The Bone Cave

Chapter 1

Cleaning the Cailleach's Well

The wind was fierce on the ridge. At the summit I sheltered in the lee of the cairn, crouching among stones and moss, the tiny green hands of alpine lady's mantle. I stayed too late on top, thrilled by the views as the sun set behind the peaks and ridges of Lochaber. Below me, the moor began to heave and shift in the dark as though it was unmoored, as though the lochs dotted across it were the only fixed points, glinting the last of the light. Dropping down from the summit, I searched along the western slope of the ridge, among banks of turf and exposed peat hags. Water seeped to the surface in dips and creases, but you wouldn't call them pools.

It was late and time to stop even before I stepped into the bog. When I pulled out my leg it was cast to the knee in wet, black peat, and it was heavy, like a false leg, or someone else's, so that I had to shake it until it felt like my own. I pitched my tent in the dark on a patch of firm ground, pulled off wet clothes and put on all my dry spares, and then crept into my sleeping bag. My head torch threw shadows that billowed with the tent in the wind.

Dòmhnall Donn-shùileach, 'Brown-eyed Donald', is camped one evening on the ridge of Beinn a' Bhric and is striking a flint to light a fire to cook his supper, when the Cailleach appears at his side out of the darkness. 'Greetings, mistress,' he says, with as much calm as he can muster, 'and from where did you come?'

'Oh well, I was on top of Beinn a' Chrùlaiste when you struck the first spark of your flint, Donald of the brown eyes,' she replies, casually.

'You will have been running then,' says Donald, just as casual, knowing full well that Beinn a' Chrùlaiste is a full day's walk to the west.

'Oh, no,' says the Cailleach, 'just strolling along, I was.'

They continue with their banter as Donald builds the fire and sets a pot on it; and even though he is ravenous hungry, having spent all day hunting on the hill, even though his teeth are swimming in his mouth at the thought of the venison bubbling in the pot, Donald is sure to offer the Cailleach the best portion of the meal. They share their supper in companionable silence, and then the Cailleach thanks Donald and disappears into the dark, leaving him to spend a fitful night, wrapped in his plaid, wondering if she might return and insist that she snuggle her bony, crony body next to his.

This is the first part of a tale I heard many years previously, told in a pub in Edinburgh by traditional storyteller Jamie MacDonald Reid. It stayed with me, in part, because the mountain is so intrinsic to the narrative - the tale's rootedness in a specific place, Beinn a' Bhric, where I was now camped, gave it substance and lodged it more vividly in my memory. The significance of the encounter between the Cailleach, the 'Old Woman', and Brown-eyed Donald the hunter, and their relationship to a wider body of Gaelic folklore, was not yet clear to me; but I was excited to be tracing the tale's provenance on the mountain, like following a stream to its source.

Beinn a' Bhric means 'Speckled Mountain', speckled like a brown trout or like the back of a red deer calf. It's one of the mountains that form a rim around the wide, elevated bowl of Rannoch Moor - a bowl that held the last ice of the last Ice Age. Twelve thousand years later, Rannoch Moor is still rising by a few millimetres each year: a long, slow decompression after the burden of a mile's depth of ice. No roads cross the moor, but there is a railway line, and the Glasgow-to-Fort William train trundles along it twice a day and back again. Once, as a passenger on the train, I experienced a kind of agoraphobia - at least I think that's what it was.

I was in my mid-twenties, travelling north to Fort William in February, one of only a handful of passengers spread between the two carriages. We crossed the moor late in the afternoon, and it looked dismal in the half-light of winter. Thin, wet snow smeared every surface, the lack of definition confusing the space between things. Peering out of the window, the mountains seemed both far away and looming, and I became disorientated, holding onto my seat while at the same time floundering out on the moor. The sensation was brief but overwhelming. I've never been so lost. I pulled myself together - that's how it felt, as though I had to haul some dislocated part of me back onto the train - and spent the rest of the journey unnerved, buried in a book for distraction, grateful as night fell that the windows reflected back the lights of the carriage, keeping out the dark.

Twenty-five years later, and I was out on Rannoch Moor again, or rather, above it, sleeping fitfully. The wind jolted me awake, and for a moment I thought that the tent had untethered and was slipping from the ridge. I lay in the dark, pressed to the ground while the wind beat at the flysheet, and thought about my family, my two daughters when they were young - those times when they would wake in the night in a storm, afraid, and I would pretend that the house was a ship, heaving on the sea's swell, so that I staggered as I walked from the bedroom door to their bunks, asking, 'Avast me hearties, what ails thee?' Teenagers now, they still remember the stories I'd tell to soothe them, and the funny house that we lived in, with its straw-bale walls and timber mezzanine - a house that you would imagine might sail and list in the wind. The memory of being there for them was a solid truth, like a stone, weighting me to the side of the mountain.

Beinn a' Bhric is twin-peaked - the summit to the west, which gives it its name, is smaller in height and less shapely than its neighbour, Leum Uilleim, 'William's Leap'. The pair stand shoulder to shoulder, conjoined by a curving ridge, with Coir' a' Bhric Beag, the 'Little Speckled Corrie', clasped between them. The mountain rises above Corrour Railway Station at the north-western edge of Rannoch Moor and provides the backdrop to a well-known scene in the film Trainspotting. Fans still catch the train to Corrour, the highest railway station in the British Isles, to take pictures and pose at the spot where Renton delivers his soliloquy on national identity: It's shite being Scottish . . .

*

By morning the wind had eased and cloud huddled around the ridge of Beinn a' Bhric. I was inside the cloud, the air wet and cold, and there was no summit or sight of other mountains. I cut out a small circle of turf on a level bank and unpacked the bag of kindling and the half-dozen lengths of firewood that I'd carried in my rucksack. My fire was a compact sun, unnaturally bright against the grey of the mist. I set a pot of water to boil and willed the flames to lift the cloud and conjure the actual sun. I made tea, ate oatcakes and a cold, sweet apple, and carefully tended my fire on the mountain in the clouds. It was the morning of 1 May, Beltane according to the old Celtic calendar - the word's meaning most likely a compound of 'bright' and 'fire'.

After the fire died, I poured water over the ashes and replaced the circle of turf, tramping it firm, then took down my tent and packed my rucksack. The wind had shifted, thinning the cloud so that gaps were opening and I could look down into Gleann Iolairean, and across to the grey lochans on the plateau of Meall a' Bhainne. I took out my map and gauged my position relative to what I could see around me, checking that I was in the right place.

When I'd sat down to look at Beinn a' Bhric on a large-scale map, before setting out to climb it, I'd noticed below the summit the name Fuaran Cailleach Beinn a' Bhric, the 'Well of the Old Woman of Beinn a' Bhric', and felt the thrill of discovery. Jamie MacDonald Reid's tale didn't mention a well, but here was confirmation of an association between the Cailleach and the mountain, as well as a hint of other stories still to be found. As for the location of the well: in Gaelic, fuaran usually means a well in its natural state, an undug pool or spring, so it was possible that the peat bog I'd stumbled into the night before, with its few inches of surface water, might be all there was to find.

The side of the mountain steepened below me. I clambered down to where a stream had formed a gully between two crags, and then followed its course back up amongst the folds of the slope, hoping it might lead to what I was looking for. Rags of cloud drifted across the mountainside. I startled a hare that was crouched in a dip to the left of the stream, encroaching on the tolerated space between us as though I had nudged a tripwire. It sprang away into the mist and left my body charged with adrenalin.

I found the Cailleach's well tucked in a hollow, hidden from above and below. Even at a short distance, you could walk by without noticing it. It was an oval pool, gravel-lined and clear, like a portal, with the stream I had followed pouring from the lip of it. The water tasted like stone. I filled my water bottle and cupped my hands and washed my face.

Local tradition tells that the Cailleach cleans her well on the first morning of May. In her absence, I rolled up my sleeves and cleared some of the silt that had built up around the outflow. After a few...