This fiendish quarry
Magic is in the air. It is in the tearing wind that roars and rages across the mountains. In the multicoloured carpet of sphagnum moss lighting up the heather with flashes of crimson, claret, shamrock green and burnt tobacco. In the might and majesty of Schiehallion looming overhead, its conical summit rising imperiously over the glens one minute and ghosting behind swirling clouds the next. It’s there too in the little droplets of water splashing up from the boot-trodden heather, that catch the sunlight and glint like cascading diamonds. And there is magic, of course, in our quest to stalk a red hind in the depths of a Scottish winter.
“It makes you feel alive,” says Richard Barclay, our host and stalker at Innerhadden, his 5,000-acre estate in Perthshire, raising his voice to make himself heard above the wind. By God it does. Especially when you are fresh off the Caledonian Sleeper, exchanging the frenetic hustle of
