The Nature of Winter Read online

  Each year, after the midwinter blizzards, there comes a night of thaw when the tinkle of dripping water is heard in the land. It brings strange stirrings, not only to creatures abed for the night, but to some who have been asleep for the winter. The hibernating skunk, curled up in his deep den, uncurls himself and ventures forth to prowl the wet world, dragging his belly in the snow. His track marks one of the earliest datable events in that cycle of beginnings and ceasings which we call a year.

  The track is likely to display an indifference to mundane affairs uncommon at other seasons; it leads straight across-country, as if its maker had hitched his wagon to a star and dropped the reins. I follow, curious to deduce his state of mind and appetite, and destination if any . . . January observation can be almost as simple and peaceful as snow, and almost as continuous as cold. There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.

  About the time Leopold was immortalising the skunk’s emergence, I had decided to emerge myself. I did not actually witness the winter of 1947, although you might say that I was alive and kicking. But it was the July of that year before I eased myself into the world, all 10lbs 3oz of me. My mother – whose first-born, my brother Vic, was only fourteen months old at that point – told me (once I was old enough not to be overly offended): “When I knew I was expecting you, I nearly drowned myself.” Happily for all concerned, the notion passed and ours was a family upbringing from which I have harvested only the sweetest of memories. No child of my fresh-air-craving persuasions could have asked for better.

  The thing about the winter of 1947 was that it quickly became the stuff of folklore due to the sheer volume of snow that fell between late January and mid-March. Throughout my childhood years, my grandfather often related its events in vivid words. But my grandfather was a storyteller of distinction, and whether he was inventing some off-the-cuff adventure of the Amazonian jungle to entertain his grandsons, or reliving the events of his own lifetime, he was never less than enthralling. So when he pronounced that the year I was born, the winter snows had been piled up in the streets of Dundee as high as the upper decks of the trams and buses, I had trouble imagining what that might look like, and trouble trying to decide whether to believe him. I have since seen the photographs and read the newspaper cuttings, and oh, ’tis true, ’tis true. There had been six weeks of snow, and in Scotland the final assault was the heaviest, and it drifted to a depth of twenty-five feet. Then abruptly, the temperature climbed, the snow melted, but because the land was still frozen, the flooding that followed was equally epic.

  The other winter of legend in my own lifetime was 1963, which some sources claim was the coldest for 200 years. But the characteristic of the winters of my young life was that they were reliably wintry. There would be snow, there would be sledging and snowmen and snowball fights in the school playground, and lo, to some extent or another, Bleak Midwinters came to pass.

  But the 21st century has borne witness to a more or less relentless march towards the decline and fall of winter, with every now and then a brief throwback to remind us of what has gone, and to fill the media with dire headlines forecasting the worst winter since 1963/47, forecasts which never bear fruit. In 2010, the temperature at Altnaharra in Sutherland fell to minus twenty degrees Celsius, which permitted natives of a certain age to tell stories of 1955 when it had reached minus twenty-seven. I liked the much-quoted words of the hotel owner at Altnaharra that winter of 2010: “It’s a little bit of winter heaven when the freezing fog lifts. It’s really beautiful just now and the scenery is just fantastic.”

  Alas, she had no hotel guests to share it.

  It all depends on the school of thought you inhabit: snow was falling, snow on snow, snow on snow, in the bleak midwinter, long ago . . . or a little bit of winter heaven. If only Christina Georgina Rossetti had been marooned in Altnaharra rather than Highgate Hill she might have been of the “little bit of winter heaven” persuasion. After all, it’s a better line for a Christmas carol than “In the bleak midwinter”.

  The nature of winter is transformed and it goes on transforming, in Scotland and around the world. In March of 2017, the World Meteorological Organisation of the United Nations produced its report for 2016. It recorded unprecedented heat across the globe, exceptionally low ice at both poles, rising sea levels, Arctic ice “tracking at record low conditions since October, persisting for six consecutive months”, and in the southern hemisphere the least amount of sea ice ever recorded. The WMO also warned that with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere consistently breaking new records, the influence of human activities on the climate system has become more and more evident. It added that “as weather, climate and the water cycle know no national boundaries, international cooperation on a global scale is essential . . . ”

  But alas for international cooperation, a few days earlier the new President of the United States had produced his first budget, which included a thirty-one per cent cut in funding for the Environmental Protection Agency. His spokesman confirmed that the administration would no longer fund measures to combat climate change, adding: “We’re not spending money on that any more. We consider that to be a waste of your money.”

  The leader of the free world had just made a pact with the devil.

  * * *

  Yet one of the fascinations of writing a book like this – a series of books like this – is that even as I do my research, compose my arguments and test them against the accumulated fruits of all that I have derived from a life largely spent in nature’s company . . . even then, the very capriciousness of nature that has so endeared itself to me again and again forever, suddenly drops a pearl in my lap. Perhaps, this particular pearl is telling me, winter is not completely done yet, winter has not yet been completely wiped off the map of the seasons.

  Chapter Three

  Sweet Medwin Water

  The map in my hands was published fifty years ago and 300 years after the event that lured me here. It is Bartholomew’s “one inch and a half to the mile” map of the Pentland Hills and Edinburgh District. There is an old handwritten inscription on its cover in black ink block capitals, which was its writer’s idiosyncratic way with treasured quotations. Even now, I read the inscription with a shiver of an emotion somewhere between recognition, gratitude and regret, for that hand was responsible for what must have been hundreds of letters, postcards, drafts of poems and captions for an endless stream of cartoons, all of which came my way. And drawings, of course, always drawings. What the inscription says is this:

  “the sweet monotony when

  everything is known, and

  loved because it is known”

  – george eliot

  The map is frayed round the edges and broken at all its corners. The front is so stained on its margins and faded in the middle that it is now impossible to tell whether it was originally white (in which case that was surely as stupid a colour for a walker’s map as cartographic mankind ever devised) and now tending towards sepia, or the other way round. When you open it out, you find that a large part of the map – the part occupied by the Pentland Hills – has been covered (not by Mr Bartholomew) in overlapping sheets of some kind of clear laminate, and that outwith that area, some of the more weathered folds have been belatedly sellotaped. There are also holes where the tape has succumbed. There are rainwater stains, sleet stains and snow stains, tea stains and coffee stains; and whisky stains for which I was responsible while trying to unite the contents of a hip flask with just the right proportion of sweet Medwin Water one old and dark December day. There are countless other indeterminate stains, the result of decades of manhandling in all winds, all weathers, all seasons. Other than that, it is in pretty good condition, considering the life it has led.

  Strictly speaking, this unlovely document is not mine, and it was never in my possession until its rightful owner handed it to me about twenty years ago, having reached that point in his life when he judged that he could make no further use of it. Thinking about it n
ow, the significance of the gift begins suddenly to deepen, and I have never stopped thinking of it as his, as if he might one day materialise out of a thinning mist on a shoulder of Black Law and ask if he might reclaim the map he had lent me. It is just an old worn map of the Pentland Hills, but old worn maps amount to rather more than the sum of their taped-up parts, for they are the unwritten anthologies of the hill days of perhaps half a lifetime. For the better part of the last thirty years of that lifetime, the map’s owner was the closest friend I ever knew. His name was George Garson and he was a shipwright-turned-artist (and there are not many of those), whose change of career so prospered that he became a senior lecturer at Glasgow School of Art, a mosaicist and stained glass artist with an international reputation. The Pentland Hills was his soul country, Dunsyre Hill was his Dunadd, and the Medwin Water was his aqua vitae.

  The Pentlands coursed through all his lives – Edinburgh youth, National Service drill sergeant (“I used to like to make patterns with the marching men!”), shipwright at Henry Robb’s yards in Leith and Burntisland, mature student (he went to art college at the age of thirty after a neighbour saw him in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh when he should have been at work and told Jean, his wife; she confronted him, it turned out it was far from the first time, then told him that if he was going to do art he should do it properly and go to college, and she took on extra work to help him through it), then professional artist, then latterly journalist, poet and author. His art was blessed by the fact that he had built ships, his journalism by the eloquence of his art, his poetry by the unashamedly working-class rootedness of his journalism.

  He came from an endless line of Orcadian Garsons and he told me with some pride that the name means “son of the dyke-end”. Orkney’s horizontally-striated bedrock, and the way the islanders worked with stone, was the seed from which his unique mosaics blossomed. He used slate to mimic the horizontally-stacked stones of Orcadian walls, as consummated in the exquisite 5,000-year-old Maeshowe; and, inspired by these and the standing stones of such as Brodgar and Stenness, he fashioned a one-man art form. Its finest example, Black Sun of Winter, is in the collection of the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Two smaller slate mosaics hang on a wall of my house, as do drawings, paintings and pastels; and a first-year student piece of wood carving stands on a bookcase. He painted and drew more or less every day until a few days before his death in February 2011, just short of his 80th birthday and less than two years after the death of his beloved Jean.

  Orkney was yin to his Pentlands yang. The words “I’m a Garson” were a mantra that opened many doors to him in Orkney, not least his long friendship with George Mackay Brown (and it was through his introduction that I met GMB, the writer who still means more to me than any other). The salt of the earth does not come any purer, any saltier, than George Garson, and I was never anything other than enriched by every moment of his company. He came into my life like an onshore gale while I was still a newspaper journalist, a gale which blasted many of my more timid ideas about writing, art – and life – into smithereens, and which urged me relentlessly along the path I have followed since.

  * * *

  It is the 29th of November, 2016. The low-slung, low-curving whalebacks of this south-west corner of the Pentlands are sunlit, snow-lit and frosted, and in the deepest recesses of the Medwin Water’s banks, low-bowing blades of grass have been transformed by ice, the green sliver at the heart of each gleaming icicle as gloriously incarcerated as a pearl in an oyster. I have never seen these hills wear a fairer face than this. I am here because on this of all days I have business up the Medwin Water, but inevitably he is here too, in every whispering waterfall, in every fold of the ground, in every footfall. We have been here before, you see. The first time was when he told me the story and then showed me the landscape of the Covenanter’s Grave. And this of all days is 350 years to the day since the Covenanter in question was laid in that grave.

  Ah, sweet Medwin Water! A mouthful soothes the back of my throat. Another handful splashed in my face is a kind of renewal, a symbolic gesture of homage to what will always be George Garson’s landscape in my mind. I simply borrow it occasionally, as I have done since the passage of time caught up with him, and he charged me with the responsibility of keeping an eye on the place and reporting back to him. Now, I mutter a word or two of thanks for all that was shared here, all that is gratefully remembered.

  Walkers are fewer in this corner of the hills than in the over-promoted, mob-handed acres of the Pentland Hills Regional Park in the north. George was its sworn enemy, a regular and fluent curser of what “they” did to the hills he grew up with, for he was an Edinburgh south-sider by birth. The few folk you meet down here tend to be solitary chiels like himself, not given to walking the hills in parties, fond of the hills’ solaces and silences, yet cheerful enough when you do pass the time of day with them because they know the chances are you are of the same cast.

  We (I am something of a lone wolf in this regard too) like to think we take our cues from the hills themselves. They meet our needs. We mould our moods to theirs: if they are hunkered down through a week of anti-cyclonic gloom, we go deep and dark ourselves. And if they celebrate winter’s early arrival with sun and frosted snow, see how we glitter in response! They are subtler hills than their northern kin, wide-open on the surface, and given to concealing the best of themselves among the smaller intimacies of cleuch and syke. It was a thick, Lowland Scots tongue that named this landscape – Black Birn, Yield Brae, Lingy Knowe, Bawdy Moss, Bassy Burn, Fingerstane Cleuch. The hills around the north-south course of Medwin Water – Bleak Law, Black Law, Darlees Rig, Catstone Hill, Fadden Hill, Millstone Rig – rise easily in wide, airy curves until they are ultimately gathered in by the twin heights of Craigengar and Byrehope Mount. For all that these twins barely graze the 1,700-foot contour, they wear their overlordship of this land bravely enough, and in a glazed ermine of two-day-old snow they would pass for anyone’s idea of mountain royalty. They despatch their various waters far and wide across the face of south Scotland: Medwin Water is a tributary of the River Clyde, Lyne Water to the east of it is bound for the Tweed, and to the north of that high ground, the first flickering burns of the Water of Leith set sail for the very heart of distant Edinburgh, thence to the River Forth at Leith.

  There is a roof-of-the-world-ish feel to these wide-open heights. George Garson would tell you they are painted with broad brushstrokes and restricted palette. Then, warmed by my question, he would tell me what he meant, gesturing with an artist’s hands at shadows that implied but did not reveal the hidden gully, and clasping an imaginary brush he reeled off the five different shades of grey on offer from almost blue to almost purple to almost black; then with his hand in front of his face he would rub a thumb repeatedly across the tips of two fingers to denote the landscape’s texture, sinew, pith. He not only preferred these hills to the more sharply etched summits of the regional park like East and West Kip and Scald Law, he also preferred them to Highland mountains of the far north-west and the Cairngorms, where I had been his guide. At its root, the attraction of the Pentland Hills was one of kinship, of belonging. He slipped in among these hills with the ease of a hand in a cashmere glove; only Orkney endowed him with something comparable. I am as sure as I can be in his absence that he embraced with his artist’s eye, as well as the twin strands of belonging, the comparable shapes of these low, whaleback hills and Orkney’s low, whaleback islands. In his heart and his mind and his eye and his mind’s eye, nowhere on Earth moved him like these Pentland Hills of home except for those Pentland Firth islands of home to untold generations of Garsons.

  His favourite ploy in his hillwalking prime was a fifteen-mile-long circuit of his own devising, beginning and ending at Dunsyre, and stitching together all his preferences and prejudices into that singular journey among that herd of hills that gathers above and around sweet Medwin Water. He – and I (for he shared it with me occasionally) – loved it b
est in winter when the landscape wore an acutely primitive air and a smoky blue cast (but can you see the yellow within that smoky blue, I hear him speir at me, and in time I learned to see it), and when it necessarily consumed all the meagre daylight hours at our disposal. We emerged at the end of it all physically tried (but not found wanting) and spiritually supercharged by the terrain, the wide-open hilltop winds, and the old snow’s tendency to linger longest and deepest between the hills where it smoothed over the ditches, burns, sykes and boggy holes, and it became something of a dishonour to escape without sinking at least one boot up to the knee, and preferably two. And that first time, then, he showed me the Covenanter’s Grave, and told the immortal story of who lies buried there.

  With the benefit of 350 years of hindsight, and especially on such a breathless late November morning as this (when nature will always provide the only religion I will ever need), the Covenanters’ place in the history of Scotland strikes me as much ado about very little, and poor reason to shed blood, to kill and to die. It had all begun in 1637. King Charles I, a Stuart king of all things, had introduced the Book of Common Prayer, an episcopalian invention of all things, and decreed that it would be used throughout Britain. Opposition would be interpreted as treason. The Presbyterian Church of Scotland, for which episcopalianism was not too far removed from the work of the Devil, duly declared its opposition. In 1638 it drew up the National Covenant, to be signed by everyone who was opposed to the interference of the kings of Britain in the affairs of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Scots signed up in their thousands and thousands.