29 12 07

There is a need to approach Sunart oakwoods obliquely. Like sitting. Sitting very still, alert & relaxed, waiting for something to arrive: a deer, maybe, or an owl. If I look at trees in the dusk directly, they dance in vision; it’s the way our eyes are physically made. Look to one side & the tree is clearer. I approach trees sideways, a little nervous of their history & presence. I count geese, deer, list mosses, enumerate spiders, look out to sea with my back to the woods, holly & birch & alder all around. It’s as if to look directly is to somehow obscure a latency, a voice that I want to listen to; but it’s not enough to be attentive, scientific; it’s necessary to be receptive. I’m impatient. I’ll not live as long as an oak.

28 12 07

At night I sleep dreaming under goose down. Heavy in the early morning on the peat bog I’m mazed by a solitary goose struggling to get airborne - a mastery of muscle & pneumatic bone over gravity - & when she’s joined by a vibrant honking hooting cavalcade of score upon score, following in an untidy raggle of flight, up, yapping up, then for me, awake now, it’s also willing them aloft to circle & make off celebrating life & flight; uplifting & uproarious all at once.

There’s two sorts of goose here, the barnacle, all black & white & the grey lag, with its pink bill. This enormous gaggle is the largest I’ve seen; up to a hundred birds. I’m still smiling as the skeins make off to the south barking all the way; & at four to five pounds weight each bird I’m still lost at the power of feather clad muscle; each of my watery steps across the bog makes sucking noises accentuating my weight, my pressure on the goose feeding grounds.

26 12 07

Nine intoxicating things at Loch Sunart today

To stand in darkness rocked by a gale

Rain in the night

The order of birds that comes to finish morning hen food: three grey crows; a blown flock of chaffinches; one robin; four wood pigeons

The first lilac alder buds

Clubmosses

Foxglove rosettes

23 herons taking to the air & wheeling for 3 awe-long minutes, huge against sky above Garbh Eilean before landing to sit in rain like random boulders on a rock outcrop, muttering in convocation.

The raised head of a single seal at the same place from the sea

Water blueing after grey with the traverse of rain along the loch

24 12 07

This one, the snow moon, wakes me at night; full & high. By day full double arcing rushing rainbows one above the other; in the spaces between grey showers & grey clouds, scraps of bows here & there on & off to the east & now to the west & then south.
Waves of what is come together, coincide for a while & dissolve, in the sky as in the bay.

21 12 07

The day before winter solstice & all the ice & frosts have melted. Down at the edge of the bay two donkeys softly graze at the regreened but salty grass. The sunlight is radiant & the unclouded sky a zinging blue. The donkeys are dark against all this. They’re minded by a woman & a child. One is led from a grass cropping to the next; the other is free to roam, but stays close to his companion & the girl. Donkeys here in Ardnamurchan are a rarity these days, what ever might have been in the past. These are retired, though from what work I don’t know.

It’s more than thirty years since I backed a donkey into a donkey car to tackle him to bring in hay. While donkeys can be biddable, they always have minds of their own. Ours, a rig, had a habit of submitting to the collar, and backing up far enough to be tackled, then moving forward sharply so that the shafts dropped. The old TVO tractor that replaced him was not a lot better. It was commonplace at that time in Kerry for donkeys to take the milk from maybe a half dozen cows each day from the holdings to the collection point for the creamery lorry. Even then, they were being replaced by bulk tanks, coolers & tractors with cabs.

The donkeys here in Gobsheallach may never work & even on occasion bite, just to let you know their ancestry, but in the solstice sun here, now, there’s plenty of grazing for them. In Palestine, since the checkpoints were rigorously (re)enforced there’s not a lot of diesel or petrol getting into the West Bank or Gaza & donkeys are the general transport, serving as taxi & ambulance & draught animal. Beasts of burden. Grazing is scarce in a land one-fifth the size of Scotland but with more than two and a half million people. Many farms, frequently olive & citrus groves, have been annexed for a wall between Palestine & Israel; the trees are bulldozed & the land out of farming. On any other fertile ground, crops for people is the order of the day. Even with the price of a donkey twenty or thirty times what it was before the virtual sealing of the Palestinian lands, if grazing, or hay or concentrate can’t be had, there’s no future for donkeys in Ramallah or Hebron or Bethlehem.

18 12 07

It’s light but the sun is not above the hills yet. Frost everywhere, from roof slates to the sheep-cropped grass, which is white, no shade of green. I set off across the brittle tussocks which only the highest tides cover. Tide last night was moderate & low was at half past five. I want to find out if the white out on the bay is ice. Coming off the salt flats I step onto frozen sand ridges which the sea has left. Wormcasts are frozen solid. Bladderwrack is frosted white. Any depressions in seabed (that’s what I’m walking on – the point where land is reclaimed by the sea in its continual cycle) are filled with shallow sea ice. At twenty past nine the sun glows at the hill line. At this time of year it’s so far south of east as to be disorienting; I think I’ve gone badly astray, a feeling heightened by the double blinding of the sun & its reflection in the iced sands. Squinting downward, I head directly into the sun, towards the three scattered islands where sometimes stranded sheep sleep in the summer, Eileanan Loisgte, the burnt islands. Another five minutes & the sun is clear of the hill & rising along its low arc. Even a couple of days from solstice where everything hangs & tilts, the brilliance is too much for me . I head into the black gloam of the islands & turn back along my footprints. My shadow , cast ahead, is thirty feet long. At this point, I’m in the middle of the bay among crackling mussel beds & the air’s cracked, torn apart by a roar that goes to my nape; ahead of it goes the Tornado jet itself, which I only catch a glimpse of with its wing missiles. The noise is visceral. It bypasses everything rational & goes direct to the thalamus - seat of primal reaction. I crouch down, vulnerable on miles of open sand. There’s no cover.

It passes. I straighten up & with the jet safely away shake my fist. I curse. Atavism recedes into the reptilian brain & I walk on back across acres of frost & ice, the weight of sky on the back of my neck. The mountains of Afghanistan are not so very far away. Not a bird stirs.

16 12 07

With the very short days now, sunrise at about nine o’ clock & sunset at about half past three, giving six & a half hours of daylight, there is more of the night & consequently of the moon. The waxing half moon rises at noon & rides high in the sky most of this cloudless day until it slips behind the horizon thirteen hours later at one in the morning. Plates of surface ice hem the lochans all day.

As well as the weather, of importance here is light & clarity. On this clear cold day, when every breath is felt deep into the lungs, there’s much talk of how far can be seen & how clearly.

As the sun rises, the hills make one black & broken line to the south; in full sunlight, they resolve into three clean lines of hills, one behind the other, receding in distinctness. Even now, towards dusk it’s still clear. To the west, the hills of Rum make a jet profile against a low band of coral flushing the horizon. Overhead the high sky is a translucent duckegg blue. To the east & south the sun flares red on the hills, somewhere on the spectrum between the bracken & rusting plough at the grazing called Park & the flames of the fire burning the year’s end scraps at the Kentra croft.

As the sun sets, the lines of hills become one again against an ice-blue sky. Clarity dissolves to dark.

13 12 07

The south wind has reached a storm, though still without rain. Outgoing tide is crossed by the force of the wind, spray flying high.

Whiteness of lichen rings on oak & the stems of birches, their peeling bark white as thighs, stand against a sky black as spilled ink, a silhouette in reverse.

Clothes pegs clack luminously along the clothes line back & forth like the beads of an abacus. A crow, just blacker than the sky, is torn away from the hill by the updraught & swoops down to a hollow like any gathered leaf.

Lurid is very close to lucid.

11 12 07

A soft day. The southerlies seem to have brought milder weather, with harmless & haphazard smirrs of rain wetting nothing much. Matching that soft weather, I hear the calls of the ravens before I see them – a large silhouette flying across the hill just below my clear sightline attracts my attention & I’m momentarily puzzled when it swoops up as a buzzard. Then the two ravens appear & jink together, above & below the buzzard, sending it clear over the crest of Gobsheallach hill on an updraught of wind & curse. The raven pair then flies over to demonstrate possession of the entire south side of the hill. They might be performing a mating flight, such is their exuberance, wing to wing coasting, stopping short only of the upside down flight I associate with their mating. But I guess it’s too early for that & they are just whooping it up a little after their effortless eviction of the buzzard.

It’s their gentle glottal calls I enjoy the most - the triple hyonk pyonk donk followed by a musical note like striking a dry emptied small log with a heavy stick, a deep xylophonic note, a marimba & mallet. I’m entranced at their flight & their bonded ecolect, their overheard personal conversation.

By the bay, the thin peep & rising inflection of five oystercatchers, like so many whistling kettles, as they rise to settle twenty yards further along the tideline is uncertain quavering soprano to the tenor gargling of a solitary curlew.

10 12 07

further in yet
further in yet
green hills

(Santoka, poet, hermit, sometime sake brewer, “good for nothing”,

Buddhist mendicant; translated by William J Higginson)

Today being Human Rights Day, I ponder more than usual the scream of the Tornado jet as it passes between Beinn Resipol & Beinn Bhàn west to east along Loch Sunart.

When I arrive at Camas a’ Choirce, the sun has already dipped behind Beinn Bhàn, the big hill above Laudale on the other side of the loch in Morvern. Although only about 50 yards across the water here, Morvern is hours away on foot. I climb the slope to Resipole, through forestry & remnant oak forest where the gorges of Allt Camas a’ Choirce (the bay of corn) & the rocks & gradients made it unprofitable for planting sitka spruce. Picking my way among the frost pockets which dissolve the bracken in winter’s attrition, cracking the ice in standing water, crossing & crossing again the deep cut burns to gain a little height, my pluming breath steams out, like any old horse at winter work & beads spider webs. The burns, small but insistent, are feeders for the torrent in the gorge, here & there dropping off less worn rock edges in waterfalls. There’s no sound here but the brawl of water – constant but rising & falling in cadence as I slowly make my way up alongside, now close enough to be splashed, now behind overhanging oaks, as the terrain dictates.

It was my intention to reach the snow line on Resipol, but when I finally clear the trees – my progress is slow, poking & peering, stopping & listening – I’m in the sun, having climbed higher than its angle behind Beinn Bhàn – & too hot in my sweater for the climb. The sweater, an Aran knit has just been darned for me by an expert in the village. It was made more than thirty years ago here in Argyll; it didn’t wear out, but was attacked by moths. I mention it because round about the time it was made, I was panting up Carrauntoohill, Ireland’s highest mountain, in my best tackety boots & met, near the top, after some particularly irritating scree, a man looking after his sheep. He had a cigarette in his mouth, & no more equipment than a flat cap & welly boots.

I sit on a rock outcrop that’s bare among heather, smoothed & weathered over millennia, the kind that elsewhere in Argyll has been carved with enigmatic neolithic cup & ring marks. The flesh of the mountain. I sit for the best part of an hour, cooling, senses at a threshold level, simply receptive. When the sun starts blinking again behind the mass of the mountain, so do I. Resipol, at about 2,700 feet, is a Corbett, not so tall, but the snow seems to recede with each step I take & the rises between me & the peak seem to grow in number; I think of the poem by Santoka. I’m not concerned with mountain tops; faced with a choice of going further up, ice & snow above or down before dusk into frost, I take the path of the unhurried stag, preferring to leave the tops to their volcanic dreaming & move downhill, the body’s song in my every step.

The oaks corkscrew on themselves, their lower branches brushing my head as I pass under. Undisturbed webs are thicker here; the trees wound with ivies, climbed by lungwort & lichens, buttressed with mosses, into which my singing springing steps sink. Among the oaks are scattered younger hollies & birches. Lower, the oaks are cracked, torn & broken by winds; they fall partly to lean on their fellows. Their slow growth still seeking the upright. Along the burn the deep quiet pools alternate with white spume as water hits bed boulders. The floor of the spruce plantation the other side is black & silent, only small creatures negotiating the tangle of branches down to knee height on a man. The boundaries we set are not held to: among the sitka are yearling hollies, their hard seeds perhaps passing through the gut of a songbird to grow where they land; among the oaks are sitka saplings, seed brought by wind & squirrel. Full of laughter I move faster downhill, tapping the bracket fungi on birches, a little dance past the last lime green leaves of low fraochan - the sweet blueberries of summer gone.

06 12 07

On the sea: a low guttural r-rak & moaning moo-oo-airh

At the headland: croaking & retching, frarnk & a liquid bubbling trill cour-li crwee croo-ee

In the oakwood: a cascade of notes ending with a flourish – choo-ee-o then chwink wheet chwit & a persistent scolding wheet tsack tsack & tit tit tit & a prolonged breathless jingle of high notes

On the hill: a croaking clucking plainsong & a deep high metallic prronk

In the sky: pee-oo mee-oo

Birdsong is hard to approximate in our alphabet & there’s a huge debate about its musical notation, with some commentators claiming that, Messaien & Handel notwithstanding, it’s nonsense to transcribe birdsong into Western 12 note scales, since they sing microtonally. Charles Ives describes microtones as the notes between the cracks on a piano. For sure the “words” used to describe birdsong here, which I drew in part from Peterson, Mountfort & Hollom’s Birds of Britain & Europe, my companion for all my adult life, are perhaps unrecognisable as the liquid languages of birds I encounter this morning on a walk to Port a’ Bhata. It’s also been argued that human music is a response to & (to begin with at least), an imitation of birdsong. There’s no doubt that it’s the same impulse that has me laughing & rasping aloud a fragment from the Song of the Volga Boatmen as I step yet again into ankle deep mud, slotted with deerprints along the path stags & hinds have trodden for how long.

Birdsong is a response, a pure clear communication of heart & mind & body together, spontaneous; & to hear, among hills & bays, is fathomless & silencing.

But nothing silences the possible.

05 12 07

The urge toward naming is to make anchors for ourselves in an unreliable mutable world.

The rain’s finally stopped, though the wind is as strong as ever. In Antrim last week at a fish farm the entire harvest of salmon, about a hundred & twenty thousand fish was killed, when a mass of mauve stinger jellyfish, Pelagia noctiluca, filled Glenarm Bay. The numbers of mauve stingers was in billions & their mass extended over ten square miles & was thirty-five metres deep. Some salmon died of stings, but most were asphyxiated - the bulk of jellyfish prevented the flow of ocean water into their cages. The high tides & storms probably broke up that swarm, but ocean currents would have sent the jellyfish this way eventually. They have been sighted in the waters around Eigg & in Loch Sunart. Among the boats that work these waters is Speedwell out of Salen on Loch Sunart.

I walk to the fish farm in Ardtoe, from where Eigg, less than an hour’s sail from here, can be seen most days. The fish farm is called that still, but is really a hatchery, with its own tanks & waters behind dams away from the shore.

The Bay of Ardtoe, which has no name on the maps, only on the Admiralty Charts, is broad, full of small bays – from Camas an Lighe, the overflowing bay on account of the burn there, where the sands are said to sing in certain conditions, to Sailean Dubh, the black inlet. There’s a scattering of skerries – Sgeir an Rathaid, the skerry of the road, Sgeir nam Meann, kid skerry, Dubh Sgeir, Sgeir a’ Chaolais.

I stand on the rise above Rubh’ a’ Mhurain (sea bent headland). Sea bent is Arundo arenaria: a grass that, according to Umberto Eco in The Search for the Perfect Language, Linnaeus diagnostically describes as “single flowered within calyx; involute tapering pungent leaves."

I clamber down to the strand. There are no birds in this wind except a pair of cormorants far out toward unseen islands, low, skimming the crests. There is a large belt of kelp washed up to high tide line, but no mauve stingers; in fact Eigg might as well not be there, it can’t be seen either, whatever might be swarming in the waters around it. Only a black terrier is moving here, running from one end of the tide-diminished Sailean Dubh to the other at the water line, barking at the incoming ocean. The wind hustles me back onto my heels.

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FISH PRICES

Fraserburgh: monk: £70-£80; witches: £30-£60.
Boats that landed: Guide Us, Ocean Way, Ocean Reaper, Transcend, Replenish, Concorde, Accord, Gratitude, Serene, Deliverance, Just Reward
Peterhead: monks £2-£3.80; witches 80p-£1.50; megrim £1.50-£4.
Boats that landed: Constant Friend, Ocean Harvest, Our Guide

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The names we give out, sometimes at random, to creatures we share space with can sometimes return. The fact that sheep, Ovis aries go by many names, according to gender & age – tup, ewe, lamb, wether, gimmer – doesn’t diminish our need to give them personal names. If we get personal names wrong, it’s more or less insulting. So a certain tup with one eye, who once inhabited the byre where I now stay, has been offended by my misnaming. I’m happy to set the record straight, though I was only trying to protect his identity: his name’s Billy, not Charley.

Other times, like the hound here called Dharma, the naming of animals can have unsettling effects. A ewe by here, from a blackface tup to a Hebridean ewe (I’m guessing) with black & white markings, has only an unofficial descriptive name. To burst into the bar then, to announce “the badger’s had a lamb” can be the occasion for some puzzled looks among tourists.
Likewise, to encounter a man as it’s getting dark, slamming his door behind him & setting off along the road yelling “Whisky!” is something summer visitors find only too believable of west highland men. They don’t stop long enough to learn that it’s his dog’s name.

04 12 07

My news for you
the stag roars
winter snow
summer is gone

wind high and cold
the sun low
quick its course
sea running strong

deep-red the bracken
its shape lost
everywhere the cry
of the wild goose

frost has hold
of the wings of birds
season of ice
these are my tidings

Something catches my attention this evening. The wind backs up & blusters somewhere else for the first time in three days. My ears ring in the absence of fast moving air; it’s like a reversing truck, how I imagine tinnitus to be. As my ears adjust & begin to stretch my hearing for something else – a curlew maybe; perhaps the hiss of tide retreating - the wind & rain return.

If the anonymous poet of the Scel lem duib, (the poem here translated from the Irish with spare elegance by Geoffrey Squires) were to visit Ardnamurchan today & sit here, back to an oak tree in a hollow, watching the tide in the bay, he’d find the land unchanged. Although the stags have now stopped their roar, rutting over, the wind is high & strong & the wild goose frets across the moss. The word scel is usually translated as poem or song. Geoffrey Squires, with more than elegance, has the right of it by using the English tidings, & news. It’s truly news; a report as fresh this evening as when the poet was first chilled by that wind 1200 years ago at the end of summer.

Even in my waterproof fleece-lined German ex-army trousers (swords to ploughshares, or at any rate breeches) the cold strikes home & I move across the hill into the wind & back to the byre, where the spider is sheltering from the weather.

I’d thought her at first to be a house spider, Tegenaria saeva or domestica. She’s certainly the right size – approaching an inch from eyes to spinner, excluding legs - & moves fast enough; though with a strange patience, if it’s that, she’ll keep still while I bring the lens to bear on her abdomen & dramatic pedicel. We’ve been moving around each other from room to room since the southwesterlies first arrived, & by now I’m convinced she’s not a house spider, but like any other creature this past week is avoiding rain & the wind that blows rain into cracks & fissures. She has no web that I can find, no cocoon shaped web-dwelling from which to run at prey. Her abdomen is black, as is her carapace, but she lacks any abdominal markings that I can see. I leave her be, both of us in the dry, unfurling bracken days a memory. When I’ve towelled off, she’s nowhere in sight.

03 12 07

I’m woken in the night by squalls of rain syncopating & sloshing on windows & skylights. The sky is black, with rain rushing in on a southwesterly. The morning dawns slowly with no let up in rain; in fact it’s becoming fiercer. Wind birls around the byre battering at every window, not just in the prevailing wind direction. The topography here sends the winds into a flurry of indeterminacy, blowing from every quarter, sometimes seemingly at once. It’s like dusk all morning. Rain eventually falls away in the early afternoon, but I still don’t get too far from the house. Over on the peat bog by Shielbridge, 16 barnacle geese rise reluctantly from the small dug-over sloughs, cackling at my intrusion on their sheltered grazing. They rise as one tattered organism, slowly, peeling heavily into the wind to land a hundred yards away from where I walk, leaning into the wind. Barnacle geese were once believed to come, not from eggs, but from barnacles on the sea shore. Like me, folk learn things through observation; if you’ve never found a goose nest, because they breed in the Arctic, anything is possible. The shellfish & goose connection is an earlier notion of how things relate: ecology.

From here, looking west, the bulk of Eigg is visible, though not the loom of the Sgurr; there’s no sign of Rum behind it. I move back into the wind which the Shipping Forecast had told me is force eight becoming force nine later. I need no forecast to careen into it at a buffeted angle to keep moving forward, just as the geese used the precise & minimal amount of energy to escape my passage. Since the geese are feeding & I’m not, I begin to think of food, (eggs?) with maybe a tot of rum in honour of these two near small islands, surrounded by storms today, & on which doubtless, few geese are moving beyond the next grassy beakful & even fewer people are straying far from the fireplace. A day for a glass of rum in the twilight, window-gazing.

29 11 07

Ten in the morning & the waning moon rides high in a wild sky. There’s every kind of cloud here, cumulus, black in its lumbering rolling mass, stratus & alto stratus, pulled into ribbons by the wind, all tinged at their edges by the morning sun. The wind pulls tears from my eyes & spreads them across my cold cheekbones. In the bay a cormorant coasts along the gusts, unruffled, a winged lizard, then turns back into the wind for a rising drop into the teeming sea & straight under, wings folded. There’s only one mushroom under the birches, a charcoal burner, Russula cyanoxantha. Despite its name, this one is good to eat, witness the slight nibbles that a hind has taken. I guess it’s a hind since I’ve seen no stags this way for days. I’m happy to share; I picture it with a breakfast egg, whatever the hind may envisage.

John Cage, an avid mushroom hunter-gatherer, cooker & eater, is not above spreading fallacies concerning mushrooms. In Indeterminacy, he writes “Certain tribes in Siberia trade several sheep for one Amanita muscaria and use the mushroom for orgiastic practices. . . . . The Vikings who went berserk are thought to have done so by means of this same mushroom.” The key words here are orgiastic, which goes counter to all the evidence that this was once the intoxicant used during shamans’ curative practices; & berserk, for which there is no evidence, though it might perhaps have been a constituent part of an alcohol based cocktail that would send anyone wild; berserk if you will. I’m happy, though that he perpetuates mycophobia, I wonder if it mightn’t have been his intention. A mushroom gatherer will do anything to send people away from their patch with the idea that all mushrooms are deadly poisonous. I have several ruses myself. John Cage, again: “Guy Nearing sometimes says that all mushroom experts die from mushroom poisoning. Donald Malcomb finds the dangers of lion hunting largely imaginary, those of mushroom hunting perfectly real.” The fact is, though, that mushrooms are one of the last remaining wild foods available here, as elsewhere, & as such belong to those who find them. The law, a notorious ass, & with it the most risible of landowners, would suggest that anything found on a laird’s land belongs to him; including wild fruits & fungi. As well then to clear the land of noxious & poisonous mushrooms that I’ve seen deliberately trampled by those afraid of the orgiastic berserkers who might ingest them. Good with eggs, though, with just a little garlic.

Mushrooms & their association with the woodland here (as everywhere) have a beautiful symmetry. The mycorrhizal connections allow an exchange between tree & fungus of carbohydrates for mineral nutrients which each would find difficult to access otherwise. The exchange is made with a colonisation of the roots of oaks & birch or other trees by fungi. Look for healthy woodland, healthy trees, & they are made so by the fungi which grow on & around them below the soil. Some fungal mycelium mats outlive generations of trees.

Deer nibbling the fruiting bodies – mushrooms - may also bark young trees, but their droppings enrich the woodland floor, making yet more nutrients (droppings derived from their browsing in the Sunart woods) available to tree & mushroom alike. What the Sunart oakwoods may have been like centuries ago, can only be a matter for conjecture. A few years back, the ecologist Frans Vera put forward the theory that’s been debated since, that woodland in Europe (& therefore Scotland) was a savannah, with groves & grasses kept open by herds of roaming deer & other mammals. This runs counter to our belief, founded on folklore & perhaps a wish-fulfilment daydream that the ancient woodlands covered Scotland coast to coast in a single continuous closed canopy. Sweeny ("This clearing is too open, / without trees; . . .”) & the Green Man live there.

Whatever the cover of the trees in Sunart’s Atlantic oakwoods six thousand years ago & despite being a resource for timber products, the arrival of sheep altered it to such a point that ecologists & conservationists today have difficulties in trying to restore woodlands. I make no secret that I have a fairly low opinion of the intelligence & usefulness of sheep. I'd trade several for a big cep or some chanterelles any day. They were an indirect cause of great suffering (Landlords being the true manipulating culprits) during the Clearances & today have little economic purpose; but I have nothing like the spleen of the good Doctor of Rahoy, John MacLachlan, writing towards the end of the nineteenth century on sheep, shepherds & the subsequent decline of woodland, by then well under way. He writes (in Donald Meek’s translation from the Gaelic):

“Alas for my plight here, as I am so lonely,
going through the wood which I once knew closely,
when I cannot get a plot in my native country
though I’d pay a crown for a mere shoe-breadth.

Unsweet is the sound that has roused my reflections,
as it comes down from the heights of Morvern –
the Lowland shepherd – how I hate his language! –
bawling yonder to that slow dog of discord.

Early on a May morning when it is time to arise,
I hear no music on branches, nor lowing on moorland,
but the screeching of beasts in the English language,
yelling at dogs to make the deer scatter.

When I observe the towering mountains,
and the lovely country which was once Fionn’s homeland,

I see nothing there but sheep with white fleeces,
and countless Lowlanders at every trysting.

The glorious glens where one once found hunting,
where dogs on leashes were held by young fellows,
I see nothing there now but a ragged shepherd,
and his fingers blacker than the crow’s pinion.

Every old custom has been sent packing – . . .”

His poem equates the degradation of the woods with the erosion of language & Gaelic culture, a process that continues to this day. An ecological balance, once unbalanced, must find new purchase on the land: ecology as entropic biodiversity.

28 11 07

I seem to inhabit time backwards these quick days; a regression into memory. As a child, I heard of Eskimoes having hundreds of words for snow. Now I know that Franz Boas the anthropologist recorded just four: to mean lying snow, falling snow, drifting snow & snow drift. This, in just one language of the many of the people I now know as Inuit. Maybe there are many more Boas was not told. Here, there’s rain. It’s falling straight down & is constant. This morning’s Shipping Forecast gave six options for rain around the country: occasional rain, rain then showers, rain or showers, continuous moderate rain, slight drizzle & rain, & finally, occasional rain or drizzle. Before going out, I try to decide which I’m seeing through the kitchen window. It must be continuous moderate rain. Fliuch; wet then, in Gaelic. There’s no wind. Our words in English for rain – drizzle, showers, heavy rain, squalls, pour into my mind as the moderate rain falls on my green knitted hat.

One of this year’s piebald lambs – a cross of a blackface tup with a Hebridean ewe – with one and a half thin horns, nuzzles the hens where they disconsolately scratch the sogged turf. Up the hill water abandons its usual courses across & through thin soil, & being pragmatic, takes to the roads to follow its way to the bay. Which might be fresh rather than salt in all this rain. Fresh now, as though it’s the first time I’ve seen this (though in truth it’s an abiding memory from I don’t know when), on every hard rush blade, at the junction of each now-dead flowerhead & stem, drops of water catch my eye, rinse my sight.

At the point that looks out to the Atlantic, the morning’s heron voices her displeasure at my appearance & cracks long wings over to the island, to the looping, lingering call of her always companion, the curlew.

As the short day eases into dusk, the rain clears & a dilute sun sets a little west of the Tor of Beeches, its off-vermilion blush momentarily lending the hills a purple light among clinging clouds; as though the heather was again flowering as it did in summer. As the small stems of stork’s bill, Erodium cicutarium, flower unseen & unseasonal, by the sea’s edge right here, right now.

24 11 07

By Castle Tioram the fat handfed black pheasants are strident in their protest at the mere sight of the hound & myself. The dithering birds chak-chak at the hound, who, since they’re behind a wire fence, affects not to notice them.

A red squirrel climbs the Scots pine anti-clockwise, finding tiny things of interest there; its incurved tail meagre & rufous. It cares as little for all of us as the hound for the pheasants, as I do for the man who pays the breeder of the birds, reared only to be killed; food a long way from consideration.

The hound makes a hiccupping sally towards a rabbit on the island the castle sits on.

A herring gull mourns overhead.

23 11 07

At sunrise, together with a hind limned against a lightening sky, I watch as the bay becomes gold across its newborn sand. The news bulletin told me of Palestinians waking to the bulldozing of precious & ancient olive trees uprooted to make way for the concrete wall. The sun gilding sand is heart stopping, an organ played on by the blood of hind & human.

The hind moves on delicate black hooves over rock & heather, downhill, elegantly scratching her ear with her right rear leg; maybe, now in calf, she’s in as contemplative a mood as myself. I move up hill in a sky rapidly silvering then greying as the sun rises above the bay, above Ben Resipole’s hip & above rain clouds moving in from the Atlantic. The birches & the moss below are full of the flit & dart of chaffinches. The males echo the day, with their blue-grey crowns & rosy breasts, with the upcoming generation, or so I take it to be, slightly less coloured, but they’ll grow into it. The female is altogether olive brown. A grey crow, one of a pair in an alder, is wiping his beak on a branch, with a knife-sharpening motion, to take off traces of breakfast.

Under alder & birch & oak alike, the skeletal remains of bracken keel & reveal the green vividness of sphagnums & the herringbone pattern & green corduroy of shield ferns, (Polystichum aculeatum is my stab in the darkness of my own uncertainty). In the oaks grow polypody – Polypodium interjectum, their green multiple tongues dripping & refreshingly free of cant.

Dusk comes a little earlier each night, bringing greater safety, but greater hunger to the deer. The Glen Tarbert stags are down from the tops; three of them that I see have almost identical broken left antlers. They’re young & their rivalries are over, leaving only those cracked anti-trophies of male hormone flow, subsided as tide in the inlets. At Camas a’ Choirce, a solitary fossicking badger trots & snuffles between pounding rain squalls, light on her feet, her belly low-slung & her body-mass-index enough to frighten humans. Mostly nocturnal, she (I have no way of telling the sex of this animal) will spend more time sleeping in the longer colder nights, but have no food shortages just yet; the woods an autumn larder of roots, worms, carrion & mushrooms. At Kentra, young hind calves trot ahead of me, bemused by my torchlight in the pre-moon dark.

Clarity arrives with the full moon. Although there are clouds, the light is brilliant, lighting the white of sheep up on Gobsheallach hillside with a shining matched only by the luminescence of lichen rings on the rocks I finger as personal touchstones as I pass. Scale is confused in such clarity where I find it hard to ascribe anything but equal value to what is in front of my eyes wherever my glance falls – a lunar illumination scaled to fit human perception.

20 11 07

There is a second flush of growth in oak & other trees, known as lammas growth. It happens in the summer & is a response to temperature & other factors favourable to a fresh surge of growth. The tree is most prone to this when it’s young; it doesn’t happen in old trees. Nicolas Battey, writing in the Journal of Experimental Botany: “This decline could be conceived as learning from experience . . . A youthful tree shows lammas growth. It seems an enthusiasm, an impetuous response to summer warmth and light. With age, it declines, and the tree settles down to more sedate growth.” It’s a kind of freedom of expressive growth; it’s not the expansion of spring laid down the previous year. I don’t doubt that trees also learn from experience; to see any tree in Sunart oakwoods reacting, however slowly, to prevailing wind & the falling of old limbs from gales & lightning is to see trees balancing on rocky slopes in a decades long dance.

Lammas Day (“so call’d from the Mass said for preservation of Lambs”) is perhaps a Christian pilfering of Lughnasadh, the festival to celebrate the start of the harvest season, the growth that has given the first fruit.

It may be there is a correlative to trees’ lammas growth in the ragged robin & the spear thistle; a learning & an urge to make a fresh spurt, an utterance of life. An impetuous response. A song.

Also with a new burst of expansion are the jet planes, which have not yet made their eastward migration, but were only waiting on fine weather to make their high-sky vapour hieroglyphs, which fade to parentheses & the symbol for eternity; a figure eight on its side. These offensive jets (I’m using the MoD term) are Harriers & Tornadoes. Somewhere between the swept back wings of Tornadoes are Storm Shadow & Brimstone missiles, as well as General Purpose Bombs & Cluster Bombs which sow their submunitions over a couple of acres to flower at will. In other fields. Some of these aircraft rip to Ardnamurchan from Lossiemouth, about 150 miles as the crow flies. The vapour symbols are probably scrawled by a defensive Typhoon; the Eurofighter.

Among the boats returning to land fish today are: New Dawn, Celestial Dawn, Fruitful Vine, Fruitful Harvest, Harvest Hope & Ocean Harvest.

19 11 07

I can feel the frost coming. The air is cold & still. Chimney smoke over by Kentra, not moved by any wind, drops to the bracken & rolls, spreading like liquid. The sky has cleared itself of sulky grey & the moon has already risen high. There are two sunsets this evening. One, the colour of an angry boil against a few delicate stratus clouds slips behind Torr Beithe, the tor of beeches, now conifers. The other, the colour of salmon flesh is hard against me in the sea by Eilean Dubh. A curlew’s thin thread of a call as she rises stitches the two.

******************************

With the moon nearly full, the shadow of the two rowans just by here & my own shadow as I pass by them are as distinct as any negative formed by the sun. There are no Leonids, comets or shooting stars; the moon is enough, picking out the shine of rock. This moon is the Blood Moon, it’s written on my almanac, with vague neopagan overtones.

17 11 07

sleet or snow?
feels good it soaks into.
my body wet.
mistily moistened.
snow or cold rain?
acanthus rooting above me gone bad for the cold?
or those withered leaves suffering heavy snow?
what’s that faint sound coming on?
a jet?

I find it hard to observe frogs closely without being distracted by fragments of Kusano Shimpei’s poems. That one is from monologue of a hibernating frog (translated from the Japanese by Cid Corman with Susumu Kamaike) & it’s what frogs should be doing round about now, not leppin across roads in front of cars & pickups & heavy boots. But there they are. Making sure they don’t dry out; though in Sunart oakwoods, it’s just about impossible to dry out. There’s no doubt though that the year is somewhat warmer for longer than is usual. Over on the north shore of Loch Sunart, close by the wrecks of two small boats, ragged robin, Lychnis flos-cuculi, is still in flower. Here at Gobsheallach, right outside the door are the tall purple flowers & foliage of spear thistle, Cirsium vulgare; up the hill, as elsewhere around, male catkins of hazel share a branchlet with as yet unshed & now lime green autumn leaves. I mention this in the bliss of ignorance. The thistle & ragged robin are summer flowering, yet here we are in mid November. How easy to use phrases like global warming; the truth is, there are complex factors at work here, which such easiness undermines. It’s certainly the case that plants have a wider period of flowering than memory or text books generally allow. Frogs make up their own minds, according to temperature. & Kusano. & here we are in a temperate zone (& therefore basically not too extreme), in what amounts to a rainforest, made so partly by the north Atlantic drift. Frogs may come & go as they please, to a certain extent, using the glucose in their blood as a kind of anti-freeze; though I grant, not of their own volition. When they do hibernate, it’s in a hibernaculum. What a grand word for sleeping in mud.
But neither the frogs nor myself are sleeping the winter away yet. There’s a half-moon, lying on its back among broken clouds, the way I feel to be, looking up at the few visible stars, but no sign of the Leonid meteors, which are only for three days from the 16th to the 18th of this month; nor of the shooting stars that my star chart predicts. Peter tells me also that I might be able to see the comet Holmes, in Perseus, not too far (though that has to be relative) from Andromeda.
I see only the frogs tonight

proceeding quietly single file.
long silent single file.
file of frogs proceeding.

from Lululu’s funeral (accompanied by Chopin’s funeral march) Kusano Shimpei.

15 11 07

swords into ploughshares

a gunmetal sea

& when I write grey skies I think of Gertrude Stein. These are not grey skies but curling greyladen clouds, formless in whisps & solids, changing their formlessness as wind drives them. Light & dark according to density, the load of moisture they hold, that they are. Nothing recognisable, as different from yesterday’s grey sky as the shapes clouds don’t become. No trees, faces, monsters. They’re all down here, where here is. All morning behind that grey a reverberance above cloud tops; another unseen jet rolling over the sky, rumbling the hills here. I’d thought the manoeuvres & ravening aerobatic displays over, that air force jets had ended, another seasonal event, going into underground hangars like the woodants, to sleep & dream of becoming. But this is probably a last summer visitor who can’t wait to catch his fellows in their fall migration to the middle east, the mountains of Afghanistan & plains of Iraq

13 11 07

Is a stag an event? There’s no wind, droplets of water on every aspen, birch & oak, as well as at the tip of each stalk of hard rush. Ambling across the bay west from Kentra, two hours ahead of low tide, pausing only to scratch, the dark necked stag owns it all. I move up the hill to cut him off & sit quietly where he’ll come ashore. To see things, it’s easier to be still than to lumber behind. I sit for maybe twenty minutes until the damp seeps in. Experience says he’s scented me & moved off below or above. There’s no further sight of him.

In the afternoon I walk round the headlands on the bay’s sands & there’s his slotted hoofprints leading in to an inlet east of where I was sitting in the morning. It’s among the poised & ponderous heron prints, each foot just about the span of my hand. The ridges & wrinkles of the bay are crisscrossed by worm casts & the meanderings of small whelk trails & the musings of other shellfish creeping. Just as the outlines of heron, stag & fish prints are softening in the moisture retained in the sand’s striations, so are the lower slopes of watercut hills of rock around the bay blurring into cloud; the peak of Ben Resipole rising into sun. The stag’s away.

11 11 07

-- through metaphor to reconcile

the people and the stones.

Thinking about William Carlos Williams’ short poem A sort of a song. That reconciliation is difficult, even when I know there’s no real separation, no such thing as independent existence. It’s what Dogen meant when he wrote of mountains constantly walking. The bedrock does not protrude from the mosses, it wears them. The trees don’t displace air & water, but contain them.

The night of the new moon & the rain has not let up any, coming in hard twisting ribbons curling across the woodland. In a search for shelter, or maybe just restless, frogs leap high across the road. A sullen elk-wet stag, shaggy & hunched, steps out from my torchlight & behind the dripping oak at Camas a choirce.
The following day in Morvern, by Laudale, the wind persists, buffeting until the shelter of the trees at Aird Beitheach, the high birches, is reached. Leaves swoop back into these trees with the wind, dipping from tree to tree, up at the last moment to land on the topmost twigs, to resolve themselves into a flock of tits & treecreepers, momentarily leafing the bare birch & oak in their own fashion. At night small mammals are constantly running across the road, perhaps mice or voles, tawny brown & rushing from one side to the other before revealing their nature as dried leaves scuttering in wind.
Then, last night, pulled from the trees, the last downtwisting small birch leaves, despite the intense cold, become what they maybe were all along: flimsy breezy moths. There’s a brown owl sitting on the fence, fully awake, & I guess tired of moths.

(No ideas
but in things)

Williams wrote in the same poem. Things have their own ideas, they’re themselves, sometimes idea-less, happening, an event, walking their own way.

09 11 07

SHIPPING NEWS

A maritime seasonal gauge at Ardtoe Jetty is the number of boats at moorings. In the summer there's a dozen or more small boats, a couple of which are working boats, bringing home in an infrequent way, lobsters & crabs. These boats, mostly pleasure craft, are brought ashore, one at a time, as the oak & aspen leaves fall around them. Today, there’s only three boats & two RIBs. The RIBs act as tenders to the two small fishing boats, OB 108 being one, & will ride the winter here. The only boat I've seen there with a name, Tarbaby, has gone.

Caledonian MacBrayne ferries from Mallaig to Eigg, Rum, Muck & Canna did not operate yesterday in the storms & squally winds.

Among the boats from Fraserburgh & Peterhead that put out: Valhalla, Tranquility, Ocean Pioneer, Contest, Courage, Accord, Achieve, Celestial Dawn, Arcane, Fear Not, Opportunus, Harvest Hope, Challenge, Fruitful Bough. One boat put out from Scrabster: Seagull.

Monks & witches landed everywhere.

08 11 07

A gale here & stronger wet squalls coming with northwesterlies. Rain’s dashed down against the slates but the strength of wind curling round Gobsheallach hill contrariwise pushes it upwards again to sing over the roof ridges. Rain takes turns with bouncing hail. The hound is unnerved by the squalls; facing them the air is forced into her long nose & sets her sneezing, behind & she’s forever looking over her shoulder to see what the noise back there is bringing. In a sheltery dip she puts up a sudden snipe from the bracken where neither of us saw it until it flew a few feet. It slid sideways in the wind & curved up slightly, in that deceptive way of snipe, before, blown, clipping a small birch trunk & then running into the heather & over the rock; more pheasant than snipe. She may be sheltering or may have been pushed down by the gale & injured a wing. If that’s the case, it’s the fox who’ll benefit tonight.
It won’t be the same fox, but the story is told of the fox trotting down the hillside here & along the road past the house over by. The man of the house sees the fox, bold as brass, & fearing for the hens, runs inside for maybe a gun, but comes out with only a hearth brush, which he lobs anyway at the fox. The fox, nonchalant, turns, throws a look, grabs the brush in his smirking teeth & trots on his way. When the farm is having a new shed built, two-three years later, a fallen trunk needs to be moved; in a den underneath, dry & in good condition is the red hearth brush. I think it’s in use to this day.

07 11 07

The wind’s blowing up from the west again & from the point above the ants that looks out over Eilean Dubh I can see ocean spume. Although the ants are in full hibernation, beside their small dwelling I find a pair of Scarlet Hoods. These mushrooms are blood red with a waxy feel & shine among dead bracken & deepsea green moss. They’re also edible, so into my hat they go for safe passage home. Then, with the easy optimism of an early find, the hound & I set off mushrooming in the woods.
The woods, like me, are not sure if autumn is coming or going. The oaks are browning & crisping their leaves, one tree at a time. It’s not age, nor yet exposure that causes this patchwork undressing, but perhaps an expression of health or of individuality, with here a mature tree in green leaf, there a partially clad elder & here a stripped fifty year old youngster. The taller hollies are vibrant with berries, a signifier of a bad winter, it’s said. Other hollies here seem close cropped, perhaps by deer; certainly they’re very low & appear to be layering into small groves, but no taller than mid calf. They have no berries, so maybe they are too young , or simply all male trees. The willows are still leaved. The Scots pines are direct from a Chinese mountains & waters landscape scroll, with their backdrop of soft-toothed hills. A signature is the final spindly foxglove, with its single purple bell.
It’s a joy to walk in these damp, duff-smelling moss clad woods; I think of Sweeny, exiled, mad, & his naked wanderings in the woods of Ireland & Britain: “Dense wood is my security, / the ivy has no edge.” in Trevor Joyce’s perfect translation. & “I occupy in alien woods / an old retreat; / in my familiar square of trees / shrewd centre of such intimate quincunx am I”. Quincunx, where he counts himself a tree. Indeed, it’s so silent here, that the slight sibilance of our exhalation is equal to the fall of sap in these oaks.
Of mushrooms, though, not a smell; save for a single psilocybe. I stravaig north & west; past the trunk where once was frosted chicken-of-the-woods, a dim memory in the skillet now, past the small stand of beech & deeper into the oaks, where, still serving my stomach, I take the consolation of a bite of wood sorrel (Sweeny: “Though you relish salted hams / and the fresh meat of ale-houses, / I would rather taste a spray of cress / in some zone exempt from grief.”) But the truth is, the sorrel’s tough & at the uttermost end of its season.
Once, I would have been pleased by the psilocybe, but with deep woods & scarlet hoods singing bloodred in my brain, now they stay unplucked. Hinds & stags have no such scruples, browsing through the woods. Nor the slugs. What does a slug experience, nibbling on Russula emetica: the Sickener? Hard to imagine a slug with vertigo, or seeing flashing lights, or even vomiting. These are the toxic effects on humans of this little cherry coloured mushroom. Fly agaric seems to be eaten with impunity by deer. It has, of course been taken for its psychotropic qualities over the ages in northern woods. I’ve eaten it raw and any psychotropic experience – the flashing lights, organic curlicues of Green-Mannishness & an overwhelming certitude (of what, is never asked) - is second only to uncontrollable shivering & prodigious, endless vomiting. Americans also assert, helpfully, “it fries the liver”. It has also been taken when passed through another’s liver. Some stories have it the liver of a deer, others the livers of the rich, (poor people being unable to afford the mushroom: but this doesn’t stand scrutiny, much; poor people need only go to the woods. But again, parenthetically, we might ask what else have the rich ever done for the piss-poor). Mrs Beeton might say: first catch your deer. & what would the rooted & branched stags experience in the way of apparition & delusion from psychotropic agarics? Safely through a liver, then, the urine may be drunk: result – intoxication without toxicity. I’ve met men who’ve drunk turps & even brasso & achieved a kind of Sweeny-state; they’d maybe drink urine too, if they were half the believers that our current ranks of neo-shamans & Latter Day Druids are. Sweeny was never half so deluded.
The hound looks at me – I’ve sat still long enough. All day, we’ve seen nothing moving but a wren; heard nothing but the running water of burns among boulders thick with moss, & now the lowing of cattle over the hill towards Polloch. It’s just two Scarlet Hoods then, with my supper eggs & potato. At the kitchen table, I’m eating & leafing through Dogen’s “Instructions to the Cook”: (“When you prepare food, never view the ingredients from some commonly held perspective, nor think about them only with your emotions.”) & out flutters a small clipping. It’s dated by me in pencil 12 11 05, almost precisely two years old. It’s from the Guardian, & in entirety reads: “Swedish papers reported the tale of the rampaging, drunken elks that threatened to attack an old people’s home. The old people were saved, but the elks were following well-documented behaviour that included attacks on joggers and cyclists after feasting on fermented apples.”

06 11 07

Smoke’s curling out from the top of the chimney; the day is grey, a shade somewhere between the meditating heron’s back & the negative-blackness of the cormorants barely skimming the salt water. The light begins to fail at four o’ clock on November days like this & a prolonged dusk adds to the sombreness of the day. Sea in the bay reflects nothing. There’s no break in cloud cover, only layerings of darker & dark. I’m taken by surprise, then, by the vivid yellow of the furze bushes to the west of the bay. As I warm my eyes with their glow, I’m distracted by the dartings of a wren, brown in her cave of spikes. Sheep graze furze in hard winters; I’m thinking it would need to be hard indeed to get past those inch long spines, which are in fact its leaves. It was once ground as cattle fodder & is still fed to horses who apparently delight in it. I’m lost in the quick jinking of the wren & the hardiness of this plant, when the rich almond smell of the flowers reaches my nose; it’s zesty & sends me straight back to childhood kitchens & marzipan. Warmed by memory, scent & sight, I stroll on, nonchalant in the cold wind.

05 11 07

In Scandinavia, the burning of birch has led to whole technologies of the wood-burning stove. Although it gives off a good heat, it’s no sooner lit than burned through. There’s plenty of it here, as in Scandinavia, but here also we have oak, the quintessential firewood, lasting long & burning hot. Firewood has been taken from these woods as long as people & woods have co-existed here, with folk still taking logs & brushwood, though nowadays most wood, if felled & if removed (rather than left for the slow energy burn of beetles, wasps & spiders & their kin) goes for other purposes. In other times, holly was said to burn like wax; plenty of ash was laid to a fire, burning as it does green or seasoned. I still start fires when I can with knuckles of ash, from faggots collected under the trees when storms crack off limbs & shower down twigs. Likewise the whitethorn, which burns hot & is said to bake the best bread. Rowan also burns hot, but though I’ve saved the trunk & arms of a storm-felled rowan for three seasons, I’m too superstitious to burn it; rowans guard a house, & although I sometimes believe this & sometimes don’t, it’s just not polite to burn your guardians.
The bonfire to celebrate Guy Fawkes (though there was no effigy of himself or the Pope) was a huge wigwam of scrap wood on the foreshore at Salen. I’ve no idea what types of wood it was made up of; though it’s a fair bet that most of it came from elsewhere. As far as I could tell, it was salvaged from demolitions & renovations of local houses; though there appeared to be the sides of an old shed, entire. It felt mean at a fine public festivity, of which there are too few left, to be thinking of the use all that wood could be put to. When the man from Salen said, almost in a whisper, that it was a shame to see all that heat wasted, I couldn’t but agree. But; & but, the anarchist, the peasant at the tumbrel, the child in me, was overjoyed to see the fire catch & take in the offshore wind, flames neither dancing nor licking, but drinking the wood. It was the sparks that danced in that elemental dance, retaining the shape of the hot updraughts, pushed this way & that like stars at the beginnings of time; that same dance of purest elation, driven by the same force, to be seen in shoaling fish & swarming bees & the swoop of starlings at dusk as they prepare to roost & pour into a tree or ivied wall.
It all made a fitting spree for the passing into winter, although it was past All Saints & All Souls Days. The flames, if you believe such things may have helped souls of the faithful attain their places elsewhere. Saints needed no such help, having probably already been roasted to ensure their sojourn in the clouds. With harps. (or is that angels?) Myths are fun. & the month is called samhain in Gaelic anyway, meaning harvest & surely a time to remember the dead & that we’re alive & with a fine crop.
The commemoration of a man who didn’t succeed in blowing a parliament to hell & which led to excesses of anti-Catholicism (why do I think of the Revd. Paisley & his refined sense of smell: “No pot-pourri here!”); the celebration of Halloween, itself a kind of Christian theft of the harvest hullabaloo of Samhain, at which cattle bones were thrown in fires to ensure prosperity for the coming year (indeed the word bonfire or bonefire is said by some to be a direct translation of the Gaelic tine cnamh), all makes for a mix where, like at the edges of the fire, at this fringe of the Sunart oakwoods, distinctions become blurred. Perhaps the more so because it’s damned cold & we’re outside the pub clutching our whisky glasses, but within sight of the still crackling blaze on the shore & its sense of redemption for those damned in the myths. Though I note that over the road the big house was once a Temperance Hotel, so maybe the whisky will lead us all to perdition. Or to laughter: the same place for an unbeliever.
The children, tumbling in the wet, leaping from the walls, clattering into shins & yelling, are there already.

**********************************************************

My prevailing sense of anarchy, the child in me at this bonfire, has echoes in an unpublished chronicle I’m privileged to read - A Highland Boyhood in Ardnamurchan, written by Angus Cameron, who grew up here & like most of his generation in the peninsula, had no English before he went to school. It was loaned to me by my neighbour, a cousin of his, but even though she & one of her sisters & another relative try to unravel the knot of kinship, it remains tied & unresolved as to what degree of cousin.He writes of Kentra in the years of the First World War: “As the year rolled round, Hallowe’en was looked forward to with great fervour, as a crowd of us would dress up to go out “guising” and get involved in a host of pranks and tricks. Boats and carts would be removed and replaced in somebody else’s croft or patch. The shoemaker (Allan) guarded his boat carefully, but as soon as he left for a cup of tea, we would have it shifted. One year we put it beside John George’s potato pit, exchanging it with John George’s cart, which we left on the shore.”

03 11 07

It’s the old way, still the way of most of the world, but it’s become remote & we try to banish it: to walk unaided by light in darkness. How apart & rare. Now ten days after full moon, four until a new moon. No houselights east or west. A little dim starlight as the west wind frays the lumbering mass of greyed cloud. To slowly feel the way with cautious feet. To feel alone in silence. To feel cold in dim mountain bulk, the absence of complication, world reduced to the slow & slowing unseen but present; like the presence of the liver & spleen in the body – unfelt but known of. Stags in the dark. Birds roosted. One step. & another

31 10 07

Five days after full moon & still there’s light through torn clouds greater than the starlight, looming Ben Resipole at the end of the road I’m walking. No lights but for these. All the steading lights are out across the bay; the stags are no longer moaning in Moidart or Laga. Late curlews waver their calls across the leaden sea at Eilean Dubh. The cold bites the bridge of my nose & I’m suddenly & unassailably happy & singing: the sign painted on the road bend is SLOW & oh I don’t hurry; I step slowly into the night’s mysteries & out across the turf under which a million infinitesimally small creatures lead their lives in the forever dark, through which owls & bats swoop thick & noiselessly & the slugs slowly curve their way. Fresh rain drops on my hatless head; my neighbours the mountains dream on.

29 10 07

The landscape of my childhood was littered with snapped & chewed pencils, the wooden pencil being a necessary tool for turning wayward boys into scholars, as was the birch, according to the then prevalent educational theories, or at any rate practices. In all the little inlets of the loch, where the land descends in the grip of rock to the edge of the water grow those great colonisers, birches. Many, having seeded themselves in the most exposed places & grown to a certain age have snapped at the leading edge, leaving only a broken & chewed looking stub. They grow in fours, fives & sixes. Maybe one is weaker than the others, or closer to prevailing gales & storm weather & snaps. This leaves a wind passage, for they all draw a little shelter from each other, & one by one, the others crack, being brittle rather than sinewy enough to bend with the wind. The weight of leaves & twigs will fold the tree top down, where it becomes a titbit for any passing deer. Those that survive , if it were not for the deer & sheep grazing seedlings & in lean winters eating the bark, shelter other species of tree. They act as nurses to alders, oak, rowan, holly. If there were no sheep & no human interference, there would be good woodland regeneration in a short space of time.
I like to think of pencils made of birch wood, but I know that most are made from cedar, a few, still, from pine. In Tibet ten years ago, I would sit down wherever I could to rest from the thin air & write with my pencil – the only thing it’s possible to write with in the rain. Everywhere a shy child would appear at my elbow, even where I could see no houses. The girl, or sometimes boy, would look at my pencil, look at my paper & look at me. I let her write, or sometimes the very young would draw. The pencil would be reluctantly handed back. When I stood, I would make a small gift of the pencil. We can get pencils cheap. China sells them by the million. When I need a pencil now, I wander along the streets that Scottish schoolchildren use & find them littering the ground, unchewed, seldom broken.
The pencils may not be made of birch, but from Sailean nan Cuileag just over the hill, the last loads of birch brooms were taken away at the end of the last century. The brooms were used in the Clydeside steel foundries. They were made in dark winter, as piece work at 4½ d a dozen, less than 2p. Hugh Cameron claimed to Alastair Cameron to be able to make 24 dozen in nine hours, which included felling the trees. Timber was shipped from the little bays and inlets around here for centuries, Sailean nan Cuileag, Port na h-Uamha, Camusaine, (where the number of trees was recorded precisely, as 41,070) for building, for charcoal, bark-oak for tanning. Cameron, again, records “all the tree except the crash it made when falling was used”. In the 1870s fellers & snedders were paid 16 shillings a week, a high wage in comparison to the birch-broom makers. Lost trades go with lost language & their gear & tackle. For tanning, the bark was taken from the bottom of the tree before it was felled. In Gaelic this was called moganachadha, & was a skilled job in itself. The moss was scraped off with a sgrioban coinnich which was curved to fit the tree; smaller branches were peeled - spitheagadh - by girls. I’ve yet to discover any Gaelic speaker here who knows these terms who did not come across them as I did, in Cameron’s Annals, written within living memory.
Peeled branches, as well as pencils also littered my childhood, but then I didn’t have to peel them to earn a crust.

28 10 07

Two days’ heavy rain, driven by westerlies, & the burns overspill & topple white & fast down the hills. The bare rock faces gleam in lulls & rainbows flash on & off as the sun & rain chase across the heights, mostly north, sometime south. The ant colony nearest is sodden & quiet. I suppose the ants to be in hibernation. In what way they hibernate, Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Ant does not recount. It’s my ant bible; though it’s stuffed as full of myth, suppositions, parallels, wishful thinking & righteousness as the Christian bible, it has an easy story-telling & at times, elegant prose. Materlinck only writes of the ant at rest:

“When after a long adventure, burdened with booty three or four times her own weight, she returns to the nest, her companions who guard the entries hasten to meet her and . . . cleanse her of the dust that covers her, brushing and caressing her, and lead her to a sort of sleeping-chamber, far from the tumult of the crowd, which is reserved for exhausted travellers. There she soon sinks into a slumber . . .”.

I had visualised ants hugger mugger together, like sleeping puppies; hibernating like dormice or the hedgehog who lives the winter out under my raised wooden hut at Carbeth. But I’m sure this is not the case. In fact the colony gives every appearance of being deserted; wet through, there must be a drainage system inbuilt, just as there are ventilation ducts in the architecture. But to see the mushroom growing from one side is to doubt this. It may be Bolbitius vitellinus, it may not & seeing it, I’m reminded of the moss creeping once more onto the cold roofs of holiday & second home cottages now the fires remain unlit in ashy hearths. Wet again, the hound & I return, she to crunch her bone & sprawl across the floor (she’s the best part of five feet from nose to tail tip & uses a lot of space) & my glass fills as I listen to rain hard on the window & peel yellowed birch leaves from my boots.

26 10 07

It’s been a long time since anyone called me son, but the old woman was surely entitled to do that according to age. It’s certainly a splendid thing to be called son by someone who’s not my parent. It reminds of a time (maybe imaginary) when the elderly were seen as wise in the ways of the world; when an old woman could respectfully be called cailleach. The term has overtones also of nun & of a childless woman. This makes it all the more endearing – a real human exchange is made in the one casual word. It’s full of genuine humanity, a trust that’s often far from us, with our care for our own narrow self-interest & that of our immediate circle. When we discriminate against those who are not “our” children, it’s possible to close an eye to other children’s suffering. Pick up a magazine to see how we objectify the starving, maiming & sexualisation of others’ children, scarcely able to part ourselves from the SUV which takes “our” kids to school.
Vandana Shiva, the physicist & eco-activist wrote that we go to the woods to learn democracy. (I paraphrase from memory). In these woods here, is a co-dependent community of trees. That community is symbiotic with all the other communities, the microflora, the flora,– from orchids to lichens – each with its contribution to the general woodland structure; the fauna & small creatures that I’ve already written of here in the journal: woodants, spiders, slugs, along with the beetles & wasps & flies. I have no idea how many species there are in these woods, never mind individuals of each species: the number is incalculable. Yet here is true democracy, with all these creatures having the right to exist (unless tampered with by a landowner who sees them as subject to his whims & economic will) in & of themselves, valued (is that too strong a word? I think not where absence of one leads to the degradation of the whole) equally for their contribution. Our recently elected government wants a conversation with Scotland. If it were to extend that conversation to the commons – the woodlands, the heaths & bogs, mosses & mires; to the voiceless, then we might all begin to live deliberately. The curlew at dusk has more resonance than the bleatings of parliaments; the small sound of a dragonfly laying its eggs in a sidestream, the tok tok of a stonechat, and the kind word of an old woman.
It’s not so much that we don’t value the trees & their fellows, we simply don’t see them. What we see is largely economic. What price can we derive from timber. Of course there’s an increasingly recreational attitude: what fun can I have in a woodland, as well as the neo-sacred & neo-mystic: how do the trees enhance my personal growth & healing (& nurture my delusions). We seldom allow woods to be for their own sake; that would be to admit that we’re all on an equal footing, co-existing in a fragile & complex space. There are no meetings with remarkable trees – all trees & therefore all woods, are remarkable. The Sunart oakwoods are also remarkable in their survival of economic appropriation. I’d like to see them survive for their own sake; not simply because they’re a place of quiet vitality in a busy world – they’re part of that same world - & can refresh busy people & inject a little calm into folks’ lives (which they do), but because they have as much right to exist as we do.
Meanwhile, here at Ard Airigh, I’ve been soaked twice & dried twice walking through the woods today. I’ve tried to step on as few plants as possible, but they’re forgiving, my tread only marginally heavier than that of a hind. Glimpses of the loch through the trees & the occasional sun shafts releasing the last delicate flies from where they shelter, & I’m still carrying the old woman piggyback in my mind.

20 10 07

Port round up:

Mallaig: Progress fishing the Minch, Wanderer III fishing the Firth of Clyde.
Buckie: Boats: Achieve, Aspire, Pegasus, Loyal Friend, Illustrious, Vigilant, Osprey, Silver Rock.
Pelagic vessel landings & nephrops at Mallaig & Peterhead. Witches all over.

17 10 07

the small rural
newspaper soon
read through

Ozaki Hosai, (whose poem that is, in translation by William J Higginson) the early twentieth century Japanese poet, led a troubled & alcoholic life. Perhaps his drinking arose from the fact that he was not allowed to marry the woman he loved, as she was too close a relative. He worked in insurance for many years, before becoming a Buddhist monk at Shodoshima (small-bean-island). A colleague in insurance described him as reeking of alcohol early in the morning. Although fellow workers wore business suits, Hosai owned no clothes except a pair of pyjamas & a tuxedo, which is what he wore to work.

the nail box:
every nail
is bent

Hosai was a chronicler of the overlooked. Just outside the door here, next to the roll of waiting-to-be-used sheep fencing, is a handleless feed bucket full of nails. Each one is rusty & as unusable as bent nails (though in years gone by I’ve straightened & reused many a pulled nail).
De tha dol?, too, our small newspaper here is very soon read through, scanned eagerly for news of distant neighbours, notices of any change in shop opening hours or a fundraising event. Though we go back to it the following day, for fear of having missed something. A sheep dog trial is a big event here, where we really do leave our doors open. Who’d come in but neighbours? There are no burglars, where even a visitor’s straying dog is seen a mile away by more than one pair of eyes. As I recall, there’s only been one theft recorded in De tha dol? in recent months – back in May, a sundial was taken from a garden in Ardnastaing & featured in the Letters Page. Neighbours come & go, entering houses at will, to leave mail given them by the postman for safe delivery. Once, here, my neighbour came in while I was away at the ferry. She was in need of a drink, but since I was not in, took a bottle & glass & had a drink at the table. Then, when I wasn’t soon back, wandered off with the bottle. I took this as a compliment. She knew me well enough to know I’d have happily joined her in a drink & sent her away with a bottle; if she’d appeared next morning in a tuxedo, we’d both have known that’s how life gets.
I’ve carried small poems of Hosai’s in my head for more than thirty years, the way sheds & porches carry tins & boxes of bent nails & torn-slotted screws. It’s proof, as if needed, that poetry, when rooted in the personal, the closely observed, moves far beyond the cultural grounding of its origin & becomes culture.

at midnight
a distant door
pulled shut

16 10 07

Andromeda galaxy, 300 billion stars’ light taking 2 million years to reach us, cold. At 21.09 tonight, stags are belling through rut, & through the air splitting roar, above the faint mountain horizon’s stars to the south, of a low flying fighter jet leaving only its faster than sound anger. At 21.11 the jet returns, a little north. & passes round again at 21.15. There’s a rustling in the dying bracken.

11 10 07

There’s a solitary wood ant roaming the colony at the road bend. At the colony on the rock above this, yet more has slid to the rock below, but that landslide, that cityslide, seems abandoned. There’s not a sign of the multitude of webs of a couple of mornings ago. We’re all stunned by last night’s heavy rain. The geometric webs are made by spiders of the Araneidae family. A study on Islay by the Biology Department of the then Paisley College, of Peatland Spider Communities, may reveal, of the 24 spiders listed, that some are orbweavers, like those here. I cannot tell. I scan their names but all that’s revealed is the beauty of another language naming: Pardosa pullata, Alepecosa pulverulenta, Centromerita concinna, Lepthyphantes zimmermanni & Lepthyphantes mengei; the boldly named Pirata piraticus, the posing Antista elegans & Silommetapus elegans, & Oedothorax gibbosus. Some of these are the builders of the hammock webs I saw: money spiders to us. & for sure, they represent the riches of earth & the Earth. Orbweavers, money spiders, wolf spiders, together with other small fauna leading their stamped on & hidden lives, & with gastropods, literally bind the fabric of the earth together. It’s because of these small & slow creatures that I see each trunk a habitat, each stand of bracken or bog-myrtle a copse; a map of someone’s territory.

10 10 07

FISH PRICES
Fleetwood - 22,500 kilos on the market. Witches 30p-£1; monkfish £2-£3.80; flounder 20p-60p.
Fraserburgh – 14 boats landed 1,005 boxes. Monkfish £90-£200; witches £40-£60. Boats – Virtuous, New Dawn, Celestial Dawn, Arcana
Peterhead, 9 boats, 2 consignments, landed 3,205 boxes. Monkfish £2.20-£3.40; witches £1-£2. Boats – Lapwing, Budding Rose, Harvest Hope, Fruitful Bough, Fair Morn

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I like the story I once heard of William Stafford. He said his habit was to write a poem every day. When asked how he managed to write so much, he thought a moment & answered “Some days I lower my standards.” The story may be true, is possibly apocryphal, but comes to mind writing this journal. I have too many words. What’s written here is spontaneous, I’ve nothing to lose but the words. It may be a broadcloth journal, from cutout bits from poems; the poems are the holes in the cloth from which they’ve been cut. Like the Jain image of the released spirit, a negative, since they’re not yet written. In the surrounding material are many repetitions in the pattern, like speech. What goes down here is only words. Attributed to Allen Ginsberg, (but certainly first articulated by Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan refugee who co-founded Samye Ling Tibetan Centre in Eskdalemuir) on spontaneity: First thoughts, best thoughts. If I think anything it’s probably: Having thoughts? Think again.

All words. I’m having a clear-out, there’s too many for my storage space. I’ve an incomplete set of oddities if anyone would like them, previously enjoyed (as car-salesmen say): unguent & ungulate. Some are words related to religion that I really should bin, like zealot & apocrypha, but they can be sold these days to newspapers. I have trouble getting out the word aspen, also, nearly always saying poplar instead. I blame Linnaeus. The botanic name of aspen is Populus tremula: the trembling poplar. I left a poplar for an aspen elsewhere in this journal. If you find it, it’s yours.

09 10 07

To walk across the coruscating mile of the bay in October sun, between land & clear sky, is to walk on rippling quicksilver. A heron stares at a limpid & disappearing rock pool. The pure, bubbling, unworded call of flighting curlews curves down to my ear. Halfway across I’m a tiny figure in reflected light, walking, walking, just one foot before the other.

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a brindled hound
a lichened oak

Inside a wood, it is hard to see it for the trees which overwhelm with their forms, twisted, broken, growing one in the other. The curling holly finds shelter in the oak, rowans crawling decade on decade round the rocks send out more roots, grip tighter, a birch trunk springs back on itself in a slow double bend; a complete alphabet, a language of forms & lives. I find it hard also to see the trees for this reason. It’s infinitely more complicated by the lichens & mosses. Mosses are knee deep in places and year on year take themselves further up into the trees. Where the mosses are not in evidence, the lichens bubble across trunks. Ferns, too, in the crooks formed by the reaching out of limbs. & of course, the old nurse trees will have saplings growing in them. Sometimes it’s possible to see what appears to be two or even three types of leaf on the one tree until the intertwining trunks, like ivies, can be separated from the moss & the ferns by the recalcitrant eye.
In places where we wander, say at Sailean nan Cuileag, the inlet of flies, there’s no such problem for the hound. She’s suddenly there ahead of me on the path, her eyes undeceived & undeceiving, she follows me, now to the east, then the west, ahead, behind, plaiting around me like a sapling alongside a veteran oak. She’s perfectly disguised for this woodland, soft footed, & in the October colours & light, all but invisible in her fur lines of broken amber & darker brown. We don’t take the same path - she has long delicate limbs, built for the speed of the chase, which would catch in the cracks of those mossy rockfaces I scramble up & down - but we end up in the same place – she’s a gaze hound: from within her grace she can see my upright lumbering form as surely as I see the bunching leathery lungwort on the oak trees we pass.

08 10 07

All morning Ben Resipole, Creag Dhubh, Bein Bhreac & the others can’t rise from the clouds. There’s no Sgurr visible to the west, no pointed Viking hills of Rum – Hallival, Askival, no Ainshval to be seen. The hound lies heraldic on the heather. Over by the parish church they slash & burn rhododendron understorey, but the smoke cannot clear the canopy, tangles in branches. Sheep amble past on their journey into the subconscious. While the mist hides, it also reveals: vast moorlands of webs, each with points of water at each intersection. There are two types of spiderweb here – one is floss & largely horizontal, but with diagonal digressions & sometimes seemingly random. This is all across the bog myrtle & up high into pale birches. The other kind is the geometric spiral from one branch to another of the oak & the rowan. The spiders must have (over millennia) adjusted web building techniques to what they hoped to catch, if hope is not too far-fetched a notion in the case of a spider. Like any fisherman, the mesh is larger or smaller according to the anticipated haul. Mist also amplifies the often unheard, the unlistened to: the booming surge of the incoming tide & crescendo of curlews. From all directions, the stags’ great groans of existence, their moaning lust for life driving them. Electricity volts through the hound’s lead to my hand; she’s seen them first - a stag & three hinds making unhurriedly for higher ground. Her ancestors sing in her blood, she trembles lightly. In another life I would have slipped her after them & followed her uphill.

07 10 07

Hill farming economics, 2007: Scottish Government subsidy per lamb slaughtered & incinerated: £15. [“ a welfare disposal scheme to slaughter and render up to 250,000 light lambs that would normally be exported, but which are stuck on Scottish farms and now in an unmarketable condition because of the export ban and livestock movement restrictions”]. Abattoir prices in Dingwall: (200 mile round trip from Ardnamurchan, includes ferry) for slaughter, £17 per lamb. Slaughtered, butchered & dressed, total per lamb, £30. (Cost to farmer). No local buyers for lamb (& certainly not mutton, despite aristocratic & chef noises off). Wethers at market: £2 - £3. Wool: no market value. Cost of lamb chops in supermarket: £3.67 per kilo. Cost of grassland, per acre, per lamb, unknown. Cost of supplementary feeding, variable, but expensive. From The Herald (October 6 2007): “The Northern Ireland Red Meat Industry Task Force, established to develop a five-to-10-year strategy for the beef & sheepmeat industry has concluded that suckler-origin beef and hill sheep have no future.” “The report also concluded that it is not possible to create an economically viable production model for an efficient producer of hill sheep unless the farmgate price increases substantially to approximately £2.80 per kilo. Such conclusions are just as relevant to Scottish producers and will set alarm bells ringing in an industry already in crisis from the foot-and-mouth and blue tongue outbreaks.”

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.

06 10 07

It’s easy to make out the warp & weft of society here, how bards & poets are fabric, along with genealogists & story tellers. They’re in fact often the same person anyway, & there’s little distinction between personal history & society’s doings, real or imagined. Alec Dan Henderson, of Acharacle, in conversation with Donald Archie MacDonald, in 1967, as recorded in Tocher, discusses local folk of the time of the clearances: “The people were cleared away from Ardnamurchan. And he climbed out by Beinn Shianta and saw the places where the people used to be, and the old walls which were left. There was nobody there.” The he in this is the Doctor of Rahoy, one Dr John MacLachlan, a poet of whom Sorley MacLean writes: “ . . . your back was strong and straight / as you went up the face of Ben Shianta / with the burden on your shoulders / of seeing the land a waste / under sheep and bracken and rushes.” Alec Dan, although not a young man in 1967, may not have met John MacLachlan, who died at seventy years of age in 1874, but his memory is strong, & he sings a song from someone who had it from the Doctor of Rahoy: Direadh a-mach ri Bein Shianta; Climbing up Beinn Shianta. The doctor no doubt knew the Ben when its lower slopes were inhabited. The song has a verse: “And d’you think you’ll find peace, with your sheep and your cattle-folds?” addressing “Grey-headed MacColl of the evil deeds” who put out the people from their place. In the same poem [Dr John MacLachlan (of Rahoy in Morvern)] Sorley MacLean also writes of “The Cameron in Bun Allt Eachain, / that rare knowledgable man, / he told about a gleam of the sun / on beautiful Morvern / in the time of its emptying and its misery.” The Cameron, Alasdair Cameron, a road man, wrote elegantly in both English & Gaelic. Bun Allt Eachain is where I was walking yesterday, driven there by Cameron’s little book “Annals and Recollections of Sunart”, published in 1961, in which he writes of the nearby Tigh-na-Caillich: [which] “commemorates landlord despotism, which made a harmless old woman the victim of a son’s indiscretion. Why? Oh why, one may ask, should the iniquity of the son be visited on the mother – particularly when he did punishment for his crime of stealing a sheep.” I was looking for the “solitary Scots pine tree, a lone sentinel which has braved many a blast” at Bun Allt Eachain; but it was gone. Later I spoke to a man in Strontian who had known Alastair Cameron, or “North Argyll” his pseudonym, or “North” as he was affectionately known.
The Doctor of Rahoy, born in 1804, sees the results of mid-century clearance & makes a song. The song is sung in Ardnamurchan & Morvern, where it’s heard by Alec Dan Henderson and passed on; The doctor’s story is told, also in the middle of a new century, by one of the greatest Gaelic poets. (MacLean’s note to his own poem: “Dr John MacLachlan was one of the best Gaelic poets of the nineteenth century”) MacLean also remembers the knowledge of the road man, the Cameron of Bun Allt Eachan, where as a visitor I look for a Scots pine. In its topics, its feeling for people & its democracy of greatness, as neat an encapsulation of the last 200 years in the memory of Gaels as may be found.

That long memory is abroad in this parish today in other matters – the writing of a letter apparently questioning the mental faculties of another doctor of medicine, the calling to the General Medical Council, & “enforced” resignation. The consequences of that letter divided the usually polite co-existing communities here. There may be many odious reasons for clearances & more yet for sad & bitter resignations; but those who clear are not forgotten. Painted signs, nailed to oaks & chestnut trees, hung from deer grids & rock faces read “We support Dr Buchanan” all across the two peninsulas. Recently new signs have been hung: “Backstabbers Your Day Will Come” & the single word: “Traitor”