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.
