It’s strange, isn’t it?
You know that feeling which sometimes overtakes you, when you have lived in an area most of your life – or return to from time to time – and quite suddenly you see the lay of the land or city, from an entirely different perspective?
Well that’s exactly what happened when I visited Pitlochry during a film recee for a project commissioned by Perth and Kinross Council and the Green Tourism Business Scheme.
The Atholl Palace Hotel sits perched like a fairytale castle on a little hill to the south-east of the village with with the River Tummel sweeping itself away from it’s lower slopes, southwards through the Vale of Atholl.
Directly to the north, Ben Vrackie displays its early autumnal russets like samples of rough new tweed ready to dress the afternoon hillside.
The air is thick with the unmistakable ochre smell of heather and hill.
Appearing – as if from nowhere – Innes Smith meets me with a handshake that’s as strong and assured, as the land he lives on. I also feel an immediate sense of his physical presence, which is as firmly rooted to the sub-strata, as the giant red cedars which surround him.
In his early days as a pioneering organic sheep farmer, with a flock of 1800 Cheviot ewes high in Glen Tilt, it’s fair to say Innes was probably well ahead of time. Some twenty years later when he left that part of his life as a high ground hill man, to join the hotel as estate manager, he very quickly became a principal driving force force in the hotel’s work towards Green Tourism Business Scheme accreditation
As we make our way through the verdant grounds to a hidden fruit and vegetable garden – which he has created – his eyes light up as he describes his passion for his work and the ability to visualize the changes needed to benefit the immediate and wider environment.
We wander over to the young orchard. All the trees have been handpicked and planted by his good self.
His thick grizzled fingers reach out delicately to the fine maturing skin of a Bramley.
‘This,’ he say’s ‘Is what it’s all about!’
Later I remembered the lovely lyrics in a Fleet Foxes song;
If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m raw
If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore
And you would wait tables and soon run the store
Gold hair in the sunlight, my light in the dawn
If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore
If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore
Someday I’ll be like the man on the screen
Well someday I’d like to be like Innes in his orchard, self assured and as solid as the earth he stands on.
For the moment though I now view that particular piece of our planet, which he is carefully nurturing, quite differently, and of course, know it’s in safe hands!
How could I not?
Photography
Follow Us!