On the Hoof

Over the hills and far away, recreating a highland drove across Kintail to Glen Affric with a team of luing heifers and the memory of an old song.

When you kill a cow, you have to reconcile competing moods of tragedy and pragmatism. On one hand, a soft and meaningful life has been brought to a violent end – and you only have yourself to blame for the accompanying feelings of shame and embarrassment. But regrets are quickly superseded by more realistic concerns - because you have to cut the throat and get the carcass off the ground so the blood can drain. Days of work then follow in breaking down the mighty limbs into strung parcels and baggies of mince. The labour is so boring; so lonely and dull that grief doesn’t stand a chance against it. And even when you finally drop a steak into a frying pan, the transformation is only partially complete - the animal has been turned upside down, and yet it hasn’t gone away.

All the strange, confused allure of cattle can be found in the moment of their killing – the sacred weight of ancient gentleness pricked and deflated by the brash brutality of a bullet. But the same contradictions can also be squeezed up from the moss of the drove road too, and walking ten red heifers from Kintail to Glen Affric last week, I came away feeling dazzled by the framing of those beasts. All the head-to-head enormity of souls and personalities clashed against the pragmatist’s memories of butchery and cookery.

We threw the miles behind us. The sun soaked us, and then rain came. Ravens moved through the corries, and in the zig-zag ascent of sudden peaks, the heifers tripped in tiny slips and sometimes tumbled forward in clumsiness. They were fine, but we had asked them to heave a route upwards through a narrow, shattery bealach. So they knelt and bent and grunted in the shift of weight from one foot to another, and having dismantled so many of those glistening, slippery joints on a butcher’s block, it was a revelation to see them in the full strain and glide of their potential.

It turns out that those muscles move - just as the bulge and slop of those bellies disclose the location of innards and tripes and the beckoning movements of pluck. But even in the midst of that replicable, copy-and-paste anatomy, each animal sprang to life as an individual. The same few heifers walked to the front of the drove each day; the same slackers hung behind it. Braver beasts could be relied upon to cross at fords and therefore pull the scaredy-cats behind them. Each animal shone in the light of itself - and those which seemed to lack a personality became recognisable for having such a gap.

We found that the best way to drive cattle is not from behind, nor is it to pull them from in front with the promise of treats in a bag. Those tricks might work on shorter distances, but the best way to cover a ten mile leg is to walk near the head of the group, with your focus upon a shoulder of three or four of the best and boldest animals. From that position, the leaders can be steered with movements of a stick or an outstretched hand – they can be encouraged and reassured by jokes and commentary, and in moments of blissful flow, the rest of the drove can be forgotten altogether. You know that they will follow; the closest animals breathing sweetly into your pockets, the furthest seventy or eighty yards behind in a daydream of scabious and the white, porcelain flower called grass of parnassus.

In those moments, the beasts slip into the palm of your hand like a well-used stick. The pace falls to a loping, easy sway which can run for hours and days without tiring, and even if that’s only somewhere between one and two miles an hour, it’s brisk enough to feel the world rolling beneath your feet. It makes it possible for the distant hill which first rose up from the rain in the morning to be behind you by the late afternoon when you fall to pause and let the animals graze again.

These periods of unity and flow were often shattered by juddering standstills and stalls of confusion. Nothing would last forever, and after two miles of steady, comfortable progress, the beasts might suddenly veer off their track for the chance to graze on some rank and obscure shred of heather. At one point, the whole drove stopped altogether because the heifers were dazzled by the discovery of a deer’s bone which lay on a tussock of moss near the path. Every single one of them paid their respects to that bone, and there was no sense in hurrying them then. They had to be rearraigned and organised into shape over the course of ten minutes, nudged forward in fits and starts until their natural momentum rediscovered itself.

It’s often bothered me that music can feel like a storm without grounding; certain songs fill space in ways that are heady and grand, but afterwards they pass and leave me lost for words. Sometimes a song will deafen me with the urge to write - and yet when I rush for a pen, there’s nothing left to say. At other times, the sound of a song can transport me back to a very specific place or time - the connection is vivid, but it can’t be forced into being and it quickly withers if I try and pin it down. Songs evoke places and places evoke songs, but there’s often a lag between one and the other. Storms almost never strike in two ways at once.

It happened that in the midst of those cows in the tumble of heather, with miles of grass and soft rain ahead and behind me, I ran into a period of deep, abiding flow. Everything had come together; the beasts swept their bellies in the grass and the leader lowed for the sheer joy of lowing, just as there’s no useful reason why the Carlisle train sometimes whoops in the darkness. Without realising that I had been on the edge of myself, I heard the cows’ call and suddenly broke into singing a version of Óró Sé Do Bheatha Abhaile – the old Irish “welcome home”. It’s been used to mean a hundred things over the centuries, and I’m not entitled to use many of them – but even the sound of my own voice was a lightning strike on that hill to me; and it struck home; and it stood on its end like the white slash of a birch tree’s trunk, bright in the laps of its grounding. With one palm downspread on the neck of the beast to my right, I suddenly had to stop my song for the choke of blubbing.

When the cows settled down to sleep one night on the remains of tumble-down shieling, the grass was heavy with old spirits. Ancestral figures woke up smiling at the sound of hooves overhead; they gathered around our beasts admiringly, and here was another whisper of Óró Sé Do Bheatha Abhaile which ran around the cows in the cool autumnal breeze. A generation had passed since the last cows grazed here, and yet the words from the shadow of those old lodgings were “welcome home, girls – you are known here”.

Night fell in a rush and a crenelation of stags on a far horizon. We slumped into our tents in the darkness - even as we did so, a gash in the cloud cast sudden streaks of moonlight like jugs of silver paint against the far side of the glen. We watched that light rush out and away across the mountains to the sea - and next morning, the heifers were up and ready to go at first light, knowing that we hadn’t arrived yet, greedy with a mood for movement.

The purpose of this walk was to rediscover something of the old traditional cattle cultures and to stand more closely beside these animals. It turned out that our route took us through a complete telecommunications blackspot – no sooner had we begun to drive these cows than our telephones died. But to be sure, we didn’t set out on this drove in an attempt to reject modernity. It’s nothing like a model for beef production in the twenty first century. The summer shielings have become archaeological dregs – the drove roads are empty and folk are astonished when you tell them it used to be possible to walk such enormous quantities of meat down from the hills each year. Beef has become little more than a product now; a combed and folded confection of mince in a tub with the fat content labelled as a percentage - so you don’t eat too much of it.

And yet in the heart of that drove, I discovered a lightness and buoyancy to the work that I have never felt in any other walk of life. The natural pace and movement played against the cattle themselves; a heads-or-tails instability which slid between attitudes of clunkiness and synchronicity, soulfulness and profanity. Somehow there was room in those hides for an equal blend of spiritualism and dinner, and it’s very like cows that I have spent so long in praise of their calm and gentility without mentioning the mottled purple bloom of a bruise on my leg from where I was kicked in the pens.

Humans have been fascinated by cattle for thousands of years; shadows of every fascination were present on that walk, and maybe you could be surprised by the silliness of four grown men who had decided to play at being drovers. I think it’s true that perversity played a part in our journey, but it wasn’t our own. The fundamental rightness of that drove consumed me to a point at which I was genuinely upset when it came to an end - and I was astonished to realise that it’s not how the world works anymore.