WHEN THE HILLS behind your house form part of your childhood playground, you soon learn what’s safe and what’s not, what hurts and what doesn’t, what’s fun and what isn’t - and that’s how we discovered scree-running. Tough on boots and tougher still on the runner if he loses his balance, it made for an exhilarating descent of a slope. Mind you, the scree had to be well chosen; best was the small, well-weathered stuff that moved easily. If it was right, it was just like running down an escalator.
About halfway up Castle Law is a precipice of pretty impressive proportions. According to my geologist neighbour, the rock is andesitic - a mixture of lavas and ashes and, probably due to a fault near the top, it has weathered badly and it’s very unstable. The huge apron of spoil at its foot was testimony to this and it became our favourite scree-running spot.
Several hundred feet below the precipice is a large field of about three acres which, nowadays, is a big wilderness with Blairlogie’s tiny car park in the middle - much used by those who prefer to climb Dumyat rather than walk over to it from Sheriffmuir. In a former life, this land was worked and lived on: a row of three 18th century cottages looked onto an open area of grazing-cum-growing ground, and behind them was a substantial belt of fruit trees. Because of these, the place was called the Orchard.
Clearly the builders of the cottages didn’t regard the looming presence above as any kind of threat. They probably felt the undergrowth on Castle Law’s lower slopes, along with the Orchard’s boundary wall and the fruit trees beyond, would absorb and check the impetus of the odd rolling stone. For a long time this seems to have been the case, but nature has a knack of making fools of us all. By 1935, the cottages to the west had become empty and, being devoid of even the most basic amenity, were immediately condemned by the local authority and their re-occupancy forbidden. The easternmost of the three, therefore, was the only one occupied - and that was about to end alarmingly.
It seems that the summer of 1935 was, to the chagrin of farmer and holidaymaker alike, a complete washout; days and days of rain with only the occasional half-hearted sunny interval. On a typically dreich day, one of the villagers set off to walk the dog and, as was his habit, he turned into the Orchard to follow the path leading to the hill. The precipice, straight ahead and up, is a dominant feature - one that naturally attracts the eye and the dog-walker found himself studying it as he’d done many times before. This was to be different. Horrified, he watched an immense boulder break away from the rockface and begin a ponderous, tumbling downhill progress. By the time it reached the escarpment at the foot of the scree, it was clearly heading for the eastern cottage and its unwitting occupants - but, after careering briefly into thin air, it was deflected by a tree (which it flattened) and, after demolishing a length of boundary wall and a couple of fruit trees, the monster came to rest 20 feet from the cottage.
There was more to come. A crashing clatter from the scree slope high above heralded a bombardment of smaller stuff leaping and bounding crazily downhill. Amazingly, the cottage and its occupants remained unscathed, but the woman (who actually owned the field) and her adult daughter were visibly shaken when they saw the size of the thing that had just missed them. As soon as a house became vacant in Menstrie, they were off. The land was left to fend for itself and all three cottages were now condemned; for the next few years the weather and general neglect led to their rapid deterioration. Then, in 1943, along came Mr Evans.
He clearly had a yen for a wartime version of the Good Life and, having looked favourably on the ground that went with the Orchard, he bought it from the landowner - the daughter by this time, as the mother had recently died. Doing something with the cottages would be prohibitively expensive, so he bought a timber-clad bungalow in Condorrat, dismantled it and then, with the help of a brickie pal to lay foundations and do other bits and pieces, rebuilt the thing right beside the monster rock that had nearly brought death and destruction eight years previously.
Though never in a position to give up the day job, for many years Mr Evans and his family led a semi-independent life. A big vegetable plot occupied the western half of the ground; one of the cottages was adapted to form accommodation for a few pigs, and truly free-range hens scratched around contentedly. The eastern half became the pitch for Blairlogie Thistle FC - the result of much wheedling by his two sons though it never had their father’s wholehearted support; but that’s another story. And so our charmed childhood centred on “the pitch”, the village, the hills behind and the farm (now the Coffee Bothy) to the south. But time moves on and by 1958 we were into young adulthood.
That summer had been particularly atrocious, with prolonged periods of heavy, scouring rain - just like the one all those years before. On the night of Sunday, 13 July, the Evans family were abed, but their sleep became a confused and terrified waking as a succession of thudding blows rained down on the felt and sarking roof causing it to sag drunkenly over their heads: shattering glass heralded the total demolition of the bathroom to the rear. Short of being caught in a night air raid, I can think of nothing more terrifying than experiencing a night rockfall. Next morning, the Orchard and Mr Evans’ dreams were abandoned for good.
Were one to dig around, I dare say traces of former occupation could be found - but, on the surface, there is not a trace of the wee bungalow or the nearby cottages. It’s as if they’d never existed.
Robin Kelsall