A walk up Beinn Dubh
(looking across to the site of the proposed Farr Windfarm)
on the 27th October 2002

By James Fenton

Late afternoon, a time when the light is at its best, the low autumnal sun drawing long shadows against every clump of heather, every tuft of deer grass, and every mound in the peat. Snow, wet and scattered at first, small patches carelessly left behind by the thaw, but eventually giving way to a fuller cover, with drifts deeper enough for the dog to rush at, excited, as most dogs are by the first snows of winter, unable to hold himself back from a scrabble and an ecstatic roll on his back. The long, low light, coming out of the grey cloudwrack of the west, the light, silver, tinged with gold, streaming over the high moors of the Monadhliaths, their colour enhanced by the monochrome of new snow. All the lowland of the Moray Firth below, the Black Isle, today dark in the shadow of the grey-white Ben, the tails of the North Sea flowing into Beauly and Dingwall, a cold, steel sea, Inverness, bridging the firth and unable to any longer to contain itself, Strathnairn below, scarred by quarries and the endless green of the plantations, but the fields lit up and etched by the sun, the light seeming to emanate from Duntelchaig, a loch glowing with light itself.

The dog is racing away, tempted, as all dogs are, by the succulence of the mountain hare, for so its smell must be, and I watch the grouse fly off with a startled outburst, and was that a ptarmigan with them? Hard to say in the fading light, but it would be the first I have seen on these moors, these moors, wild, unbroken, stretching to all horizons, the wild heart of Scotland, the Scotland of both the Gael and of John Buchan, the Scotland of imagination, but here, by a knife-edge, still hanging on in reality. In summer, the ever-haunting call of the golden plover as you stravaig from one bird's territory to the next, each bird standing, alert, darting away, but always watching to see you off their land, but today it is the geese, returning from their Arctic summer, skein after skein flying fast and low, chattering to themselves, keen to cross this wilderness, which is too akin to the winter they are escaping in the far-off tundra of Jan Mayen, of Greenland, of Iceland, of Svalbard. This wilderness, I hardly dare to use this word in Scotland, this is a wilderness, a survival of the old world, a world fast disappearing, obsolete, of no use, not understanding economics, although it is, perhaps unbeknown to itself, it is playing its part in our lives, silently storing the worlds carbon in its ever-thickening peat. And I think of the unsubtle knife that is about to rip into its surface, tearing a permanent scar across its side, gouging out pits, shredding its surface into myriad parts, pouring in concrete, and I shudder at the sheer callousness of it all, the unfathomable lack of sympathy, and I wonder, as I often do, how people can be so insensitive to that which is around them. But these people, these industrialists, and I would not deny that we do need industrialists, they are not of the moors, the hills, the true highlands, so how can they understand? A gentle footprint, a lighter touch, an understanding, this I might thole, for I am probably as greedy as the rest in my needs, but this, but this, this........