ALLT NA DA GHOB
There are places that seem to exist out of time, and the old military bridge over the Allt na da Ghob is one of them. Tucked away in the deep cleft of Glen Lyon, it is a structure of grey stone and memory, a crossing point not just of water, but of worlds. To know it, you must visit it in more than one light.
The first time, I went by night. A hard frost had silvered the glen and the moon was a sharp disc in a sky pricked with stars. The track was a pale ribbon underfoot. Long before I saw the bridge, I heard it: the deep, percussive boom of the waterfalls in their gorge. The sound was a physical presence in the cold air, a drumming that spoke of immense, ceaseless energy. The bridge itself was a thing of shadow and bone-white stone under the moon. Leaning on the parapet, the granite cold through my coat, I watched the water, a turmoil of black and quicksilver. It was a elemental scene, stripped of colour, reduced to form and sound and the raw chill of the Highland night. The place felt ancient, pagan, belonging only to itself and the darkness.
I returned on a bright morning in late spring. The change was absolute. The same water that had been a torrent of monochrome fury was now a celebration of light. It plunged in cascades of brilliant white, catching the sun and throwing off rainbows in its spray. The roar was still there, but it was softened now by the chirr of a wren and the sharp, piping call of a dipper that bobbed and curtseyed on a mid-stream boulder. The rocks, black by moonlight, were upholstered in mosses of a hundred impossible greens. Sunlight dappled the water through the fresh leaves of birch and oak. The air, once thin and sharp, was now thick with the scent of damp earth and primrose. It was the same place, the same stones, the same water, yet it was utterly transformed. The bridge was no longer a stark silhouette, but a warm, sun-drenched perch from which to watch the glen’s vibrant life unfold.
The bridge holds both moments. It is the crossing point between the wild, elemental dark and the bright, living day. It stands as a testament to the fact that a landscape is never a single, static thing. It is a collection of moments and moods, of weathers and lights. The spirit of the Allt na da Ghob is not just in its moon-bleached rock or its sunlit spray, but in the memory of both, held together in the arch of this old stone bridge.