Sea eagles crossing the country pause here from time to time, and the first west-making beavers from Tayside have found their way here too. What would it take to restore something of all of that? Well, the idea of rewilding is in the air everywhere, and here and there across the face of the land, the idea has become a physical process. The idea of rewilding is in the air everywhere As it is, the oaks are a shadow of what was, and from stem to stern the glen is one of the emptiest of human habitation anywhere in the central Highlands. How wondrous with oaks this glen must have been once, and well-lived in by both people and nature, the drover herds passing through, heading for the distant waters of the Earn beyond the far end of the glen, beyond the hill pass of Glen Ogle, then west from Lochearnhead to the tryst at Crieff, wolves for company from time to time. My attention wanders off for a moment to the lovely but sparse oakwood on the north shore of Glen Dochart. Survival is more a matter of luck than judgment. So summer ducks play the percentage game. A brood of ten that takes to the water for the first time on Monday can be extinct by Friday, the bewildered mother duck the last to go. For the otters, and for that matter the pike and the peregrine, all that reverberating, rippling life is just so many sitting ducks. Mallard Duck (Anas platyrhynchos) close up of male, drake at rest on the bank of a canal, Cromford, Derbyshire, England, April 2009ĭucks like these – teal, wigeon, tufted, mallard (by the hundred), goosanders, mergansers, and their kindred spirits – grebes, moorhens, coots – reproduce on the safety-in-numbers basis, and by now the loch is chaotic with infancy. But nothing squirms through improbably tricky gaps quite like an otter, a discomforting truth for the wildfowl hordes that thicken the darkest parts of the loch, and these lie under the crags on the north shore. The island itself is so thickly wooded that you might think an otter would have trouble squirming between tree trunks or buffeting its way through the cloying density of the understorey. Is nature playing games with me? The ruinous castle on its mid-loch island should be gaunt and vaguely ominous, with a cormorant perched on top like a cross between a gargoyle and a weather vane. I’m too warm, too comfortable, suspiciously so. The shapes are too rounded, the textures too lush and soft, the shores too fertile, the trees too leafy. Right now it looks as if it has borrowed someone else’s frock, and it doesn’t quite fit. Rather, these belong to its autumn oaks and glittering glimpses of aspen, the fire shades or the greys and whites and hard metallic blues of winter, the daffodil shades of winter-into-spring. Happily though, the bog creeps into Loch Dochart, and Loch Dochart and I have been soulmates for many a year, although this midsummer guise is not the season of the year in which I have stored most of my memories of the place. How wondrous with oaks this glen must have been once Instead, it creeps out of a bog on the edge of Crianlarich. I have long thought that it would be more fitting if Glen Dochart had burst into sunlight out of a great watershed like Glencoe or Brander. In the eyes of this nature writer at least, it has always struck me as an unsatisfying conclusion to the ample girth of the natural highway that is Glen Dochart. Such is the landscape between Auchinchisallen, one-time domicile of one Rob Roy MacGregor, and Crianlarich. West of Loch Dochart there is a wide wetland mile where the river is hesitant and sluggish and given to flooding at the least encouragement, and what with the winter and the backward spring that followed, it had a whole year’s worth of encouragement in the first four months of 2018, and repeatedly pronounced itself no longer satisfied with the channel it had cut for itself through the peaty ooze of mud and reeds and tall grass. There is a necklace of small lochs, and there is Ben More, massive over your left shoulder so that you keep turning round, looking up, vast and unchancy mountain that it is from the north side. Its fragments run parallel to placid stretches of riverbank hand-printed by otters going west (the river, deep and dark and going the other way). The old railway line through Glen Dochart – what’s left of it – is a long, thin thicket of self-sown birches, alders, rowans, brambles, willows. Subscribe to our magazine for more great content The wide wetlands of this glen provide the perfect shelter for hordes of wildfowl of many different species…
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