The last valley...

The other night we watched the 1971 Michael Caine film The Last Valley, which we must have seen in the cinema when it was first released. I always remembered it as a marvellously atmospheric film with a real sense of the horror of war and the fragility of peace, or perhaps peacefulness. It's showing its age a bit - we don't do films with the constant background music these days, and there was something odd about the screen ratios this time - but the atmosphere of the chaotic 30 years' war in Europe is as powerful as ever.

The valley of its title is a hidden oasis of peace and prosperity in the Alps, relying on its inaccessibility to keep it safe from marauding bands of soldiers. This afternoon, the upper part of Glen Massan felt like that, with its sheep and lambs (all colours - white, black, brown, speckled) and the green pasture beside the burn, which in this hanging valley is gentle and brown before it pours over the lip of the gorge and becomes a torrent till it reaches sea level. This is the bridge over the upper river; beyond it there are horses in a field and some houses set round the foot of the encircling hills. 

We'd walked up the road from the foot, past what I think of as the three cataracts of the river; I always enjoy the sudden sweep of view that greets you at the top of the hill and the gentle slope down into the glen, and this is usually where we turn round and head back down again.

Interaction with nature included a chat with a lamb that picked its way through the mud to the fence to say hello (really - except maybe for "hello") and a red squirrel that dashed out of the trees and then up the road ahead of us until it found a way into the dense rhododendrons on the other side. And when we got home there was a blackbird perched on our telegraph pole, singing its heart out.