Wild Voices

Wild River

It's difficult to know where the river ends and the sea begins. Probably there isn't such a place.

Two of us and the ghost of a third were standing on a kind of peninsula at the edge of Findhorn Bay, the river opening out from behind and to our left, the bay ahead. The ground was sun-dried that day, but water would soon be there from the front and back - more from the back - greater amounts of tree debris and brash had been dumped by the river than styrofoam and plastic left by the sea. A place at the margins, unsure of its future, like the lands beneath the man-made Culbin Forest a mile across the bay.

Late in 1694 a huge storm swept the coastal sand dunes and sent them across the surrounding farmland, which was then an alluvial and high-yielding area known locally as the 'granary of Moray'. The storm was just the tipping point, and in a few weeks the entire estate comprising sixteen farms and a mansion house became a wasteland of drifting sand. Fresh dunes blocked the River Findhorn, damming its waters into a huge lake. With no way out, the waters rose and after some years broke through and carried away the small port of Findhorn, a centre for shipping and mercantile trade. Today not the slightest trace of it remains.

Neither of us could visualise such ruin as we gazed over the bay on a warm sunny morning, the air lively with gulls and oystercatchers, families of ducks bobbing on the water, white-sailed dinghies moving slowly at the opposite side. On the coast beyond the narrow entrance to the bay and the present-day village of Findhorn is a substantial sand bar, and I suppose at the start of this journey we should have been there, not here, facing out to sea, looking across the Moray Firth to Sutherland and beyond to Caithness, 'land of exquisite light', which is how the writer Neil Gunn described his home country. Gunn was born there in 1891 and lived his early years in the village of Dunbeath; the river rising on the moors and flowing through its small harbour became the central focus for one of his most evocative works, Highland River.

Highland River haunted me from its first reading. At its core is the story of a boy, Kenn, and his relationship with a river. A pivotal event early in the tale is when nine-year-old Kenn lands a huge salmon with only cunning and bare hands, and from then on, as Gunn writes, 'the river became the river of life for Kenn'. It grew in his consciousness and was like a thread that joined somehow the delight and wonder of his world, the goodness of his life, the unspoken love of his parents and the close-knit community of the fisher village. Even during the depths of horror of the First World War, amid the mud and blood and bombs of the trenches, the river rose before him 'with the clearness of a chart'. Two decades later, with his parents now dead and their old home lived in by strangers, he returns to the river of his youth, this time in a bid to reach its source in the distant moors, a place he'd dreamed of but never seen. A final journey of aching sadness and discovery takes him not only to the source of the river but into the mystery of his own heart.

Like the best literature, Highland River reaches beyond its own time and sings in the memory. In ways I couldn't altogether fathom, it swayed my view of the world. Kenn came out of the pages and into my life, a ghostly companion on many trips, a figure who grew in my mind until he shadowed my footfalls across the Highlands and beyond; yet he was also someone about whom I had misgivings. I thought he might join me on another exploration, this one on his own familiar ground. To what extent, I wondered, would my experience of a river grant me a glimpse into Kenn's world, and bring something imaginatively drawn from the page into the bright, sharp-edged world of the senses?

My desire to follow the Findhorn from its outspill here to its beginnings deep in the Monadhliath Mountains would also provide a chance to solve a small riddle. Writers about the Findhorn have long disagreed on the exact location of the river's source. I thought that by simply following the riverbank, always taking the larger branch wherever the channel divided, would eventually get me there. A few lines hidden away in The Old Statistical Account of Scotland claim that the fountainhead lies close to the summit of Carn Ban, 3,045 feet, where a stream issues from Cloiche Sgoilte, a 'cloven stone', a large rock with fissures in it.

It was an image to hold onto, at least, and I carried it as we turned away from the bay, leaving the briny marsh and rot, and followed a river that ran gently, making little sound beyond a murmur of tiny bubbles. After a mile or so we eased around a bend and it was suddenly fast; not quite rapids but with an urgent swirl on its reddish surface, the water hurrying past stony banks with an unending clucking and something lower - a stone-roll coming from deep. So close to the sea and crossing land that was virtually flat I'd expected a broad and lazy spill, but it was narrow and jumpy and bristling. Small drifts of foam spoke of a tumult higher up, and when I stopped to place my hand in its current I felt the icy cold of recent snowmelt.

The Findhorn chugged through a corridor of alders and birch, all green with new leaf, as were the giant hogweed that were uncoiling along the bank. White-flowering anemones brightened the shady places and the sward by our feet was lush and thick with wild flowers. At some distance from a main road and with only the sound of water in our ears it was peaceful walking, and we felt buoyant in ourselves at the start of this journey, if a little cumbered with our loads. The path was wide and well-beaten, from the endless footings of fishermen we assumed, but fresh tyre marks in the mud told another story. Sure enough, after a few minutes there came the rising pitch of a revving engine, a sound that in seconds drowned all others. A trail bike sped towards us. We pressed against a bush as it flew by, upriver, the noise receding, then rising again as the rider gunned down and back along the opposite bank, bumping and whining past an angler who looked resignedly at the water. When something choked the noise there was a second of absolute silence before the river and bird-sound and soft whorl of breeze came back to us.

Crossing the footbridge at Broom of Moy, we skirted regular fields of oilseed rape and more stands of hogweed, reaching a railway bridge where we spoke to a man and woman who lived a short walk from this spot. 'Ah, the bikes.' The lady's face hardened and she told us a modern tale of young teenagers who built fires by the river, drank themselves stupid and shouted obscenities into the night. We'd seen the charred driftwood and ash piles.

A mile further on we waited out a shower beneath the flood arch of Forres Bridge and listened indifferently to the drumbeat of lorries and cars overhead. This bridge, built in 1923, replaced a rather grander structure, a chain bridge with gothic towers at each end.

As we set off again I paused for something. Nick, my companion, turned and looked back. Earlier that year a snowstorm had swept Inverness, leaving the usual chaos in its wake, but I had been thinking of spring when I phoned Nick about the Findhorn.

'You said something about this river a while back,' he'd remarked.

'I probably did, but where?'

'In Qatar.'

'Qatar?' I thought for a moment. 'Yeah, I remember.'

A peat-tinged Highland river and a city in the desert, there could be no greater contrast. I recalled the day for other reasons. I was on a teaching contract and the father of one my students invited me for a day in the desert with his friends and some falcons. It was a pretty macabre spectacle, not like the gentle falconry practised here. A fat pigeon was released, given a few seconds of freedom, then a peregrine spurted off like a missile and the end was a distant puff of feathers. Not my thing, but I remember the space and silence of the desert as we sipped tea at sundown, long shadows cast by the dunes and a coolness I had never found in the city. It reawakened something - a river running serpentine from the moors and through the woods to the sea. The Findhorn. I'd told Nick about its wild spates and hidden gorges and its birth among the strange high country of the Monadhliath, the 'grey hills'.

While it's easy to paint word pictures of the unknown, the allure was different for each of us. And while I had the company of a ghost, Nick knew nothing about it.

I pulled a cord on my rucksack and went on, following Nick though not his movements. He was struggling. His sack was full and taut and I thought the weight was cramping his gait. I noticed how he crow-footed around a big stone that I took in one step, and every incline elicited a soft grunt. Then he went through some yellow-flowering broom and disappeared.

A track came to our path from Dalvey. At the end of it were parked cars belonging to fishermen, and looking upriver we could see maybe a dozen figures, most on the banks but a few standing midstream in two or three feet of water, clad in waders and jungle fatigues and casting and floating their flies in a single action. They were all after salmon.

Then in one short step the riverbank changed from flattened grass and openness to a steep slope so densely wooded we could hardly get onto it. After the easier strolling of the first stretch we now fought for every yard, over or around fallen and half-fallen timber which all seemed to have died downslope and crossways to where we wanted to go. Though we tried hard it was impossible to twist our bodies through oaks and birch that grew thick to...