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Weather

This Sunday the weather has been particularly humid. The long southern depressions of August have not yet quite gone away, a day of rain is forecast, but not quite yet. The rainy weather seems some sort of judgement, this year, no summer. The rain bands seem particularly prone to sit across southern Scotland and Northern England and Ireland.
Apparently the jet stream is sitting somewhere over France, and so the low pressures are drawing up warmer moister air which, mixing with the cooler Northern air, has produced torrential downpours and endless cloud. There is more SAD about, and it is still summer. Angus got the edges of these depressions as they swung north and pivoted before either sinking south again. Two days were particularly torrid, but the dry weather has reasserted itself, and has been more of a norm, so far.

Local footpaths and The Cadger’s Way.

Today I thought to extend the range of my morning walk, and try to find a couple of other footpaths on a map that my neighbour had given me. I thought that I could join up with another track, and get home quite neatly.
I found out subsequently that the fields where the path had been had been set aside for a long time. This year they were planted very thickly with barley – changes in the EU subsidy regime, or just bloody mindedness on the parts of the farmers, given the new Scottish access laws?
The upshot was that I couldn’t find the path as on the map. I had trailed down the obvious trail, the more on my right. Apparently this was once the ‘Cadgers Trail’, of those who carried fish from East Coast ports like Inverbervie, Montrose, Johnshaven and Gourdon, to the Royal palaces at Forfar.
Thinking about that, it would seem that there was more than one such Cadger’s trail.
I read in a book of the local fisher people who had their own rounds, and so would have their own trails. When the bus came to this world they took that, and their fish off to parts further, including Dundee. Then, in the ’60s, they got vans. Just kept updating, making it that bit easier, but families never leaving the trade.
This one would also be the the main walking road to Forfar though, where the medieval kings sat on their traipses around the country to be seen.

Cadger’s Trail (b) and Nechtansmere

Looking at it you can see Dunnichen Hill from my window, a double topped hill from this direction. You could imagine King Bruide’s Picts being deployed here, out of sight, waiting for Ecgbert’s cavalry and infantry to come by, to sweep down on those below.
If you were coming from Ferryden or Usan you would keep it on your left, aiming for Kinaldie Hill, just over there. When you go round Kinaldie Hill, being now at the low summit anyway, you can see Turin Hill on the right, its precipice the old river bank of the Lunan valley that must have flowed throuhg here in vast torrents as the ice melted. Like a smallewr verrsion of the Gwaun (Gwine) Valley in Pembrokeshire.
Keep a line between those two hills, and you are heading for Forfar all right.
The first fishers didn’t come here until the 18th century, but if this is the road that King Ecgbert took to Nechtansmere, and this Lunan Valley is that Nechtansmere, then it was probably the obvious route to take even in the 7th century, so you have to wonder just how old that road really is. Old Pictish bones must lie along the route, buried in a hasty grave, Scythians who came here without women.

A Walk In The Fields

I am looking for this footpath at its other end, from where they want to put the third turbine, but I can’t see it. The path that cuts across this field further up has been similarly buried under barley.
The field next door has two black track marks through it where the barley has been killed by weedkiller. Maybe it never was there, maybe it never grows there as the tractor cuts across between fields.
The real track is higher up, in the field above, the barley-ed over one. It passes that old inn. I must look in there soon.
I have to make a choice. A tatty field to the left of me, a cut barleyfield, the stubble still poking up stiff and golden, to the right of me.
Looking around in the box of signs I see that there is a slight depression in the wire into the field, signifying, perhaps, that others have passed this way. A signal sign, no smoke without fire.
I cross the fence, hope this is a footpath, see no signs of wear. It is very different to England, the right to roam feels somewhat less secure.
I don’t know who is watching, but feel the eyes of the farmhouses upon me as I traverse the bottom of the field, along the line of a small burn, mainly buried under the herbiage, a boundary between the fences of the two fields.
I mean, in England, where a footpath is makes it clear that you can walk that path. Here the right to roam seems to be challenged at all removes, exercises in concealment and watchfulness, guarding what is mine, the money I have tied up here, the work and sweat I have to do, me being tied to making a living from a very harsh and unforgiving regime,.
And this the richest farmland in Scotland, defended by the Pictish kingdoms, and the medieval Scottish state, the place where the mythos of Scotland was born, and settled by force, the King’s will being writ whenever he felt strong enough to take on and beat the local lord.
The path did not really develop. I have to wonder just what my neighbour had meant by a Right of Way. The edge of this field follows a small burn, now a field drain.
With the way the land lies, rising up and back, towards the moor, and a progressive declivity, rolling down towards Lunan and the sea, you can see that this was once a river bed, the outspill for a whole load of ice and alluvium, now muck, kept fertile with large fertiliser and pesticide inputs. Big business stuff, and very reminiscent of the Cotswolds from where I had come.
The river bed had contouring, that now deepens, rises again, deepens. The dry river bed sometimes hides me from the eyes of the white farmhouse (breathe out, sweet relief), now reveals me.
I feel myself under that river, walking quietly along the bed, bubbles coming from me as I smile; the water cold, ice.
I walk down the stubble, no path in sight. I feel that I have missed it, but I can’t be too far out, surely?
I come to a point where the field swirls away uphill. On my left is a double line of barbed wire fencing, choked with stinging, barbule-y vegetation. There is a burn down there. From this angle you can see that it is the main one to drain the fields on either side. The Gighty Burn, which might flow along the bottom of our field, is a tributary to that. Actually, I am not yet sure which one is the Gighty Burn. Something for another day.
This swirly point is the boundary with another big field, the same kind of stuff, big bales of straw littering the stubble, now all awaiting the plough. They have been waiting awhile, working in and out of the rain.
Today is forecast to be another rainy one.
I am a bit stuck now. I know this joins up with a road, according to the map anyway. The grey farm up the rise provides the new set of eyes though, and, across in the next field various farm workers, figures in the landscape, hostile, bar outsiders, closed down, no faces, and their machines. They catch a sight of me as I skulk back into the cover of the trees. They may be friendly though.
I could brazen it out but am not so brazen. I can’t see the road. Maybe it is a farm track anyway. I skulk back, in among the pines and vegetation.
I think to cross into the potato field, but think too that the effort is a potentially scratchy one, all rusty barbed wire, thorny briars and stingy nettles.
Down there too is a burn; ah, I can see it , it even tinkles a bit. I will try to cross here, and the dog jumps straight into the burn after I haul him over, grateful for a drink from the phytochemical soup.
I have to think though that I cannot cross here. I don’t remember why though, now. It looked a bit too wide, too deep, too scratchy on the other side, too open to further scrutiny by “The Men”.
For me I have been walking at a fair pace, the rain is not far away, great drops drop every so often, from the grey sodden sky. I sweat great drops too, into my polyester inner top, bright red, and my old, old running microfleece.
The texture of the sky made me a bit overdressed but, I confess, in a summer like this, I don’t know what to be up to dresswise. There is a real danger of getting hypo-thermic in such aerial dampness.
The sweat is partly a mild panic, I am out of my comfort zone, a new country, new rules, a new place that I yet have no sense of. But, I am not done yet.
I decide to turn back, and retrace some steps, the twists and depths and shallows of the Holocene river bank, now lifting me, now dropping me; into, and away, from the prying eyes, those ones that bore into the side of my head. They can’t really see me of course, because I can’t see them. I look straight ahead, and am hidden. Oh yes I am.
I head back to the sworly field boundary, stop a moment to catch the lie of the land. Suddenly, over the barbed wire fence from stage left, leaps a fallow deer hind, and heads off across the field, in its bounding, boundy stride, galloping off at highest speed.
Ben the dog, an elongated springer spaniel, with perhaps some German Pointer, sets off in the hottest pursuit.
I wish I could stop him doing that, but even if he would listen, it would be the biggest noisiest effort. I just feel a sense of resignation, too many instincts come into play.
His need to chase, to sniff out, to kill things in the underbrush – chickens, rabbits, pheasants, great mouthfuls of feathers, baldness and squawking, squeaking.
Sometimes I get him, I keep him on a lead as much as possible, but he is really only a running dog, not one for innocent play.
If I catch him I make him stop, a townie bred sense of compassion. I wonder if it is best to let him finish the job, like that black alsatian’s rabbit, the Friday night at Seahorse Stables.
But it is a deer, and while Ben is fast, his back legs power does not match his front. In the sheer madness of his chase he can run a long way though, fuelled on dog adrenalin, such a depth of desire to fulfil his doggy nature, nothing like mine. I could never be a dog, could never be my totem animal.
I wonder what that totem animal might be? Not a dog, maybe a bear, but I don’t really want to kill anything. Maybe a deer, but I am not that flighty at signs of danger. I am working on the idea of a horse, I think a horse, a gelding though.
I don’t really want to run, though I think I do. I want to fly, like a peewit flies, in horizontal and vertical planes.
I feel somehow satisfied about this form of chase, he gets a good long aerobic/anaerobic run, ‘cos then he suddenly realises that I am not there, and his neurosis takes over, his need not to be alone, to be near the biggest dog, the one I have to be.
And so back he runs at his fastest pace, tongue slavering and hanging out, breathing deep breaths he thinks nothing of, no sense of why he feels like he does, he just is. I don’t really envy that, which is another reason that I couldn’t be a dog.
He trots close for a while, catching breaths, gathering strength. He could keep going all day, only suddenly sinking when the lactic acid finally makes him too weary.
Most days he never feels that kind of tiredness though. I don’t know where a dog like Ben would be happiest.
He isn’t really a suburban kind of dog, too tense and nervous, too needy of company, his substitute big dog. He’d be happy to be the boss, if I was of the temperament to let him.
You can see why I am not really a dog person though, I feel it more as a constant battle, an interface of human and animal, where I always have to be a dog for him. But he will never be a human for me.
And in that interface lies the dog lover, in the middle of the mornings’ dry river bed, swimming with their dog, down through the barley stubble. Ben and I are on opposite banks, going in the same direction over different micro terrain.