travel

Sighting wild boar

| kirsteenbellblog

Anyone who drives the roads around Lochaber at night will have caught glimpses of wildlife in the verge: headlights glancing off the gold line of a woodcock’s beak, or the twin green reflections of a pine marten’s eyes – not to mention those glimpses of antlers or a soft brown back that send your foot to the brake pedal in anticipation of a stag or roe deer running out.  Driving home late last week though, just before Invergarry where the forest grows close to the road, my foot hit the pedal. Not at something running towards me, but at an unfamiliar long dark shape climbing the bank away from me.

I reversed back up the stretch of empty road, window opening to the night, trying to sharpen my eyes into the shadows to confirm what I had seen. The movement had been too low to be a deer, too black, and the way its weight shifted against the slope reminded me of pigs we’ve kept on the croft. Boar.

A growing population of wild boar call the woods of the Great Glen their home, but I have never seen one.  Huge they may be – an adult can be almost a metre tall at its shoulders, with immense strength behind their elongated snouts and short tusks – they are known to be secretive beasts.

Once a keystone species in woodland habitat, boar had dropped out of our collective consciousness for centuries. They can be integral to healthy and balanced woodland regeneration, disturbing undergrowth to allow new trees to take root, and creating space for wildflowers like bluebells to reach through to the light. However, they are not wholly welcome in the human landscape.

Sightings have been recorded in the south at Leanachan Forest, on trail cameras in Glen Loy and Loch Arkaig, and north by farmland and estates near Drumnadrochit. Each time I drive the road between Fort William and Inverness my peripheral vision keeps an awareness in the trees, hoping out the corner of my eye to snag on a heavier presence in amongst the scrubby understory of birch and oak, or the quiet emptiness of the conifers. I never really expected to see the wild pigs so close to the road though.

The numbers of wild boar in the Great Glen have reportedly been increasing in recent years, with more anecdotal evidence of sightings from walkers on the Great Glen Way, particularly on the approach into Inverness.  The messages on Facebook walking boards are mostly of warning, and many farmers and crofters see them as nothing short of a nuisance, as they can dig up land used for grazing.

Like so much wildlife in the Scottish Highlands, there are multiple ways in which we can interpret the boars’ presence, for good or bad. I gave up staring into the dark forest and resumed my journey home, knowing the boar had far more patience with which to outwait me. It will carry on trying to live its life and we will carry on our trying to live ours. Whether we can find a happy medium that allows both human and boar to co-exist remains to be seen.

January dark

| kirsteenbellblog

It is easy to romanticise the past lives of Highland landscapes in summer, when hillsides are light-filled and lush with green. I daydream then about reroofing the tumbled stone ruin in front of our own new-build home, imagining its empty windows filled again with warmth. In the book Romantic Lochaber, written in 1939, Donald B. MacCulloch describes the houses on this side of Loch Eil as ‘snug little Highland cottages’, ‘reposing at the foot of gently rising green hill slopes’. January, however, tells a harsher story.

Walking against the wind, up the side of the knoll on which the ruin sits, ‘gentle’ is the furthest word from your mind. Instead of a roof, long oak branches sway wildly above the open walls. From the windows of our house nearby, light spills in great splaying rectangles that only just reach the thin edges of the oak tree and the lichen-crusted stone beneath. Inside the old home is black.

The walls of the ruin are thick, almost three feet across. In daylight you can see their construction: two dykes of heavy grey stone held together by their own weight, the space between them filled in with smaller rocks and shards. I enter the dark space of the doorway, finding a seat by memory – a big lump of stone that has fallen into the one-room inner. The ground underfoot is soft with grass and dank with leaves. Sitting, my back rests on the cold and wet of moss. From here I can see out into the night, across the loch to the wee lights of houses on the opposite shore, just as the woman of this house must once have done too.

The only two window openings are north facing, so the corners now exposed to the elements would always have been in shadow, even in the day. I try to imagine where the hearth would have been, how far a fire’s heat would have radiated. How much warmer would these walls have been in January’s past?

Over the course of the month, sunrise will creep earlier a minute or two each day. But as January closes it will still be well after eight in the morning before the darkness lifts, and it will return before five in the afternoon. Average temperatures are usually around four of five degrees Celsius, and gales scour us from the west.

Despite this home’s ruined state though, the wind can’t travel through the walls. It must push at the sides, climb over the open top, bend round the still sharp right-angles of the door-less entry. I wonder again at repairing the stone, cladding it over, fitting a door, and windows with shutters. ‘Snug’ may seem a stretch, but it is possible to imagine how this home held the light close against the January night.