11 12 07

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

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

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

10 12 07

further in yet
further in yet
green hills

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

Buddhist mendicant; translated by William J Higginson)

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

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

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

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

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

06 12 07

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

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

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

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

In the sky: pee-oo mee-oo

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

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

But nothing silences the possible.

05 12 07

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

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

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

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

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

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

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FISH PRICES

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

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

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

04 12 07

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

03 12 07

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

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

29 11 07

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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