Light and Lapwings - A summer residency on the Gairn

This summer I’ve joined lapwings, curlews and golden eagles as a summer resident in Glen Gairn in the heart of the Cairngorms National Park.

Stretching out for tens of miles, Glen Gairn reaches its fingers all the way from the historic Gairn Shiel bridge on the north eastern edge of the Cairngorms to the very heart of mountains and the remote Loch A’von basin. Little visited by people and undisturbed, it’s a place where lapwings come to nest and curlews can be heard all around.

Glen Gairn; “From summer pastures to the high mountains” Oil on board

This summer I’ve had the privileged opportunity of being invited to be a summer ‘artist in residence’ at Rinloan, Gairnshiel. Located in the Northeastern corner of the Cairngorms, Glen Gairn, which leads up on to high plateau of Ben Avon and Beinn a Bhuird, is a quiet corner of one of Scotland’s otherwise well visited National Parks.

I started my residency, by exploring the Glen from its outer reaches at Gairnshiel to its hidden heartland in the inner Cairngorms. I was struck by the light and tranquility of the Glen, the wide open Strath seeming to absorb and calm all around it.

In this quiet Glen, wildlife and history thrive, and in my first foray into the hills, and on my first visit I encountered lapwings so unused to human disturbance that one sat on a rock chirping out its ‘peewit’ call just a few metres away from me. Further up the Glen, nearer to the high plateau at the now abandoned Corndavon Lodge, two golden eagles, repeatedly alighted and departed from a rocky perch not far from I sat and sketched.

Eagles soar over the abandoned Corndavon Lodge. Onsite sketching with acrylic wash and chalk pastels

The other thing which marks out Glen Gairn as ‘different’ to other parts of the Cairngorms is the abundance of ghostly ‘township’ settlements. Heading up the Glen I came upon one after the other of these small collections of ruined dwellings, stock walls and bygone infrastructure. ‘Townships’, which might sometimes have comprised of up to a hundred dwellings are often taken to be the remains of crofting settlements, but townships pre-date the practice of crofting (in a time before landowners displaced the local communities to make way for sheep), and flourished in a harmonious and egalitarian form of farming with land held and farmed communally.

The open spaces, the light, the undisturbed wildlife and the time capsule of a lost way of life, are sure to inspire.

Tullochmacarrick, Glen Gairn. An abandoned way of life.