Welcome to "Man with two dogs" - the family website for dog owners and dog walkers.

This is my countryside diary which appears each Saturday in the Courier & Advertiser newspaper.

COUNTRY CLAIVERS*

*Claivers:  gossip.

(See Dr Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language 1879)

FEBRUARY 2006 

INTRODUCTION

Writing about Scotland is like hunting for a needle in a haystack. Where do you start and where will it finish? In this newsletter – to be published monthly - I look forward to telling you about my Scotland, and sharing with you my stories of its countryside and wildlife, and the people I meet along the way.

The great thing about nature is it is mostly simple and straightforward. Wildlife, in all its varied forms, lives and survives mostly in an uncomplicated manner. The way it goes about it is sometimes magical in its ingenuity, but mostly what most creatures want to do is live and reproduce in comparative peace and harmony.

Survival of the fittest is the law of the wild, summed up in the doggerel verse –

Small bugs have big bugs
On their backs that bite ‘em
Big bugs have bigger bugs
And so on, ad infinitum

Few animals have no natural predators, but all animals have Man as a predator, or at least as a threat to life and limb. Man has been managing the environment, and the wildlife in it, for more than five thousand years. We have such control over so much of our world that we can now never relinquish our environmental management responsibilities.

Scotland’s countryside and wild places is a glorious backdrop to the wonderful fauna and flora that I grew up with. My wife shares my love of the outdoors, which we have passed on to our daughter and two sons. And now there are grandsons and granddaughters, who already show signs of appreciating and respecting nature.

GROWING UP

Even in the middle of our cities you are never too far from the countryside in either time or distance. I was lucky – I grew up in Montrose, a historic port on the east coast of Scotland. Walking or cycling, in just a few minutes from home I could be on the golf course or the beach, or be at the harbour, and along the way see rabbits, butterflies, seabirds, songbirds, colourful flowers and plants, and the splendour of trees.

In summertime there were traditional salmon fishing nets staked out on St Cyrus beach, and on Montrose and Lunan Bay beaches too. The already declining numbers of inshore fishing boats landed cod and haddock, and lobsters and other shellfish at Montrose harbour, and at Ferryden pier across the water. From the top of Scurdyness Lighthouse I watched seals on the Annat Bank at the entrance to the Harbour. And my father and I went out in his boat into Montrose Bay and caught mackerel - by the bucket load, as I recall it.

Montrose Basin was on our doorstep, although in the 1940s its European, and certainly not its world, importance as a wader sanctuary had scarcely been recognised. But in the 1950s my parents once entertained the late Sir Peter Scott, the great wildlife naturalist, to dinner when he visited the Basin to make a radio programme about it. Now some four-fifths of the Basin very properly belongs to the Scottish Wildlife Trust which manages it for today, and for future generations.

Fifty and sixty years ago it all seemed so natural to a young boy, and I just took it for granted. I was lucky, too, because my parents loved the outdoors, each in their slightly different ways to be sure, but they gave my sister and me every opportunity to grow to love and appreciate it. Camping with Father wasn’t always the most comfortable way to get closer to nature, but something good must have stuck, because I took my own family camping as soon as I thought they were all old enough.

MY SCOTLAND

My Scotland is a very varied place. With only minor breaks, home has been in the countryside since 1958. I cannot envisage living with neighbours, although I do realise that we cannot live in isolation forever. And I like the good things that towns and cities offer. The cultural pleasures and different eating experiences, and shopping expeditions (but maybe not for too long at any one time!).

Edinburgh and Glasgow, and their sister cities of Dundee and Aberdeen, and Inverness which recently achieved city status, and Perth and so many large towns like my own home town of Montrose, all have wonderful park lands and open spaces where wildlife flourishes. Edinburgh and Dundee have Botanical Gardens, and Edinburgh also has its Edinburgh Zoo.

Scotland’s city fathers and burgh leaders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had a foresight about the need for green places where folk can slow down for a moment, maybe even stop awhile, and draw back from the pressures of daily life. It’s feels a bit unreal to look back from the perspective of today’s hectic lifestyle and think that a hundred years ago people might have felt stress in the way we think we feel it today.

But it’s all relative. Who, today, would have wanted to work in the ‘satanic mills’ of Queen Victoria’s times?

My Scotland is the Scotland of William Wallace and Braveheart, of King Robert the Bruce and the Battle of Bannockburn, Bonnie Prince Charlie and Culloden. Of Mendelssohn and Fingal’s Cave – I’ve sung in Fingal’s Cave, but I hardly think the spirits of the cave were much impressed!

My Scotland is the colourful Scotland of artists such as Peploe, Cadell and Hornel, of William Mactaggart and of my great-grandfather Joseph Henderson and his two sons, my great-uncles John Henderson and J Morris Henderson. And now of my friend James Morrison of Montrose.

Writers - Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Buchan and Violet Jacob - have all touched me, and affected my own approach to writing. Music plays a great part in my life. I grew up playing and loving classical music, but bagpipes and pipe bands, and Scottish country dance music and Scottish country dancing all have a very special place in my life.

It isn’t difficult to relate my life to the countryside and wildlife. Standing at the kitchen window looking out is as much to do with the countryside as standing outside looking in. Life would be a barren experience without it all.

All that’s above the earth and below it, the sky, the sea, our lochs and rivers, in daytime and at night. Outdoors in the city and outdoors in the country – there will always be something for me to look at and comment on. I’ll never run out of countryside in my own lifetime, and the countryside is in safer hands now than it probably ever has been, which guarantees its future for my grandchildren and their grandchildren’s grandchildren.

MY DOGS

And what of my dogs, which is where the writing all started. I grew up with dogs and a house isn’t a home without at least one to keep us humans in order! One dog really ought to be enough for any family but a long time ago a second one arrived, and we just got used to having two.

Macbeth, our West Highland terrier, was a gift from my wife. He’s been variously described in his short life, but perhaps the most inventive epithet is ‘demented ball of string’! Four times a year his fur is clipped and trimmed and for a few short days afterwards he looks clean and respectable. But the grooming is just a challenge to him, and it takes less than a week of scrambling in and out of burns and streams, creeping through hedges and hunting through woods for the familiar, disreputable Macbeth to reappear.

Like all terriers West Highlands, or Westies as they are affectionately known, were originally bred for working underground – from the French ‘la terre’, meaning ground. The breed as we know it today probably owes most to a Colonel Malcolm of Poltalloch, who set about establishing it around the start of the twentieth century. Poltalloch estate lies just north of the Crinan Canal in Argyllshire on the west coast of Scotland.

Bred to flush out foxes from their dens, Westies are a hardy strain of terrier with strong hunting instincts, but they make ideal house dogs and walking companions.

Inka, our black Labrador Retriever dog, is still a puppy. I’m assured that spelling his name thus is the original, and correct, spelling. Inka means ‘lord’ or ‘supreme ruler’. We don’t see much of a regal personality at this early stage, which is the equivalent of a wild, self-assertive teenager. But he has a handsome, bold face which perhaps betokens future dignity.

There’s some mystery about the ancestry of Labradors. They most likely don’t originate from Labrador on the east coast of Canada, but more likely from nearby Newfoundland, where it’s thought they were bred as fishermen’s dogs.

They probably came to England in the early 1800s, originally through sea trade with Newfoundland. Their thick coats and ability to withstand severe winter weather appealed to the sporting gentry of the times, who found that they had a natural disposition to retrieve the game birds that they shot.

As well as black, Labradors are bred with yellow (or, erroneously, ‘golden’) and chocolate (originally called ‘liver’) coats. The biggest Labrador I ever saw was a chocolate one, and they tend to be the largest variety of the breed anyway.

They are also strong swimmers and their tail is thought to resemble that of an otter and is sometimes referred to, by the well-informed, as a ‘rudder’, synonymous with an otter’s rudder.

A development in breeding has produced Labradoodles – a Labrador crossed with a Standard (or full size) Poodle. They are attractive cross-breeds and by all reports very affectionate, and have the valuable benefit of having fur, rather than the Labrador’s natural hair which moults all over your carpets!

Having two dogs to walk every day prevents me from becoming a couch potato! Whatever the weather the dogs must get their daily exercise and I always enjoy going out with them. No one day is the same as the last and more often than not there’s something new to see or hear or wonder about. I don’t believe I could have had the same pleasure walking without my dogs.

KEEP VISITING

If you have enjoyed ‘Man with two dogs’ you can read it each Saturday in the Courier and Advertiser newspaper which is published in Dundee and is the leading daily newspaper for the east of Scotland. If you are too far away, however, you can follow Macbeth and Inka’s exploits by logging onto this website every Monday when the previous week’s article will be posted.

Every month a fresh newsletter will appear. Next month (beginning of March) I’ll be talking about the county of Angus and Tayside region which are my home stamping grounds.

I don’t have a grand plan for my website, except that I want to write about my Scotland. Over the months I’ll travel round Scotland picking up interesting stories and visiting new places and old haunts.

Helped by my wife, the Doyenne of ‘Man with two dogs’, we’ll be giving you recipes, mostly with a Scottish flavour.

I’ll look at some ‘Guid Scots words and phrases’ and explain their meaning.

Comments and Updates, Notebook and Newsflash messages will be posted, so that there is always something new to read about throughout the month.

If you have enjoyed Country Claivers please tell your friends about this breath of fresh air from Scotland.

Best Wishes

Angus Whitson
Man with two dogs