As they at last reached the long length of golden sand by Ard Choille, Greg saw what his fellow firefighters were now faced with.

What they had feared had already happened. The birchwood behind the house was alight and the only thing saving what had become the hated Party House was a circle of firefighters dousing it in a continuous stream of water from An Lochan Uaine, the green fairy loch.

The Blackrig Wildfire

by Maya Villan

They fought to save Ard Choille. I wondered if they shouldn’t let it burn because it had brought such pain to the village in so many ways. But they fought for it none the less. They’d loved the man who’d built it, you see. Lord Main, the main man they called him, they considered as one of their own.

He’d built Ard Choille so that it might be one with the trees, where he could watch the birds, and look over An Lochan Uaine, or the green fairy lochan, as I like to call it.

By the way, I still can’t make the ‘ch’ sound, so say ‘the green lockan’. Greg is working on that, but I fear such cultural sounds are acquired when young, and difficult, perhaps impossible, to acquire as you get older.

Anyway, they saved the house by hosing it continuously with water from the green loch as they bulldozed fire breaks all around it.

The far side of the loch was the worst hit. It was there they lost a fire engine and the firefighters had to flee to safety as an oxygen tank blew up.

From there the fire burned far up into the moorland. They say the peat is still smouldering underground in many places. They will need to dig holes and pump them full of water to douse these underground fires.

Although the firefighters and volunteers did their best, they were eventually saved in their endeavours by the rain. It began to fall in sheets forty hours after the fire began.

It rained for days, heavily at first, then just steady and continuous. I watched from the hill behind Beanach as the blackened, roasted landscape greedily swallowed that water.

Then, in the evening, we watched as the rain beat the darkened windows of Beanach and slid like tears of joy down the glass.

Greg

When he rose in the early morning, the clear sky reminded him that the rain had indeed stopped. In its ferocity, he’d imagined it might rain for forty days and forty nights, so biblical were its proportions.

He and Colin had ventured out as soon as they felt it opportune to do so. Despite their proximity to Ard Choille, the Bothy, Colin’s home, and the estate larder had avoided the fire.