29th September 2008

My friend Dogo Barry sets me a nice problem, one I’d already been pondering. It’s a question of how to continue a journal – a journey started - when I’m elsewhere.
Once, it might have been the sea paths, out through the Firth, west past the Mull of Kintyre, then north through the Sound of Islay & past Colonsay, west & north again round the Ross of Mull, the point of Ardnamurchan & east home. Now I follow the A82 north past Ben Lomond & Tarbet, rising up as I travel past Ben Lui to Tyndrum, where the hound & I stop, walk, drink water & to her delight, share a bag of chips. Then on to Orchy Bridge, across Rannoch Moor, through Glencoe, passing Glen Etive, cattle-fold to the sun, then Buachaille Etive Mor, Buachaille Etive Beag & Bidean nam Bian. The bridge at Ballachulish, then the ferry at Corran across the tidal rip (& it’s raining again) & over into Ardnamurchan & home.
This I do in memory. Ardnamurchan has become for me a state of mind. The seasons are strange here; as childhood may appear subjectively as summer-long leisure, these seasons of the ardnamurchan-mind come & go at their will, now autumn browns immediately followed by the greening of April.
I wrote this today & the following in April last year, for Practice Journal in California, which seems to have become a little unseasoned itself, its spring issue yet to appear.

April in the woods

No-one talks about Japanese prisons: how they might be a boiling hell for believers. You’ve been eaten by a machine of hell we somehow invented. A place was a good idea. Here I drink & watch sun on the second range of mountains but not the first. There is rain to the north & I’m supported by underground cables that buzz & hum through the world & surface wherever hell is manifested. There’s no appeal to the saints. There are so many because they’re all scruffy & drunk on something or other & we keep beatifying. The ewes here right now (though I didn’t want to mention them) are on pilgrimage across the saltflats & the radio speaks (or the man inside pulls the wires in ventriloquy) the story of a man dismembering a woman. Here I’m lifting the entire sky. It will stop raining. It will rain again. It is morning. It’s enough or maybe too much. To come home safe is all we ever wanted. Whatever home is. The pickaxe has toppled from where it was stuck in the thin crust of this poor earth & is rusting. Beasts & fantasies still live in the brain. But the soaring buzzard & dipping stonechat & spin of the very earth



Who started all this anyway & who said it was or could start & where will you go for it when the creek as you say runs dry. Why did you cut your birthday cake with a sword shazam when all the world is hungry & some maybe even most are starving. Hungry for what’s found at the heart of a nasturtium godsake it really is that simple. If not now when. & to wake up & find us all fed including the signatories to the bombs fed. & then the rain comes on again & where will you go for it. Come to it slowly approach it unawares. Nonchalance the order of the day. This is not philosophy more incontinence inability to stay sober & no-one is drinking here but come to it. Intoxicated with possibility. Enough of words for the now let’s examine the rocks and their twists & turns anticline syncline these & the water & its sweet rain can curlew can birch in the wind can fill the bay with salt water can let’s be up in the hills by the volcano sitting in a hot spring it’s called Hell Valley but we know what that means



Who for what for if you like we can talk of dharma of all the rest of that. More the distribution & disappearance as if they were ever appeared of species how to love the humble bee the bumble bee bombus and to sit patiently where there might be an underground nest & that person who demands tension has the weight of the atlas on his scapula & I know what another gin solves & why the thunderbug comes in thunder & who she brings with her what for being the only question & if it’s not to save & oldfangledly succour then there’s the door. The word knocks the skull to be let inside. Parasitic to synapses it exits diving off the tongue & flies & multiplies but dies in the winter & needs to start the cycle again it’s to escape that cycle we’re gathered here sweet ones


going north sing going south sing sitting still sing walking away sing oh buzzard♪ oh teacup waiting for me swallows visited yes♪terday leave the blue rope the line can slacken they’ll come back & the cuckoo oh

Friday goes & Saturday wine with it & two axes leaning by the wall & unmoved wood waiting for the unanswering tea if the reflection of the flag in the opposite side of the wobbly hut window moves in the wind what’s so to speak moving you would know my mind moving is agape its tongue lolling in purest wonder night stuff forgot forgot black tiny shadow traces of spiders in the north woods in the wren falls from the rowan jinks up for the stone where’s the in the where’s the cuckoo the empty (the! goosepair honk overhead

19th June 2008

poems from the same series as the last couple of postings can be read online at http://gistsandpiths.blogspot.com/. There seems no need to duplicate them here when this link should take you directly there. There's part of another set there as well.

April 23rd 2008


Sailean nan Cuileag


the pelt of sea its tongues
smooring & quenching &

plucking what will be left
at tide’s going air

of what’s uttered oystercatcher’s
pitch & pipe smew & craik of

curlew pulse of what’s given
what’s yielded what’s opened

3rd April 2008

this is not an explanation or critique of the poem last posted, but another poem, titled

COMMENTARY

we construct landscape
as identity
there is no water imagine
imagine there is no sea loch
Resipole has its foundation
in syncline
cormorant curves in
that nothing which is something
already easing away
the mountain’s walking off
into that hour before
dawn that is the same every
where everywhere

17th March 2008


Camas Torsa

glacier talks
under ocean moon

above Resipole rises & shrinks
tide swills & hangs

Spindrift’s gutting across
sun’s line of gulls

its engine throb hub
of the scoured world

March 3rd 2008

wearing a summer hat.
walked out into powdery snow.

Shimpei Kusano: Certain Days

Leap Year’s day came & went. The smallest hind of Gobsheallach hill has not been seen for five days; in her place is a small stag, timid & keeping close to the two larger hinds as they move across the bay, exposed, & as they browse on the sparse green among rusting bracken. Has the small hind been shot, or is there some transformation happening here in this corner of a materialistic land where a white stag can be explained by leucism?

I’m content here, heaping language onto landscape, through winter’s mouldering, now watching spring’s shoots; but I’m leaving Ardnamurchan, on a day of blizzards alternating with the blue-blindness of cloud free skies. The dramas of the mountains, companionable Beinn Resipol & Beinn Hianta in Morvern & the doings of the waters: Loch Shiel, Loch Sunart, & Abhainn an Iubhair & the burns & puddles no longer ask my daily attention. Spring is a good time to leave; though here, in this journal I will still be writing, though more slowly, of the walking of last summer, last spring, grounded in memory & experience. The Atlantic wind will blow my nose cold from another quarter. Like any trumpeting swan I’m migrating; like any wild goose, I’ll land again on this bog, unworked since the sixties, near Airigh Bheagaig.

Back in September I wrote of the notion of a weblog (though I call this a journal) being a we blog. Of late, comments have been arriving & have been most welcome. They will be more welcome in weeks to come, as I post new entries, poem-drafts even; back-channel (as I write this, I see the south channel between the mainland & Eilean Shona) or here, publicly. The mountains’ll keep on walking & I in my green knit hat rushing to tongue the snow.

27th February 2008

The moon’s sliding the sea into its tidal heaping back into the bay again.
How tender the hill is where the woodlands are thin; a child with solitary promise. Spring is here, whatever the weather, & it has been wild & wet, but mild with it. The colonies of birch with their hair-like traceries of twigs have small ochre leafbuds & are putting out their first catkins. Spring’s not reluctant, but I’m happy still to be in the bareness of the woods, finding great pleasure in the journey; enjoying the forms of the trees & their limbs, boughs, branches & twigs rising towards the increased light of advancing days. Unless it’s possible to appreciate the underlying structure of winter’s austerity, then surely it would be hard to welcome the leaf, blossom & fruit of summer. I’m reminded here of just how much like purple figs alder buds are, just at the point of ripening; it’s a matter of scale. The hazels have extended their lime green catkins; every branchlet terminates with a small club shaped bud. The contorted willows (weather does this, it’s not a true contorted form) have tiny rufous buds. Each fragile brittle length of woodbine ends with six newly opened leaves, while amid the tangle, in the sheltered hollows where burns roll to the sea, the first handsbreadth blades of flag iris thrust their sword leaves through rust brown rot from clearly visible rhizomes. The furze has been flowering a month & more, its almond scented yellow a discussion of dormancy with the iris, which will not show colour for a full two months yet. There’s a rippling cloud in every transient puddle; the newly minted translucency of holly leaves glows against the dark green waxyness of the old sharp foliage. The little faint buds of the dogrose call the pink-white flowers that’ll rise from stems. Aspens, still now, have heavy pointed chocolate coloured buds, which will soon start their wind whispering as leaves. Out at sea a curlew’s ringing its song. & the oaks - all ages leaning into the hill, woven with ivies, sheltering holly & birch saplings, their every branch-end knobbled & swelling , last year’s lobed & brown papery leaves still clinging, the mossy oaks are distending their strong pointed buff & sandy buds. Everything’s bubbling & fizzing its irresistible course through trunk & stem, through sap, bud & blood. On the rocks, lichens continue their concentric growth like soft moist meandering trails of night time snails.

There’s a convocation of crows in a half mile circle around me, from rock to outermost tree top; they bow & sing rasping beautiful songs & no-one to hear; no-one to see their spanning but the seven hinds of Airigh Bheagaig, eyebright & long soft leather ears pricked, & a solitary sceptical buzzard hunched in her own glamour.

I’m back at the Byre just as the sulphur coloured evening rain begins its downpour, lashing bud & me & the incoming sea alike.

25th February 2008

On the ruddy golden coat of the warrantable deer the bright sunlight shone, so that the colour seemed unsteady, or as if it was visibly emanating and flowing forth in undulations.

Richard Jefferies; Red Deer

Having only yesterday performed the comedy classic of falling off a ladder, I’m hirpling about among the trees & in no position to go chasing over the heather & moss after the white red deer stag that’s been sighted in the west highlands. If white red deer stag sounds like an oxymoron, not to mention contradictory, that’s what the animal himself is. Of course, he has no idea (I guess) that he is in any way exceptional.

What makes him special is that he is leucistic. Leucism is a reduction of all types of skin pigmentation, resulting in a white skin or coat, unlike albinism, which is a reduction of melanin only. Leucistic animals have normally pigmented eyes. Leucism is also seen in the irregular patches on other animals - the hides of some cattle, where localized hypopigmentation gives the pied effect in differing patterns of Friesian herds, for example.

For me, that’s enough, but white stags have always exerted a kind of reverse shadow on the imagination. There’s lots of talk about the special nature of such a stag. Those who see him are sure (it’s said) to have a profound change imminent in their lives. A white stag also seems to have been conflated into a unicorn in past ages. Now we’re perhaps a trifle more materialistic; though Latter Day Shamans, Druids, & Wicca folk were outraged by the shooting & decapitation of a white stag last autumn on Exmoor, presumably as a trophy for sale. These folk, & to be fair, many others, including local farmers, not normally given to vapours of a mystical kind, spoke of the sacred nature of the animal. What they all feel on the shooting & beheading of red red deer stags is unknown.

Here, I hope it might give another kick start to the great deer debate & take it further than the usual hunting versus photo-opportunity for tourism impasse. The red deer in Scotland, indigenous to these parts, is too often seen as an opportunity; a resource. Whether for venison or the thrill of stalking with a camera, it raises so many questions, from landownership to local food sourcing, from woodland regeneration to wolf reintroduction, that I’m actually pleased not to be in any fit condition to bother the white one by walking in his area (I know his whereabouts): he doesn’t need me ogling him as a curiosity. His peers, the other stags, have no doubts that he’s one of them & another rival come rutting time. No more, no less.

I’m not much for walking anyway. Walking for me in the past usually had a purpose, like helping gather sheep, or walking to the hay meadow. Sitting still, contemplating the way the sun moves, or the tide comes & goes & to see what the woods, waters & fields bring my way has never been a problem though.

This year, I’ve been re-examining that attitude; spending time walking the woodlands in what Richard Holloway calls “exuberant purposelessness”. I have no purpose, other than to observe the poetry of clouds & winds; to cheer the dance of gnats & moths, to listen intently to the musical compositions of wrens & herring gulls. There’s no point to caressing the moss as I go, to saluting the ancient oaks; no point to commiserating with the birch on the loss of its limb. But I do it all anyway. It’s for no reason I study for half an hour the spider spinning a filament across my path, then walking round it. I have nothing in mind when I see the rising & wheeling of herons over Garbh Eilean & count them to be, today, nineteen in number. The woodlands are full, if not of purpose, then of clarity & movement. Each creature here has enough intent for me as well. Exuberance rises from the knowledge that I am not needed.The woodlands are as liberating of egotism as of ideas & objectives.

I have no need to follow unicorns.

18th February 2008

3 events at Gobsheallach today

This morning, a column of cloud rises from Bein Resipol, from just below the summit into the upper sky. Volcanoes look like this.

At noon, a grey crow flies down to the large sheet of unleavened bread, stale & curling, that I’ve put out front of the byre for her. With claw & beak, she neatly quarters it & flaps away with the whole bread in her beak.

An eagle eats up the miles westward with an easy but fast flight. She is silhouetted for a moment against a pale moon, three days away from full.

16th February 2008

What shall be given unto thee? or what shall be done unto thee, thou false tongue?

Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper.

Psalm 102

Juniper burns very hot, without smoke, maybe that’s why it was used in the whisky stills in the hills; no betraying smoke for the Revenue men to spot. Alastair Cameron tells the story of two other Camerons, Donald & Hugh, their ponies laden with whisky, who met a gauger for the Revenue at a river. “He did not reveal his identity, neither did they express any sign of suspicion.” “As there was a good flow of water”, Donald offered to carry the gauger across the river on his back, to save him from getting wet. The Revenue man agreed, but when in mid stream, Donald flung him into it, yelling to Hugh to give stick to the ponies & “take to your heels, son of John, son of Hugh.”

It’s only ten or eleven miles from here that happened. I leave the new road, a highway for these parts, & backtrack a little onto the old road, leaving it immediately to cross Abhainn Coire an Iubhair, the river of the yew corrie, which runs, flatly at this point through a stone bed in something approaching ox-bows, north to south. The river is fed by so many small tributary burns that they have no names. To the west, curving round to the north is the corrie, a cauldron, a blind glen, with its head turned back on itself by Beinn Bheag. Here lies the actual cauldron, a lochan surrounded by twisted contours & contorted outcrops & upthrusts, all worn to a smoothness, save for where they’ve been more recently cracked by frosts. From here down to the sea loch, it’s steep-sided, a classic glacier scour. Along the river bed at this level, not far above the sea, the banks are lined with holly. With alder, which it outnumbers, it’s the only tree here. The dead spate-borne grass stalks are three feet up the trunks, showing the rough & tumble of the winter rains & snow melt, though all week it’s been dry & the river soon drops. Heading north & up, with the corrie sides enclosing now, the hollies peter out. Nothing but heather. To the east the ridge, Druim an Iubhair, becomes more pronounced. Iubhair, yew, in this instance, as with most other place-names containing it, does not refer to yew, but to mountain-yew, iubhair-beinne as Carmichael had it from Eoghan Wilson in the Blessing of the Struan, iubhair-creige elsewhere. Juniper. & there, at the turning west of the whole corrie, but on the low ridge to the east, it’s lowly growing.

In the nineteenth century, it was so common here that sacks of berries were sent to market in Inverness & Aberdeen, where they were bought by merchants to send to Holland to make their gin, jenever. Juniper & jenever are cognate, from the Latin juniperus, which is its genus name, communis being the specific; but the procumbent form of these beautiful conifers, one of three native here, clinging like a waterfall to the rocks from which it cascades, is the subspecies nana (syn. sibirica, alpina). This plant, to thrive, needs a certain lack of competition from heathers & grasses when seeds set; a controlled grazing provides that; but latterly the glens & corries have suffered from the sheep & are very much overgrazed, meaning the sheep (& deer) will eat the seedlings as soon as they appear. The fact that this has happened for more than one generation means that all the juniper is old & making little, if any seed. The future may hold only extinction; like the yew itself, juniper might only be found in captivity – churchyards, botanic gardens.

Which all adds to the quick joy of finding plants here, some with their flowing trunks as thick as my forearm; a pleasure only to be found by prolonged looking, sometimes in the bitter cold, as today. The scramble up a ridge, slick with seeping water, finger & toe-holds carefully sought, bringing a soft green, light to dark, slightly pricky-leaved plant up close, to caress, is to come to terms with the Gaelic name & to breathe in the plant. Mountain yew it certainly is. A true psalm zinging in bare rock, livening the whole corrie with its ancient presence.

I once spent an entire day at Taynish searching for these plants (though not the dwarf subspecies found here) without success (albeit with the consolation of chanterelles). As well as the overgrazing, maybe the illicit stills in the glens & hills helped the depletion to the point where I rejoice to see a couple of plants; where before it was plentiful enough to lend its name to river, corrie & ridge. Maybe the psalm is lament.

As it is, I toast the survivors with Waterford sloes potent ly & redly infusing Cork gin, a birthday gift made by Morven. My own small shebeen back at the Byre, with the shade of Donald Cameron.

15th February 2008

The thing is, we get the point more quickly when we realize it is we looking rather than that we may not be seeing it.

John Cage: Lecture on Nothing

you who hurry toward leviathan woods,
you who walk into the gloom of clouds and mountains,
fasten up your raincoat, damn it.

Miyazawa Kenji: Traveler

Although I consider the soaring eagle to be a good omen for the day, I’m kept grounded myself by Miyazawa’s words as I make off up the hill from the loch. Even after noon, as this is, there’s pockets where that frost painting of bracken – a silvering outline of each brown dead frond – is evident, along with the woodland floor’s resistant crunch as I walk.

It’s axiomatic that if you go looking for the woodlands they’re not there; just the trees. Once you’ve given up looking (& a lifetime is too short) then you arrive. Here, against the backdrop of the loch, with split rocks from which moss’d ferned birch & oak spring up like woody fountains; among litters of lichened twigs, broken from boughs by storms, it’s easy to get caught up in the detail of the trees. Individuals: oaks with their leaders neatly snapped by gales, long fallen limbs debarked, each showing twists of growth round on itself; a triple stemmed ancient sheltering a holly. Out of the burn’s gorge rise hazels all keeled at ninety degrees to the slope, rising at right angles to that growth & bifurcating, a metre round, mossy, stretching for the light away from the always shade of the gorge. An ivy winds round a young oak, with its choking climb upward. There’s triple stemmed oaks, double stemmed oaks, rarely a straight singleton stem.

Slowly, I realise, as I follow deer tracks through all this, brushing spiderwebs from my face, that there are open spaces in the canopy (even though the leaves are still only buds, the twigging above can be dense) & that in fact, I’m looking at a sort of parkland or savannah brought about by intermittent grazing. I’m seeing the woodland. I give a little shake, moving with the dance of gnats in the afternoon sun in one such opening; I notice the flitter of small fragile-as-dust buff coloured moths. & there: even a red admiral butterfly fresh from hibernation, with its erratic zigzagging flight.

Among the oaks in this are hollies, which may or may not have started as infill among them. Sometimes hollies may predate oaks. Just on a small rise is a quartet of old fellows among the heather & fraughàn, bracken & ubiquitous moss, rising to ten feet up the oak boles; higher up are small ferns, perhaps the hard fern, Blechnum spicant (though my ignorance extends to ferns as well). These old hollies are almost within touch of each other; one’s a five stem with a stem dead, the next has three stems with two dead, the remaining two have healthy twin stems. They’re like broken toothed oldsters anywhere, sharing a rueful joke at the expense of youngsters around them. At their swollen bases is another indicator of spring coming from below: tender fresh leaves of wood sorrel, which is truly delicious & less vinegary now than at any other time throughout the year.

Birch & oak are indiscriminate in sheltering, here & there, juvenile sitka spruces, their seeds probably brought by wind or squirrel from the forestry plantation to the west. A small winged creature lands on my hand as I lean contemplating the mossy decomposing lines of trunks & rootplates. A dead oak takes at least a century to disappear completely, so these must have fallen at least fifty years ago, though the moss blanketing may have speeded up decomposition by a few years. There’s a young oak, maybe fifty years old, liberated into the light by the fall of these prostrate forms, perhaps; but like any crone, bent backed, growing three feet up, then at right angles to that, then straight up again. In the hummocks & tussocks of sphagnums (how I’ve tried to identify them; always I come back to: it’s a sphagnum, never further) there are birches sloughing their skins like any adder, along the lines of dead limbs all the way down to the floor. Moss seals & heals the lowest cracks; other birch branches from the same trunks are vibrant with new growth buds. The dead limbs, stripped of bark demonstrate clearly the twists of slow spiralling plants following sun clockwise. Scabs of lichen everywhere. Growth in, around & on everything, sap driven, moss softened, rain nourished. As many dead as living; as many wounded as healthy. A slow war of attrition with weather, browsing & life itself, even, especially, in February, bristling crawling & packed brimful on the woodland slope.

I walk & walk in pasture-woodland’s own reverie, until the sky is streaked with cirrostratus over the eggblue of morning & noon gone & the sun moves toward a Morvern evening to the west. There’s the rumble of high flying unseen jets; gossamer catches the low light finding its way under the heavy limbs. Oakwoods found & lost. I’ve been looking & seeing all along.

14th February 2008

valentine

you are not here

walked by retreating tide uprooted oarweed has left an arcing trail one hundred & ninety four paces long

sand’s mirror of the crescent moon’s camber across kingfisher sky

sun cast water shadow ripples & bubbles on

ridges of sand the ebb moves across

surface coruscating with brilliance

oak leaves flattened along sand edge

oystercatcher imprints

Tornado jet contrail

thirty five curlews plainsong wheel & silver into that white

lichened anticline & syncline rising straight from the seabed

the print of hinds’ feet on the foreshore

a herring gull sings

heron & grey crow make refrain

where do the sea paths lead

where do the boulevards of cold sky lead

& the heart’s trance

looping & winding each other

as sound follows ear

as sea follows eye

as the heron invents us all through the flat shine of the tidal pool

you are the lichen inspector

you listen when the mussel beds crackle

you grade the ocean’s weeds

kelp & bladderwrack

you measure the frost inching up the oak bole

you speak to the troubled wren

& I’m islanded here where

you are vein & artery

11th February 2008

After another clear sky day, the moon has set & above me is an ocean-field of stars of all magnitudes. Even this third night of dark-walking, how little I trust my senses. Trying to abandon hesitancy & step out, since I know the paths, I stumble over every pebble, wonder at the nearness of rock & tree trunk. Soon, however, eyes accustom themselves to starlight & I’m aware of other things at the edges of perception – the squeaking in the ditch, which would suggest a small rodent unwisely voicing at my footfall; something that could be the slightest of draughts from a passing wing; I’m straining towards physical understanding of this blackly transformed landscape.

After the unaccustomed brilliance of the day where all has been psychotropically bright, especially the trunks of these silent white birches, walking with no light but the boundlessness of stars is moving from dream to dream. In all the runnels & burns is a sparkling from the light of centuries past sent by distant luminous gas to enliven water.

Night birds sing. I can only look up; I’m stopped & still, mind silenced by light. Light that’s veering here & there into the red & green parts of the spectrum as those gaseous masses pulse like the throb of blood in my brain lighting my eyes.
There is no scale for this except, as ever, that of my own body. & its untrusted senses. I touch the mosses, I smell the drying soon-spring earth, I hear the whirr of a snipe as she plummets downhill; tonight, mortality has a metallic taste at the back of the bared throat. But it’s sight that’s rubric for imagination, allowing through these pupils untold immensities of light. Of light which is a greed & a curiosity for every corner of life.

9th February 2008

gamb’yan gamb’yan
our dream
colour of dawn
our song
gamb’yan gamb’yan

gyawalot’gyawalot’gyawa-lololololi(t)
gyawalot’gyawalot’gyawa-lololololi(t)
gyawalot’gyawalot’gyawa-lololololi(t)
gyawalot’gyawalot’gyawa-lololololi(t)
gyawalot’gyawalot’gyawa-lololololi(t)

is part of Shimpei Kusano's wild but tender rendition of frogs’ voices in his poem Birthday Party.


With a paring of the storm moon high in the true blue sky, the day is clear for anything. Frogs have already found that clarity & a breath of spring for their clutching & spawning in the ditches. When they disappear again, they leave behind hundreds of eggs, each in a ball of jelly as proof of their passion. Or imperative genes. Amplexus is the clasp of a male on a female’s back; an embracing kind of copulation where the male fertilises the female’s eggs as they emerge into the water. The poet Shimpei Kusano, for whom frogs were a metaphor of life itself, had no doubt: genes & libido are one & the same, driving frogs; all living things. In an echo of the swelling moon, these eggs will grow to become tadpoles by the time of the last quarter of this moon. Each globe of jelly holds the beginning of a frog, a black speck far smaller than the head of a safety match.

Once I had an ancient glass battery jar & watched this development in the cold porch each year, never tiring of the astonishment of spring childhood, of the dream of life becoming. Now, I’m content to watch as I pass the shallow wild water. The frogs have sung their soft songs. To slightly paraphrase Shimpei Kusano in his epilogue to Birthday Party: “as author I have no desire to stop the choir at this party celebrating birth. by a ditch near the burn at Gobsheallach, by Acharacle, in the peninsula of Ardnamurchan in the western Highlands. a party of points tinier than sesame seed as yet. this ecstasy’s swaying echoing flowing place.”
A new spring & I step along the path together.

6th February 2008

With heavy rain alternating with longer pauses from rain, insubstantial mist hovers over forestry & woodland alike. It rolls over rockfaces & slowly topples downhill. It’s hard not to see Chinese landscape scrolls in this as I walk along: pines, rock, water & mist unfolding; now obscured by brief abundant showers, here clearing to reveal a mossy worty oak. The ropes & tresses of the hills’ overburdens of water from a distance make their sinuous white way to the loch; up close, they fall sheer & bounce fiercely from boulder to outcrop in torrents & surges that would wash stags away.

The hinds of the bog pick their usual way west, with perhaps a little more elegant high stepping than usual; the wet ground, no doubt. Their three followers seem to have deserted them; maybe they were passing through, looking for their own territory.

Apart from the deer, there’s only a grey crow, on the road verge, moving with that odd sort of sidle strut that suggests stilt walking. Overhead, now the rain’s off for a while, just two ravens. They’re very low, negotiating the coast down on cool air, close enough for whiffling wing sounds to be heard. Their muted, offhand, gamelan calls to each other fold me in to another temporality. I pause; the birds hang in sky; then it’s movement again.

4th February 2008

In the flat grey & foreshortening light, it’s hard to see the hinds, unless they move. Although I know they are there, if they’re still, & they usually are, then with the naked eye, even their white rear flashes can be mistaken for lichen on a rock. Their faded rust coloured broken coats are entirely the complexion of the winter bracken, broken down as it is by wind, & curling that way & this after a season’s rain.

The three hinds of this quarter, though, have been joined by another three. There’s no stand-off, none of the stags’ confrontational bellow. It’s more irritation on the part of the original trio; they move on ahead, grazing, browsing, moving further up the hill with flicks of the heads & eyes & ears as the others make small transgressions into the precise margins of sociability.

The same bounds apply to all the gregarious animals here. The cormorants on the rock beyond Eilean Dubh are absolutely evenly spaced. If one lands on the rock, having fished awhile, the whole colony must needs shuffle sideways to allow her in, but without breaking the pattern of spacing. The chaffinches bustle about fallen seeds, but keep within the same imperative limits.

There’s food enough for them all, & no need of overcrowding & jostling. I’m mindful of this, brought back to the Byre by thirst, as I make the first morning pot of tea for one.

2nd February 2008

It’s been snowing hard since yesterday morning. Snow has settled all across the bay wherever there’s no incoming tide channels. It’s on all the windward sides of tree boles & in the clear parts of the woodland where I’m standing, west of the burn that flows into Sailean an Eorna. The trunks themselves are patchworked by mosses & snow drift, set against off white lichens with here & there a snuff coloured lichen on nearby rocks. Lungworts (Lobaria pulmonaria), also on the trunks, are a leathery green, vaguely lizard like. This is mature oakwood, with a few fallen trees, sparse & interspersed with holly & hazel. There’s a few birch trees here too. The fallen trees are almost certainly a result of storms, perhaps hurricanes. Some are split, the weight of large branches become insupportable in high wind, while others are toppled entire, with root-plates at right angles to the woodland floor, though it’s seldom horizontal on this slope leading down to the loch.

One fallen limb, a metre round, is eighteen paces long, from the main trunk, but still joined; it’s a sessile oak; the main trunk a metre & a half round. Growth has been good from this limb, curving up & away from it, its recurving forms giving living space to a variety of epiphytes.

The oaks here have a massive beauty, fallen or standing, their relic lives entwined with each other & with all the other species of the woodland. Here, in a rootplate ten feet high (more than three metres) growing straight up, while the oak shoots from its recline, is a holly. It’s more than double my handspan round, the displayed upper roots all elbows & knuckles smooth as if polished. From the same plate is one of the ubiquitous birches, though smaller than the holly. Another oak, standing, has a massively thickened lower trunk, made that way by epicormic growth. Its girth is more than five metres round. Lying close by is another ancient of four metres’ girth with a partner birch, older this time, maybe a metre & a half round. The bole of the fallen oak is host, under the snow, to a small holly, showing only its first pair of true leaves – last year’s germination. Its roots will grow & assist the oak’s subsidence back into the soil & rock from which it slowly rose. The ivies run round straight trunks, which subdivide fairly low into main branches. Each subsequent division curves & curves again, some so much they seem to spiral on themselves, sometimes almost making knots.

I try to read the woodland, limb by limb & leaf after leaf. Its full story is conjecture. The epiphytes are an indication of ancient woodland, but it will have been worked here too, coppiced, perhaps, certainly bark stripping happened, & selective felling for charcoal. There may have also been plantings; though now there’s no indication of this. The woodland, like all worked landscape, is art, & as such, fictive. If I’m expounding on the great book of the woodland, the lives of the trees, their history & economics, then each tree, in its subdividing & recurving limbs, is reciting genetics, performing climate & topography, geology & its own personal survival so far.

My ignorance is boundless. Not only can I not know the trees’ stories, the woodland itself reaches beyond history. I can’t tell the names of the mosses & lichens. But I’m happy in my lack of knowledge; nothing at all can stop me from fully experiencing the setting & enjoying the secrecy of the trees; their utter stillness, which nevertheless they impart to me, here for a short while.

As I leave the oaks, just two feet from where I pass, & not at all bothered, a huffed up goldcrest is bobbing & pushing her head into snowdrifts, below which are small plants’ seedheads which she raids in her search for warmth.

28th January 2008

It’s as well to have a pocket full of seeds. Last month I travelled to the deep south & this afternoon pulled on the old Donegal jacket I wore then, to make the happy rediscovery of maple seeds I had stashed. I’d been amusing the toddlers by throwing them in the air to watch them whirligig down with little rises in the puffing wind. None of us could get enough, marvelling at these patterns & dissemination of purest opulence.

Last autumn wherever I went in the woodlands I collected seeds. Oak & hazel mostly, which have spent all winter in my fridge. Now, with the time come to stratify them (some would have done this immediately, but I’m in no hurry, nor are the seeds), I’ve been casting around for a container that neither the hens nor sheep will upturn or rootle about in.

The sheep are fresh on the hill, released from the gated Park, foraging like me, nuzzling the salty sand piles the road men leave for icy weather. Mooching around with no set purpose, still foraging for seeds even now, there by the boathouse is a plastic blue shallow fish tray. It’s washed up on last night’s tide & perfect for sand & seeds, with uniform holes to let the water through. It’s under my oxter before I really think about it. I saunter home, an Ardnamurchan flaneur, with sea riches, thinking of the wealth of germination & the first leaves to come & dreaming of a tree nursery for these parts.

24th January 2008

The drama of the night is the moon, a night after full, navigating high, with gale tattered clouds mottling its surface. Several times gusts waken me & the moon is still there, as large an appearance in the night as truth retained from dream. The booming in the house has fooled me a few times, too, thinking that someone is banging the door to get in. At one point I’m at the front to make sure that the gate is shut & it isn’t the flock looking for shelter.

The morning dawns on blizzards, with a full & high tide; white is everywhere. The sun makes brief guest appearances, but with the force of the wind, the clouds are driven in again, blackening the very brief clear spells. By mid morning, growling thunder has stepped up its volume & is now exploding round the hills. When the sky’s at its darkest, hail rattles the small branches & topmost twigs, battering on down, stinging noses & muzzles alike.

The day moves on, with curtains rising & falling on weather scenes. The woods, usually noisy with bird calls, a twittering of chaffinches, is silent. The bay & sea & skerries, normally full of noisy oystercatchers & burbling curlews, is silent. Bare bones of trees make grinding noises against each other in high wind. Only a pair of buffeted siskins moves, low down, fossicking for seeds, flighting close to the ground as I approach.

Hazel catkins seem to fold on themselves in the cold. Only the rhododendrons, those natives of Spain & Lebanon, with their spurts of growth since I last passed here & with their new terminal buds, seem aware of a spring that might arrive one day soon.

23rd / 24th slipstream January 2008

There’s a hunger that compels at this lean time of year. The hinds feel it in scarcity, driven to feed the calves they carry, growing. The bared woodlands , framework for light made leaf, through terminal buds grope away from last summer towards another spring. I feel an urgency to make marks to represent all this. To re present before present is past. To signify the fleeting thin things of winter.

I’d wanted to make maps. A map marking seasons’ boundaries. A map that counteracted the victories of mapmakers, perhaps. A map that marked cleared villages here: Smirisary, Port a Bhata, Buarblaig, Inniemore, Uladail, burial grounds mossed over. A map of stories told by placenames, when story & tradition translated is no more than a loss.

I’d make a map of the boroughs & colonies of woodants – a story of community going & coming. A map of badger setts. Another of where the woodbine scrambles in its tangled way through branches of oaks; a map of the homes of the insects that make different kinds of oak-gall their home. Another of April’s early purple orchids. An underwater map that left aside the numbers on a chart, which show only depth in metres; the lives of tubeworms & mussels have depth for those who feel that imperative hunger.

But of course the oak or the birch is a map of itself. Lichens stain the trunks, mosses clamber the boles, worts & ferns & microfauna consider it a territory, an occupancy, a home & commonwealth.

The circumambulation of the hinds round Carn Mor may be the start of our art. Quartered, crossed, marked with hoofprints. We map ourselves in a physical act, not reverential but existential. The first art of the circle, of cup & ring marks on stone; the art of palaeolithic hand prints in ochres from earth.

My hind tracking is a wonder at the art of creatures in a territory – inhabitants of a map which is not distinct from their selves. The present can’t be re presented. Experience & memory impel the hinds in their search for sustenance & constrain me to my appreciation of their mapped world, from which I derive a feeding for the breathy spirit.

23rd January 2008

The three hinds were passing outside the window again, moving easily & alert from east to west. They’re the same three I’ve been seeing at this hour of the early morning for a week or more. I’ve no real idea of the range of deer. I know they are hefted to a particular territory, but the size of the hill-ground, & in their case the bog, they consider theirs to occupy I can only guess at. I’ve seen them two miles from here to the east at dusk. They are easy to recognise, always three & one considerably smaller than the other two.

So this morning, giving a good half hour’s start so as not to alarm them in any way, I follow the three sisters (as I think of them). They’d outrun me & I mean them no harm, but I want to try to track them in their usual day’s routine. They need to cross the little road across the hill here, so I’m looking for their run, mindful that there are no sheep on the hill just now, so runs would be likely made by these three.

& there, where there’s the most shelter between the birches, leading from just beyond a stand of alders, is their line. I follow the meander of a path. They seem not to mind the boggy patches in hollows, which suck at my feet more than their small cloven hooves, though they must sink further, the way a high heeled woman would. But it makes the slots easier to follow, & the dark droppings here & there, show a regular route. I come across beaten down patches of bracken in dips, where they must overnight sometimes.
Sometimes a bite has been taken from a low fraughan, blueberry. The track’s leading up in a spiralling kind of way, west & up. The going is colder & rockier & of course I lose the track. Not before, however, working out that their only route needs to be to head back eastward round the curve of hill; that or walk off into the ocean.

Deer do seem to enjoy mooching on the sands here & there. I’ve seen them often enough, not browsing the sea’s weeds like the sheep, but rather contemplating waves. But here there’s no sand, just drops from the rocks.
I’ve travelled only maybe a mile and a half & not very high, but the direction suggests that they will head back to where I see them at dusk, keeping the sea to their left, circumambulating the hill to make for the lower bog & the degree or so extra warmth & the shelter it brings. They’ll be slowing down a little, with the calf each carries, half way through the gestation period, maybe not too picky about food, a little hungry; but nevertheless their occupancy of this limited stretch of hill & bog, bounded by the Atlantic, would seem to make a walk-round of about eight miles, taking in some three thousand acres of homeland, if my calculations are correct.

With the coverage of trees & rocks, with their ability to see & catch scent of me, their autumn bracken colouring & wariness, it’s no surprise that I see their traces more often than their presence.

January 19th 2008

What do we call the shimmer of sea, each platt & wavelet, as tide pours in?
What word do we have for the shadow of a white birch limb on cracked white-lichened rock?

The wolf moon is bulbous, slung low over Moidart’s crumpled hills.
Two curlews raise their pibroch plaint of wild poetry & are gone.

January 17th 2008

it starts of course
with the finished product.
nothing starts with the 1st.
Nothing. The end
is first. Always.
There is no beginning
unless the end
has been reached. First.

Ed Dorn (A Theory of Truth / The North Atlantic Turbine)

Sunart oakwoods are what they are because (among other factors like high rainfall) of the southern ocean’s heat borne here from the Gulf Stream, along the North Atlantic Drift, travelling thousands of miles, cooling a little on the way to invigorate our coastlines. These gloomy days, the Drift is perhaps threatened by icemelt entering the Atlantic & moved south by Greenland Sea currents. A cooling of the North Atlantic Drift could have strange & unguessed effects on the oakwoods, with temperatures perhaps falling by 5 degrees; though there may be increased rainfall, which might or might not counteract the drop in temperature.

The ecosystems we share with ocean current & climate are as fragile as wrens' eggs. Last spring at Aird Tobha the crofter was piking loads of the sea’s weeds from the foreshore into his trailer for the potato crop on his sandy soil, as Highlanders have done for generations; six hundred cartloads for a small croft each spring not being unusual. The weed in question was a Laminaria (digitata) which I’ve taken myself in smaller quantities for drying & adding to stock for soup. It’s every bit as good as the Japanese variety Laminaria saccharina which can be bought now at great cost in delis & “health food” shops. This saccharina is found here too, but is less common. There’s another Laminaria – bulbosa, that I’ve not found, appearing as it does only at equinoctial low tides & which Fraser Darling describes as “rather like coarse tripe turned inside out”. The Laminarias are also the chosen delicacy of sea urchins, whose skeletons, or fragments of, are washed up on all the open Atlantic shores here, common wherever the Atlantic Drift licks the shallows. These graceful creatures have an exoskeleton no larger than the size of a small apple, covered in spines & deep purple or pink. The mouths of urchins are underneath the skeleton & have five beak-like teeth for nothing much other than scraping seaweed.

If the North Atlantic Drift were to cool further, or divert slightly because of wind, what would become of these creatures, who depend on its warmth; what would happen to their food-source & my stock?

Build a better mouse trap, they say. At Aird Tobha, what I took to be a fish hatchery (it’s that too) turns out to be breeding sea urchins. They have twenty or thirty of both Paracentrotus lividus, the purple sea urchin & Echinus esculentus, the “edible” sea urchin. Edible here refers to us humans eating urchins, not in any Swiftian sense, but the sea creatures; though in Brittany, the urchin of choice is the Paracentrotus, (oursin violet) which is lightly boiled in plenty of salt water for two minutes, then cracked & eaten like a boiled egg. The purpose at Aird Tobha, though is not culinary, but for urchins’ scavenging qualities.

The plan, with the aid of the millions of eggs these urchins produce, is to stock waters around farmed salmon cages, where they will eat particles of fish food which have escaped the salmon in such large quantities, that together with their excreta, make the seas murky for divers. The urchins will also be fed seaweed, Laminaria & Alaria (probably esculenta, used until recently here & in Ireland in soups – I know this as oarweed) which will be bred specifically for this purpose.

All this mouse trapping activity is of course about financial feasibility. We like to eat salmon, but there’s too many of us, & salmon increasingly move towards extinction; no longer swimming inshore “thick enough to walk on” like a huge flock of underwater passenger pigeons. We invent then the farming of salmon, but the salmon cages pollute the seas. We breed urchins to clean the ocean around fish farms. To help the urchins on, sea vegetables are bred. This could be “viable on a commercial scale”: urchins & weeds sold to fish farms, salmon sold to supermarket.

I’m not sure where this cycle leads; if urchins, Laminaria & Alaria can be eaten by us, (& in harder times were) where might that leave the salmon & their farmers if we all took to eating them. How would Tesco market small purple spiny creatures & sea vegetables that would be pungent in a very short time from harvest? How long before we need to clean up after urchins? What will happen to fish, urchin, sea weeds & oak woods if the North Atlantic Drift cools & our climate with it?

The story of the tree surviving because it is too crooked, gnarled & cracked to be of any use to the carpenter also possibly applies to sea creatures. It seems they’ll only survive our predations if they are inedible to us.

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

FISH PRICES

Hake 60p-£7.50; plaice 60p-£2.50; cod £2-£3.40; lemon sole £1; whiting 20p-£1.40; sole £7.40-£14; roker 60p-£2.20; John Dory 50p; coley £1.20-£1.40; red mullet 60p-£4 (kg);megrim £3.50-£6; ling £1.50-£1.80 (kg).

As ever, monks (£2-£3.50) & witches (£3) everywhere.

Boats: Provider, Gratitude, Bountiful, Just Reward, Ocean Bounty. Also landing fish: Avocet & Osprey III.

January 13th 2008

The sea, at the little boathouse along by the jetty near Aird Tobha, has offered me a plank. It is five feet long & ten inches wide, with, at each end, the remains of three evenly spaced screws, loosened in their holes by the hammering of onshore surf. It’s as well not to refuse what the ocean offers, because it as easily takes away. This plank I welcome. It has clearly been in the sea a long time, heavy with salt, washed about the coast before the currents & recent gale stranded it here. It’s broken along one edge, which I can easily saw to make straight & true again as the tree once reached up. It’s pine. I’m guessing it did not grow in Sunart, though its history is uncertain. Once, is all I know, it was part of a tree; now planked & dressed it has a swaggering air, like any sailor at port. I’ll dry it, use it on my boat, as a part of the small dresser which needs to be built to take the Japanese biscuit barrel, the teacups & saucers, remaining china from my mother’s long-ago wedding. It will be sanded, oiled to show its sweep of grain, with its story of summers & winters past for those who read such things; living again & at home again as part of a boat, since that’s surely where it made its first home as plank. Next to the future dresser is the stove. Aldo Leopold writes that there are two dangers in not owning a farm. The second is of supposing that heat comes from a furnace. The offcuts from this plank will help fire up the stove for the baking of bread or the boiling of the kettle, to bring into play those teacups which will sit on the dresser's dressed plank. The heat of the pine trimmings will momentarily warm me, the teakettle, the water in the boiler & the boat herself.

I’ll be sitting, mind working all this in woodland, wondering if the sawn tree itself is from the Baltic or maybe - & here imagination makes a little leap – from the Scots pine I could not find at Bun Allt Eachain that Alastair Cameron writes of in his Annals. Either way, I’ll glean more than the plank; I’ll guess where the tree grew that works so hard to give a glow in several dimensions.

January 12th 2008

The Sgurr Biorach is the highest sgurr,
but Sgurr nan Gillean the best sgurr,
the blue-black gape-mouthed strong sgurr,
the tree-like slender horned sgurr
the forbidding great dangerous sgurr,
the sgurr of Skye above the rest.

Sorley MacLean

The rain & squalls stopped yesterday & the sky turned blue. Frost rose from the ground very hard, under a sky in which every star could be plucked & the Milky Way spilled itself north. This morning is clear & cold & the road to Aird Tobha is icy. The sun is about as high as it ever gets at this time of year & shining on the sea leads over to Eigg & beyond Eigg, to the little peaks of Rum. They are all wearing snow on their heads & haunches & from this distance, maybe twenty miles, are of a perfect & delicate volcanic symmetry. They are set in a clear sapphire ocean & lead me further, over the hatchery dams, across the tide-low sands of Sailean Dubh, over the inland machairs: inland only so far as they are sheltered by west facing rocks. Where the tide has retreated, it has left goblet-thin sheets of ice across tussocks & over departed pools. Compelled forward by a need to see more of the islands, since I’m now at sea level, but with no sight beyond the nearest rocks, I move crabwise round Carn Mor, where the black terrier bitch that belongs here, to the man of the fishing boat, joins me. Like me, she picks her way delicately; frosted moss has a very thin crust. Where she senses a depth of water, she detours the long & drier way round. I move up & down, still skirting the Carn, past all the headlands – Rubha Fassadh nam Feocullan (which I take to mean the place of the pine marten), Rubha na Clioche Bàine, Rubha na Caillich round nearly to Rubha Mhic Artair. & there, when I finally get a clear view west are the islands: flat little Muck the southernmost, Eigg of course, with its own sgurr & guarding it from the worst Atlantic gales, the hills of Rum. But to the north are the Cuillins & Skye laid out as a summer’s day, north & slewing round out of sight to the west behind the great sgurrs of Sorley Maclean’s poem; Sgurr Biorach & Sgurr nan Gillean, Sgurr na Stri, Sgurr nan Eag & Sgurr Alastair with Sgurr a’ Ghreadaidh; their names a litany of solitude & geology; places known best by those who live there – eagles, buzzards, ravens & crows - but which pierced MacLean’s heart.

The way round the Carn is to move from the islands’ stilling presence, eastwards & inland along the south channel, Eilean Shona to the north. I’ve hunted the small terrier away: I have no knowledge of how she is with sheep, & I’m heading for Fhaodhail Dhubh where the sheep wander at will. I cross the burn at Port na Lathaich with its little groves of snapped & dead birches, the sky punctured by the ravens’ silhouettes & the rush of the water an arrhythmic counterpoint to the soft & melodious prunk prunk of the ravens discussing such a one as myself edging across the hill of the brush.

January 9th 2008

The dog in the paper is said to flow from the trap at 40mph. The picture alongside the story shows a handsome brown dog wearing two collars. I’m not sure why two collars, but then any dog that fast can presumably wear as many collars as he likes. Like the hound here & myself, he appears to be quite indolent when he’s not winning races. He rises early, but simply to breakfast on toast & soup. His only exercise is a two mile walk & a 300 metre gallop on the straight. The hound on the sofa at ten years old does more than that & so do I, though I do without the gallop. I’d love to know how fast the gently snoring couch-hound can move. She certainly has almost caught a hind now & then. Maybe I’ll organise a time trial on the sands one day; it might be difficult, since she only runs in a circle with me at the middle.

I’d left the hound behind to go out for air between squalls (she hates weather), but the crofter, the Highland woman, her dog, the one with the same name as the postman’s baby (the old one that is. Postman, not baby. We have a new postman now. I don’t think there’s any connection.) : that dog loups up behind me & insists on tagging along a way, flushing snipe & looking round at me, tongue hanging, white tail-plume aloft, as though we’re partners. In these cold January days, with snow on the hills, I’d like to think he can also feel the spring just ahead of us or behind the old oak trunk, somewhere there. But I guess he simply needs to stretch his legs like me, & I’m his alibi for wandering away from the croft. We stand & look out at the bay, curlews & all, with not a word passing between us, a companionable silence as dusk gathers itself, with a squall moving in across the Atlantic. We turn at the same time to get back before the sleet, but it overtakes us anyway as we knew it would. At the byre, the slates of the house over by are turned gold in the sulphurous & nicotine light of the whirling weather front & the hillside bracken a scarlet as deep as any autumn rowan berry.

So the short days pass & the dog & I part company at the door – me for a dram, him for chasing a pickup moving along the hill to the croft house.

January 8th 2008

Even when you take to the woods,
you're taking political steps
on political grounds.
Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.

Wisława Szymborska

Away in the city for a while, captured by its busyness, bludgeoned by noise, I return through the blizzards home. Beinn Resipol, white in the night sky lights my way as surely as a crescent moon.

It’s not an escape here, but an engagement with the world as it is; something that’s not entirely as we have determined it to be. It’s just more apparent in Ardnamurchan that we have built over the rotting layers of sandstone & pitchstone, over the black basalt. Geology is obvious here, the topography where we settle in the hollows away from a climate predominantly of wind & rain. The woodlands have naturally been exploited and manipulated, the beasts & plants who live in, on, & around them exploited too.

This world, though, as it presents itself more clearly than elsewhere in a wholly built environment. It’s as well to engage & re-engage with small sounds that punctuate the quiet, the greenfinch darting for crumbs outside the byre, the hirpling grey crow making a single note before rising idly away as I walk by, reed buntings tseek-tseeking their calls back & forth, sleet falling onto the bare branches & boles of the oaks. Domestic noises too: after the power cut the click of the hotplate & the creak & groan of the heating kettle.

& the things whose noises I don’t hear, simply take in with silent eyes – the white capping of each hill from here to Morvern, & north to Moidart, the glisten of the tidal flats in the bay, below which live the worms whose songs are of dark & of crackling salt.

I’m at the top of the chain that starts below the worms & their subterranean songs, a chain (rather a web) of mutual dependence, of symbiosis & clear ecological interdependence. That knowledge is a barn full of riches. It’s also the wealth on which cities are built, & it’s here that I fully engage with that.

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

As a child, I pictured the ancient Greeks as philosophers walking back & forth, or standing still, lost in thought, dressed in loose robes, scattered across rolling hills bathed in sunlight. To enter the sloping woodlands this morning is to enter that place of my early imagining; the oaks sombre & silent, the random holly trees fresh with their green, aspens whitely standing & all apace on the hill, occupying precisely the positions of the philosophers, with here & there a rowan & an alder twined in earnest debate. Some have stood still so long that their feet have become buried in moss, which creeps up their boles to knee height; their limbs speckled with lichens like the liver spotted skins of the very old. Like any dialectic, winter has revealed the woodland armature, demonstrating, enacting, structure & formation of organic growth.

Here I have found the world as it is & also as it was for that child; a place of myth & of undisputed poetry, a place that has its location wherever I am properly awake & fully engrossed, enmeshed in things – which may be another definition of politic.

January 1st 2008

When the tide’s at its lowest, it’s possible to walk straight out on the sea bed, north along the Black Sea-Ford for half a mile towards the island & small skerries in the South Channel. With no mark of a footprint on the sand except for the tracings the various sea vegetables make as they are swung back & round by the ebb tide. These vary from circles to what looks like a small child’s drawing of a three eyed elliptical alien, but is only an impression drawn by the sea of bladderwrack. Otherwise, no curlew has passed this way, no oystercatcher. Sometimes a stag or hind will pass here, but it’s a little soft today & they’re elsewhere in the hills grazing, sleeping, at this hour before dusk. It’s just ten days since solstice & already there’s a little more light in the mornings & even more noticeably in the evening, when the day is extended by about half an hour.

I head for the promontory of the MacNeill, across from the promontory of the Dividing, though of what I’ve no notion, unless it’s one set of broken skerries & mud sand flats, one set of salt flats & shoals & yet others to the west; though perhaps also defines the bounds of land-use & tenancy. It’s along from Port Ban & I want to walk as far out into the sea as it’s possible to get without a dinghy. The promontory when I reach it is sodden with the rains. Not just the past week or month, but of the centuries. Itself a rock into the channel, from whose bed it rises up, cracked & worn by sand-laden wind, in its twisting & walking & weatherings it has developed hollows in which water lies, covered by sphagnums rotting into what, given greater depth & another thousand years could become peat.

Skirting the deepest moss hags, given away by the red moss growing patchily among the green & yellow rising sphagnum, & sticking to the bare rock & the few patches of soft rush which give a firm foothold, I crest the slight rise to look out to the open sea, at this point uncluttered beyond the shoreline of tumbled rocks & rounded tide blackened boulders. & there, at this point where no one goes from one year’s end to the next, a silhouette against the glare of the ocean surface, is a man knee deep in waders, I guess fishing.

As I stand wondering whether to abandon the walk & make for the eastern headland after all, he slowly swivels his head & reveals the massive curve of an eagle’s beak. The sun had fooled me, along with the glare & conditioning of my kind to see human figures in the landscape. But there’s no doubt about it & a hesitant step or two carefully avoiding any more of the skyline shows me this cracked & unvisited landscape is hers, not mine.

Her three foot height is also bulky enough to have fooled me, but stood on top of a low boulder facing the sea she appears much taller. A heron swings away to the north & to the east a noisy pack of oystercatchers chatters by, piping their grumbles to the world. She’s still as I am, unmoved, focussed, her profile still to the west. I hold my breath, move closer, but even above the noise of the cold wind she has heard my squelchings & scrabbling on rock, & her head swivels a little further & I’m caught in that crisp & cogent stare. Without a word, I’m as apologetic as I would be having disturbed any new year angler; but she doesn’t trust me & I’m far too close at less than thirty feet, & she rises slightly, spreads her wings, which are so huge, I feel they would umbrella the distance between us, & takes off in a single flap & a long glide towards the big island north. She reveals a white tail & I take a breath as I realise what I should have known all along from her size – she’s a sea eagle. She dwarfs the skinny heron still making across the channel & is over, I think before I draw breath again, to disappear among rocks her own colour.

I sit, exhilarated; take a swig of malt from the flask in wonder & elation, & the seals edge together slightly. Throughout the drama, for it can best be called that: the facing of eagle & man, the seals have been as unnoticed as any other rocks, not fidgeting as they often do, silent, dozing. But the tension’s ended, & something has changed for them in the charged air & they yawn themselves awake & then back to sleep.

Frances Pitt, writing in 1946 saw the last nesting place of the sea eagle in Britain, the west cliffs of North Roe in Shetland. A pair nested there every year until 1908, when a local farmer shot the male. The female, a partial albino, returned each spring until 1918, after which she was seen no more. In 1947, Frank Fraser Darling writes of the sea eagle & its disappearance from Mull, Jura, Eigg, Skye, & the Shiants: “It is all a dismal story; and it is a matter for doubt whether, should these species try again to colonize this country, they would be allowed to breed in security. The vested interests of game preservation (by no means dead in a Socialist Britain), of a decrepit sheep-farming industry, in the West Highlands and Islands, the pressure of egg collectors and irresponsible gunners, are heavy odds.”

Not only are the vested interests of game preservation still strong, but they have seen off the attempt at a “socialist Britain”. Sheep farmers have changed however. My neighbours here, the man & woman of the croft were as pleased to see a sea eagle as I would have been, & it standing by the phone box at the road junction where no houses are for a quarter mile in any direction. Maybe it was expecting a call from Rum, which lies seven miles offshore, & where sea eagles were reintroduced in 1975, breeding from 1985. They’ve grown in numbers, though they are slow breeders, & spread a little in the past twenty three years, but there’s still only about two hundred individuals across the Small Isles, Mull & hereabouts.

30 12 07

In Cill Chaluim Chille,
near the Camerons and MacLeods,
among the MacLeans and MacInneses,
in ‘the big graveyard above Loch Alainn’,
I chanced on MacLachlan’s grave,
not knowing it was there.

I know fine well where John MacLachlan, the Doctor of Rahoy is buried, since Sorley MacLean writes of it in his praise poem. I also know that there’s another grave over at Rahoy, & that intrigues me, as there’s no church or burial ground there.

The day’s not good for a foray to Rahoy, the other side of Loch Sunart at the inside length of Loch Teacuis; wet, cold, grey & blustery, but the grave is calling & I want to see what the Doctor would recognise there 130 years after his death.

At Kinlochteacuis birches & oaks show a distinct tendency for corkscrewing their growth into the air with the passing years, which I’ve noticed elsewhere in the woodlands, but it’s a clear pattern here. Despite the wet & the cold & the season, the woodbine is beginning to tenderly leaf &, oddly, there’s some delicate white bramble blossoms. Spring may come early for its own reasons, but the first signifiers I see have the imprimatur of ownership – Estate signs with stay away as a not quite hidden undernote: Private Road, Deerstalking in Progress During . . . the usual dreary preoccupation of people taken with the notion that Rahoy (& Kinlochteacuis, Morvern, Ardnamurchan, Scotland outside cities) is a sporting estate for the enjoyment of a few whose traditions enable them to escape thought & conscience.

“ . . . I cannot get a plot in my native country
though I’d pay a crown for a mere shoe-breadth.” writes the Doctor.

As the rains wet the woods & hills indiscriminately, my thoughts, gloomy to begin, are lifted by the knowledge of the reefs in Loch Teacuis here, which John MacLachlan probably never saw, but neither do the current landowners have control of. The land & sky is grey, but there are rare serpulids beneath the grey loch water, at only ten feet down. The home of tubeworms, the shell-like reefs twist up from the seabed at perhaps the same rate of growth as the corkscrewing birch & oak on the slopes that move down below sea level. There’s only four sites in the world for Serpula vermicularis reefs. The worm’s colours, bright red & orange, displayed in bronchial crowns outside the coral-like tubes, brighten my day immeasurably. Even the MacLachlan one would have smiled, taking a moment from his sadness & anger at landowners’ disregard of his culture.

The squalls set in once again from the southwest, with dusk not far behind. The grave, when I find it near the dun, is to a Naval officer who died in 1933, fifty nine years after John MacLachlan, & who is buried under a stone cairn topped with a cross. Nearby (“not knowing it was there”) I find another, newer grave, of a young Army Captain who died while climbing Ben Nevis in 2000, Colin Campbell his name.

The irony of a Captain Campbell’s final resting place being Morvern would not be lost on the Doctor; who would have known of the burnings on the Morvern coast: a retribution against those who joined the Jacobite cause in 1745. Philip Gaskell in Morvern Transformed records: “On the 10th instant, (March 1746) at four in the morning” [the writer is Captain Duff, in charge of the sloops Terror & Princess Anne, after having burned every boat he could find on the coast of Morvern & Loch Sunart, in a letter to the Duke of Argyll] “ I landed Lieut. Lindsay ... [&] Captain Campbell with twinty men from Mingary Castle, a lieutenant & fifty five men from my ship with orders to burn the houses and destroy the effects of all such as were out in the rebellion.” [Camerons, MacLeans, MacLeods] “They began with Drumnin M’Clean’s town and by six o’ clock at night they had destroy’d the Morvern coast as far as Ardtornish.” As well as 400 houses, several barns “well fill’d with corn, horse, cows and meal” [adds Captain Hay, another RN officer] were torched. The woodlands surrounding that entire part of the coast also went in flames – a scorched earth policy for sure – and in the ensuing two centuries, whatever else has been healed, the woodlands from Drimnin to Lochaline have never fully recovered.

The Doctor would not know the houses, holiday cottages here today (& I suspect he may have been as bemused as me by the welded steel stag on the big house lawn) but he would recognise the heavy hand of alleged landownership. The hills, the loch, the woods, remain unchanged.

In the scant oakwoods of Rahoy, Captain Campbell’s grave is marked by the planting of half a dozen small specimens of what looks to be an exotic species of pine, clustered round the bronze plaque and seat with fine views along Loch Teacuis & the hills.

My way home is lit by the white throat of a pine marten crossing the path.