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Loch Freuchie
A walk around the loch looking at the historic relationship of humans within this landscape through the ruined settlements along the loch side. Route shown below ⬇️
Part of a possible displaced gravestone left in the remains of an abandoned homestead.
Perthshire has a strong link to carving and mark making within the landscape carving and mark they can be seen dotted all in the forms from religious carvings to cupping stones and Pictish Stones.
Another runined settlement further along, along with a more modern abandoned building.
Video “recreating”/ “reliving” my walk.
I accidently forgot to turn off my sound whilst recording… sounds;
Yaeji playing on Spotify
Clicky keys
Over heating laptop
And me grunting... occasionally.
Layers of technologies within the landscape some now obsolete others vital to modern way of life.
Below photos an extract Nan Shepherd’s forward from The Living Mountain 1977, she talks of how place (the Caringorms) changes over time with the advancements of technologies and humans.
FOREWORD
Thirty years in the life of a mountain is nothing—the flicker of an eyelid. Yet in the thirty years since this book was written many things have happened to the Cairngorms, some of them spectacular things, things that have won them a place in the Press and on the television screens:
Aviemore erupts and goes on erupting.
Bulldozers birze their way into the hill.
Roads are made, and re-made, where there were never roads before.
Skiers, swift, elate, controlled, miracles of grace and precision, swoop and soar—or flounder—but all with exhilaration.
Chair-lifts swing up and swing down (and a small boy falls from one and is killed).
A restaurant hums on the heights and between it and the summit Cairn Gorm grows scruffy, the very heather tatty from the scrape of boots (too many boots, too much commotion, but then how much uplift for how many hearts). New shelters are sited for climbers. A cottage at Muir of Inverey is enlarged and fitted up as a place of resort for Cairngorm Club members, the members themselves laying the flooring and erecting the bunks. Glenmore houses and trains those ready to learn. Skills are taught and tested. Young soldiers learn the tech-niques of Adventure. Orienteers spread over the land (but the Lairig Ghru, so far, is not to be tamed as part of a national ‘way’).
Reindeer are no longer experimental but settlers.
The Nature Conservancy provides safe covert for bird and beast and plant (but discourages vagabonds, of whom I have been shamelessly one—a peerer into ivcorners). Ecologists investigate growth patterns and problems of erosion, and re-seed denuded slopes.
The Mountain Rescue service does its magnificent work, injured are plucked from ledges by helicopter, the located, the exhausted carried to safety.
And some are not rescued. A man and a girl are found, months too late, far out of their path, the girl on abraded hands and knees as she clawed her way through drift. I see her living face still (she was one of my students), a sane, eager, happy face. She should have lived to be old. Seventy men, with dogs and a helicopter, go out after a lone skier who has failed to return, and who is found dead. And a group of schoolchildren, belated, fail to find the hut where they should have spent the night. They shelter against a wall of snow, but in the morning, in spite of the heroic efforts of their instructress, only she and one boy are alive.
All these are matters that involve man. But behind them is the mountain itself, its substance, its strength, its structure, its weathers. It is fundamental to all that man does to it or on it. If it were not there he would not have done these things. So thirty years may alter the things he does but to know it in itself is still basic to his craft. And that is what, thirty years ago, I was striving to do in this manuscript. It was written during the latter years of the Second War and those just after. In that disturbed and uncertain world it was my secret place of ease. The only person who read the manuscript then was Neil Gunn, and that he should like it was not strange, because our minds met in just such experiences as I was striving to describe. He made a couple of suggestions as to publication, but added that in the circumstances of the time a publisher would be hard to find. I wrote one letter at his instigation and received a courteous and negative reply and the manuscript went into a drawer and has lain there ever since. Now, an old woman, I begin tidying out my possessions and reading it again I realise that the tale of my traffic with a mountain is as valid today as it was then. That it was a traffic of love is sufficiently clear; but love pursued with fervour is one of the roads to knowledge.
Nan Shepherd, August 1977
https://file1.largepdf.com/file/2020/04/23/The_Living_Mountain_-_Nan_Shepherd.pdf