life. Not often animal, except in the rut, but it's a bad day if you go without hearing birds. Plover up on the moors and sandpipers along remote loch shores are particular delights, while the knowing, intelligent croak of the ravens is a harsher taste to acquire. Grouse, though, just get ever more annoying, with their clatter and unvarying alarm cry; it is their uphill cousins who are to be admired for their calm presence and varied burblings - in the spring, the male tarmachan can distinctly be heard muttering 'here comes the bride' through clenched gullet.

Just occasionally, the sounds die away. Drennan Watson reminisced with us recently of an evening returning from behind Lochnagar when he became convinced he was being followed. After stopping for a third time to find no-one behind him, he realised that in the stillness of dusk the loudest sound was his own pulse keeping pace inside his skull. It is rare enough for the wind to fade to nothing, but well nigh impossible to escape the sound of water, which can carry for miles from quite modestly tumbling burns. A hard freeze can bring true silence, if you can stop long enough to appreciate it, but to lie back and savour it in warm sunshine is a recollection for a lifetime. You might best seek it where a depression on a broad summit gives acoustic shelter from valley waters and crest breezes. Such a place is the saddle of Meall nan Eun, otherwise the least distinguished of the Etive Munros (obviously the birds after which it is named must have flown elsewhere that July day).

We bring our own sounds into the hills with us, of course. Boot on rock, through heather, in squelch; best of all, crunching across what I like to call 'velcro snow'.

Those sounds can become intrusive - the clatter of Leki poles on stony ground, or that maddening srish srish of some people's gaiters or waterproofs (no, you don't know who you are!). And chit-chat of course - your colleague (how do they have breath to spare when you don't?), other parties (you don't know how far your every word carries!), or your own (when you find you are talking to yourself after a few days out).

So when does sound become noise, in the wilds? Scientists have a nice way of using 'noise' to describe data that doesn't fit their nice graph, or equation, or theory - clutter and distraction caused by impurities or other things going on, which have to be filtered out to arrive at the perfect experiment, or wilderness trip. We seem to be less bothered by noise intrusions than visual intrusions in the hills. Perhaps visual changes such as bulldozed tracks or telecom masts grate so much because they are sudden and raw, whereas noise tends to build up over time, or be a passing disturbance. It is unusual for a new development to be resisted on noise grounds - the helicopter flights round the Cuillins being a classic case, and admirably resisted.

An intriguing if depressing study in England into 'Tranquil Areas' showed how over several decades the countryside free of noise intrusion (motorways, airports, stadiums, urban zones, etc) had shrunk drastically. It is almost extinct in the South-east. We might think this is not a problem in Scotland outwith the Central Belt, but think on't. Over 50 Munros are in earshot of a busy trunk road with fast traffic, whether at the summit or for much of the way up - notably the Arrochars, the Crianlarichs, Glencoe, Drumochter, and Glen Shiel. Another dozen are much affected by 'honeypot' ski resort car parks and clatter, winter and summer.

Traffic levels have built up subliminally over the years, so perhaps we regulars get accustomed. It took a rare hill visit with my son (over from the hurly-burly of Mexico City and looking for some Highland peace and quiet) to point out that on a superb, calm, blue sky winter day over An Caisteal and Beinn a' Chroin we were never out of earshot of the continuous traffic on the A82. There is not a lot we can do about this source of noise, although resurfacing with 'whisper tarmac' will help - you can hear the difference on the M9 east of Linlithgow - and this should be made a priority on trunk roads in the National Parks and Scenic Areas.

There is a particular brand of traffic noise which seems ten times more intrusive than the regular trucks and cars. It comes from the strings of motorbikes which like to test fast-but-winding main roads such as Callander-Crianlarich and the A87 'Cluanie racetrack'. Your Steering Team have told me not to be a killjoy for others' recreations, so the line is they are welcome to pit their skills, but maybe they should turn the volume down. Either the decibel limits on motorbikes are not being enforced, or they need tightened up (with indirect benefits for road safety too). It is notable that the convoys of big beefy German tourist bikes are scarcely audible - much more impressive!

With a quarter of our Munros no longer 'tranquil' from these causes, we need to be watchful against other noise encroachments. In the remoteness of Affric the other week, cloudless if a bit brisk, the only human sounds were from aircraft. Now I have always loved the reassuring rumble of the twice-daily old turbo-props to Stornoway. What is new is the frequency with which transatlantic jets cross the Highlands - and can be quite audible in certain conditions. It is now almost impossible to look up and not see the contrail of one, or three. (Actually, it must be a bit of a sickener to be on the Greenland icecap, say, and always have these things overhead.) And several times there were sudden ominous roars over in other glens, but happily they never emerged onto my stage. that's another story, to which we might return - and your comments would be very welcome.

Perhaps the greatest potential airborne threat to wild tranquillity is coming from recreational light aircraft - these are now a feature of any fine weekend on the hills close to the Lowlands, if still surprisingly rare in the Highlands proper. By way of a foretaste, a recent all-day hike to a hut in arctic Sweden was not enhanced by the arrival of a helicopter with a foursome and copious refreshments for an evening by the lake. This may be an issue which needs a code of good practice similar to the Access Code, or even pre-emptive regulation, before it becomes yet another unchallengeable intrusion into the wilds.

At least mechanical noise tends to die away at night, so that tranquillity can be experienced by bivviers and bothiers. Except that when Richard invited me up Ben Lomond the other July after work for a birthday treat, we were assailed the whole way by an amplified DJ and disco music from the campsite at Luss - there's one for the new National Park! And as we fade back across that fuzzy boundary between noise and sound, I recall Richard once cursing 'the coathanger bird' which so disturbed our sleep in the Mullardoch-Elchaig col, and again at Kinlochaffric. This nocturnal miscreant he so named because it was like someone incessantly sawing logs with a coathanger. After prolonged study I have deduced that this is the 'noise' of the snipe, whose ethereal drumming is surely the finest sound our wild places hold for us - and so unloud that you can only hear it on the stillest, quietist early summer evenings.