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.

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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.