Scotland: a while since I’d been here, some sixteen years. Aberfeldy was familiar territory from the first eighteen years of life spent in Perth, and thus a remembered spot, associated with youthful ascents of Ben Lawyers and Schiehallion. How damp it felt after the much drier air of Andalucia.
‘You must go up the Birks,’ my friend said, so off I went in the right direction, though still managing a detour up a lane with very elegant detached houses, before finding the car park at the start. The Birks (Scots for Birches) is listed in a Times article, Five of the Best Woodland Walks in Scotland (25.01.23) and by coincidence there was another article in the Times series Walk of the Week (09.11.23), just after I had been there.
The Birks of Aberfeldy is the name of a song by Robert Burns, written in 1787. https://allpoetry.com/The-Birks-Of-Aberfeldy It uses a simple rhyme scheme, repetition, and a catchy chorus to persuade his lady friend to accompany him up the Birks. Here he is at the start of the walk; he wrote the poem in situ, and it is sung to a traditional ballad. Someone has placed a small bunch of roses, naturally reminiscent of another of his famous songs, A Red, Red Rose.
While The Birks of Aberfeldy sounds like a courting song, thus meant for a tenor or baritone, here it is sung in a very limpid way by Davidona Pittock: https://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk/the-birks-of-aberfeldy/ A more traditional version can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjiwsNAXYz4
Now, by all accounts, one is meant to go on this circular route anti-clockwise, but I had forgotten and did the opposite; if you go the recommended route, the best views of the Tay valley appear while descending. It is quite a steep climb up the banks of the Moness burn, and here one must explain, that ‘burn’ in Scots is a small stream. Some of the feeder burns flow in narrow disciplined channels over tough underlying rock. Others are cascades. The perfect contrast of tree trunks, mosses and autumn colours, had attracted a number of photographers, with elaborate equipment being balanced on tripods.
So, although I had gone round the glen in the opposite direction to the established one, I was able to contemplate the people who came into view descending the walk as we came face to face, and to speculate which of the family groups was the possessor of the Lamborghini parked in the carpark, amongst other large, ostentatious 4×4 vehicles. Then, by simply turning round, I could look down on the quiet, patient landscape, where some fields were notably thick with almost static sheep.
A perfect Autumn walk, though the colours will be more resplendent if the light is brighter: but November is November, not the summery time that Burns took up pen to record his impressions and longings. The air is calm, heavy and moist; mist hangs in the valleys; clouds form, wander and vanish over the summits; leaves drift down. And the burns, for a’ that, and ‘a that, rush and gurgle.
Now Simmer blinks on flowery braes, And o'er the chrystal streamlets plays; Come let us spend the lightsome days
In the birks of Aberfeldy.