Lairds and guests
John McEwen
THE HIGHLAND GAME: LIFE ON SCOTTISH SPORTING ESTATES by Glyn Satterley, introduced by Michael Wigan Swan-Hill Press, £1295, pp. 136 Glyn Satterley's commitment to the facts is in itself a romantic quest for truth, but he also sees the drama and beauty in a scene, so that while his black-and-white photographs never fail to be interesting records they are frequently invested with a poetry beyond documentation. The present collection began as a photo-documentation of a year in the life of a highland game- keeper but developed into the exploration of an entire culture through the increasing changes of the last ten years. This means that the workings of several rather than one estate are recorded; and life in the 'big house' is taken into account as well as that on the hill.
Satterley admits to seeing
keepers as rather heroic figures, out in the landscape battling against the odds and taking it all in their stride
and the finest photographs are of keeper- ing — foxing with terriers by day or lamps by night, stalking, fishing, hind-shooting in Arctic conditions like a negative of summer long after the lairds and their guests have migrated south again.
The book is lent a special piquancy by our knowledge that every waxed jacket and anorak (Satterley reports that keepers swear the traditional tweed suit is as 'weather tight and considerably warmer'), every mobile phone, over-and-under shot-gun and Argocat (now as indispens- able to the Highland keeper as the four- wheeled motocycle is to the hill shepherd), every syndicate, phoney grouse-blooding ceremony and ear-muff spells the end of the rural way of doing things ritualised by the Victorians. His most haunting image is of a Victorian shooting lodge seen across the boggy wastes of the Flow Country — a vision like a 'mirage', as Satterley writes in the caption, and, like so many of the wild places, doomed to burial by the hateful planters of conifers. One fears ramblers and nature parks cannot be far behind.
Lochdhu Lodge, Altnabreac, Caithness
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