There
is still a community at Corgarff where this section of the military
road ends but the population is much decreased and fewer and fewer of
the people make their living directly from the land. There are a few
farmers, and much of the land, which is owned by owners of large estates,
is used for recreational hunting. The population is in part sustained
by people who have come to live there, but earn their living from passing
tourists, or through jobs or incomes from outwith the area.
Some newcomers seem to understand the land and develop
a feeling for its history quickly. Others are less successful in this.
The old route between the bridges reflected the skills of the road makers
just as did the bridges. For example, small streams that flowed across
the paths could have washed it away, but well laid paving at these points
prevented this. Flows from other streams were directed into well-constructed
stone “culverts,” that is small tunnels under the road.
These features endured for centuries and walking along the road and
seeing them and others imparted a sense of the age and history of the
route to the walker.
The
techniques employed by the military engineers in the manufacture of
the road would have exploited local skills and linked these with the
imported military engineering techniques. The roads for example might
have used alignments of old hill tracks, the lines of which would have
been established over hundreds of years of local knowledge. The effectiveness
of this fusion of skills and knowledge is clear in that very limited
maintenance in a harsh environment maintained these structures for 250
years. Can even the great Victorian engineers say as much?
Shortly
after the restoration of the bridges was completed, new shooting tenants,
who had rented the recreational hunting rights, “improved”
the road using mechanical diggers. Old features like those mentioned
above were buried or removed. The bridges remain but some of the sense
of history and age that was so much a part of the road between has gone.
Ironically, the “improvements” were done with poor understanding
of management of local soils and drainage conditions. The improved road
will also be a testimony to its makers, but perhaps of a different kind.
If
there is a lesson, it is that unless we value our history and what it
conveys to us, and take the trouble to understand how to manage the
land sensitively, our history will be lost to us, and what replaces
it will be in many ways inferior. Whatever the impact of these most
recent roadworks, the land will continue to act as host to whatever
form of human social and economic society next comes to dominate this
environment. The old system, which provided a lowly state of human comfort
but lasted here for hundreds of years, will not return. The current
unsustainable system, subsidised by remote economic success, will go
in time. The hills remain an asset to be used under whatever set of
circumstances comes to dominate this remote but potentially self supporting
landscape. Like the bridges, the efforts of those to come will remain
written on this landscape for future generations to read.
