‘Ralph’s Far North’  is a collection of evocative accounts of journeys
through the landscape and seasons of Caithness and Sutherland,
one of the least known and most beautiful parts of the world. The book
is based on material from the column ‘Out and About with Ralph’ ,
written by Ben MacGregor,  which has appeared  in the ‘Caithness Courier’
over many years and is illustrated with delightful drawings by Moira Webster.

Ralph’s exploits, on foot and by bike,  take you through the remotest and
least known parts of the Scottish Highlands in sunshine and storm,
occasionally venturing as far afield as the Northern Isles and the North
of England. From nights spent on mountain-tops to long treks
across the flow-country to cycling daily to work through the worst
of the January storms the book is well summarised in  Ralph’s motto -
Live adventurously!

Whether you read from beginning to end, dip in at random, or just flick
through to look at Moira Webster’s inspired illustrations this book is a
must for anyone who loves the outdoors and especially theScottishHighlands.

p&p free in UK, add £2-50 per book for p&p if overseas.

Order Online from Curlew Cottage Books

Or phone Ben on  01847 895638

Or e-mail:  via Curlew Cottage

Or send cheque to:-

              Ben MacGregor
              Curlew Cottage,
              Hilliclay Mains,
              Weydale,
              Thurso,
              Caithness
              KW14 8YN

Two sample pieces from 'Ralph’s Far North' are given below;  there are 75 in the whole book.

An August day in the far North. The sun rises at 5-30 over the edge of the moor, throwing a shadow from the croft-house a quarter of a mile down the fields. Dew glistens, anyone abroad this early sees a white halo refracted around the shadow of their head. Early sun gleams on distant hill and mountain slopes, Knockfin, Armine, Klibreck, briefly Summer-green and sharp in the clear air.

Midges gather round the moorland sheep, they toss their heads and flick their ears, eating hurriedly and moving on to the next, greener, tuft. There is yet little wind. The low sun shines over great drifts of heavily scented meadow-sweet by the roadsides, here and there mixed with the red of willow-herb or ragged robin. Miles of quiet verges have been lined with white for weeks, first cow-parsley, then hogweed, now ground-elder and meadowsweet.

The creel-boat is setting out from the harbour, wind is forecast for later. Little waves lap the white shell-sand beach, across the bay are the red cliffs of Dunnet Head, beyond are the rounded hills of Hoy. Terns fuss, piping oyster-catchers fly low. Along the low clifftops the the odd late flower of pink thrift is still in bloom, with patches of wild thyme, while the oyster plant with its fleshy leaves and bright blue flowers sprawls over slabby rocks near the sea. A few yards inland, dense thickets of hogweed and nettle give way suddenly to the short grass of cultivation where hay has been cut and baled.

The creel boatman hauls in the night’s catch, Lobsters and crabs are now scarce as a result of over-fishing by large operators. But it’s a way of life. Half a mile away a tractor sweeps up swathes of cut grass to deposit round bales every fifty yards, making silage while the sun shines.

It’s not yet eight. From the ‘Hoy View Lounge’, the lorry-driver crossing on the ‘St Ola’ sees the 1200 foot cliffs of Hoy slipping past the window, he smokes a last cigarette over coffee before getting ready to disembark at Stromness. It’s been a good smooth crossing. Meanwhile, sixty miles further south, the refreshments trolley makes its third trip along the early-morning train as it rattles down the raised beaches to Brora. Seals and cormorants bask on the rocks and an early golfer tees off on the links.

Curtains in the house are tightly drawn against the bright sun, for some it is still night. Baby rabbits nibble on the roadside by fields of ripening barley. The oats look, as ever, as if they’ll not quite make it. Bumble-bees fly to and fro in the garden, potatoes are growing, gooseberries and currants are ripening, carrots are ready for eating, soon too the peas and broccoli.

From the bakery a smell of chocolate-cake drifts out across the town, from the B&B the smell of frying bacon. On the crowded campsite the first camping gas stoves and Primus stoves are hissing, sleepy caravanners goggle at the view across the blue sea to the sharp, sunlit hills of Hoy.

Six buses in a row, several hundred cars one, two, three, overtaking, 60-70MPH, nine miles in ten minutes. The Dounreay rush is on, from bed to plant or office in 25 minutes, pop music or news of the latest war on car radio. A young herring-gull lies dead in the road, each car in turn veers to miss it. Down, over the bridge, round. Under the bridge the river flows quietly, the waterfall little more than a trickle. Salmon jump in the bay, awaiting the rains.

The morning draws on. Bumble-bees fly to and fro in the garden. There’s a light breeze from the South-East and a bit more haze, now its getting really warm. Shops are busy, the Co-op car-park is full, the trolley queues are lengthening. The tourist caravans and caravettes are on their way, to stop and start and pull in and out of passing places all the way to Tongue and Durness. A piper plays to the crowds at John-o Groats.

Blue and brown butterflies flutter over the flowery East coast slopes - harebell, Grass of Parnassus, bedstraw , yellow rattle. Honey-suckle clings to the cliff-top. A family of eider ducks, the young now well grown, waddle into the sea from the empty, stony beach. Anemones wave pink fronds in rock pools. Puffins fly to and from their burrows on the stack. The last of the young kittiwakes, black and white, take to the air from the ledges.

The moorland deer are restless, pursued by clegs and clouds of flies. A rare family of grouse feeds in the heather. The keeper, hopeful for the twelfth, is out counting the meagre numbers, buzzing up the shallow grassy strath in his all-terrain quad. The peat is already stacked. Dragonflies dart over dubh-lochs. Diver-chicks are now hatched, but one of the pair succumbed to the arctic skuas which nested nearby, the remaining chick swims close to its parents. Suddenly the peace is smashed by the screech and roar of a pair of low-flying jets, just 10 minutes out of Lossiemouth. Nothing takes the slightest bit of notice. The quiet descends again.

Bell-heather and cross-leaved heath are in full bloom with early ling on sunny banks.Soon the road from Loch More to Dalnawhillan and Glutt Lodge will be lined with purple and scented with honey for all its 12 miles.

Now the south-east wind is strengthening, cold mist drifts in and out of Wick. Further west the wind, blowing over miles of sun-baked moor is hot. The afternoon sun, beating on flat office roofs at Dounreay raises indoor temperatures to the mid-eighties. With blinds drawn against the sun and doors propped open, desk workers sweat at computer screens. On the foreshore, great banks of yellow balsam soak up the afternoon sun. Between John-O-Groats and Burwick the wind is good force 7, against the tide, the sea is turning wild and chaotic. Day-trip tourists to Orkney on the ‘Pentland Venture’ will have an interesting return crossing.

Evening draws on. Westward the sun lowers through the haze of smoke carried from cities hundreds of miles to the South, before disappearing behind thick high cloud. Over much of Caithness the air is now fresh and cool, with haar still lingering on the East coast. Hooked cirrus clouds are moving in overhead. At Armadale and Bettyhill the wind has dropped, the air is warm, humid and sticky. Midges swarm, tourists seal themselves inside tent or caravan. The rain is spotting in Tongue, there’s cloud on Ben Loyal. Ten miles west and Foinaven is lashed by wind and driving rain, the Dionard is high, the salmon are jumping. In Strath Hope the campers cower out of the wind and rain. Thick fog and drizzle shroud Cape Wrath.

Nights are starting to draw in, by 10PM dusk settles over Caithness. The tractor is still out on the hill, headlights blazing, the farmer will be baling till midnight. It’s still dry in the east, but rain is forecast. A neighbour is flattening silage in the clamp, driving the tractor up and down and up and down, making the day as long as is has to be. Old cars and taxis throng the streets of the town, youngsters gather, catcalls come and go. The ‘Ola’ slips into Scrabster harbour after its sixth crossing of the Pentland Firth, a little late with the strong winds. Two trawlers are setting out. Peat reek drifts from the croft chimney. Curtains are drawn, lights are out - already night for some. An August day in the far North.
 
 

Three Winter days, all different, and yet alike...

A mid December day, one of the darkest of the year. Calm and foggy, rare weather indeed for the far north. An occasional spit of drizzle or the lightest puff of wind were the only things to change, though occasionally the cloud would lift to give a misty couple of miles visibility below a grey sheet at two hundred feet. This was a day for the coast, a good day for cycling without having to fight winds.

Castletown was still dark, the Dunnet road was empty in the grey early light, Scarfskerry was just waking. Further on, leaving the bike, I crossed a misty headland and clambered down to a bay where twenty or thirty seals splashed from rocks out into the sea. Their heads bobbed near the water's edge, watching this lone intruder walk their empty shore.
Mist came and went on the coast road but had lifted enough for Stroma to be visible from John O'Groats. Although it was late morning almost nobody was about and the harbour was deserted other than for a pair of eider duck. The top of the Duncansby stacks rose into the fog, while below, the quiet grey rocky beaches gave a peace that in Summer is never found even at this relatively remote spot.

Back along the coast at Brough the tide was out, permitting a slippery crossing over seaweedy rocks to the stack. A bevy of seals splashed and snorted into the water leaving one, marooned in the middle of the exposed rocks, which snarled and hissed at me from a few yards away.

There was still time for a detour out to Dunnet Head, to watch the lighthouse beam sweeping out into the fog as dusk turned to dark on one of the shortest days of the year.

Christmas Eve by contrast was a day of sharp, cold clarity. A strong south-west wind, clear skies, hills 50 miles away crisp-white on the horizon but the nearer landscape still awaiting the first real snowfall. Beyond the horizon rose great wispy cumulonimbus, giving storms and blizzards on the West coast. The low sunlight was almost harsh, casting long shadows. Lochs were dark blue amid yellow-brown moors, and the bog pools had a thin crust of ice.

The bitter headwind gave hard cycling in the dark before dawn out to Westerdale and on to Loch More, but was more from the side for the run to Altnabreac, with the sun now up. Soft sand can make cycling these roads almost impossible, but on this occasion everything was frozen hard and only a few ruts required care. I carried on west, almost as far as Strath Halladale before leaving the roads and striking north across the heart of the flow country. An obvious route, linking a string of five remote lochs, leads to the end of the Shurrery Lodge track. To drag and wheel the bike this way was hard work, but worth the effort to traverse the heart of Caithness in the depths of Winter.

By what is, arguably, the remotest loch in the county, a strange thing happened. A bird looking like a grouse appeared, flying straight towards me and the bike. It landed about four feet away; it was dumpy, much smaller than a grouse and a very handsome speckled brown. As I watched in amazement it sat for a few seconds then scuttled a few feet and disappeared into a peaty hole at the water's edge. I could see it there, sitting motionless below a little peat overhang and could have reached down and stroked it. The only bird that fitted, from the books, was a quail - but such had no right to be in the middle of the flows in December.

I wandered up onto Ben Nam Bad Mor, one of my favourite local hills, to see the sunset over the moors. A couple of arctic hares seemed almost tame, only running off in a very unconcerned manner when just a few yards away. A thin layer of snow covered the summit; more would soon be coming!

A week later - Hogmanay, lying snow, frost, and brilliant sunshine belying a dreadful forecast. In some trepidation I drove the icy road down Strath Halladale in the early morning; there had been some drifting near Forsinard but the road was passable and I carried on over the bealach to leave the car a couple of miles on by the old roadside cottage.
I'm always wary about leaving the car for hours on such a day as a rising wind and drifting snow can quickly block roads - but the weather looked set fair, with showers staying well to the west.

Cross-country skis gave steady progress over the deep snow-covered heather, with frozen dubh-lochs giving particularly easy going. After an hour I was climbing up towards the plateau, cutting across the slopes at an easy angle. Behind, the pure white slopes of the Griams, Ben Armine and the Sutherland hills looked incredibly remote - then came a familiar sound, and there was the two-coach Sprinter heading northwards looking like a toy train in wonderland. It must
have been a superb ride from Inverness on such a day!

The sun appeared over the skyline, and soon I was on the ridge, heading south for the highest part of the Knockfin Heights. The skiing was quite slow, with grasses and heather showing through the snow, but vastly easier than slogging knee-deep on foot.

Views on such a day from the hills are beyond my humble powers of description. Factually, most of a white Caithness was visible, with the sea and Hoy in the distance, the Morven-Scaraben range, as well as all the Sutherland hills from Golspie to Klibreck,and from Ben Hee to Ben Hope. The wind was cold, but not that cold, and moderated as the day wore on.
For an hour I skied around the Knockfin plateau, the frozen lochans giving excellent going. This is a place to visit either on a day such as this, or in June when the birdlife is at its best. Or go on a misty day in November for a test of route-finding - but don't forget the compass!

I managed to find gentle slopes down which even I could ski with only a couple of falls, and with surprisingly little effort was back at the car as the sun was setting. In the last hour of daylight of the year I carried on down to the shores of Loch an Ruathair, the track giving some of the best skiing of the day.

A full moon was rising above Meall a Bhealaich and the frost was setting in harder, as the silent white hills awaited the New Year.

JOGGING through peat and heather near Dunnet Head in warm evening sunshine... mountain-biking along a 3000 foot mountain ridge, laden with camping gear... clambering down to a rocky bay on a morning of thick mist... skiing across frozen dubh lochs in the Flow Country... This is Ralph, out and about in the Far North and beyond.
 Those who have encountered his fortnightly column in the Caithness Courier over the best part of two decades will need little introduction to Ralph and his adventures in the back of beyond. For the uninitiated, his articles  some of which have now been published as Ralph's Far North (Curlew Cottage Books, £12.95) - take the reader on a voyage of discovery through the nooks and crannies and hidden corners of Caithness, Sutherland and an assortment of landscapes further south (and, indeed, further north).
 The solitary syllable of his pen-name seems to suit his style perfectly: enigmatic yet amiable. In his expeditions to wilderness areas of mountain and moorland and secret stretches of coast, plodding along in his battered trainers, riding his overworked bike or making swift progress on those versatile skis, Ralph is always on his own. "Company on the hills is fine," he says in the introduction, "but the outing is then a social activity with the surroundings as a backdrop. To properly appreciate the environment, to have time to listen, to see, to think, I have to be alone."
 And yet, while his love of nature and the countryside seems to border on the obsessive, or at least the mildly eccentric, Ralph doesn't see the great outdoors as his own private domain. On the contrary, he never wastes an opportunity to urge his fellow citizens to leave the car behind, get away from the telly and discover the unspoilt grandeur that surrounds them in the Far North - "still one of the least-known and most beautiful parts of the world".
 In  a chapter headed  "Explore Caithness", for example, Ralph acknowledges that many a visitor will have formed an impression of a flat, boring county with little more to offer than some barren moors and an uninviting coast. "But just go and look," he implores. "Potter around. Wander the cliff-tops. Scramble down the geos. Peer into the old ruins. Follow moorland burns through chains of lochs to their sources. Explore the old quarries. Walk across the county away from the roads and realise how fragile is man's grip on this exposed northern land. Visit the standing stones... and the brochs and the cairns and the castles. Caithness reveals a mass of interest and beauty once you look below the superficial surface appearance."
 Elsewhere, Ralph reflects on his almost lifelong fascination with exploring. How can anyone, he asks, drive down the A9 "without at least the urge to stop and walk up the glens and hills, or along the cliff-tops or down to the harbours, or round the lochs"?
 Those who have managed to venture off the beaten track will find themselves making a mental note of their own favourite spots in response to "The Best of Caithness". In this chapter, Ralph nominates the county's best town, village, loch, mountain, stretch of river and so on, concluding that the number one place on his personal list is the plateau of the Knockfin Heights - "an Arctic tundra in winter, a naturalist's paradise in summer."
 As far as Ralph is concerned, work (even if that work happens to be important and high-powered) will always take second place to such outings. Occasional business trips are regarded as an intrusion, a necessary evil that must be expelled from the system as quickly as possible... "So just a few hours after leaving London suburbia I was jogging over the Hill of Olrig, feeling like an escaped prisoner running free across the top of the world."
 Ralph tends to be rather self-effacing about his own athleticism - but anyone who can traipse through miles of peatbog, jog over imposing hills and cycle into wintry headwinds to the extent that he does must be very fit indeed. He is similarly modest about his knowledge of geology and botany, yet it is clear that he has a firm grasp of both subjects. (Only a couple of weeks ago a delighted Courier reader wrote in praise of a recent article in which Ralph had identified over 100 species of wild flower within half a dozen miles of his home near Thurso.)
 Ralph's Far North is not a guidebook. It's not simply a catalogue of sights seen and places visited, and there are no maps (instead the text is embellished with some nice pen-and-ink drawings by Moira Webster and with the author's own photographs). It is, quite simply, the work of someone who chooses to go his own way.
 Ralph has strong views on the manner in which certain privately-owned estates are run, and he devotes most of the introduction to his thoughts and advice on access and the "freedom to roam". From there on, each chapter is an essay in its own right - sometimes lyrical, frequently informative, always unpretentious. These are one man's impressions of the world around him, and that world is encapsulated in the Far North.
 His message is to proceed at your own pace if you want to share his sense of exhilaration. "My advice is that you don't do anything beyond your capabilities, beyond what you feel happy doing - and always be prepared for bad weather."
 If you have any attachment to Caithness, either through living here or as a visitor, this inspiring book will enrich your appreciation of the place. And, if you're healthy and able-bodied, it'll make you think twice the next time you contemplate driving from point "A" to point "B" if it's a distance that could conceivably be walked or cycled.
 As the man himself says: "Live adventurously!"

Alan Hendry
 
 

FOR years Ralph MacGregor has been contributing a column to the Caithness Courier on his stravaigings around the countryside. Stravaigings is the right word to describe what he does, particularly as it is held to derive from the Latin 'extravagari' to wander about outside. Certainly hillwalking is inadequate, as Ralph is just as likely to use a bicycle or skis.
 Indeed his expeditions in the bills at all seasons mean that he knows the wilder, more remote corners of Caithness and Sutherland better than any other man alive.
 Some may think him slightly mad, others will envy him. I do a little, as I share to some extent his love of wild places, even although I don't often get to them now. It's also apparent from the columns collected in this volume that he gets by on little sleep. That's one difference between us.
 Ralph always seems to be rising before dawn to cycle off to the moors or catch a train from Thurso, It's easy, of course, to rise before dawn in December and January but Ralph does it to pedal to his work at Dounreay from Weydale, that's about 12 miles each way by my crude reckoning, and he does it irrespective of sleet, rain, gale or snow. And, to make the challenge worse, he often takes the longer back road by Shebster.
 The essays in the collection follow the year and you can accompany Ralph- peching, perhaps - as he climbs Morven, Ben Loyal, the Cairngorms and many another hill, or crosses the Flow Country, or walks along the cliffs of Berriedale or Hoy.
 Ralph writes in an easy, attractive style and fills his descriptions of the hills with details about plants, birds, weather and anything else that takes his fancy. The book is also illustrated by photographs and drawings in a variety of styles by Moira Webster.
 "Live adventurously" are his opening words in the Introduction. A little further on he warns the reader that his book is not a conventional guide, as if anyone would think it so. He also has some practical things to say about access and the "freedom to roam".
 It is tempting to write "Don't try this at home, read the book instead," but there is no doubt that Ralph's enthusiasm for the outdoors may inspire some of you to emulate him. Just remember that he keeps himself superbly fit. On the other hand, even a little hillwalking  would be worthwhile, as I am sure Ralph would agree.

Jim Miller