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.