Of otters and men

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It's a bad day for the Talisker distillery's water supply, a good day for us. There's grey cloud to the west, but mostly the sky is blue and the weather warm. Parking on the roadside near Upper Sandaig, we follow a path down towards the bay. Just below the road lies a broad pool of water and reeds, marked on the OS map as Loch Drabhaig. Signs tell us that timber harvesting is in progress and warn us to beware of machinery. It's Sunday and the machines are silent. On both sides of the path, the landscape resembles a World War One battlefield of stumps and strewn white branches. The remaining trees, exposed, creak in the wind. When we turn a bend, we see a lane snaking round the hillside, lined with high stacks of logs.

As we descend, we glimpse through the pines shallow waves breaking. A muddy track through denser woodland opens out above a derelict crofter's cottage, with the beach beyond. This is the place called Camusfearna, the Bay of Alders, by Gavin Maxwell, the writer and naturalist. Here, by a well trodden path through long grass, stands a boulder with an inscription, marking the site where his house stood. A broken power lines hangs from a pole. We walk across the rocky beach, green with seaweed. The sea sparkles in the afternoon sun. Returning to the meadow, we find another stone that commemorates Edal, Maxwell's otter Nearby, the red, fast-flowing burn is his "Ring of Bright Water". There's a rope suspended between trees, where it's shallow enough to ford.

David saw the film with his mother in the 1960s. He remembers flinching at a scene towards the end, when (if his memory hasn't distorted it) ditching workmen kill the otter with a shovel. Later, on a family holiday in a Scottish B&B, he came across a paperback copy of the book, and was so puzzled to find no reference to this (on a cursory inspection it seemed that the otter died of natural causes, wrapped in a towel) that he never read it.

Someone - it might have been William Golding - was sceptical about the love of animals, describing a man's bed as a preposterous place for an otter.

Back at Dornie, we fall in with the coach parties at Eilean Donan castle. The building stands on an islet, joined to the mainland by a stone bridge with three arches. It claims a history back to the 13th Century but was extensively rebuilt from 1912 to 1932 and much of the interior evokes a country house more than an ancient fortress. As we return to the car, a heron rises from the shallows of the loch.

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