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Wild Land News no 64, Autumn 2005

How wild was Knoydart?

Article

David Jarman

Walking into Knoydart is a long and arduous haul, as befits any true pilgrimage. Four passes lead in through the Rough Bounds, across the main watershed of Scotland; the weather legendarily turns from pretty bad to much worse as one goes. This gives rise to the prevailing image of Knoydart as both wild and remote. But in half-a-dozen visits to all parts of the peninsula, I have never yet walked in, and only once walked out, along Loch Hourn.

Did I say 'peninsula'? Knoydart is thought of as an almost-island because it is the only chunk of mainland Britain with a village and tarmac road accessible to motorised traffic only by sea. Really though, it is not a peninsula, in that sea level would have to rise by an improbable 200m to isolate it by joining Loch Nevis to Loch Hourn - by when Scotland would be an archipelago. Nor is Knoydart a promontory, like Ardnamurchan. If anything, it is rather at the heart of things, with Skye opposite, less remote than Cape Wrath, or the heart of the Monadhliath (for a few months more at least).

In fact, Knoydart is very accessible by sea, depending how long you have, how deep your purse is, and how much of yourself and your goods you want to keep dry when you disembark. (Here I allude to the state of the public boarding point at Mallaig, which if it were a railway station platform rather than a mailboat quay would have been condemned as outrageously inadequate long ago).

We landlubbery hillgoers tend to overlook just how commonplace sea travel was until tarmac and internal combustion inverted communications geography. Indeed I only know two people who both sail and climb, and they keep them seasonally separate, rather than boating in to remote hills. But for most Knoydart people today, getting about by water is natural. It took the appearance of a local lass joining our JMT tree-planting squad at Inbhir Dhorrcail for the day to bring this home to me - her dad brought her round from one of the roadless crofts, in as little time as a city parent would take their kid across town to a music lesson.

So in the days of subsistence settlement, Knoydart would have been no more or less inaccessible or 'wild' than any other west coast mountain area, whether mainland or island. And there would have been informal drove routes overland from Knoydart, making export of cattle as feasible as from any neighbouring area. Nor is Knoydart particularly barren: many of its slopes offer good grazing, especially the square kilometres of fractured terrain which are naturally free-draining. The 'Norwegian' expanses of bare rock are confined to a tract only about six miles wide, where glacial scouring and breaching across the watershed were most intense and on exceptionally resistant strata (although the Rough Bounds may be tough going, it is often the smoothness of the outcrops which is remarkable).

Even the harshest land had some economic value at the height of sheep-ranching in the Highlands: it is a considerable surprise, on finally purchasing the 1:25K map, to find that the most prominent artefact in east Knoydart is a fence stretching from Barrisdale round behind Luinne Bheinn, negotiating the Carnach gorge, threading between Ben Aden and Sgurr na Ciche, and joining the famous wall along the Garbh Chioch ridge. In 1980, approaching Luinne Bheinn from the south, I 'crossed the relict sheep fence, rather unexpected here'. Indeed.

In the 19th century, Knoydart shared in the accessibility of all the west coast to the 'puffers', and of course to the steam yachts of the gentry.

But today, for the vast majority who sail the tarmac rather than the waves, Knoydart is perceived as cut-off, inaccessible, remote, and thus wild. Given the totemic status of this tract of the Highlands, it is curious to discover that Knoydart is not cut off by natural barriers so much as by the hand of man and the vagaries of public policy. Let us take those four passes by which you can walk in:

• on the south, the classic right of way is from Kinlocharkaig over Mam na Cloich Airde (315m), down to the head of Loch Nevis, and over Mám Meadail to Inverie. There is a path most of the way, but it is made longer by the public road stopping well short of the head of Glen Dessary, a place motor vehicles can now reach by virtue of obscenely intrusive afforestation. The rough headland above Sourlies is a considerable obstacle unless the tide is out. The Carnach River was a serious barrier when the footbridge was washed away, but (pace Hamish Brown) with Camusrory an oasis inhabited by crofters or by lairds, a bridge or a ferry boat would always have been to hand here.
• on the north, the 225m pass from Glen Garry over to Kinloch Hourn has long had a road, and accidents of land ownership and council policy have seen it tarmacked and open to all motorists. The walk-in to Barrisdale along the loch is thus only 6 miles, however exhausting the improvised path - why foot it when you can boat it, earlier generations would have said, and indeed canoeing down with the tide in a heatwave is about as close as I can imagine to transcendent rapture.
• in between, there are two less well-known routes in via Loch Quoich. One branches off up Gleann Cósaidh and over a 275m col into Glen Barrisdale, past its magnificent fragments of wild pinewood.
• the other continues through the lowest of the four passes, now at 200m but once a little lower - drowned by Loch Quoich when it was dammed at both ends for hydro power, along with the lodge settlement of Kinlochquoich and most of the track in from the Kinloch Hourn road. Strangely the natural valley line west of the watershed dam lacks a built path for the middle mile of the way down to the Carnach River to Camusrory. A track does however rise up over Mám Unndalain and down to Barrisdale.

Imagine that Loch Quoich had never been dammed, and that Barrisdale had qualified legally as a settlement meriting a public road - as Kinloch Hourn or Arnisdale do today. We would be able to drive at will to the foot of Luinne Bheinn and Ladhar Bheinn.

Show how wild is Knoydart today?

Inverie today is a welcoming base for the munroist or destination for the pass-walker, with a celebrated pub (real ale from both Skye and Herefordshire, surreal), a fine teashop/restaurant, and a splendid bunkhouse up at Torrie. All three munros are within a 10km radius of this mecca. Wild land in the large sense Knoydart is not. In the Rough Bounds, all the munros and corbetts can be reached in a day from the Arkaig or Kinloch Hourn roads.

In 1980, paths such as that over Mám Meadail were notably untrodden. This year, the main paths over the passes and the prescribed routes up the Munros were well patronised. There is no sense of privilege about being here: instead, the places to which I feel privy have shrunk to out-of-the-way recesses. This is not a complaint: it is a welcome democratisation of wild experience, which necessarily changes radically what we mean by 'wildness'. It changes it from an objective statement of desertedness or unvisitedness to a subjective sense of differentness from our everyday urban crush. Having pontificated thus, in three perfect April days on the main ridges this year I saw not a soul above the glen road.

Just talking about a place and making it better known can reduce its mystique and thus its perceived wildness. Telling people in 1980 that I was going to Knoydart seemed about as wild as going to Madagascar. Today, you would raise more of an eyebrow by saying you were going to Cornwall (this allusion assumes some familiarity with the Hitch-hikers Guide). In 1980, nothing had drawn any attention to Knoydart since the post-war land raid. Then it came up for sale, and several turbulent years ensued before the high-profile purchases by JMT, Sir Cameron Mackintosh, and the community-led Foundation made Knoydart familiar by word and picture.

We are now in a different era where 'wildness' has to be redefined, and refined, as perceptions and expectations shift; as the human need to find solace in relatively unspoiled surroundings increases. How does Knoydart shape up to such re-evaluation?

Between my original metric map of 1974 and my new 1:25K map of 2002, there are three prominent changes to the geography of Knoydart:

• large blocks of 'commercial' forestry have been planted in Gleann na Guiserein. This is a dull strath, the least sensitive landscape in Knoydart, but nonetheless a grievous intrusion into a core wild area, with the sharp-edged plantations intruding onto the very footslopes of Ladhar Bheinn. It is disheartening to learn that this heavily-subsidised project is now written off as uneconomic to harvest for the foreseeable future. The timber is far in excess of domestic requirements on Knoydart, even for energy (its private hydro plant is greener than burning wood). If simply felled to waste or left to decay, it will be a worse blot on the landscape. This kind of site, that should never have been planted, should be made eligible for funding to convert to native woodland.
• what used to be paths from Inverie over to Inverguseran and Folach are now landrover tracks. I don't mind this, since it makes the farm at Inverguseran viable (and it let me bike to explore the west coast on an off day). Few other vehicle tracks seem to have been made, which is a blessing, although the path up Gleann Meadail seems to be getting restored to a standard which will allow quad bikes at least. And my reverie on Luinne Bheinn recently was not enhanced by two scramble bikes ascending to Mám Barrisdale (but then, are they any more selfish than the boy racers jetting through the Sound of Sleat?).
• the dotted line with the talismanic symbol 'F' came out in 1974 from Mallaig not just to Inverie and Tarbet, but right up to Camusrory. Did this last leg ever operate as a public ferry? Not according to my SMC Guide of that era. It now stops at Tarbet, and I have never managed to get an affordable ride up to the head of Loch Nevis, which I suppose has to be good for core wild land.

There are more subtle impingements on wildness. The John Muir Trust has agonised with itself for several years over the acceptability of deer fencing on the wildest north side, and it seems likely that this will be removed as soon as woodland regeneration has been achieved. Having done a couple of tasks there, I find the young plantation has an unnatural feel, however 'authentic', which will take a while to wear off. It is also amusingly perverse to devote time to maintaining the stalkers path which considerably reduces the wildness of Coire Dhorrcail. It may be useful for culling, and a handcrafted historic relict, but is it any different in principle from a bulldozed track into a remote area?

Other deer exclusion fences have been erected, with public subsidy, at the Barrisdale Caledonian pinewood (Doire Asamaidh), and above the south portal of Gleann Meadail. The latter has certainly failed, with not one young birch to be seen after ten years, and plenty of deer evidence inside it, and ought to be rethought or removed as a visual intrusion and obstacle within wild land.

But the detail which most sticks in my mind lingers from that off-day coastal exploration. It was good to see the crofts at Cnoc Gorm and Croulin inhabited, and accessible only by sea or a vestigial path. It is understandable that they should want to have a reliable telephone link. It is just a pity that BT ran their conspicuous pale grey cable along the path route, unburied. It is rulebook stupidity that the engineers fitted standard white plastic protective sheathing to the sections of cable which dangled across the numerous wee gullies - sheathing which has snapped apart and now bestrews the way in 2m sections which will never biodegrade and which no-one may ever bother to remove.

This 'wildness audit' has looked at Knoydart as a visual landscape: much more could be said about the management of the land and the deer, the naturalness of the wildlife, the subjective experience of the wild as a climatic or a social phenomenon. So to counterpoint all these varied perceptions of the wild, Knoydart is the place where I have spent longest reclining in a jacuzzi, at least an hour. I just happened to indulge this tamest of inactivities in a perfectly-contoured polished-rock pool in Coire Dhorrcail, after sweating over Ladhar Bheinn in a west-coast heatwave, with a canoe down by the shore to carry me effortlessly away - till a headwind got up. And my view out from the pool was unsullied by anything tangibly unwild (that dratted pylon line to Skye above Kinloch Hourn being obscured in the haze).