Season in Strathglass Read Online Free Page B

notebook. Sister sits with Aonghas, who's rubbing out bits of his pencil work, correcting the line.
    â€˜You missed the monks,’ says Patricia when I return later to say goodbye. Patricia, from Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, is in retreat at the Marydale skete.
    If only I'd known . . . This morning, I've been in Glen Affric and found the car park at the top of the glen thronged. Milling around three white minivans was more than a score of men of all ages, dressed in jeans or leather jerkins or tweed jackets, chattering and laughing. Somehow they didn't look like your average tourists. Who could they be? Monks from Pluscarden Abbey, as I learned later.
    Once a year they break free of the cloisters and they'd called at Marydale for the midday office. They sang with gusto – 30 male voices raised in praise. The rafters rang.
    Sister says they arrived out of the blue. She thought they might have left a message warning of their visit but she hadn't checked her emails. She's not very practical that way, which figures. Nuns are unworldly – right?

12
    Breakfast at Comar Lodge, Ian at the Aga with the frying pan in his hand (‘One egg or two?’).
    Where's a good short walk in the neighbourhood? – ‘The Hill Lochs,’ says he. ‘Start at Tomich.’
    Tomich, three miles upstream from Cannich, looks a village out of place and time. It's a row of neat stone cottages all built to the same pattern, with latticed attic windows and flower baskets at the doors. There's more to it than that, but not much. These doll's-house cottages survive more or less as built, though gentrified now, along with a small hotel and a tiny Post Office – a wooden chalet painted blue with fretwork eaves, open for business six hours a week. At the roadside stands a memorial drinkingtrough, with fountain (now dry) in a shell-like recess from which, in another climate, I fancy Venus might emerge naked. But it's springtime in Tomich with a frost on the ground and a nip in the air.
    The fountain bears medallion portraits of the Tweedmouths, lord and lady, in low relief. All the land for miles around belonged to the Tweedmouths and Tomich was their model village.
    Tall iron ornamental gates stand permanently open at a wonky angle. At the top of the drive a stable block, unseen from the road, comes suddenly into view. This is no ordinary stable block but a rather grand affair, a handsome steading in pink stone designed to impress, with a clock tower above the archway. It has been converted into tourist accommodation but this is the slack season and there's no one about except for a man in a tractor digging in the field.
    Not far from this elegant stable block is a villa in the same pink sandstone, which used to be the home farm for the Guisachan Estate in the Tweedmouths’ day. Here lives Donald Fraser, once a farmer in a gentlemanly sort of way, amateur sailor and owner of the remains of the estate.
    The track leads up past the stable block to open moorland, a heather-darkened landscape of hollows and hillocks. Ahead there's a glint of water – Loch a'Ghreidlein, the first of the Hill Lochs. A low hill above it is topped by what might be, as seen from a distance, a slender obelisk, a needle outlined against the sky. In spite of its name, Beinn Mhor (Big Hill), it is only 401 metres high but the climb is stiff enough to cause me to break sweat. At the top, I find the heather burned off and green shoots already poking through the tangle of charred stems. They crunch pleasantly underfoot.
    The monument turns out to be a Celtic cross engraved with the names Edward, Lord Tweedmouth (died 1909) and Fanny, his lady (1904), erected – it says – by the grateful tenants of Guisachan Estate. (Grateful for what?)
    Tweedmouth? It sounds familiar. But I'm thinking John Buchan of The Thirty-Nine Steps and other ‘shockers’ as he called them, later a grand public servant and consequently Lord Tweedsmuir. Tweedmouth