Postcard from Loch Lomond

INSPIRATION | CABANA TRAVEL | WORLD OF CABANA

“Eating is an agricultural act”: Photographer Sam Parkes has spent 13 summers on a hill farm on the north-west shores of Loch Lomond, joining farmers and their dogs to gather wild hill sheep from vast Highland slopes. Walking miles of rough ground, he reflects on the drama of the gather, the shared meals, the sense of communal purpose and the inexorable pull of the Scottish landscape.

BY SAM PARKES | CABANA TRAVEL | 14 MARCH 2026

Throughout the year, the bleating of sheep provides the cantus firmus of the farming life, but on gathering days it ramps up into full percussion. From where I stand, a group of around 25 are being driven from one side of the hill to another. Eventually I catch sight of them; pixelated white dots rounding the base of a knoll like a blizzard.

Every summer, for the past 13 years, I’ve worked on a hill farm on the north west shores of Loch Lomond in the Scottish Highlands. I’m no farmer, though. That would be like mistaking a museum guard for an art historian because they stand near the paintings; but whatever I lack in expertise I compensate with love.

The aim is simple enough: over the next two weeks, a group of around 6-10 people and countless working-dogs will set off at various points around a specific hill- there are three Munros (mountains over 3,000ft) here in over 6,000 hectares of land- to gather as many sheep as possible and funnel them down into a holding field where they’ll be clipped, dosed, horns-checked, health-assessed, and then released back onto the hills.

But these are not docile, fenced-in sheep: they are stoic survivors. They live high and wild, beyond boundaries and paths. No vehicle can make it up here. One mile on foot across these tussock-covered slopes feels like four in regular money.

High up, on a clear day, facing north, the landscape rolls on and on, peak after peak, to Ben Nevis and beyond. To the east, the eye strays across a basalt-black loch punctuated by a small tree-covered island with a ruined castle, to Ben Lomond (over 3,000 feet), shaped like a pyramid robed in ill-fitting suede. I can see the farmer, John, standing on a crag 200 feet above me, hands curled over the crook of his stick, assessing the situation.

John, along with his wife Jane, and family at a partnering farm further south, has been the farmer here for almost 50 years. In my mind’s eye I see him lithely making his way to the top of the hill, trailed by all 31 dogs they’ve ever owned on the farm.

To an outsider, one hill is superficially much like any other, the differences are subtle, shaped by language. There is barely a rock or burn here that isn’t attached to a story, a myth. My favourite: the Fiddlers- a rock clearing where a shepherd used to play the fiddle to while away the night; and it never fails to strike me as curious and heartening that archaic expressions and language like this- on gatherings with Man and dog, barely changed since medieval times- should still seem so familiar and human.

A line of sheep are about to cross a narrow ledge, trailed by the lemniscating tracks of two dogs following the familiar calls of their master. Their white cloud-bodies pass in single file against a wall of grey rock, like cave paintings. I hear my name shouted. “Sam!..Sit down, Sam!” For a brief moment I start looking for a clearing in the bracken before remembering that, comically, one of the dogs is also called Sam. “Walk on, Sam!” I continue, uncertain.

Every year, with the predictability of ritual, almost immediately after setting off I’ll plunge both feet through a spongey illusion of grass hiding a burn and for the rest of the afternoon my boots will slosh like a pair of aquariums. Crag-fast, clinging to a rock face, surrounded by a diver’s-helmet of midges- simultaneously sunburnt, wind-whipped, freezing cold and sweating- feeling almost transcendentally awful, and oh by the way there’s heavy rain sweeping in from the north at 4pm so we’d better press on, there will come a moment where I ask myself why I continue to return.

But I have no choice, emotionally, at least. As long I can remember I’ve held this rather pathetic longing for some lost paradise, an unspoiled Shangri-la of wilderness that acts as a redress to modern life – like a draught of clear water, with immense healing properties – bound by a sense of community, work and shared meaning, surrounded by dogs.

There’s a Scottish Gaelic word which perhaps gets closest to how I feel when I’m not there: cianalas- a sense of longing or belonging to a place; a bittersweet yearning caught somewhere between nostalgia and homesickness. I mustn’t get carried away: I suffer the sentimentality of the outsider. Truth is, life here is physically demanding, the work often laborious and unglamorous. On bleak days it must cling like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross.

Seldom do I walk away from a long day in the fank without a whacked shin, bruised thigh, stubbed toe, or this year, a new honour: a split lip. But ‘the good life’ never meant utopia. It always involved grit, labour and dedication. It’s also often communal, jocund, high-spirited.

We’re on the final stretch now after more than six hours on the hill. The promise of a cold beer, warm meal, and the honey-lights-of-home have pepped my flagging spirit. With the ease of a falling feather in reverse I’ve shifted gears in consciousness from the wretched to the sublime and I’m reminded, with sudden clarity, why I love to be part of this.

I’m keeping pace beside them on an elevated road running parallel. When the time is right, I will proceed ahead of them and open the gate to the field where they’ll be held for the next few days, but for now, along with some walkers who’ve stopped to watch in rapt fascination, I’m just enthralled to the spectacle.

This scene, appreciated most acutely from a distance, plays out for me in private symphony to the music of Bach: the pauses, breaks, looping melodies and building crescendo in contrapuntal step to this amorphous, shape-shifting cloud, corralled by the curl of shepherd’s crooks and curving tracks of dogs, weaving its way across the valley like thread in a medieval tapestry. The sheer theatre of it. It is archetypal. Biblical.

Back at the cottage. Boots divested of water, socks wrung out, wizened and anaemic looking toes- free at last. Blunders and successes exchanged. The fire lit. I hear my name called again, this time asking for the kettle to be switched on. I look for Sam-the-dog, but that is surely meant for me. Another day of gatherings complete.