Beauty & Austerity

These dual qualities capture Glen Coe's winter landscape, one which offers a home to predators, challengers and masters of camouflage

- Jim Crumley, Scotland's leading wildlife author,

IT is the south side of Glen Coe that makes the place what it is, or at least what it has become. What we all know is that litany of mountain shapes and the spaces between, shepherded into a ragged, westering flock by the herdsmen of Etive - Buachaille Etive Mòr (the Great Herdsman of Etive, affectionately known as the Boochle) separated by the Lairig Gartain from Buachaille Etive Beag (aka The Wee Boochle).

Then there is the ragged flock itself - the Lairig Eilde, Beinn Fhada, Coire Gabhail, Bidean nam Bian, Stob Coire nan Lochan, the buttresses of Gearr Aonach and Aonach Dubh (which, with the blunt end of Beinn Fhada, masquerade as the Three Sisters, and God knows why), An t-Sron, the Fionn Ghleann, Gleann Leac-na-Muidhe and Meall Mor. For first time travellers it is a bludgeon of a landscape, and how they react to it is invariably love or dread at first sight.

It is only a façade, the ends of mountains and the beginnings of passes and corries and ridges, yet to the thousands who cram the roadside car parks every year it is all the Glen Coe there is. It certainly reeks of the breath of Glen Coe, but every mountain remnant wedged into the glen's ice-age-trampled flank also unfurls southwards the walls of other scaled-down Glen Coes of its own, mountain thoroughfares and no-thoroughfares that dodge and collide with more mountain walls deeper into the maze. Unseen and unheard from the car parks, Glen Coe echoes through them all.

It is the north side of Glen Coe that unmasks the façade and begins to make sense, if not of the entire maze, at least of its entrances and exits.