Wild Land News no 65, Winter 2005/2006

A simple stroll on the wild side of Drumochter Article

David Jarman

Taking a break from the wilds and all their woes, I was down in Huddersfield recently for my annual blast of new music (highly recommended, not least for easy escapes by bus or train into Pennine retreats ... he's obviously a hopeless case - Ed.). Chatting in the queues, one enthusiast remarked on how you become ever more over-sensitised to the least disturbance. Not just the inevitable coughs and sneezes, but note-scribblers, programme-droppers, Velcro-tearers (ever so slowly), distant sirens (emergency dashes for fish suppers...). An aural intrusion may only last a second or few, but the after-effect distracts for minutes. And rehearsing suitable retribution can occupy you for hours.

And so it can be in the wilds. I'm losing count of the number of foreign visitors whose enduring memory of a day in our mountains is of a low-flying jet catching them unawares, even though the actual sound is a brief one-off. The sonic scar across what to them is an unspoiled wilderness vandalises it irreparably.

In the mountains of course, most distractions from their simple enjoyment are visual not aural, although when Keith and I managed to snatch a weekday up Beinn Eibhinn, we were accompanied of all the incongruous things by the penetrating sound of a reversing bleeper on an excavator quarrying road metal several miles away beside the track into Corrour from Moy.

Some of these distractions are new - like, well, mobile phone masts - but most have been around since I began hillgoing - like, um, bulldozed tracks. I used not to be bothered by things less obvious than jets, but the more you value our shrinking wilds, the more you can't help noticing the accumulating insults, whether little or large.

So it is with simple pleasure that I recount that rarity, a day in the hills with hardly a blemish to compromise my humble enjoyment. It was not a likely location, nor did it occur to me until at least half way round that it might be so distinguished - spotting an absence is always hard. And it was a weekday, which usually guarantees a hello or two from the RAF, to offset the absence of other hillfolk.

My aim was to get onto the East Drumochter plateau for the first time, not by the usual munro-grabbing quickie, but circling Coire Mhic-sith from Dalnaspidal. This curiously unglaciated valley has a fine east ridge, with unusually distinctive tops for the Gaick - Glas Mheall Mor and Beag. No track leads up onto them, the sound of the A9 is soon left behind, no fence follows or obstructs the crest, the views across Atholl and eventually towards the Gorms are unsullied by any prominent tracks or masts or turbines. A dip is crossed, peat hags are skirted, and a reasonable line can be found (by eye from opposite, and by instinct, not by GPS - though I confess to having been aided by vertical air photos) to A' Bhuidheanach Bheag.

Hereabouts a line of fence posts intermittently indicates the estate and county march; I gave the loose ones a good thinning, as one does, while conceding that an occasional marker is a boon in mist. You can follow them to the brink of Drumochter for a view west without becoming conscious of its modern communications, although megapylons might start to out-top the intermediate berm. Heading off down the broad south shoulder, there are hints that quad vehicles might once have come this way, but if so it was long ago. Only on the lowest slopes are there regular tracks, and these have not been bulldozed, just follow lines of better ground.

We are entirely indebted to the private estate (whoever it may be) for observing traditional proprieties by walking this ground, when it would be only too easy to engineer roads well up the spurs - as the next estate east has - or to drive quads right over the tops, as we observed on the east Meagaidh range. Maybe we should instigate a discreet award scheme to foster such benign ownership. Or maybe I should have stayed blissfully unaware of this absence of trammelling, for - over-sensitised - I shall now never dare venture up there again, lest...

My other aim was to take a proper gander at Coire Mhic-sith, that innocent seat of controversy. Had you been there in pursuit of tranquillity a couple of Mays ago, you could have encountered a score of grown men and women in heated contention as to whether the parallel rules across the opposite slope were geological strata, or the shorelines of an ice-dammed lake. Certainly there are fine overflow channels at every dip around the perimeter. And if we are over-anxious at signs of the unhandiwork of man, it is good to come upon erratics of Rannoch granite dotted about the plateau, from days when it was deep beneath the icesheet.