‘Welcome to Glencoe!’ we tell the students, on a brisk day in late October in the blustery remnants of Storm Ashley. The south-westerly gusts hurtle up the glen, funnelling neatly round An t-Sròn so there’s no shelter at all. The horizontal rain pelts our faces, needles into every crack and seam in our clothing, and shoots down our necks when we bend down to examine the face of a stone wall half buried in the rushes.
Most of this class of Masters students are new to Scotland and to the rapid shifts of Highland weather. What was this like without modern clothing, we wonder? To go barefoot in the bog in October, walk through the rainstorm to the next village with a woollen plaid and no Gore-Tex?
We stand in a dripping circle and reconstruct the experience of living in this landscape in the 17th and 18th centuries. So what was it like to live here in Achnambeithach, I ask. ‘Horrible!’ comes the immediate answer. But the discussion turns to the thick walls of the houses we’re mapping, the insulating properties of turf as a building material, the heat of the peat fire trapped inside – along with the smoke.
In a way, Achnambeithach is like the next little village up the glen, Achtriachtan, and the next one down the glen, Achnacon. It’s a cluster of three or so thatched houses with stone and turf walls sitting at the base of the mountainside with a head dyke enclosing them and some land for gardens and little fields. But there’s some interesting phasing going in. The landscape of Achnambeithach seems to tell the story of what’s happened here in the last few centuries.
The older houses have entrances in the middle of one of their long walls, with the cows in the downhill end and your family uphill. There’s the 19th century farmhouse, with outbuildings and sheepfold, very like those at Achtriachtan and Achnacon. But inbetween them something else is going on, an odd square complex of enclosure, house and outhouse. It looks as if it falls between the 17th–18th century houses on their own and the bigger, more formal complex of the 19th-century sheep farm. Perhaps the transition from a clustered community of houses to a single sheep farm was more gradual than we thought?
Suddenly the squally rain lessens and almost stops, and a rainbow glows behind a thin line of trees that fail to break the wind. Across the glen an elongated patch of sunlight glides across the slopes of Aonach Eagach, the Toothed Ridge, then another lights up the remaining leaves on the line of trees. The Purple moor grass on the slopes above the head dyke, so rich and green in summer, glows a startling russet-orange.
We sit in the rain below a bank which we optimistically hoped would provide a bit of shelter from the wind and eat our sandwiches. When it’s too cold to sit any longer, a bunch of us go up to trace the line of the head dyke, while James’s group map the complex house with the GPS and Eddie tries to lead a group experience on multisensory landscape archaeology. It turns out that the only sense we have left is the noise of the rain pummelling the hoods of our jackets. It’s time to go home.
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