Kirkton Glen runs from the village of Balquhidder in the Southern Highlands up to a lochan called Lochan An Eireannaich - the small loch of the Irishman.
I walked up there the other day along a wide forest track under a bright sky. The close-planted forestry covering the hillsides was leavened by the scots pine, oak, rowan and birch that are native to this part of the world. At the top of the glen, the track gave way to a narrow muddy path and I climbed to the watershed and the lochan, the view opening into a breathtaking panorama along Glen Dochart, with distant views of the mountains of Breadalbane and beyond. Two of the Southern Highlands’ highest mountains - Ben More and Stob Binnein - lurked nearby, their tops hidden by the silver clouds. Unlike Kirkton Glen with its tight-packed sitka spruce plantations, the landscape beyond had no trees, only endlessly rolling moor, bog and heather-strewn hillsides.
I clambered up away from the path and found a rock to sit on and eat my lunch, taking in the silence and the hugeness of the open air. The only sounds were from a few crows cawing, the occasional croak of a raven, some little birds I couldn't identify twittering in the craggy hillside at my back. At times there was a silence so complete it was almost unsettling.
Then I heard something else. A roar, deep and far-carrying, echoing from the crags behind me. It sounded like something from another world, like an ogre was about to come stomping into view or a wyvern might fly out from behind one of the hill tops and swoop down upon me. My heart was in my mouth. It came again, longer this time, a throaty bellow, not so much carried across the mountains as emerging from them. I sat on my rock, listening to this call come again and again. Then I recognised it. It wasn't some monster from myth come to eat me - it was the rutting of red deer.
The rut is red deer breeding season. Between September and October, the red deer stags compete for dominance over their hinds, bellowing and roaring at one another, clashing antler to antler. It's an impressive, intimidating sight, but it's also an immensely moving sound.
The deer were in a patch of marshy hillside, about half a mile below me and at that distance they were so well camouflaged it was hard to see them. They only became obvious when one of them moved and, if the rut is about anything, it's about movement. The great stags battering into each other in a tangle of antlers and snorting breath. Still, I was too high up to see things with any detail, but the echo from the crags behind me meant the sound came loud and clear, reverberating across the glen. A few times I heard antlers clashing, that wooden, hollow sound as the stags fought, but it was the roaring that kept me rooted to the spot, kept me listening and wondering, imagining.
The wild places of Scotland are not that dangerous a place to walk in, certainly not from the animal life. There are no bears, no wolves. There used to be both of these, but we don't have them any more - which is a huge shame on us - and means the only predator is the midge. Lucky for me, on this day, the wind was too high and the season just a little too late for those blood-suckers. There was just me, some corvids, and the bellowing beasts in the glen below.
I'd heard the sound of the deer rut on nature documentaries, of course, but nothing could have prepared me for how unearthly, how ancient the roar was. It made me feel both completely immersed in the landscape and the moment, but also transported to some other version of that place, where great and numerous beasts still roamed the glens, where the forests were not commercial plantations for the profit of the few, but deep and never-ending, full of light and variety and of animals: bear, lynx, beaver, wolf and deer.
For that's the irony. The red deer is naturally a creature of woodland. There they grow much larger, thrive in the habitat they evolved to inhabit. They don't really belong on open moorland, but that's what they have now, bred as they are for sport - again, for the benefit of the few. True mixed, native woodland, the oak and pine, alder and birch, don't make money for anyone so they exist only in pockets scattered across Scotland, holding on, a remnant from another time. The deer roam the open spaces, out of place yet nurtured by humans as targets for the gun.
Still, there was a moment as those unseen stags bellowed across the treeless hillside when I could close my eyes and listen, imagine a time when that call was just one of the many calls of Highland Scotland. But that’s what it is now - imaginary. A fantasy.
Here are a handful of photos from the walk.