The Fish Ladder (19 page)

I walked down to the harbour. The sea was blue and silver, striped like a mackerel, and the moorland that skittered into it over sandstone cliffs had the colour and appearance of deer hide. Crimson heather glinted on the wind-burned moor, iron oxide under gold leaf, the mineral pigments pure. Heaped-up pearly clouds covered the sun. I could make out occasional townships, slipped like love-notes into cracks along the coast. There was an almost mythological cleanness about the place, as though I were standing on a stage, these things just props, and a drama was about to begin.

The river mouth was held open, on the southern side, by concrete ballast. On the other side was a jetty wall, and both the ballast and the wall reached into the sea like the arms of a flamenco dancer. Scrubby detritus – a rubber float, gull feathers, old bits of rope, a one-gallon plastic container – garlanded the shore on either side of the dancing arms. A single lonely fishing boat rocked in their embrace. I walked to the tip of the wall, to the very end of the jetty, and looked down into the water. It was almost black. I watched the tide as it pushed into the river, and I found it difficult to focus, to judge distance, or depth, amid the waters’ shifting pattern. This was the place, the beginning, or the end, where the identity of the river was lost, or discovered, depending on how you looked at it. I stood quite still following the movement of the water, the movement of my breath, and the sound of my heart and the blood in my ears drowned out the sound of the water. And then the moment passed, and the sky, which had seemed to grow suddenly very close, became once again impervious, a canopy, the sea was before me, the river behind me, the sense of dissolution gone.

I turned to face upstream.

On the opposite shore a man in chest waders, with a black-and-white dog, was tying a feather fly to his fishing line. On my side of the river was a bronze statue showing young Kenn, the protagonist of
Highland River
, resolute, determined, his fingers knotted through the gills of his fish, which was almost as big as he was. A cool breeze pulled at me, returning me, reminding me that the time had come to choose my path. The fisherman and the collie were on the southern bank, accessible by a footbridge. The bronze statue of the boy and the fish were on the other. I chose the statue. I would remain on the northern shore.

In his novel
Christ Recrucified
, the Cretan writer Nikos Kazantzakis describes a group of villagers as they prepare to take part in a Mystery Play. As the weeks slide by the amateur actors make the ancient lines their own, and gradually the villagers begin to exhibit the attributes of the characters they have assumed. As I passed beyond the metal figure, and past neat stacks of lobster pots, I felt as though I, too, was taking part in something, fulfilling a role.

I passed back beneath the viaduct. On the tourist map I had found at the Heritage Centre there was a black dot marked at the edge of the river that indicated the well-pool where Kenn caught his salmon in
Highland River
. I could see an inlet with some stepping stones, but I couldn’t be sure if that was it. Maybe the recent floods had concealed the pool. A way-marked footpath crossed under a second, older road bridge that pulled the two sides of the village together. The footpath was clearly in regular use, and the first few hundred yards of the bank were littered with dog turds in every stage of decomposition, which gave this section of the pathway the urban feel of a city park. The fashion for notices that had been so evident at the River Mersey, at Fountains Abbey and at Pitlochry was also a feature at Dunbeath. While the English signs had been full of direction, and even instruction, about what one might – or might not – do, the Scottish signs concentrated on avoiding mishap:
Danger of Death: Keep Off, Danger – Overhead Electric Power Lines – No Fishing, You Cross This Bridge at Your Own Risk. Cast with Care
. Drawings of stick-men in different forms of extremis, hit by lightning bolts, falling into water, illustrated the hazards.

After a few hundred yards a wall appeared, reaching almost to the water’s edge. It emanated from a ruin on a raised mound above the riverbank. According to the map this was the site of an ancient monastery and was known as the House of Peace. The stones were green and covered in moss; there was a farmhouse near by, called Ballachly, meaning cemetery. One night, according to the notes on the tourist map, a tributary of the Dunbeath Water had flooded, and the dead had been raised, and then lowered, although not quite in the same place where they had started. The farmer had ploughed the displaced remains back into this field, and was said to have had ill luck from that day on.

A wooden footbridge crossed the tributary burn and a path led to the Dun Beath Broch, marked on both of my maps. I walked on, beyond it, not wanting to be diverted, but the riverbank crackled with reminders of human habitation. A few more yards revealed a hut circle, the remains of a field system was visible on the higher ground. My OS map was dotted with clues:
Chambered Cairn, Quarry (dis), Settlement, Standing Stone, Broch
.

A long wall was bent in a right angle close by the river’s edge. Behind the wall was a beech wood, framed in a perfect rectangle. The trees were huge, and their dry leaves chittered and clattered above the sibilant rowans and rustling birch on my side of the wall. A second right-angled bend marked the end of the enclosed beech wood, and small trees pressed closely on both banks of the river. Sunlight was filtered through the tissue-paper discs of hazel leaves. Lichen, ghostly pale, bloomed in the shape of oak leaves, garlanding and silvering the hazels. I pulled a sprig of green nuts from a branch and put them in my mouth, splitting the pliant shells between my teeth. A milky juice spilt from a soft core, tasting of grass, with a hint of wood, and it was like sucking an ice-lolly stick, but without having had the benefit of the ice cream. I reached for another sprig, snapped it off, and was about to repeat the process, but instead dropped it into my pocket. The green nuts, rather than providing a snack, were actually making me feel hungrier than I had been before I started eating them.

The land had been rising gently, and the river bubbled wide and shallow. But now a gorge opened in front of me, its sandstone walls tall as a church. The river opened into a peat-coloured pool, in the middle of which was an island of heaped-up pebbles. The banks on either side were smooth and grassy, but beyond the pool the gorge looked impassable, the red stone rising sheer above the river. I would have to leave the bank, for a while, and follow along the top of the cliff. I sat down and took an apple from my bag. The place was like a cloister, warm and green. The soft banks and quiet pool invited sleep. Brightness bounced off the water as it was whipped into peaks by a passing breeze, before flattening again, smooth as a new-made bed.

A dark fin broke the surface, a black back sliding through sunlight. A salmon! I longed to let my arm trail in the water, to feel the salmon move against my hand. But I was captivated by its appearance of indolence, in awe of its explosive power, and I couldn’t move. I found myself wondering about Finan Cam of Kinitty, a sixth-century Irish saint, who was said to have been conceived when his mother went swimming in a salmon pool at night. Both Finan Cam’s acuity and his great wisdom were attributed to his aquatic parent. Every so often the fish broke the surface and picked off a fly, leaving ripples as round as plates.

A Scottish tale, from Jocelyn of Furness’s
Life of St Kentigern
, tells the story of a Highland queen:

who turned her eyes onto a certain young soldier,

who seemed to her spring-like, with a beautiful appearance . . .

And as a man who was sufficiently ready and inclined for such homage,

he was easily made to sleep with her.

She gave the spring-like soldier a ring, of great value, one that had been a gift from her husband. The young man was not at all discreet, and wore the jewel openly. An informer told the king about the lovers, and the king invited the soldier to escort him on a hunting trip. In the afternoon, when they had eaten, the king suggested they might rest awhile on the riverbank, and so the two of them lay down. The unsuspecting soldier fell immediately asleep. The king saw the ring in his open hand and, although he was sorely tempted to kill the soldier there and then, he removed the ring instead, and cast it into the water.

When the king came home, he asked the queen what had become of the ring he had given her on their wedding day. The queen said she thought that it was in a certain chest, and went off and made as if to look for it. Instead, she dispatched a messenger to the soldier, who sent word back that he had lost the ring. He then remained in hiding. Consumed with jealousy, the king accused his wife of adultery, and had her held under guard. He let it be known that, if she could not produce the ring within three days, he would kill her.

The queen sent a message to St Kentigern, who was living as a hermit on the banks of the River Clyde, begging him to help her. St Kentigern, who had already heard the story, ordered his servant to take a fish-hook to the river and bring him the first fish that he caught. When the servant brought the fish – which was a salmon – the saint opened it and found the ring inside its belly, and he immediately sent the jewel, with his servant, to the queen. Humbled by this quite extraordinary proof of his wife’s innocence, and the apparent falseness of his accusation, the king knelt before the queen, begging, publicly, for her forgiveness, and swearing that he would put her accuser to death. But the queen wisely maintained that it was her deepest wish that the king should not harden his heart against the man, but forgive him. She then went to visit the hermit-saint, and made her full confession. She amended her life according to his counsel,
restraining her feet from another such fall
. While her husband lived, the queen never revealed the means by which mercy had been shown to her, but after his death she let the story be known to anyone who wished to hear it.

It seemed natural that St Kentigern should be kindly disposed towards the queen. His own mother, who was also the daughter of a queen, had been thrown from a cliff for conceiving outside wedlock. When that failed to kill her, her father took her to the deepest part of the ocean and set her adrift in a leather coracle beyond the Firth of Forth, without oars, and commended her to the mercy of the sea. She washed up on a shore, near Culross, and made her way to the embers of a fire, which she stacked up with driftwood, and then gave birth to her son. The light from the fire attracted some shepherds, and they brought meat to the mother and clothing for her and her child, and brought them both to the home of St Servanus, who named them, and cared for them, as though they were his own.
*

With regard to the unknown paternity of the saint, his biog­rapher Jocelyn of Furness simply remarked:

Truly we think the matter absurd to inquire further as to who the sower was and in what manner he ploughed or even planted the earth when, by the Lord’s goodness, this earth produced good and abundant fruit.

Kentigern had lived over fifteen hundred years ago. He was also known affectionately as Mungo, meaning the dear one, or darling. In spite of being a hermit he attracted a great community around him, and this came to be known as
glas cu
meaning the dear green place. His community still thrives on the banks of the River Clyde.

Glas cu.

Glasgow.

Good and abundant fruit.

The salmon tilted in the pool next to me. My eye caught the curve of its back as it broke the surface, and I heard a
clock
as it slipped away.

I climbed up a steep bank clustered in hazels. Below me was the sequestered pool in its chapel. The riverbank had been protected from the wind, but now I could feel a cool damp breeze on my face, although there was no sense of rain. Two red grouse flapped up in front of me,
crack-crack-crack
, their voices like the hinge of a gate.

I stepped out onto a flat, wide world. I couldn’t see the sun. The river was tucked away inside the gorge. At the northern and southern edges of the flatness were low rumpled hills. At the peak of one of them a monolith leaned into the wind, as though it were trying to walk. Beyond that, and some way north, were the twirling blades of a wind farm. The gold and chamois peat flows lifted in front of me. Two thin black lines, a Land-Rover track, ran parallel with the hidden river. Occasional low walls split the land into sections. These few features, like delineations on a board game, created an illusion of emptiness more intense than if there had been nothing there at all.

I approached a five-barred gate. According to a sign the land ahead was private. But
pedestrians visiting the cemetery
were welcome. In spite of the word
welcome
there was something off-putting about the notice. Possibly the inclusion of the word
cemetery
. Looking behind me I could make out a large low hunting lodge on one of the hills above Dunbeath. I wondered, belatedly, if I should have asked permission before coming here. But pedestrians were welcome. I climbed over the gate and took out the Ordnance Survey map.

I was standing at the edge of that same area of whiteness, that vast empty page, which had so unnerved me when I saw the map in the camping store at Aviemore. Three towns, Dunbeath, Latheron and Latheronwheel, were linked by the candy-stripe A9. Rivers, hemmed in green, bisected the towns, passing beneath the road and wriggling towards the sea. An intricate patchworked field system skipped along the coast, a lacy trim along the edge of the page. Inland, the map was minimalist. It seemed more so in daylight, and the occasional contours, blue lines, spots and tufts of grass were as mute and inexplicable to me now as when I last looked at them. There was no forest, or anything that might be thought of as a mountain, and no loch beyond the boggy clusters of dubh lochs.