Extract: Borrowed Land by Kapka Kassabova
An extraordinary portrait of the Scottish Highlands: this is an epic and urgent story of destruction and renewal, told through unforgettable encounters with its people. Enjoy this extract from Borrowed Land.
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The forest is full of things. There are beings among the trees, hearing and seeing, breathing. Not going anywhere, just – there. I am inside a gallery of lichen, rock, bracken and air, a painted world. So many mosses! All sorts of different mosses. On the rocks, on the birches. It’s a padded land, a kind land. You can lie down anywhere and make it your bed, suck water from a mossy pad, cover yourself with a blanket of moss and sink your head into the merciful pillow of the earth. It welcomes you. The moss filters water and air. It’s the lungs of the glen. I’m inside a living body, maybe that’s why I feel reverence. The rusty bracken, the yellowing blaeberry bushes I try not to tread on, the noble Scots pine with its bodies twisted and alive. Like the Farrar itself. Even dammed, it snakes its way to some essential winding var. The sound of water everywhere – burns, rapids in the gorge that opens up suddenly below this hillside road in an astonishment of secrecy and growth. A gorge far from the world is ideal for the romantic – in it you will find either rapture or death. But I’ve only just arrived, I stick to the path.
The old transmission line marches with its pylon soldiers in a straight line across the noble land. It marches west to east, ghosted by the rivers, the drovers and the prophets. It has already conquered the land in all directions. The army of useful pylons with their special operation – where are they going, what is their final objective? They were erected by the Hydro-Electric Board seventy years ago at the same time as the dams and the power stations – and soon they will be restrung in an upgrade for energy security. Nobody knows what this means and what it will entail.
Water courses down from all sides, generous highland water reddish gold with peat. And the bellow of stags! Raw, big-bodied, it means business – the business of life and death. They have come down the glen for the rut. They fight each other over the hinds that live here. In this matriarchy of red deer, hinds live within five miles of where they are born and have the best pasture. The males live ten to twenty miles into Strathfarrar. Their gender-separate existence is interrupted by the mating season and once the rut is over, the hinds send all the males away again, except the young ones under a year old who are their children. Faces watch me in the forest. It’s the sheep. Big long-legged Cheviot-like sheep live here but they are not Cheviot, it’s another breed. They lie down in the rain. One looks at me without moving her head, like a marble sculpture. She looks with understanding, the way animals do. All animals. They understand something fundamental that we don’t.
Every day, the colours of the tree crowns will change. That rowan! It has a red top but the rest of it is still green. My God, all the rowans are doing this. It’s like a magician’s act. They have red, yellow and green in their hair, in layers like poetry stanzas, and I stop as if shot by an elf ’s arrows. My knees almost give way under the weight of so much art. To kneel among the birches, the rowans, the Scots pines. To pray for this not to be lost. To thank the sky for being a graphite grey. And to drink in the light of the north that makes the colours of the Farrar vibrate with truth whose other name is beauty.