Free Season in Strathglass by John; Fowler Page B

the Guisachan cottages for Donald Fraser. Thin, meaning sharp, keen, biting.
    The bare birch woods are red against the hillsides.
    In Tomich, asking directions at the inn, I see a sprightly, elderly man walking his dog down the road. ‘Albert Dormer,’ says my informant. ‘He used to be bridge correspondent for The Times .’ When he lived in Tomich? ‘No, that was before.’
    What chance brought him here to live?

30
    Catherine and I walk down the road at Guisachan in the dark, with a faint moon glimpsed through the foliage. The clock tower at the steading is ghostly in the mirk, like the gothic house in Psycho . It's pitch black under the trees but we have torches and, at the foot of the drive, there are lights, a line of globes glowing faintly. Moths have landed on some of the globes. C identifies a winter moth and a few pale brindled beauties.

31
    One of the Tomich cottages is for sale and, on a whim, we call to view. We fall in love. It's perfect – it's the home in Affric we've always wanted. For three days and nights, we dream.
    But we're not country folk. It's not for us.

32
    Albert Dormer, who's in his 80s, came to live in Tomich 15 years ago when he tired of London. He found the cottage by chance on a house-hunting trip north with his ex-wife, who encouraged him to buy. He says she probably thought it was fine to live 500 miles apart. It could have been further. They'd looked at a house on the Pentland Firth.
    His dog Pickles, a bouncy ginger poodle, jumps on my lap when I sit down on the settee, followed by a Siamese cat who curls herself alongside. Like commas. Both accept stroking.
    For years, Albert, a tournament player, was bridge correspondent for The Times and he's written several books on the game. Through bridge, he met Jaime Ortiz-Patino, wealthy grandson of a tin-mining magnate in Bolivia, bridge player and owner of the Valderrama golf course in Spain, and together they travelled on behalf of the World Bridge Federation. Patino had a mission to stamp out cheating in the international game. (Albert says the Italians were the worst.)
    He no longer plays. Instead he takes Pickles for long walks in the morning, reads the newspapers, watches a little television and feeds the geese in his garden.

33
    The weather's turned cold again, with snow on the tops. Rain drummed on the caravan roof overnight and, outdoors, the wind nips. There's been one downpour already and, in spite of a few ragged blue patches in the sky, there will be more. Dark clouds moving fast on the horizon give promise of squalls to come.
    Not the best day to explore the loch country on high moorland between Affric and Glen Moriston. Nevertheless . . .
    Hilton pond beyond Tomich is a circle of ornamental water in front of a big white house where there's said to be an osprey's nest in the trees. I can't find it. How can you tell? What does an osprey nest look like?
    A track leads into mixed woodland – conifers, birch and rowan and, here and there, an old pine, all tangled with grey-green lichens. The mossy ground squelches with water. It's all a dripping dampness. But the track has a stony surface, laid down possibly for pony traffic between the glens, and boots ring out pleasantly on it.
    A burn almost worthy of being called a river flows fast alongside, gushing over the track where the map shows a ford – it's no great obstacle, I can splash through with feet more or less dry. Then I come on a notice – ‘Wild boar reservation 200 metres ahead’ – and, beyond it, the high perimeter fence of an enclosure. I'm glad of this fence. How wild are wild boars, after all? They have tusks.
    But, when a couple of dun-coloured beasts emerge from the woods and trot along on their side of the barrier, they seem innocuous – smaller than I expected and peaceable. A second billboard informs that the reservationhas been set up with various scientific objectives in view, including studies into the effect