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.