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Snowbound
My entry for WINTER HOLIDAY 2025
© JoeMo1619 - November 2025 ff.
Preface: In the twenty years that I have personally lived in the Scottish Highlands, we have only been snowed in three times to the point where we were cut off from the outside world for at least a week. Our "native" neighbours told us that in earlier decades this was more the rule than the exception. Certainly, proof of the gradual change in our weather and climate. But when such a weather event does occur nowadays, our modern world suddenly stops functioning, and the people affected have to pull together in the old-fashioned way.
The Story:
The state-run British weather service had issued a yellow weather warning for the northern Highlands ever since the warm and green Christmas:
"30/12/2010: Freshening wind from the northeast, increasing to storm strength, will bring heavy snowfall and may lead to snowdrifts. This may result in isolated traffic disruptions on roads and rail lines."
This was the lowest weather warning level and was taken by the Scots without concern. Such yellow warnings for strong wind, rain, or snow occurred about ten times per winter, and people were used to them.
Forsinard, a small cluster of houses and cottages located in the middle of the largest peatland nature reserve in Europe, had its own railway station on the once militarily important rail line from Inverness to Thurso and Wick. During the First and Second World Wars, this railway had been the supply lifeline for the British navy in Scapa Flow and the Moray Firth and had therefore survived all the radical post-war railway closures. That this tiny village had a station at all since 1870 was thanks to the Duke of Sutherland, whose hunting estate, Forsinard Lodge, lay about a mile away. As a railway enthusiast, he had even earned a train driver's licence.
Less than 400 metres north of the small station lay the Forsinard Hotel, which had stood there for some two hundred years and which my wife Maggie managed while I, Fred Macintosh, worked as head chef and "man of all trades." We had taken over the hotel from my parents-in-law and completely renovated it more than ten years ago. As a typical tourist hotel, we opened from mid-March to the end of October; during the rest of the year we were typically booked by companies for in-house training seminars or small research colloquia on ecological topics. This year, we had also hosted a one-week full booking by a local family over Christmas for a large family celebration; after their departure on December 27th, deep winter peace settled over the hotel until February—giving me the chance to indulge in my love of hunting.
"The weather forecast seems to be right," I told Maggie when I returned from the morning hunt with my twenty-year-old son Keith. "The snow has started and the wind from the northeast is steadily increasing." In light of the weather forecast, we had driven our small herd of Highland cows and sheep onto a pasture sheltered behind a small wood the previous day, and we had also checked and replenished the winter-feeding station for the free-roaming red deer.
"It won't be all that bad," Maggie replied calmly. "Besides, we're expecting neither guests nor family. Nobody is out traveling."
Maggie was right. Keith had come home from Glasgow before Christmas, where he was studying economics. The main reason for his Christmas visit—though he had to lend a hand in our family business—was Martina Kulikova, our Slovak hotel assistant, to whom he had been closely attached since finishing school. His two older sisters, who lived with their families on the south coast of England, had decided against a Christmas visit.
Keith and I warmed ourselves with a strong Assam tea and a small drum of Old Pulteney whisky from Caithness' only distillery. We noticed that the snowfall had become even heavier since our return, and the now
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