I got out of the van a bit further up the Glenleraig road than usual, planning a circular walk to try to find some Wych Elm trees.
Consulting my friend Mr O Survey, it looked like I could save myself a bit of road walking by heading across the moor to my first waypoint: a lovely little loch with a view back across the water to Quinag.
I had second thoughts about this; about a dozen times actually. Dead bracken was tangling around my feet, and if I got out of that, I had tussocky Molinia grass with boggy bits hiding between. Hard work.

Some context perhaps?

A few weeks ago, I got a message from “Mandy-the-author” asking me whether I’d be interested in participating in a project that she was about to launch to celebrate Wych Elms in Assynt.
Take some photos?
Oh yes please; right up my street!
Mandy explained that she was planning to write a book and also offer some activity days to the community over the coming seasons.
Before it was too late.
Too late???
Yes, the dreaded Dutch Elm Disease (DED) was still marching north; its progress possibly being assisted by warmer weather in recent times.

Striking a chord it was: I remember hedgerows (lots of hedgerows) with lots of English Elm in Northamptonshire when I was a kid.
Then, quite quickly, virtually all of the mature trees succumbed to “DED” and became dead themselves.
Tragic.

By chance, “Ian-the-botanist” mentioned that he was collaborating in the Assynt project too, and that he could supply a list of existing botanical records along with grid references. Perfect.

I have a few photos of Assynt Elms already, but this was an opportunity to create a body of work, and I do love a project.

I started at Calda burn, as I knew of a very large, very grand tree standing next to a little waterfall, and I went to capture it whilst it still had its summer plumage.

On my map there was one glowing like a beacon: Gleannan a’ Mhadaidh, south east of Suilven. “Wolf Glen”. Wanted to go there for a while, now I had a reason.
Round walk: 20 kilometres; legs aching; feet wet.
Fabulous location; loved it, and a tangled-up multi-stemmed elm tree talking to me from the crag slightly above me.

Then there was the one with a waterfall behind it at Liath Bhad.

And a line of them along a limestone outcrop at Inchnadamph: very photogenic.
And a couple on the side of the rocks in the dry part of the Traligill river valley……

By now I’m hooked.
Not sure that it’ll be a “definitive collection”, but I’m certainly enjoying meeting these isolated outliers.
Might consider repeat visits somewhere, to catch the same tree through the seasons; something that floats my boat.

Now Grace Slick is belting out of the speaker behind me, and my singular typing finger is trying to keep up. Smokin’

Back on two feet; I get around the back of Loch Torr an Lochain, and the view of Quinag is super.

A reflection across a sheet of particularly thin ice in the foreground. “Cat ice” we used to call it, but I can see any cats right now.
Similar experience at Lochan Rapach, but still no cats.

Getting warm now, homing in on my grid reference, but it is only a six-figure reference from 1992, so I have no idea what I might find, if anything.
False alarm: climbing up to get a better view, its a hazel…..
A few more yards: difficult yards; the Molinia tussocks are aggressive here, if grass can be aggressive. I’m hopping from one to another remembering Indiana Jones spelling “Jehovah” incorrectly in The Last Crusade.
There it is.
Elegant.
And I really got lucky: its up on a crag with a blue sky behind it, peppered with little white fluffy clouds. Oh baby; you’re the best!

Around the corner, I change direction; north east now, and the walking improves, thankfully.
Its November 16th, and I’m still brushing ticks off my trousers and sleeves. Three different sizes too. For goodness sake.

I head to a beach that I’ve not visited before, but its boulders and rocks, and not my mission today, so keep walking.
At the corner of Loch a’ Meallard the OS map shows a number “3”, and although I found no sign of this “3” (!!!), the view of Quinag across more cat-ice had to be my favourite of the day.

Lunch was trying to get out of my rucksack, but the weather was due to change, so I stuffed some confectionary and carried on: my second location not far away.

An oak!
Maybe scarcer than elm up here? Yes, I’ll get your photo too, thank you!

1992 record says “huge wych elm on boulder scree, other elms nearby”.
And it was indeed huge. A bit of a challenge to photograph, within woodland and amongst boulders about five feet across. A very large branch had partly fallen years ago, so there was a tangle of boughs the diameter of my arm or my leg reaching down to the floor.

Finishing off here and the light faded as clouds arrived, so I was wise not to stop for lunch earlier.

The third side of my triangle of my circular walk was back to the van, and there was a gert big erratic on the hill that I headed to for lunch. It was soooo big, that it was much larger than Quinag, the mountain behind it; just look at that: 

Mission accomplished, I reckon; so long as I didn’t mess up the camera settings.

Trudging up the hill, I came over a slight rise, and suddenly there’s this thing in the sky.
Was it a bird? Was it a plane?
Splash. Wallop.
As I watched the sea eagle cruise over my head at telegraph-pole height, I put my foot in a hole full of water and fell over.
You couldn’t make it up. It was a great view, as I sat in the bog trying to work out which way was up.
Anyhow, no old men were hurt during the course of this adventure……

My Wych Elm photos are now being collected in the gallery here:

https://www.jacksonphotography.co.uk/elm-in-assynt

Time and wilderness.

There would’ve been a time before people. The place existed before it was affected by the earliest inhabitants. Wilderness.
What did it look like?
No records, no books, no photos. Only guesses.
Who and when? No idea.
Then a thriving community; maybe for thousands of years.
Yes, they, and their livestock, would have left a significant mark: not just the buildings.
Over 200 years since.
Now we need archaeologists to tell us the story.
Is it wilderness again?
Will it ever be wilderness again?

………………………………………..

Sixth day of May; it should be spring. I left home in cool sunshine with a lazy north wind blowing; about 15 minutes later, I’m at Glenleraig and reluctant to get out of my vehicle. I can see what’s coming. Then it goes very dark and slams it down with hail and sleet. One hot drink later, it starts to clear, and I get the camera out. Suddenly, I’m scampering up the roadside verge: that cloud is now on the nearby mountain of Quinag, and creates a fabulous background for my first shot of the day. Just look at that!

And I know it will be there and gone so very quickly. Over in an instant. The absolute and complete opposite of most of what I’m looking at, a landscape brim full of time. The vast bulk of Quinag is primarily sandstone that’s about 1000 million years old; the rocks under my feet are probably three times as old. Mind boggling. And in the foreground of my photograph are the remains of a building, which is likely to be from a settlement that was thriving here until it became victim of the Clearances about 200 years ago. There are quite a few like this, and, in fact, this was one of the largest settlements around before that time; quite important then.

I wander about in the intermittent sunshine with willow warblers belting out their song from nearby trees, and two separate cuckoos are, well, cuckooing. Like they do. If I was a meadow pipit now, I’d be keeping my head down, or risking an unwelcome extra egg in my nest. At the corner of an old ruined wall, a wren disappears into a hole in the stones and doesn’t come out again. People used to live and work here. After the bedrock itself, their ruined houses are probably some of the oldest things I can see. The trees are mainly birch, and are nowhere near as old.

Maybe the lichen on the stones is. There’s a lot of it, and it is very slow growing.

Perhaps it was even on these stones before they were used to make homes for people and byres for animals.

The ruins are gradually being absorbed back into the ground and overgrown with vegetation. I walk further up the glen. There is a path; it’s a bit boggy to begin with, but runs for about 4 miles towards the shores of Loch Assynt.

It’s very scenic and I know it well: I have a rowan tree up here that I visit regularly to photograph the changing seasons.

Winding through the still-dormant heather, the birdsong has petered out, and I can hear the breeze and my own footsteps crunching on dead bracken. No traffic, no people. Up by the remains of an old tree erupting from rocks, pointing at the sky like a magic wand, a lightning conductor, I look down at a grassy plateau. There’s a circular shape in the turf. It’s likely to be much older than the ruined buildings I saw earlier, and perhaps 2000 years old. Iron age? Yes, this landscape has been inhabited for a long time, and might be emptier now than it has been for thousands of years. Maybe we’ll never know.

Below me, the burn bubbles its way down to the sea. I can see a little waterfall upstream, and wonder if I can get a shot with Quinag in the background.

The middle of nowhere. No signs of the human race just here. A mountain, a stream, open moorland, and a big, big sky. Like it’s been this way for ever? I think about the meaning of “wilderness” and also “wild land”, and wonder where those interpretations start and finish. The sort of places I might expect to see “wildlife”? All using the word “wild”. So not “tamed”, then. Clearly they’re not cultivated, farmed, or gardened. But maybe it’s also about personal comfort zones and familiarity. I’m out here in places like this regularly. I don’t think about labels or definitions myself. I’d guess those previous inhabitants, whether they be 200 or 2000 years ago, didn’t either.

And I’m not “in the middle of nowhere” at all. This is definitely “somewhere” for me.

I’ve probably been up Quinag more than any other mountain nearby; I love it. Amazing views; three peaks; interesting geology; eagles; ptarmigans; mountain hares. Yes, it has a lot going for it.

There was another thing that I couldn’t fail to notice: the little burn that starts its life right in the corrie near to the footpath makes its way to the sea just a few miles away at Unapool. Short and sweet. The obvious thing to do, for an outdoor man like myself, was to walk the length, source to sea. A whole geography lesson in just one day!

So on “just one day”, I set off with my camera and tripod, because I’m a photographer too, and thought I’d have a grand day out. It was autumn, and the colours were just super. I parked my van where the burn crosses the road and set off to walk the lower section first. Within about fifty yards, I was rewarded with some really lovely waterfalls and got busy with the camera. Then there was some more, and some more….. After about an hour, I’d got almost nowhere. But this was great, so it didn’t matter. Underfoot, the going was rough and tricky, so that means “slow”. It didn’t look too difficult, but there are no paths, and lots of tussocks, rocks, wet patches and other obstacles. I left my lunch in the van. Big mistake; I was famished by the time I got back, and realised straight away that this was far more than I could do in “just one day”. At my late lunch, I realised I could do little more than a quarter in this particular day. So day one finished at the road bridges; the old and the new, side by side. I went home far from disappointed that I had “failed”; in fact totally enthused that I’d picked such an interesting, amazingly lovely subject for my little project.

“Day two” I spent on the top section; from where the burn crosses the footpath upstream to the place I arbitrarily decided to “knock it on the head”. Carol was with me, so I thought this would be part project, part walk, and I was unsure that the central section would be dual purpose. Yet again, I found some incredible features that I never knew about. For a relatively short watercourse, this was really showing off! One waterfall, in particular, took my fancy, and I’ve turned one of the photos into a “monochrome fine-art print” that I’m very pleased with. Fortunately, I wasn’t totally tunnel-visioned on the burn; I glanced up at the top of Spidean Coinich looming above me and saw an eagle not far from the summit. With no binoculars, I could only guess that it might be a Goldie. It was there for a while too; makes you wonder how often there’s one right up there watching what you’re doing. We stopped for lunch near to the top of Lochan Bealach Cornaidh, looking at the tiger stripe patterns on the submerged sand. The burn is getting much smaller now, and I make it almost up the the bealach before it star-burst into quite a few tiny trickles, and I decide that this is the “source” for the purposes of my mission. Packing away my camera, I turn around to see a mountain hare scampering away. It was easy to spot, being in ermine without any snow to hide on!

My final visit to complete the journey didn’t happen for a few weeks, due to weather and commitments. I wasn’t really sure what I’d find, as the middle section seems to go across a flat, bland plateau when viewed from some parts of the adjacent road. However, there were some real gems here too, and probably the place I noticed the most changes in the stream-bed itself. I got lucky with the weather; some lovely blue sky to set off the bulk of a snow-capped Sail Gharbh in the background. I tried to find a few shots which also featured Glas Bheinn, or something else, so my story didn’t become one about Quinag instead of the burn. I sat on an outcrop overlooking my footsteps for lunch, and realised that it really did look a bit “uniform” from up there; far from the reality of what I saw on my journey. Moving on up, I’d seen on the map that the burn split into tributaries not far ahead, and I intended to take the left fork to join up with my previous visit. This was easier said than done, as the “left fork” was completely dry. I was confused; either I was in the wrong place, or had miscalculated where the water came from. I do have a GPS loaded with 1:10000 maps, but left it at home as I didn’t envisage needing it. After a bit of wandering back and forth, I concluded I was in the right place after all, and had a mystery to solve. I really am no geologist, but had thought that “sink holes” were associated with limestone, and didn’t expect them here. So either this was actually limestone, or other rocks can have similar features. It further surprised me that I got very close to the walkers’ footpath before the water returned in any quantity. I’ve been across these stepping stones many times, and could never have predicted that such a flow would vanish just out of sight. Anyway, here I was, at the end of “day three”; joining the dots and completing my journey. I felt quite proud of myself to have done it too. I knew I’d got some decent photos, but the satisfaction of doing it was good. Very good. And what I’ll remember the most, is not individual features, views and waterfalls, but the sheer number of them. They just kept coming. Brilliant.

Looking at the map, I guess that the total distance from sea to source was only about five miles. “Just one day”?

If you’re tempted to look for any of these views yourself, on top of the stuff that should go-without-saying about litter, damage and suchlike, please bear in mind how rough this terrain can be.

I’m not one for counting, but I think I took about four hundred photos over the course of my three days. I already had a couple of shots which were worthy of using in the collection too. Initially, I distilled them down to about seventy. That was quite easy, but the next reduction became more difficult. And I haven’t written off going back for some more; everything to date has been during the autumn or winter. Different season; different day; different light.

Here’s a few of them: