A monthly feature giving you a week-long snapshot into our nomadic family life.
Monday 1st April
Black Isle, Northern Scotland
The Audacious* Six has broken new ground by going further north than ever before on these shores.
We are now on the ominously named Black Isle, north of the Moray Firth and south of its smaller sibling the Cromarty Firth.
The name of this Highland peninsula derives from the Scots Gaelic eilean meaning island and dubh meaning black: likely a reference to the dark fertile soil.
We have been in the Moray area for some time, going back and forth, round and round, with Nairn, Forres, Findhorn, Burghead, Kinloss and Cawdor receiving most of our patronage.
We went further east to Lossiemouth at one point but the terrifying, twin-engine, supersonic, canard delta wing Eurofighter Typhoons roaring out of RAF Lossiemouth scared us off.
Thanks to more than ten years of participation in men’s groups I know people across the UK who will welcome me and there’s a small but distinguished concentration of men in Findhorn and the surrounding area who have done just that.
As you can imagine, this has many advantages: kinship, companionship, local knowledge and recommendations as well as opportunities for casual employment being just a few examples.
As such, I’ve been slapping expensive black Scandinavian paint on the external woodwork of my friend’s house in Cawdor for a few weeks, weather permitting, during which time we parked up in his garden.
Yesterday, on a beautiful sunny spring Sunday, I completed the first phase of the paint job.
Today we said goodbye, following the scent of Tara’s feminine intuition and responding to a quiet but insistent call from The North.
A red kite came overhead soon after we set off and flew with the van for a mile or so, offering its presence from the skies.
Before crossing over to the island of darkness via the Kessock Bridge, where the Moray Firth meets the Beauly Firth, we stopped in Inverness for supplies.
Imagine Tesco, Aldi, Hobbycraft and Dunelm on a busy Easter Monday. An unwelcome dose of concentrated system hell. Necessary and unavoidable.
Once we had escaped and put some cold inhospitable water between us and the miserable retail leisure park, we stopped for chai.
We have regular daily rituals in the van, usually revolving around food and drink. Most afternoons at about 3pm, we stop somewhere picturesque, if possible, and I make a saucepan of sweet, spicy, milky chai (Ben’s special recipe).
Then we get the Mystery Box out, which is an old M&S shortbread biscuit tin stuffed full of Snickers bars, Mars bars, Kit Kats, Cadbury’s Creme Eggs and Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer biscuits amongst other things. Before diving in we sing a song called Mystery Box, which we pinched from an educational app called Khan Academy Kids.
A few hours of mindless Minecraft, Go Jetters and Charlie and Lola ensues and at least one adult puts in some productive work hours on the laptop in the front cab.
There are many things I don’t like about devices and Minecraft and sugar-based snacks but there are also many things I do like about Five Minutes’ Peace, temporarily subdued and relatively quiet children and not having to force industriousness during a rainy mid-afternoon when my mind lacks lustre. As such, this particular daily family ritual persists, for now.
Today we stopped at a car park with a wide view over Munlochy Bay. We considered staying put and sleeping there but then decided to leave after more cars turned up including a camper van with lowered suspension and a windscreen decal declaring allegiance to something called Scarface Lowriders.
There was more raptor rapture as we looked for our sleeping spot for the night: another red kite appeared and guided us home.
Tuesday 2nd April
Millbuie Forest, Black Isle, Northern Scotland
An opaque grey morning. A single bird sings in the plantation forest while I debut the new shit-shovel. It’s a good sharp blade, too good perhaps, easily cutting into the earth, wounding, slicing through roots: like a sword blade cutting into flesh and slicing through sinew.
After breakfast Tara’s sapience summons her to the mountains on the horizon so, leaning into the unknown, we continue north, following the amorphous feminine smoke signals.
As we leave, a flash of white on auburn-brown and a distinctive deeply forked tail in the sky: red kite appears for a third time, soaring with us, northward bound.
We’re on the right track for sure.
Peaceful remote lanes lead to back roads which in turn lead to main roads and before long we are joining the busy A9, and the course of the North Coast 500, otherwise known as the NC500. I have mixed feelings about this tourist-centred road.
We drive off the Black Isle and onto the Cromarty Bridge, striking across one of the many firths which cut into the land from the east, up here in the magnificent and regal crown of Scotland.
A six-hundred-year-old word, firth is Scots/late Middle English and was raised in the same etymological household as its Scandinavian sibling fjord, flowing from the Old Norse fjörthr.
Firths are long, narrow indentations of the seacoast: generally the result of ice age glaciation and tidal erosion widening existing riverbeds.
The bridge over the Cromarty Firth is low and exposed, putting those who cross it at close quarters with the wild grey water, whipped up by a fierce wind coming in hard on our broadside.
We drive through a road closure and on another half a mile to reach Dornoch Firth Viewpoint. There’s not much to see because of the rainy cloudy weather and the condensation on the windows but at least its quiet since most other drivers are obeying the closure signs and following the diversion away from us.
What you’re reading is my meaningful work, done for wages. You can pay my wages here 👇🏻
It’s nine months to the day since we went on the road. We’re all stuck in the van because of the wet weather and waning motivation, cooped up inside keeping warm and dry by the log burner while the steady rain comes down outside. I have a cuddle and doze with our second-born-son Oak in the front cab before making chai.
An afternoon of books, Mars bars, reading Kindles, dozing, listening to Spotify, Minecraft on iPads, knitting, writing, whittling, colouring, audiobooks on Audible and website design amongst other things.
Everyone’s a bit grouchy, grumpy and flatulent after a delicious bean stew lunch, some of which was spilt on the seat.
As darkness falls we prepare for bed. Everyone tucked in, bedtime story on, drifting away listening to the rain coming down.
Wednesday 3rd April
Dornoch Firth Viewpoint, Scottish Highlands
A workman in a truck pulls up alongside the van in the morning. He’s checking the route for the big wagons coming through to fix the bridge down the road and he’s grumbling at us. We know we’re not supposed to be here so we offer to move on and that satisfies him.
We cross another bridge over another firth, Dornoch this time, unavoidably using the NC500, a victim of its own success. Whenever I join this route from a smaller road I feel anxiety, am subject to impatience from other drivers before I get a chance to pull over and let them pass and notice that there is increased litter and mess on the roadside. As I said, I have mixed feelings about this road.
Taking the chance to pull off, we make lunch at Meikle Ferry North & Slipway, where currents and cries haunt the cold waters.
Ninety-nine people drowned here in 1809 on a calm August day when the ferry was pushed to its limits with passengers and cargo. Disastrously, the ferryman turned broadside to the tide when leaving safe harbour. The boat was swamped by a large wave and quickly sank taking most of the people on board with it. Only a few managed to swim ashore. The surrounding villages were devastated by the loss of so many local folk.
Later on, we pull up in Dalnamain just past the waterfall there, on the crest of a hill overlooking a glen with an abandoned farm house and barn. There are broken down stone walls, which once would have held livestock.
Now deserted with towering electricity pylons charging through its heart, the strath is beautiful and desolate. There are many hut circles, standing stones, cairns, duns, chambered cairns and other old and ancient features nestling quietly on the landscape, trying not to be noticed.
There is nobody around, has been nobody around since the egregious Highland Clearances, during which time people were driven from their homes with ‘bayonet, truncheon and fire’1 so that the clan chiefs might scrape something from their defeat against the English at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.
By leasing their glens and braes to sheep-farmers from the Lowlands and England the chiefs deserted and then betrayed their Highlander kin. This brutal scourge, alongside the resulting low intensity land management, such as farming and grazing, contributed to the survival of monuments from the past. The haunting cultural artefacts remain, while the people are as ghosts.
Torri Falaig, a robbed dun close by, lies long ransacked, emptied. Loch Ruagaidh is to the east.
A small river, Abhainn an t-Sratha Charnaig, flows below, leading to Torboll Fall, a forked waterfall beside a traditional salmon ladder that allows the prized fish to jump up a series of steps which are easier to pass, relative to the waterfall itself.
Before bed, we unfold the big OS map of Great Britain and look at what remains of northern Scotland north of our current location: not much as it turns out.
Drifting off to sleep contemplating the Orkney archipelago.
Thursday 4th April
Dalnamain, Northern Scotland
This morning a backhoe loader arrives at the deserted farmhouse and starts to pull down the central sections of the building. The operator sets a bonfire nearby to burn the broken down beams and rafters. Tara is disappointed. I think she had appropriated it in her mind as her own personal deserted farmhouse.
The rain turns to sleet.
I put on appropriate rain-gear and go for a walk to Torboll Fall. I feel some mental tension release and pour over the edge when I climb down to where the falling water meets the plunge pool below.
This is surely a faery meeting place: a wild, wooded, theatre-in-the-round for the secret working of wonders, a glistening wet amphitheatre for performances that enchant and enrapture.
Underneath the raindrops, surrounded by the roar of the water, the place invites me to come back the following morning to sit, drink down mushroom tea and dance into the unknown nether-lands.
Storm Kathleen, approaching fast that night, has other ideas and I do not go back. Turning down such an invitation is no small throwaway. I’ll have to make amends now, before I think about returning.
We drive on and find ourselves back on the NC500 before turning off onto a large manmade promontory, which thrusts out from the mainland like a phallus, almost bisecting the River Fleet’s progress into Loch Fleet beyond.
The Mound, as this 1000-yard-long embankment is known, was built to bypass the last ferry crossing between London and John O’Groats.
The renowned Scottish civil-engineer behind the Caledonian Canal, Thomas Telford, is often credited with the construction of The Mound, but in truth only played an advisory role.
It was planned and executed by the landowners of Sutherland Estates, through their enforcers William Young and Patrick Sellar, both of whom were at the forefront of the Highland Clearances in this area.
Sellar’s methods, including fire raising and cruelty, were so serious and hostile toward the local people that he was charged with causing death which was neither justified nor accidental. He escaped punishment at his trial in April, 1816, but he stands guilty in the memory of Highland people.
A few months later he turned his attention back to the construction of The Mound, which was completed in the summer of 1816, under the authority of Sellars and his superior Young, utilising the brawn of local people.
On a promise of ale and bread for their labours, local folk gathered with grit and blind obedience for a final push to secure the causeway in the work window between two high tides.
During the few hours available seven-hundred men, using two-hundred-and-fifty wheelbarrows and fifty horses and carts, timbered up and backfilled the whole edge of the causeway towards the sea a layer at a time until the high tide could no longer flow over the top.
Afterwards, as summer gave way to autumn then winter, the people suffered a severe famine. Sellars was responsible for buying in relief supplies for tenants, who would receive them along with a debt to repay the cost later.
The memory of the food provided by the estate: thirty hogsheads of ale and the baker’s forty boils of meal (converted into bread), must have been torturous. I imagine they would have welcomed more backbreaking work if it meant food for their bellies.
On one hand the construction, the sheer amount of earth and stone moved in such a short space of time is immensely impressive: a testament to human endeavour, skill, stamina and willpower. On the other hand it is deeply depressing: yet another example of the dominating and controlling approach an arrogant industrial culture takes to the delicately balanced natural surroundings in which it resides.
Nevertheless, we utilised this manmade embankment, slept on it and made it our home for the night, even found a little peace and quiet by the loch as darkness fell, watching some geese fly over, skimming a stone or two.
Friday 5th April
The Mound, Northern Scotland
This morning, we leave behind the story of those who laboured and toiled to make The Mound and speed across the brutal, soulless concrete bridge built by Margaret Thatcher’s relentless road builders in 1983, bypassing and overshooting all the work done in 1816.
Back on the NC500 there’s more aggravation. Filling up with diesel at a petrol station, we buy a few things in the shop. Outside, Tara fills up one of our jerry cans for drinking water using the outdoor tap underneath the shop window.
After I had paid, the woman behind the till followed me out and told Tara that it would cost £5 for every container filled. We took this to be a dissuading move rather than a serious request and left, without paying and without water.
Down the road we find another petrol station with an old hut attached to it, which probably used to be manned, but no longer, now it’s all shut up. Around the side of the hut is a tap and hosepipe and across the way a mechanic’s workshop.
I can’t see anyone around so I fill up one jerry can at a time, three in all. When I return to top up the last one a man in overalls emerges from the workshop and comes over.
‘Hello’, I say. ‘Is it ok if I fill this up with water?’
‘I was wondering when you were going to ask’, he replies.
‘Sorry I didn’t know it belonged to you,’ I offer in response.
‘Well it does’, he says. “I wouldn’t come into your back garden and use your tap would I?’
I can’t argue with that. I’m firmly in the wrong and have no legs to stand on. I’m also feeling guilty. He’s right, I wouldn’t go into somebody’s back garden and use their outdoor tap.
I do however, regularly fill up with water in public places such as supermarkets, cemeteries, village halls, industrial estates and public toilets. This is outright theft of course, but in the grey areas of the public and business realm.
This man has challenged me most likely because of the ongoing aggravation he is subject to, running a business on the increasingly popular NC500 touring route.
Maybe he is repeatedly being tapped for water by people passing by in motorhomes and camper vans. The inconvenience, irritation and cost that falls on him as a result is probably making him resentful, as it would anyone.
Now here I am taking his water, without asking, becoming part of the problem. We don’t usually travel on high-intensity tourist routes like the NC500 and for the most part I imagine our recidivist water theft goes unnoticed.
Then again, maybe there’s a long tail of unsolved drinking water related crime spiralling out behind us as we travel from place to place.
I should pay for my water, like everyone else does.
On the other hand, commodifying a natural resource from rivers and streams and selling it back to the people, with a little extra sewage overflow, chlorine, fluoride and other chemicals thrown in for good measure is not what I would call a satisfactory solution.
Abundant drinking water once flowed plentifully and naturally on these shores did it not? Available to all who would walk to the riverbank to scoop it up.
Then again, these days, there are plastic bottles full of the stuff in any shop I care to walk into. Why not pay for it and get a plastic bottle thrown in too. What will I do with that then? Oh yes.
I’m slowly slipping under the surface of this philosophical whirlpool, sinking deeper and deeper, so I thank the man for his generosity and offer to pay something toward the cost of the water.
‘No, no,’ he says, no doubt dissimulating his true thoughts and feelings, and waves me away with his hand. So off we go.
The low level resentments going up and down the road on the NC500 are starting to grate so we take a side road off and head into the mountains on a bumpy track.
Signs warn of the danger of being cut off by bad weather, snowdrifts and the like, but we press on.
A few miles in and we are well off the beaten track. On this winding single-lane road there are no garages, mechanic’s workshops, camper vans or indeed any other vehicles. No facilities at all in fact. Just brown and beige heather and grasses, occasional sheep, steep slopes rising either side: some bare, some forested, and burns and rivulets rushing down from on high to join the river running parallel with the road.
After lunch by the river we drive on, easing the van into the low gears to get up the steeply undulating track which is guiding us inexorably, intentionally to Glen Loth, in the Strath of Kildonan, whereupon, a most marvellous discovery is made: an old tumbledown croft beside Loth Burn that captures our hearts.
Saturday 6th April
Strath of Kildonan, Northern Scotland
Our remote, high-vantage, resting spot a mile on from the tumbledown croft makes for a wild, wet and windy night’s sleep. Briefly, I go out into the thick of it in the early hours. It hits me with pure unadulterated life-force and I exalt in the morning wind and rain, before taking refuge back in the van.
Heading back down the valley we retrace our route until we find the the broken-down house in Glen Loth again. As we eat breakfast a skein of geese flies over, heading north.
There’s a hell of a lot more water flowing in the burn this morning and I go off with the boys, Thor, Oak and North, to look for the remains of a ford and footbridge marked on the OS map.
Yellow primroses colour-pop the brown-beige, black-grey surroundings.
Downstream, there’s a dashing little waterfall, its flow emboldened by the overnight rainfall. The ford is awash, deluged by all the runoff from the higher ground.
Further up toward the old house, there’s no sign of the footbridge, other than perhaps an old foundation footing under the overgrown gorse, but nothing more.
Supplies are running low and we must return to civilisation to restock so, after home-made pancakes drizzled with butter and maple syrup, we drive to Wick.
The pancakes make an unwelcome return during the drive. We’ve been mercifully free of travel sickness so far but it can get a bit nauseating in the back of the van if the road is all up-down-round-and-round, but at least in the back there’s room to move about and allay the symptoms.
This time the youngest, North, joins me and our ten-year-old Oak in the front. Dozing off on the winding coast road with the heating going full blast, to help dry out lengths of pallet wood in the footwell, he wakes up to empty the contents of his belly on to the sheepskins on the front seats.
After the clean-up we find our way over to Wick with the priority destination being Caithness Coffee Company.
The stimulants coffee, tea and cocoa are some of the core consciousness-altering substances we rely upon in the van. The others being sugar: Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer currently the new kid on the chocolate block, dopamine (via shiny-shiny-bright-screen-techy-tech) and occasionally alcohol (currently restricted to high-quality single-malt whiskey: Tobermory 12 Year Whiskey from the Tobermory Distillery on the Isle of Mull being the gateway drug).
When it comes to coffee, we are insufferable, pompous ass, elitist fools. If we run out, I comfort myself with tea, but Tara experiences deep existential dread and her stone-hard industriousness, the subject of tree-stump-digging legend, nosedives.
Thus, we are always on the lookout for a good-quality, sovereign, coffee roastery, tucked away in a back alley off a side street. In Caithness Coffee Company, we find just such a thing. It is, as far as I can tell, an authentic, independent outfit.
In a well-proportioned room of a house with large windows called the Bruce Building, a silent, side-glancing man sits at a main table glaring at a tablet. In one corner an admin desk and computer and in the other, display shelves full of coffee accoutrements next to a cubbyhole for roasting, measuring and grinding beans.
The owner, a late-middle-aged Australian confusingly speaking with a South African accent, guides Tara through a tour of the roasts, flavours and blends he has on offer.
He is a little hard of hearing so misses one or two of my unmissable quips and jaunty remarks when I join them a few minutes later, but, nae bother, he has his hands on the good stuff and that is all that matters.
The house blend, combining beans from five different countries, is particularly pleasing when we try it later. This is odd, as we normally prefer single origin, but that just goes to show what pretentious piffle I’m talking.
The Australian with a South African accent describes it as a strong, rich, after-dinner roast: a very smooth coffee of full body, with excellent aroma, never bitter and widely praised.
Continuing our system jobs we drive to the retail park. Operation Sea Lion might have failed in its plan to invade our shores, but German discount retail chain Aldi and Lidl’s infiltration of British territory has been a conspicuous success.
The Wick branch of the German invader is a most depressing, hopeless place.
In response to the ubiquitous ‘how-are-you-today’ from behind the checkout, the tall, hunched, red-faced man before me in the queue replies, ‘not good, not good.’
Nevertheless, once he’s gone, waiting for me behind the till is a blessed break in the black cloud of despair: hirsute Hagen, a long-haired and bearded checkout king.
I read and say his name as we approach and he is pleased because I have pronounced it correctly: har-gun.
Asking him what his namesake has been up to, over the years, he smiles and his eyes get fiery.
‘He was one of the last Germanic vikings,’ Hagen tells me. ‘A fearsome warrior who stole a king’s treasure and escaped with the loot. He then fought to survive numerous attempts to kill him as successive waves of vengeful warrior troops pursued him and tried to get it back.’
This was the beginning of a bloodthirsty tale and I wanted more. Hagen wanted to tell it too, but the Lidl checkout queue, surely as fierce and aggressive as any viking horde, was glaring and bearing down upon us from the rear.
We beat a hasty retreat.
Sunday 7th April
Caithness, far north of Scotland
Awp.
Whaup.
The first thing I hear as I wake from sleep is the curlew. In Scotland it is known onomatopoeically as the awp or the whaup.
I’m writing in the cab this morning. Tara is busy brushing clean sheepskins. The children are playing outside. It’s sunny, cloudy and breezy.
Everyone has stepped in the bog in front of the van and soaked at least one shoe, sock and foot. The laundry is overflowing so we have to find a laundrette, which means a return trip to Wick.
There are little lambs playing in the blustery fields as we approach.
We stop in town on a quiet corner to post a letter in a red post box. There are no cars around, nothing in front, nothing behind, but we have irritated a woman approaching on foot.
Walking along staring at her screen, she raises her head to shake it at me and says in a grumpy voice, ‘you can’t park there.’
‘We’ll be gone in a moment,’ I reply, smiling.
She shakes her head again, looked down at her phone and shambles away down the street muttering to herself.
Parked by the harbour outside the laundrette I can see Waterfront Nightclub, Spice Tandoori. It’s all rather downtrodden. Christ Died For Our Sins hits us in big letters from the side of a building across the water. The waves and water in between are tinged with brown.
Suddenly, Tara shouts out. She has spotted an otter emerging from the sea and over the wall. It dashes across the road and up the opposite pavement at a pace, loping humpbacked and fast toward a woman and her small white fluffy dog coming the other way. A sharp stop, think, change of tack, then it’s running across the road and back up and over the sea wall.
A few minutes later, a head peeks up and there it is again, leaping onto the sea wall, running along the top, back across the road, narrowly escaping the wheels of an approaching car.
Then a quick scamper up the steps leading off the pavement, dashing toward the houses on the rise, where it promptly disappears from sight.
Monday 8th April
Gills Bay Pentland Ferries, opposite Stroma, Northern Scotland
A solitary, early-morning walk down the path from the top of the cliff we have parked on.
Incredible white light: whiter and brighter than anything I’ve seen for some time. The wind is very strong and has been all night, buffeting the van.
It’s sheltered down by the beach. The path is boggy green grass. Tufty and brown on either side.
Bright white seagulls and other birds wheel above a blue ocean. The waves move tumultuously.
I think I see a sand martin: a bright underbelly and short wings.
The island of Stroma sits offshore in the sunshine. Big waves hitting her south-west cliffs.
Mentioned in the 12th century Orkneyinga Saga, Stroma or straum-øy in Old Norse means island in the current or island in the stream.
Located off the northernmost point is the Swilkie, the most dangerous whirlpool in the Pentland Firth which is caused by the meeting of four or five contrary tides.
According to Icelandic legend the Swilkie is the place where the salt which maintains the saltiness of the oceans is ground in a giant quern, stolen from King Frodi by a sea-king named Mysing.
There is a lighthouse at the northern end of the island to warn ships away but frequent shipwrecks spilled goods ashore, something the families who lived on the island would welcome as bounty.
Stroma is just over two miles long and a mile wide. For centuries it supported a thriving island community: almost entirely self-sufficient, it was home to hundreds of hardy islanders who crafted distinctive barrel chested boats called yoles which were designed to navigate the extreme tidal forces, whirlpools and turbulent waters to fish and guide other seafarers.
At the start of the 20th century, it supported a population of three-hundred-and-seventy-five islanders. Within forty years the number had slumped to around a hundred and by the early 1960s, just twelve people remained.
More than sixty years have passed since Stroma’s last residents left for good. The croft houses I can see through my binoculars basking in the early spring sunshine are now in a state of collapse with sheep and birds for occupants instead of people.
Stroma is only a few miles off the mainland but it was an isolated place because of the harsh weather and the treacherous sea. The winter of 1937 brought their isolation into sharp focus when violent gales and storms lashed the island, destroying seafront houses and washing boats a hundred yards inland.
People left Stroma in dribs and drabs. The ones who stayed started to think that everyone was leaving and no-one was coming back.
The Sinclairs of Mey sold their portion of the island to Colonel F. B. Imbert-Terry in 1929, who sold it in turn to John Hoyland, an umbrella manufacturer from Yorkshire, in 1947.
Hoyland also acquired the remaining island estate of the Sinclairs of Freswick, uniting Stroma for a reported cost of £4,000. His tenure coincided with the final collapse of the island's population.
In December 1960, it was sold to Jimmy Simpson, an islander whose family had moved to farm on the mainland near the Castle of Mey in 1943.
Simpson bought it, almost on a whim, after learning that is was available during a conversation with a lawyer who was privy to the negotiations going back and forth on the property market. Simpson’s wife was not happy with the new acquisition, believing it to be an act of stupidity, and reportedly flew at him in a rage.
As well as running Stroma as a sheep farm, each summer Simpson ferried hundreds of tourists to the island. He died in 2019 and the island remains in the ownership of the family with his son William taking over the sheep farming side.
I stand still for a while, marvelling at the beautiful colours and the light: white and clear and blinding. Yellow celandine flowers beam at me. Then the grey clouds make their way over and dim things down.
Back up the path there are many caterpillars, lots of them looking at me while chewing on their breakfast. I think they are readying to be drinker moths.
From our high vantage point, we watch the ferry, Pentalina, slide around the back of Stroma and head for safe harbour: it’s not a straightforward manoeuvre and the captain has four or five attempts before coming in close and going in hard and fast to secure a successful docking.
The ramp comes down, people off, cars off, lorries off, new lorries on (reversed), new cars on (forward-facing), crew back on board and away it goes, disappearing behind Stroma.
There’s a partial eclipse of the sun tonight and we’re aiming for the lighthouse at Dunnet Head, the most northerly point of mainland Britain.
True north.
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The Highland Clearances John Prebble