Up the Dam valley


Up the Dam valley

5th August 2017

This week up and down Damhead valley running south from the Border hamlet  of Traquair, set in the heart of the Tweed valley. A day of sunshine and sudden heavy downpours, shot blasts of rain disappear quickly on a strong westerly. The returning sun bright and intense, seeding colour and light back onto forest and hillside. The rapid weather changes engaging us differently in the landscape. Sometimes huddled and protected under a leaden sky, suddenly released to a warm uplifting sun. The valley a thing onto itself, as all valleys are, protected places. McFarlane refers to them as sanctuaries that, ‘possess the allure of lost worlds or secret gardens’ * This particular one gathers a greater sense of isolation the further it pulls us from the village below. First a slow drag up , passing a demolished bothy and a strange sort of memorial garden to local horses. Their names listed on roof slates attached to the stone dykes, some recounting stories of horse and rider. A sharp right takes us onto the forest track, leading to the head of the valley.   Sitting just below the path in a small copse of syca spruce, sits a large patch of fly agaric mushrooms. We sidle down to explore further, the lack of light dulling the normally luminous red caps. Our shouted conversation echoing through the densely packed timber. Back on the track we loop slowly uphill through variegated stands of trees. On one steep section the grass covers the path, on either side small tress have seeded themselves in thick swathes of deep green moss, further back tall stands of pine frame  the walkway. The effect is fairy like and otherworldly, as sunlight streams in, sharpening everything. We stop for lunch at the apex of the valley with views back down to Traquair and Innerleithen. Shortly after, the track comes to an abrupt end at a wide turning point, the route now continues along a narrow single path through the trees. Within a few metres we break free onto open field with hills arising above us.  Before us the head of the valley opens out in an impressive ring of high ground, swathed in heather and bracken. Further on we come across a sort of compound, containing a deserted white washed house and numerous outhouses. Our guide book lists its name as Glengaber (glen of the goats), built in middle of the 19th century but no idea on when people last inhabited. Deserted now and gradually falling in on itself, it is home to a large kettle of swallows that swoop and call beneath its eaves. A rough roadway runs out and up over the purple fields, difficult to image this track as sole access to this remote spot.  Reaching a height, the exposed path now shows spectacular views down the valley and onto to other dips and rises of the surrounding countryside. Before us a huge bank of white cumulonimbus dominates the skyline, across its surface a line of dark rain clouds scurry across the whitewashed background. Time changes in the contained space of a valley. Maybe it is the sense of ‘a lost world’, or as a  place removed and separate, but as we are  dis-gorged back onto the tarmac road we cross  back to the everyday and away from a place where time and thought succumb to a different rhythm.   
*MacFarlane R. (2007) The Wild Places. London: Granta

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