29 12 07

There is a need to approach Sunart oakwoods obliquely. Like sitting. Sitting very still, alert & relaxed, waiting for something to arrive: a deer, maybe, or an owl. If I look at trees in the dusk directly, they dance in vision; it’s the way our eyes are physically made. Look to one side & the tree is clearer. I approach trees sideways, a little nervous of their history & presence. I count geese, deer, list mosses, enumerate spiders, look out to sea with my back to the woods, holly & birch & alder all around. It’s as if to look directly is to somehow obscure a latency, a voice that I want to listen to; but it’s not enough to be attentive, scientific; it’s necessary to be receptive. I’m impatient. I’ll not live as long as an oak.

28 12 07

At night I sleep dreaming under goose down. Heavy in the early morning on the peat bog I’m mazed by a solitary goose struggling to get airborne - a mastery of muscle & pneumatic bone over gravity - & when she’s joined by a vibrant honking hooting cavalcade of score upon score, following in an untidy raggle of flight, up, yapping up, then for me, awake now, it’s also willing them aloft to circle & make off celebrating life & flight; uplifting & uproarious all at once.

There’s two sorts of goose here, the barnacle, all black & white & the grey lag, with its pink bill. This enormous gaggle is the largest I’ve seen; up to a hundred birds. I’m still smiling as the skeins make off to the south barking all the way; & at four to five pounds weight each bird I’m still lost at the power of feather clad muscle; each of my watery steps across the bog makes sucking noises accentuating my weight, my pressure on the goose feeding grounds.

26 12 07

Nine intoxicating things at Loch Sunart today

To stand in darkness rocked by a gale

Rain in the night

The order of birds that comes to finish morning hen food: three grey crows; a blown flock of chaffinches; one robin; four wood pigeons

The first lilac alder buds

Clubmosses

Foxglove rosettes

23 herons taking to the air & wheeling for 3 awe-long minutes, huge against sky above Garbh Eilean before landing to sit in rain like random boulders on a rock outcrop, muttering in convocation.

The raised head of a single seal at the same place from the sea

Water blueing after grey with the traverse of rain along the loch

24 12 07

This one, the snow moon, wakes me at night; full & high. By day full double arcing rushing rainbows one above the other; in the spaces between grey showers & grey clouds, scraps of bows here & there on & off to the east & now to the west & then south.
Waves of what is come together, coincide for a while & dissolve, in the sky as in the bay.

21 12 07

The day before winter solstice & all the ice & frosts have melted. Down at the edge of the bay two donkeys softly graze at the regreened but salty grass. The sunlight is radiant & the unclouded sky a zinging blue. The donkeys are dark against all this. They’re minded by a woman & a child. One is led from a grass cropping to the next; the other is free to roam, but stays close to his companion & the girl. Donkeys here in Ardnamurchan are a rarity these days, what ever might have been in the past. These are retired, though from what work I don’t know.

It’s more than thirty years since I backed a donkey into a donkey car to tackle him to bring in hay. While donkeys can be biddable, they always have minds of their own. Ours, a rig, had a habit of submitting to the collar, and backing up far enough to be tackled, then moving forward sharply so that the shafts dropped. The old TVO tractor that replaced him was not a lot better. It was commonplace at that time in Kerry for donkeys to take the milk from maybe a half dozen cows each day from the holdings to the collection point for the creamery lorry. Even then, they were being replaced by bulk tanks, coolers & tractors with cabs.

The donkeys here in Gobsheallach may never work & even on occasion bite, just to let you know their ancestry, but in the solstice sun here, now, there’s plenty of grazing for them. In Palestine, since the checkpoints were rigorously (re)enforced there’s not a lot of diesel or petrol getting into the West Bank or Gaza & donkeys are the general transport, serving as taxi & ambulance & draught animal. Beasts of burden. Grazing is scarce in a land one-fifth the size of Scotland but with more than two and a half million people. Many farms, frequently olive & citrus groves, have been annexed for a wall between Palestine & Israel; the trees are bulldozed & the land out of farming. On any other fertile ground, crops for people is the order of the day. Even with the price of a donkey twenty or thirty times what it was before the virtual sealing of the Palestinian lands, if grazing, or hay or concentrate can’t be had, there’s no future for donkeys in Ramallah or Hebron or Bethlehem.

18 12 07

It’s light but the sun is not above the hills yet. Frost everywhere, from roof slates to the sheep-cropped grass, which is white, no shade of green. I set off across the brittle tussocks which only the highest tides cover. Tide last night was moderate & low was at half past five. I want to find out if the white out on the bay is ice. Coming off the salt flats I step onto frozen sand ridges which the sea has left. Wormcasts are frozen solid. Bladderwrack is frosted white. Any depressions in seabed (that’s what I’m walking on – the point where land is reclaimed by the sea in its continual cycle) are filled with shallow sea ice. At twenty past nine the sun glows at the hill line. At this time of year it’s so far south of east as to be disorienting; I think I’ve gone badly astray, a feeling heightened by the double blinding of the sun & its reflection in the iced sands. Squinting downward, I head directly into the sun, towards the three scattered islands where sometimes stranded sheep sleep in the summer, Eileanan Loisgte, the burnt islands. Another five minutes & the sun is clear of the hill & rising along its low arc. Even a couple of days from solstice where everything hangs & tilts, the brilliance is too much for me . I head into the black gloam of the islands & turn back along my footprints. My shadow , cast ahead, is thirty feet long. At this point, I’m in the middle of the bay among crackling mussel beds & the air’s cracked, torn apart by a roar that goes to my nape; ahead of it goes the Tornado jet itself, which I only catch a glimpse of with its wing missiles. The noise is visceral. It bypasses everything rational & goes direct to the thalamus - seat of primal reaction. I crouch down, vulnerable on miles of open sand. There’s no cover.

It passes. I straighten up & with the jet safely away shake my fist. I curse. Atavism recedes into the reptilian brain & I walk on back across acres of frost & ice, the weight of sky on the back of my neck. The mountains of Afghanistan are not so very far away. Not a bird stirs.

16 12 07

With the very short days now, sunrise at about nine o’ clock & sunset at about half past three, giving six & a half hours of daylight, there is more of the night & consequently of the moon. The waxing half moon rises at noon & rides high in the sky most of this cloudless day until it slips behind the horizon thirteen hours later at one in the morning. Plates of surface ice hem the lochans all day.

As well as the weather, of importance here is light & clarity. On this clear cold day, when every breath is felt deep into the lungs, there’s much talk of how far can be seen & how clearly.

As the sun rises, the hills make one black & broken line to the south; in full sunlight, they resolve into three clean lines of hills, one behind the other, receding in distinctness. Even now, towards dusk it’s still clear. To the west, the hills of Rum make a jet profile against a low band of coral flushing the horizon. Overhead the high sky is a translucent duckegg blue. To the east & south the sun flares red on the hills, somewhere on the spectrum between the bracken & rusting plough at the grazing called Park & the flames of the fire burning the year’s end scraps at the Kentra croft.

As the sun sets, the lines of hills become one again against an ice-blue sky. Clarity dissolves to dark.