Gill Troup / Still Without Stopping

 On our second day I build our garden and our home out of paper in utopian and dystopian form. This was good. Colour, glue, bits of stick, in the old village hall – same design as at home – which has thatdrymustydustybutnice smell of bring-and-buy sales and the Rural Institute baking and community meetings about the rubbish collection.

Our first solo, at last, and so short – afternoon until dusk about five thirty. Every one of us loses our shape into formless dark plodding things under layers of goretex and down, with humps from the bags full of blankets and the 20 items of clothing we seem to need…dressing up and dressing down is a pain layer after layer and no sooner on than nature calls.

 So out and up the Minster’s Path then off it and up the hill towards the first lonely tree. Then further up towards the second tree, I see a spent yellow shotgun cartridge and pick it up – wonder what’s been shot and if I’ll see one alive. I go across to a rocky mound – maybe some shelter from the rising steel wind – but no, already been colonised by corrugated zinc and red plastic-covered wire which has held it together.  A brown plastic beer bottle sitting like a missile in pride of place – been here some time –I wonder how long it will take to disappear….for ever?

So up again to tree three – at last high enough to see over the hills and across the glen and a hint of the valley to the east and the hill to the north. I drop of my burden, black bag and incongruous emerald greed fleece rug from Ikea made in China. One of our number has told me they make them from thread spun from recycled plastic bottles which makes me feel a bit better but at £2.75 all the way from China something is wrong and it sits out from the tree on the hill like an accusation.

Tree Three - with bag

 I keep walking up to the ridge and then faster and faster along it to the south so I can see into the place where I spent so much time as a child – Glen Clova with the Airlie monument marking its start. Why have I not been back here for decades? It is two hours from home not two days. I come across a well worn sheep track. This is where the farmer I knew will have walked with his dogs for years. He will have known these hills so well and I so little. The mist sits like a damp shrug on the hills and the wind is sharper and louder nipping into the crevices where the Michelin wrap has smoothed lines.

Sheep Track

Walking back to tree three, there are still hard packed patches of snow which tells me the temperature here has been colder than home. The grass is pale frosted and strewn with lumps of granite (is it? Why don’t I know these things?) and pointed stumps of trees across the spread of it like angry creatures  fighting their way out from the peat below. (I later find out they are remains of silver birch forest – but why so jagged?)

I sit at tree three for a quarter of an hour – too cold, too windy – and then take a long steep route back to warm dark fire at our base – still without stopping all afternoon….