The Forest….
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Much of the trees have recently been logged; so instead of dark brooding masses of conifers, there was moonscapes of bare trashed ground. Since the Galloway Forest is primarily an industrial-scale tree-growing operation, this didn’t shock us – everywhere we go in the Forest, there are logged-out clearings, along with newly-planted and young-growth plantations. It was just the comparison with that we remembered from out previous visit that jarred. Before, we had driven for miles along almost-tunnels of firs that blocked out the sun; now the empty landscape, littered with branches, rooted-out rocks and tractor ruts stretched all around.
We were heading for the remote Loch Grannoch. It’s pretty well unvisited – except by fishermen, mainly – and you get to it along about ten miles of rough forest track. The last part of the road – thankfully unlogged – runs through trees and comes out along the lip of a near-vertical cliff for a several hundred yards. Then you see the loch stretch gloriously out in front of you. On this occasion, we disturbed a herd of wild goats, looking ferociously shaggy and huge-horned.
Like many of the ancient lochs around here, it has beaches of coarse white sand, produced by millennia of weathering on the granite that underlies this part of Scotland. On a sunny day, you can nearly imagine you’re at the seaside. It was sunny when we got there yesterday, but getting late – we didn’t want to be caught out in the dark, so after a short walk along the beach, we started driving back, this time disturbing a solitary red deer as we bumped along over the ruts and rocks.
“I can remember” said B “there was a time when we’d say ‘Look! A real deer!’ Now it’s just ‘Oh, another deer'”.
A while later, he exclaimed “What! Is that a hare?” while I cried at the same time “Look, a buzzard, really low!” For a few more seconds we saw the hare leap along the road in front of us while the buzzard swooped in low; then the hare leapt into the grass and the buzzard wheeled away, disappointed.