Glen Etive stag

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So with my husband being Scottish, we have been up to Scotland many times, but his family are all from Ayrshire or just north of Edinburgh. So for a lot of the time in our early years of our relationship when we lived in Sheffield, we’d journey as far as Ayrshire and never go further north. So our first time north was for my birthday. We went to Glencoe and I’d always wanted to go to Glencoe and it’s not too far from Glasgow. It’s kind of maybe a like 90 minute drive and so it felt really achievable to, to get out and go and do this trip and I love stags and I’d always wanted to see a stag in Scotland for as long as I can remember.

And we’d heard about this beautiful glen to drive down. It’s basically a dead end, but it’s one of those glens that just kind of, every single turn is beautiful. And it was one of the things we really wanted to do. So we set off for the trip, and as we were leaving, I could see that it was snowing quite substantially in Scotland.

And so having just come back from, an experience in Iceland where the snow disappeared in 24 hours, and it was when we had the beast from east in the UK, the temperature there went to eight degrees C, it rained and it took all the snow, while the UK was completely covered in the most amazing snow. And I love the cold. I love the subzero. So given that when I’d been somewhere subzero and hoping to spend some time in snow had been stolen, the fact that it started to snow in Scotland and then we might have it and it be on my birthday and we get to see it, was something that was like, so beyond exciting for me. And so I rang up Glencoe Mountain Resort to see whether they thought the snow would stick around.

And the guy laughed me off the phone and he was just like, lassie, I really shouldn’t try and do a Scottish accent. He said it snowed over half a metre like that is not going anywhere overnight. It will be here for you tomorrow. And he was right. And we I think for about a tenner you can go in the ski lift. We don’t ski but you can get up the mountain and then you can actually get right into the really big snow at the top and there’s a little shack that does coffee and light bites and that sort of thing. So we had a lovely walk round and there were sledges that you can come down like some tiny nursery slopes and stuff.

So we had a great time that day up the mountain. But the snow line was quite low down. So when we went through Glen Etive, the I think the snow line, had basically pushed a lot of the stags further down the mountain, in their, their hunt for food and forage. And so this glen was absolutely full of deer.

And we turned this bend on the way back, and this monarch, I’m going to call him, was there just looking at us with those mountains behind him and I literally just kind of pulled the car up, popped the window down, took a couple of frames, and then we carried on. But I will just always remember that stag.

And I’ve experienced that glen a few more times since. And every single time on this bend I look up and like think, is it going to be there? Is there going to be? And never again have I seen a stag on that road. So I feel really lucky that we got to meet them that day.