By Kevin Unitt
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I wrote this well before the current crisis, and confusion, but it sits in my thoughts even more now we’re working from home, for the foreseeable, banished from the Park for the time being. It makes me pine for it and appreciate it even more. It seems pertinent a time to share the below.
The Park will still be there in all its glory when we get to return among it. In all its extraordinary and life-affirming glory.
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I think all writers, even lapsed or occasional ones, feel a twitch in their eye, a hum in their consciousness, when they read something truly special.
The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd’s tiny masterpiece, awoke the passion to pen once again. Every line sings with beauty but also took my mind away to my own experiences working and living in Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park. I had to tether myself back to the book, most pages, lest I drifted back to times hiking up a misty Ben Vane, dazzled by the greenest green you’ve ever seen at Puck’s Glen or swimming the mighty Loch Lomond itself, from which angle you only then get a true sense of the utter irrelevance of your stature in the wider scheme.
So, while evidently unfit to lace Nan’s formidable boots, I nevertheless felt imbued with the idea of revealing some of my own experiences within the national park this past decade, first as an awed tourist, next as a seasonal ranger and resident, more latterly as a married man with significant personal attachment to the place, and currently as part of a maintenance team doing our best to keep sites special and safe in the face of so many visitors wanting to soak in exactly the same feelings the place has engendered in me.
First a rough run down of the months, as I know them, up here:
January, low-hanging mist that never raised, the purest chill cutting through the best cloth, the silent stillness of loch, land, hillside and soul.
February, similar to the above but with a bit more rain.
March, the trees and bushes still bare, the first glints of green, a few pioneer plants edging into the visible. Will it ever get light?
April, the sigh of relief at a long winter gone, with snow still on the peaks and continuing rain to remind you where you really are, yet the joyous sound of bird-song, the visual assault of colour and creeping vegetation and communities enlarging with visitors once again.
May, the secret we try to keep, the midge free almost summer month where tourists tread relatively lightly in number but find perhaps the only truly (generally) settled month Scotland has to offer. I once did the West Highland Way, in May, and not a drop of rain nor even significant wind was felt for a 7 full days.
June, the puzzle, when you’re not sure if it’s meant to be summer or not, given the rain and genuine moments of cold. The trappings of high season are evident but the landscape, the weather, are clinging on to something else, harking back to the winter they’ve just had. Bracken reminds you of its omnipresence.
July, when you question if Scotland, and its people, are really built for warm weather anyway. Now it is, by turns, cloyingly hot and dustily drought like or torrentially wet and a bit landslidey. In the resulting confusion, midges find their calling. Ticks cling to the edges of bracken, spurred on by the deer that host them so genially, awaiting a new companion.
August, like July but with even greater extremes. Of even greater numbers of people, who if they never return again will never quite – in my opinion – experience what Scotland and this area in particular, is all about. Does it ever get dark?
September, the sigh of relief, the dropping of temperatures and reduction in tourist numbers, the fading of midge threat, the calming down of weather. Arguably the first truly special summer days can be experienced, shorn of extremes, just when summer is on the way out.
October, as visitors seem to have taken the greenery away with them, the rest is slowly and sometimes quickly eased off trees and bushes by howling winds and storms, but always leaving enough beautiful coloured trees and landscapes to make Autumn in Scotland a truly staggering spectacle.
Loch Chon in Autumn.
November, of even more extreme colours, but the slush of leaves that splatter the roads and paths is starting to feel more melancholic.
December, and you remember how a year can flash by so quickly. When I was 18 a year was quite obviously 1/18th of my life. At 36 it is 1/36th. No wonder time feels like it goes by quicker the older you get, because a year literally is now half as long.
There is also of course, among all the above, the ‘four seasons in just one day’ phenomenon.
These are all general observations over a decade visiting, yet Scotland, and Loch Lomond as the area I know best, really defies entire explanation. Defies description beyond your own seminal experiences. Everyone’s will be different. What conveys immense meaning for some, for me, will formulate no part of another’s.
For example, on having a first date up The Dumpling (Duncryne Hill), getting engaged there a year later, and subsequently married overlooking Loch Ard, immense reverence is now attached to these places.
About to propose up The Dumpling, and married in sight of Ben Lomond the following year.
The Glen Loin loop, a favourite of dog and family, is also up there. I owe an ode to Arrochar, the first Scottish village I ever really set proper eyes on during a snowy visit in 2005. Ben Lomond, that I have climbed and also later worked on the path of, increasing attachment to it in my own small way.
Each of these, in general, defies complete description, unless you are someone as talented as Nan Shepherd was. But that makes them all no less special. They touch my soul, and maybe yours too, in ways that are probably left indescribable. Like a lymphatic system for memory, shooting joy straight into the heart.
Seeing such sites, most days in my job, could risk leaving one blasé. Familiarity, immanence, breeding contempt. But it only takes the meeting of visitor, casting their own eyes on it for the first time, to re-set and remind you of your fortune to be here, even paid for the privilege.
At Loch Chon, the very centre of the Park but getting on for one of its ‘wildest’ spots, I have viewed from ground level, water, rickety road leading up to and beyond it, then also from high above, searching as I was for the little known, lesser spotted and visited Loch Tinker.
Lochs Tinker, Arklet and Katrine all visible from on high.
From this vantage point the peaks of so many Park heights seem somehow to condense into your vision, part now of one overall plateau. From here, high above Loch Katrine, Ben Venue at my back, I look down toward Loch Chon. Suddenly the high peak that sits to its far side now seems infinitesimal, dwarfed from this vantage point by mighty Ben Lomond behind it.
From loch level you might know it’s there but can’t see it, blocked from sight by those smaller surrounding hills. But up here, on this day, seeing for miles, a mirador for the mind, you feel a connection to the true scale, grandeur, of exactly where you are living and working. Later a red squirrel dances its way up and down a tree nearby. A pine marten pops its head into the cabin, notices movement and scuttles away. The nuthatches peck greedily at the bird feeders. It is true that we are but visitors to their home, not the other way around.
And imagine if you will, one given day of mine, an hour’s drive along forestry track, followed by steep ascent of a Munro at Ben Narnain from its’ more precipitous south face, followed by a full day near the summit hauling large stones into bags for later helicopter-lifts. All in the height of summer with temperatures close to 30 degrees. A nightmare to some? To me, perhaps a touch masochistically, the perfect day. Hard on the body but something beyond ‘tired’. Something raw and right. That evening meal and drink never tasted sweeter or more earned, that post-work shower the most glorious to date.
Nan Shepherd liked to potter in the hills too, a bit further north than here, not especially seeking the summits but just to be, to be there among them. Sometimes, remarkably luckily, I am paid to be there doing just that. A rare privilege. The hills make you feel, perhaps rightly, quite small. Insignificant even. But you know you belong to them and in them. That is where I am meant to be.
Indeed, as the strictly non-poet and sub-par Shepherd Kevin Unitt wrote, in 2020, just now under this very sentence:
‘Their truest beauty reveals, after I’ve stayed a while to see.
‘Those hills and woods and lochs now carry with them the greatest parts of me.’
Kevin Unitt, a former journalist, is a Land Operations Officer for Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park.
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