There is plenty of the explorer’s zest to be found in pursuing to their origin the authentic names of stream and corrie in the Cairngorms. One needs the language for this and I am no Gaelic scholar or, as they would say, I ‘have not the Gaelic’. All I ever knew, I first picked up from Donald Macrae of Glenelg, dressing ‘cuddie-flies’, repairing spars and pricking my fingers on fish-hooks on the Grunnd an Righ, the King’s Ground, under the shadow of Wade’s ruined barracks at Glenelg which look across Kyle Rhea to the Old Woman of Skye, though, to be sure, it is not certain that Wade himself built them. ‘Tonald’ was already near seventy and I was sixteen. He had seen the world in ships but was rarely provoked to speak of what he had seen. ‘Och,’ he would say, ‘I wass at sea a while… but I’ll no’ be rememberin’ very well, but a whiley back there was talk of a man called John Passificko… and they said there might be war and again there might not, and the recruitin’ was going’ on amang the fisherfolk, and I went… I wass no more than a laddie like yersel’, but the life didna suit me in the fleet an’ all… and after being at, what is’t ye call it, Sa— Sa’stipol, down there… I just came home again. And there’s no mistake about it, but Kerrara iss better than the foreign parts!’

Donald at seventy was still a powerful seaman-like figure, with strong gentle hands and full white beard, and from him I learned enough seafaring patter in his mother tongue for the needs of a lug-sail and the cutting of bait. A fine kedgeree of pidgin-Gaelic and schoolboy slang it was, and I can still hear his guffaws of delight at my way of saying things as we trolled for coalfish in the deep rapids of Kyle Rhea.