Two thousand acres of heather, sixty Highland cattle and a family that has walked the same droving paths since 1887.
It is barely six when Angus MacLeod meets us at the gate, two collies at his heel and the glen still holding last night's mist. 'They'll be up on the high ground,' he says, and starts walking.
The MacLeod fold — you don't call a group of Highland cattle a herd — has grazed this glen since 1887. Angus knows each of the sixty animals by name, temperament and lineage.
Highland cattle grow slowly. Where commercial breeds finish in fourteen months, Angus's animals take three years or more, building flavour the way an oak builds rings.
'People ask why the beef tastes different,' he says, scratching a horned matriarch called Morag behind the ear. 'It's the heather. It's the rain. It's the two hundred winters in their blood.'
On the walk back down, the mist lifts off the water. It is not hard to understand why the fillet from this glen is the rarest thing we make.
