The reindeer man

Utsi’s hut is hidden away in the Glenmore forest and in all the years I’ve lived up here and been coming here on holiday, I had never seen it until Christmas Day, when it was the destination of our morning walk. 

Mikel Utsi was a Norwegian Sami deer herder who moved to Scotland in the 1950s. He successfully introduced reindeer to Glenmore, where he had settled, and when he had imported his third consignment of the beasts, in 1956, he built the hut using wood from the crates used to transport the deer. It took a while to reach the reindeer enclosure so Utsi needed a place to stay. Inside was a small bed and a table and stools handcrafted by Utsi himself.

Arriving in the clearing

The hut on Christmas Day

Me and Calum at the Utsi hut Christmas picnic

Mr Utsi has come a long way. Just before Christmas, alerted by my cousin Liz, we found his herd, descendents of the original reindeer, had made it onto the front page of the New York Times.

Cairngorm reindeer in the New York Times

I remember Mr Utsi. He lived with his wife in a rather unprepossessing bungalow in Glenmore. His house was at the start of the road leading up to Glenmore Lodge, where we lived. To a shy girl like me he seemed mysterious and a little intimidating. He didn’t talk much, nor did we really have much to do with him (possibly because he was off in his hut for much of the time). But once a year at Halloween, we had to brace ourselves and ring his doorbell. We’d be invited into the living room to recite our ditties. Mr and Mrs Utsi would sit with their arms folded, listening, before fetching us the oddest assortment of ‘goodies’. It was not the highlight of our guising trail.

Now I realise he was probably as warm and hospitable as any of our neighbours – just Scandinavian.

I was so taken with the trail to the hut on Christmas Day that I returned a week later with my cousin Christopher Langmuir and his family, all over from Seville, Spain. To our tuna mayo sandwiches they brought homemade tortilla. The weather was a little calmer than on Christmas Day so we began and ended the walk on the shores of Loch Morlich. I think they enjoyed it. At any rate, despite soggy footwear the kids joined in a lively snowball fight and we brought them home for warming soup. I'm just delighted to have discovered another hidden gem.

Loch Morlich

Gathered Langmuirs

Our Spanish branch's tortilla feast

Rory and Sula look out from Utsi's hut

Sunset over Loch Morlich

Estate of mind

All across the Highlands you’ll come across country estates with, typically, a big stately home, a steading (old stable block), scattered cottages and grounds that can stretch for miles – somewhere to pursue all that hunting, shooting and fishing with which the Anglo-Scots landed gentry maintained their standing in days gone by. Some families have sold up, no longer able to make the rambling acres pay. Some have persevered, with a finger in every available pie in an effort to preserve the estate for future generations. My old school, for example, is now a popular restaurant with an adjacent shop selling produce from the Rothiemurchus estate (in the room where I once sat in primary one with our teacher Miss MacPherson) .

There are estates that have become destinations in their own right. Just outside Grantown-on-Spey is the Revack estate, where trails wind around a small hill with views across to the Cairngorm mountains. After a walk you can warm up with homemade soup in the cafe and shop for pricey Highland goods in the shop.

Revack trail

Walking on Revack Estate

A particular favourite of mine is Logie Steading, on the Findhorn river about 20 miles north of Grantown and a great place to meet Elgin cousins, or a stop-off en route to the Moray coast. The estate comprises a house and grounds – including a walled vegetable garden – and dates back to the 18th century, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that a new generation of the family took over and began to rationalise and modernise.

For the tourist, there are scenic walks along the steep gorges of the river to a historic beauty spot, Randolph’s Leap, and the Steading itself, a conversion that houses a heritage centre and cafe, various shops and one of the best secondhand booksellers this side of Edinburgh. The area is well-served for distilleries, too, so it’s a useful spot to walk, or shop, off a whisky tasting…

The Logie laird’s house

A Logie Redwood

Money plants in the walled garden

Northern light

Christmas and Hogmanay in the Spey Valley usually involves a cocktail of family and friends shaken up with an ever-changing mix of snow, rain and gale-force winds. This year has been no different and our traditional Christmas day walk was taken through driving rain with a rather exposed picnic of smoked salmon and oatcakes washed down with bubbly chilled naturally in the breeze.

When the rain begins to get us down there is the option of heading up to the Moray Coast, where the sun always seems to shine. And one of the most fabulous places to stroll is the beach at Lossiemouth, the ‘jewel of the Moray Firth’. Once a bustling fishing port, Lossie’s West beach is about four miles long, backed by sand dunes that were originally created by using old railway carriages to protect the town from heavy seas. I have an uncle in nearby Elgin and a clutch of cousins living round about. So it was with Uncle Robin and cousins Susan and Penny – with kids Lara and Louie and their Scotty dog – that I took in the Lossie sands last Sunday, and the light fantastic…

Setting out from Lossiemouth

Sunshine on our shoulders

Showing my uncle a selfie

Cousins and dog

The lighting Gods at work