UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
Amongst the Hills
By STEWART SANDERSON (University of Edinburgh) yOU are aware of Pitlochry as a tourist-centre as soon as you enter the Vale of Atholl. Half-hidden at the margin of the woods, discreet notices by the roadside advertise the larger hotels in the town. Some of them hint at Pitlochry's Festival Theatre ; others at the simple pleasures of fishing, golf and cock- tail-bars. The surface of the road has been scarred and ridged _ by heavy traffic—trucks engaged by the Hydro-electric Board, charabancs heading for Inverness and beyond, cars taking Americans and others on a tour of the Highlands. Here and there the road has been patched together ; at the worst places new cuttings are being made and the tightest corners unfurled. Pitlochry expects visitors.
The town lies on one side of the river. Its long main street carries the_ road from. Perth to Inverness and is lined with decorous houses and cottages of local stone. Shop-windows have been let into the ground-floors in the centre part 'of the town, and the gleaming glass and paint make a harmonious contrast with the warm, grey upper storeys. The town has a new-scrubbed look, which extends even to the pavements and the lamp-posts ; the clean air of the Perthshire hills seems to wash perpetually around its surfaces. Away from the main street houses climb up the slopes towards Ben Vrackie, and the slightly too luscious growth of trees lower in the valley is tempered by the open width and space of the gardens around these substantial dwellings.
The tall candles of chestnut trees are offset by laburnum and lilac--; rhododendron blooms perch on their heavy dull foliage ; sturdy yellow broom stands to attention beside silver birches, and azaleas of every colour blaze over the hill-slopes, lending to the scene a slightly Chinese exoticism, which is caught up by the birches trembling against the sky and by the evening mist which floats up the valley to curl around the pine-trees on the sky-line. Amongst this riot of colour stand the larger houses of the town, some of them privately occupied, many of them now turned into guest-houses. Beyond them lies a small but sporting golf-course, and beyond that the black-topped hills towards the north and east. In the garden of one of these houses, not far from the High Street, stands the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, its white roof and walls stretched tight against the breeze.
Its very situation is theatrical: pitched against the backdrop of the Perthshire hills,, even its fabric is slightly unreal. You turn up from the main road, climb a short hill, swing to the right behind a row of houses, and there opposite a church stands the theatre, an enormous white marquee with flags fluttering bravely from its twin tent-poles. Outside it are parked a jeep, some bicycles, a crowd of battered family cars and-one or two Bentleys and Daimlers. The town, the county and the tourists are there. Evening-dress mingles with lounge-suits, kilts with sports clothes. A body from the village, in knitted woollen cap, tweeds and grey woollen stockings, rubs shoulders with a London producer in a dinner-jacket, and he with a local laird. The manager smiles on a couple of Americans and bows to the members of a fishing- party: As you enter the marquee a commissionaire in brown tailcoat and gorgeous vest takes your ticket. Inside the marquee is pitched another, smaller marquee, not white this time but a delicate dusty pink in colour. Its sleek panels swoop upwards to the 'ceiling, and you enter it from -a platform which serves at the intervals as a sort of raised promenade. The red plush seats of the auditorium run lengthwise along the marquee, broken by the two tent-poles on which are mounted batteries of lights. The auditorium soon fills, the-lights are lowered, and the curtain rises on the long rather shallow stage where the players transport us magically to James Bridie's shades of Arabia.
At the interval the foyer is crowded. There is a delicatessen counter and a well-stocked bar, by name " The Brown Trout," where the whisky is very good. We are reminded that the theatre is but a part of the excellences Pitlochry has to offer. Conversation ranges over a variety of subjects. A dark willowy girl caught five trout the previous day ; her fingers tense round the stem of her glass as she tells how she played a one and a- quarter pounder. A middle-aged woman is expounding the recipe for a sponge-cake. One man thinks Bridie never wrote a satisfactory last act ; another would rather see Bridie than Barrie any day. Some of us go out for a smoke in the canvas lane beside the marquee. The air is fresh and clean, unlike that of any other theatre, and our conversation strikes a nice balance between seriousness and frivolity. There is a distinctive atmo- sphere about Scotland's theatre amongst the hills.
In the evening some of the players come down to the hotel. They are ifiressed rather raffishly in fine checked suits, and they wear magnificent silk squares instead of ties. They all have fancy shoes, sandals of intricately-laced pigskin or suede shoes with flippant wedge-heels. They have the unreal quality of actors the world over—the too-carefully modulated phrase, the too- charming smile, the too-elaborate sidelong glance after a sally. They talk shop. They know just what Ivor said about this and when Christopher wrote that, and how perfectly lovely Sybil looked in the next thing. The theatre is their life, and underneath the surface-play you can sense in some of them a native Scottish toughness and a serious preoccupation with their trade. The townspeople have taken kindly to them ; in the hotel the manager prepares tea and sandwiches for them after closing time, which is perhaps more than he would do for anyone else. At midnight they leave and walk home under a sky piled with clouds the colour of snow. A single star gleams in the north, and its light is reflected in the dark waters of Loch Faskally, where rising trout spread patterns like gramophone discs across the still water.
In the morning it rains. The surface of the loch is a fantastic dance of pinpricks where the raindrops fall, and the tops of the hills are lost in cloud. The rain scuds after you as you cross the river and make for the new hydro-electric power-station. The river is low here, with craggy rocks shouldering their way through its diminished flow, for on a Sunday morning no water comes over the dam. The square bulk of the power-station broods silently across the river, its simple functional lines and quiet colour fitting better into the landscape than one had dared to hope. A flight of steps leads to the retaining wall of the dam and the superb view over the loch, and a fish-ladder of concrete pools filled with swirling black water takes the salmon upstream to spawn. One of the pools is designed as a resting- place, and if you go down into an underground chamber you can watch the fish through a glass panel set at the bottom of the pool.
The atmosphere is like that of a warship's control-room—the silence, the artificial lighting, the quiet intensity of the men on duty as they peer through the, glass screen, the screen itself with its retaining nuts looking like a cross between a radar-scan and a watertight door. The dark shapes of salmon and trout surge around the pool where pebbles are hurled in the raging water ; then they disappear up the just visible end of the culvert leading to the pool above. A shining machine of grey and silver with one green and two red eyes hums into life, the tell-tale clicks up another digit, and one more fish has passed up the ladder to the broad waters of the loch.
The fishing should be good next year, as good as the theatre and the golf and the scenery and the clear air that pours around this beautiful valley. The countless hotels are waiting, and as you leave Pitlochry you can read an inscription in Gaelic by the roadside. " Haste ye tack," it says.
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