Stefan Durkacz

I was in Inverurie for work with the next couple of days free. Obviously the Cairngorms were calling, but first a meander inland to climb Morven, an outlier on the cusp of the great agricultural patchwork of Aberdeenshire. If Lord of the Rings had been filmed in Scotland, this landscape would have doubled nicely as the Shire, a rich quilting of forest and farmland, hills and winding valleys, slow-flowing rivers, twisting roads and sudden, pretty towns hidden in the folds, sleepy today in the bright heat of August. It's not an area I know well, but it is distinct with a strong identity and sense of itself, one Scotland of many, something of a political enigma too. Around here it's Doric, not Gaelic, I was reminded the night before. This is the north but not the Highlands; the lowlands but not the central belt. Back in the Middle Ages, when the Lord of the Isles was a major force, west coast vs. east coast was a shooting war. Agriculture is the bedrock here and in the 19th centu

The summer doldrums: a month after the solstice, the growing and raising mostly done, the season is sliding down the far side in a blaze of heat, haze and heather pollen. Clouds of the stuff coat my shoes and make my mouth dry on the moors above Blair Atholl. I went to climb Ben Vuirich, a big hill (903 metres) but totally overshadowed by the massive and complex mountain of Beinn a'Ghlo just to the north. A weekday and an unpretentious, self-effacing heathery lump of a hill, so solitude aplenty. But Hamish Brown writes that 'Ben Vuirich may be unobtrusive but it has the common magic of all mountains' and he's not wrong. The approach from the west, once off the Beinn a'Ghlo path which I biked along for a few miles, is a long trackless plod. The route passed lonely Loch Valigan. I stopped for lunch near a little tarn with a panorama of Beinn a'Ghlo, its curves and sweeping ridges and scree-covered flanks filling the view across the glen. So many insects this year,