A monthly feature in which I share an account of our escapades from one Monday morning to the next.
Monday 6th May
Craggie Water, Strath of Kildonan, Northern Scotland
The Audacious* Six is covered in ticks. I have escaped their jaws but Tara has found one or two on her legs and our four little tykes are harbouring mites: ixodes ricinus to be exact, more commonly known as the sheep, castor-bean or deer tick.
We pincered two from North our youngest and one from his six-year-old sister. By the evening Red had gathered four more on her upper torso and neck.
As a highly assertive and extroverted person, she objected strongly to this sudden rash of parasites on her body and generated an intense emotional drama at bedtime, but this was not our first such rodeo, and we managed to get through it together.
We also plucked some from second-born-son Oak, who had two, while Thor, the eldest, had one sitting directly on the centre of his forehead, which had not yet dug in.
Yesterday we found a place to sleep next to a bridge over a river called Craggie Water which runs through the wild and remote Strath of Kildonan, in the Highlands of Scotland.
As a sassenach1 travelling north of the border, I often encounter unfamiliar Scottish words which are mysterious to me: such as strath.
A strath is a broad mountain valley: usually a river valley, wide and shallow. Contrast this with glen: also a valley, but small, narrow and deep.
Strath and glen were both filched from the Gaels who named their broad valleys sraths and mountain valleys gleanns. Gaelic language and culture originated in Ireland before crossing the water to western Scotland via the Dál Riata tribal kingdom during the Early Middle Ages, more than one-thousand-five-hundred years ago.
The Strath of Kildonan is indeed wide and shallow but the ravine cut into the rocks by Craggie Water is deep and narrow, more like a glen.
Craggie Water is a tributary of the River Helmsdale, which is also fed by burns including Bannock Burn on its left and Suisgill Burn on its right.
A burn is a brook or rivulet. The Scottish Gaelic word bùrn means fresh water but the Gaelic word for a burn is allt.
This detailed and specific naming of things in the landscape feels unfamiliar these days. Before we were divorced from the land by the industrial revolution, amongst other things, perhaps this rich tapestry of meaning and significance would have been second nature to us.
In The Crofter and the Laird writer John McPhee returns for a time to live in his ancestral homelands on the Inner Hebridean island of Colonsay. He notes that, ‘almost every rise of ground, every beach, field, cliff, gully, cave, and skerry has a name,’ and that ‘all these names are preserved in the memories of the people.’
‘The names commemorate events, revive special interests and proprietary claims of lives long gone, and sketch the land in language: Caolas nan Locharnach (the Norsemen’s Channel), Bogha nan Diurach (the Reef of the Jura Men), Bealach Pholl a’ Ghlearain (the Pass of the Yellow-Rattle Pool), Gleann Raon a’ Bhuilg (the Glen of the Baglike Plain), Sgeir na Tuathail (the Skerry of the North-Facing Creek), Sguid nam Ban Truagh (the Shelter of the Miserable Women)…’
Craggie Water has the ring of this close relationship with the land: where the high bridge crosses the cut, rust-coloured water zig-zags through craggy, angular, silver-black rocks and crags. Pools swell between two or three small sequential waterfalls.
I first climb down the sides of the gully with Oak. Something in my son’s soul is well met here. He crouches down and sits on an outcrop, watching the water flow downstream. He becomes still.
It’s Monday morning and we all climb down together to bathe in the cold shallows. Drizzle hangs like mist in the overcast and grey sky. The ambient temperature may be mild but the plunge pool chills to the bone as everyone crosses the threshold, entering the water in their own unique way.
Oak is in and out quick-smart. For our daughter Red, the process is more embellished: there is great exuberance, joy, shrieking, smiling and laughter as she teases the edges. Eleven-year-old arctic Thor, who took regular sheepskin-wrapped naps outside on winter days as a baby, is first to swim out deep and completely submerge, without fuss, seemingly immune to the cold, fearless in the face of the chill, enlivened by it even.
Youngest son North has to be held over the surface, screaming, in the arms of one parent while the other sloshes strategic parts of his wriggling naked body. I go in and out until my feet stop hurting, then dunk down three times before admitting defeat prematurely. Tara walks out nice and slow, composes herself, takes deep breaths and then drops to her neck, keeping her head above water. She looks startled.
All the boys get out and head back up, leaving Red and Tara in the river. I witness, briefly, a pristine tableau of my woman and daughter, bare-skinned, immersed in the elements. I am, for a moment, a lone wanderer observing something secret, sacred and timeless: a besprinkled faerie glen, a gathering place for sylphs and sprites.
Fairies are said to live in the neighbouring burn of Invernauld near Rosehall. A local man once heard music coming from a cave he discovered on a hill nearby. He entered the cave to investigate and was not seen again by mortal eyes until a year later, when he was found inside dancing merrily to the music of fairy pipers.2
I let this magical moment draw out as long as it will, before it dissolves.
On the way back up Red is effusive and effervescent:
‘It’s like a new world after bathing in the river,’ she says. ‘I feel like one of the plants.’
As Tara makes breakfast, cuckoo is calling. It has been our constant companion at Craggie Water. Then a mistle thrush arrives, addressing us from the top of the tallest birch tree. It delivers short phrases of flute-like warbles and scratchy notes, similar to the blackbird's song, but faster.
Later we fill our drinking bottles with the fast-flowing water and sup. Filtered through a piece of cloth, it still has a green tinge, but it tastes mineral rich and fresh. It’s alive. Nobody gets ill. It’s our first foray into drinking from source but we balk at the prospect of putting the river water through the jerry can, pump and sink system, which means we’re forced back into town in search of a tap.
We find ourselves back in Brora. There were bad vibes here the first time we came through when we were taking drinking water from outdoor taps and the locals took umbrage; not unreasonably.
This time we head for the cemetery. Two local women turn up as I’m closing the gate to leave. I hear their exchange before they see me:
‘Oh the gate’s open,’ says the first woman.
‘They’re probably getting water,' says her friend.
She shakes her head and scowls at me as I hold the gate open for them to come through. Then she takes the gate from me and shuts it firmly behind her. Message received and understood.
Always the bad vibes in Brora. Not so much in other places but my presence and actions here are clearly contributing to the miasma, so we leave.
I craft words to delight you.
You, filled to the brim, send money by way of thanks 👇🏻
Driving out of town, I observe what could be the deeper historical root of some of the discord.3
A grotesque monolithic erection pierces the skyline, dominating everything below. Its totem-tone dangerous, foreboding and deathlike.
The red sandstone effigy, of a bilious and rheumatic creature with a great hawk-nose drooping over a prim mouth, is simultaneously conducting and transmitting ill-feeling and hostility.
It rears thirty feet from a pedestal seventy-six feet high at the top of Ben Bhraggie, which is itself thirteen hundred feet above the green water of the Dornoch Firth.
Its back is to the glens he emptied, it faces the sea to which his policies committed five thousand people as emigrants or herring-fishers.
Paid for by public subscription after his death, it is a monument to the great improver: a Knight of the Garter, a Privy Councillor, Recorder of Stafford, a Trustee of the British Museum, a Vice-President of the Society of Arts, and an Hereditary Governor of the British Institution.
He was the Most Noble George Granville Leveson-Gower, second Marquess of Stafford, third Earl Gower and Viscount Trentham, fourth Lord Gower of Stittenham in Yorkshire and eighth baronet of the same place.
Ultimately and pre-eminently though, for the last six months of his life at least, he was the first Duke of Sutherland.
During his tenure in the Scottish Highlands many thousands of his tenants were forcibly evicted and left destitute when the Sutherland clearances began in the early 1800s.
The people of Sutherland were a hardy and insular race, an amalgam of Norse and Gael, cut off from the outside world by its indifference to them and by the absence of a single road.
They raised goats and black cattle, potatoes and inferior oats, brewed a rough beer and distilled a raw whisky for their dreams. They broke the earth with wooden ploughs, lived in crude huts of sod and stone and, in the opinion of the Duke’s Commissioner James Loch, they ‘added little to the wealth of the empire.’
‘Contented with the poorest and most simple fare and, like all mountaineers, accustomed to a roaming, unfettered life which attached them in the strongest manner to the habits and homes of their fathers, they deemed no new comfort worth the possessing which was to be acquired at the price of industry; no improvement worthy of adoption if it was to be obtained at the expense of sacrificing the customs or leaving the hovels of their ancestors.’
James Loch naturally thought it proper that the people of Sutherland should be pulled out of the past by the scruff of their necks. Those who resisted such treatment deserved just chastisement from a constable's truncheon or an infantryman's bayonet.
This was the work of the Duke of Sutherland and the great Improvers, here in Brora and across the Highlands. We are driving through an epicentre of historical misery, insecurity and enforced hardship, on one of the newly constructed roads forced into the heart of an old community.
Although two-hundred years have since passed, the injustice persists and the memorialised oppressor stands front and centre, glorying in his work, a constant reminder to the modern-day descendants who live here, of how their people, their culture and their way of life, was uprooted and destroyed.
The sun that overhangs yon moors,
Out-spreading far and wide,
Where hundreds labour to support
A haughty lordling's pride; -
I've seen yon weary winter-sun
Twice forty times return;
And ev'ry time has added proofs,
That man was made to mourn.4
On the other hand it could just be that people don’t like outsiders coming through and taking what they want without recompense.
Either way, we’re clearing out.
Tuesday 7th May
Lamington Wood, near Tain, Highlands of Scotland
I’m gazing up at a tall fir tree first thing in the morning. Its new cones are just coming through on the tips of the branches, showing bright light-green. Each one has a leafy brown hat that is easily slipped off between finger and thumb. Here and there the more developed cones are colour-popping the tree with raspberry-red splashes like Christmas fairy lights, while others are starting to brown off as they mature.
I sit with my son Oak under the tree in the early sunshine. We have just finished the Kabir poem we have been writing out together and now it’s time to read it aloud in turn. We crouch down on our haunches and listen to each other reading, slaves of intensity. A short distance away, my daughter Red is also listening in, engrossed.
The Glen of Scotsburn runs through this woodland, feeding numerous springs and wells including St George’s Well, St David’s Well and Provost’s Well. Over time, drawn in by the water and putting it to work in different ways, crofters have settled and then moved on, industry has exploited and then abandoned the place, and now we come and go, making it our home for a night, before moving on.
The royal burgh of Tain offers up the supplies we need. Lidl is richer, we are poorer, and the immersion in town-city-system-civilisation leaves us overwhelmed, anxious, cranky and distressed.
We spend as much of our time as possible in natural, remote or wild places. They vary greatly as it is increasingly difficult to escape the system and find places that have unfolded naturally and geologically without too much interference from man. Another way of putting it, borrowed from Darren Allen, is that we try to spend more time on the earth and less time in the world: the world being the technological-bureaucratic-industrial-machine that is increasingly smothering and obliterating the earth and that, much to my chagrin, I cannot survive without.
‘…because each one of us has given up our lives to the system and are completely addicted to it, even as it crushes us. Turning against the entire system means turning against that part of our own souls which the system has colonised.’5
It may not be possible to escape the system-world completely but there are still out-of-reach nooks and far-flung crannies where it feels like the earth is breathing freely, where the part contains the whole, and those are the places where I can exhale fully and feel less scattered and more whole as a human being.
What is natural and what is not is difficult to define. There’s a difference between sitting on the high, bleak, ghostly moors of the Highlands of Scotland and hiding on a rough track by a farmer’s field in rural Suffolk. Arguably, one is more natural than the other, but both have been shaped and influenced by man over the centuries, there’s no denying that.
What they both have in common though is that they are not towns, cities or conurbations: sprawling, densely populated, urban areas with constant traffic, interchangeable retail parks, soulless shopping centres, rows of uninspiring houses, filthy industrial estates, bullish advertising boards, bustling busy people and relentless demands to either be afraid or part with your cash, or both.
Most of the human-built places I encounter have these grinding, wearing, soul-crushing, humanity-depleting features structurally embedded within them, by degrees, and once you start spending more time out of the hustle and bustle and less time swept up in it, it becomes very clear how slow-burn harmful it is to human sanity to live in these places.
Over the last eleven months, skirting, as I do, the outskirts of conventionality, coming in and out of the system, I have lost the ability to endure the man-made world for very long without going mad: getting upset, frustrated, overwhelmed, anxious and angry.
I recognise my hypocrisy, that I am dependent upon this world, cannot do without it. I regularly return to make use of its structural services like petrol stations, supermarkets, laundries and leisure centres, for my own convenience. I also use the road system, car parks, public toilets and rubbish bins.
Life would become difficult and challenging rather quickly if I didn’t have access to this infrastructure that has been built up under the name of progress and civilisation. Even so, this doesn’t change the fact that built-up civilisation is a miserable, unnatural and insufferable place to be.
I used to live within the system full-time. I may have to again if I can’t keep this audacious show on the road.
The prospect of losing this freedom fuels a fierce conflict between myself and Tara in a car park overlooking the Dornoch Firth, shortly after the Lidl experience.
One of our few income streams comes to an end soon and the feud ignites when we differ on how to deal with the forthcoming financial shortfall.
Faced with this sort of scenario, Tara looks ahead and seeks to plan and strategise calmly and proactively, of her own volition, whereas I wait for impact and respond retrospectively and energetically, but only when roused. These two different approaches have their own pros and cons.6
The advantage of Tara’s position is that we can get ahead of the problem and seek to smooth and clear the rocky road ahead of time. The disadvantage of her approach is that it pulls us out of the present (often benign) moment prematurely and casts us into the conceptual (often existentially fraught) future. Time spent in the future (or past) is lost. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
The advantage of my position is that we can linger for longer in the reality of now, without being troubled by real or imagined future peril. The disadvantage of my approach is that when difficulty inevitably does arrive, my response is reactionary and volatile and the transition is jarring as we hit the bumpy road without having made decent preparations. Although I always find a way through, it is unpredictable, disruptive and emotionally intense for everyone involved.
We are now fighting because it has suddenly become clear, in Tain, that we left the distant sanctuary of the Highlands because Tara was subconsciously anxious about money and wanted to resolve that. I have been drawn out of the temporary respite of the straths and glens prematurely and am now looking headlong into the system with a thousand-yard-stare looking bleakly at the reality of finding more work, proactively rather than reactively.
This realisation spikes my sadness, frustration and sense of loss and when I start to point out what has happened to Tara, we meet each other’s underlying fear coming the other way and it starts to get messy.
So while the children are (thankfully) outside playing in the nearby park, I am shouting at her from the front, repeatedly hitting the headrest as my emotions pour out, while she is seething at me in the back, combative, resentful and distrustful, as her emotions pour in.
The temperature rises and boils over and then we go silent, shut down, separate and withdraw from each other, retreating inward along our old familiar paths, both now miserable and cut off.
To escape the tension, I leave the van and walk to stand on the edge of the firth, watching the tide retreat.
Suddenly there is a harsh blast of cataclysmic sound: Eurofighter Typhoon jets are out on training exercises.
My senses are shocked and it takes a while to catch up: the sound doesn’t correspond to a visual because they are ahead of the noise they’re making, such is their speed, and I’m so far away that the loud distinctive roar is taking time to reach me.
Flying low, the first plane appears from stage right before making a steep climb up and over the forth. At peak altitude it levels off and turns sharply to circle around before disappearing into the distance. At this point the second aircraft appears, as if in pursuit, and performs the same manoeuvre. It is only when this second plane makes its entrance that the thunderous sound made by its predecessor hits me.
The noise drives everything else out. All of nature cowers before it. Bird life scatters. The sound of the sea is drowned out. People strolling stop, turn and crane their necks to see, their attention arrested by this unholy barrage.
When the engines of these aircraft are running at full power, they produce a high level of noise, and they are positioned loud and proud close to the surface with no wasteful sound-muffling apparatus. When the afterburners inject additional fuel into the hot exhaust gases produced by the engine, causing the gases to ignite and expand, more thrust and more sound results.
It is pure energy, felt as a forceful vibration. It’s all-encompassing and overwhelming. It’s exciting and terrifying, profoundly anti-human and awe-inspiring.
Presented to us as a protective, pro-human, defensive necessity, it is in my eyes a weapon more at home in the hands of gods, not accidental gods, but intentional, destructive, warmongering gods.
These military deities are based east of here, across the water at RAF Lossiemouth, which opened in May 1939 in preparation for the Second World War, and has been home to the Typhoon since 2019.
Four squadrons, each with around twelve aircraft, are maintained. The estimated cost of the Typhoon programme was more than £17.6 billion, making it the most expensive weapon system yet produced for the UK. Each plane costs roughly £110 million and the little display I witnessed burned through £3875: the cost of flying a Typhoon for one hour.
I am immersed in conflict, within and without.
In the car park later, I’m sitting on our wood chopping block leaning against the van, withdrawn and despondent, hiding inside noise cancelling headphones, listening to James W Douglass’s examination of how JFK was sabotaged, betrayed and done away with by the nation he was attempting to steer toward peace. It’s a deeply depressing tale about the darkness of mankind, which suits my mood.
A young father, holding the up-stretched arms of his little toddling daughter, approaches slowly. He must be in his mid-twenties, just finished his shift for the day, still wearing his work boots, dirty grey jeans, hoodie. I recognise a past version of myself in his stooped back and halting steps necessary to support and stabilise his child as she learns to walk. She needs him and he’s happy to be needed. His love for her bends his back.
I offer him my eyes and he opens the conversation:
‘Beautiful van conversion. I love it.’
‘Thanks,’ I say, removing my headphones and trying hard to be friendly.
‘We’ve got a bit of land and we’re moving into a static caravan,’ he says. ‘My wife’s parents gave us the land and we’re going to build our own house. We’re very lucky because not a lot of young people can do that these days.’
‘That is lucky,’ I reply.
‘Yeah, but that’s what I really want,’ he says, nodding to our vehicle. ‘I want to convert a van.’ He gazes through the open side door and disappears off into a dream. ‘Maybe when this one’s a bit bigger.’
‘Maybe,’ I say, ‘good luck with it,’ and they toddle off.
When they have gone, I reflect on what people want, or think they want, from life, and what others make up about our life when we drive into their town in our van. As far as I can tell from the limited information he shared, this fellow father has been given a lucky break in life, he has secured land, shelter and work. He has a family, a partner, a beautiful daughter. You’ve got everything you need there my friend, settle down, ease into it, enjoy yourself.
But there’s something missing for him isn’t there, betrayed by his lingering reverie when contemplating our van: the lure of the open road, go anywhere, see the world, cut loose, escape, find freedom.
Who knows.
I sit a while longer. A lone swan flies over.
In the evening as we’re getting ready for bed, I watch two or three skeins of geese head north over the Dornoch Firth Bridge into pale orange skies at dusk.
They remind me of black and white footage showing waves of Douglas C-47 aircraft carrying twenty-three-thousand paratroopers over enemy lines during Operation Overlord when Allied forces launched a combined naval, air and land assault on Nazi-occupied France.
When all is quiet and skeins of geese fly over, the collective movement of their wings creates a great rush of air which I can hear now. It is at once both gentle and powerful.
The passage of these migrating birds through the sky stands in stark contrast to the war birds that went before them, both this afternoon and also eighty-years ago.
Wednesday 8th May
Dornoch Firth, Tain, Highlands of Scotland
A new moon today. A hazy sun hangs over the exposed bed of Dornoch Firth running for miles out in front of me. A few rabbits scatter. White blossom from an apple or cherry tree is raining down on the van.
The lorry driver who parked up last night is up early. A man emerges from a motorhome to walk his dog. Attempts to style it out in a swim robe. Fails. The truly-stylish French couple in the van next door, who look chic even in camping clothes, are still asleep.
We are one of about eight camper vans and motorhomes in this car park by the water. I much prefer a sleep-spot without anyone else around. Coming from the Highlands in the last few days where it was quiet and wild and free this feels busy. But it’s peaceful and calm and friendly and I’m grateful for that.
I write these words as skilfully as I can, and trade them with you for money 👇🏻
After breakfast we drive to Tarbat Ness Lighthouse, which is located at the north-west tip of the Tarbat Ness peninsula near the fishing village of Portmahomack, on the east coast.
The land here extends its little finger between the Dornoch Firth and Moray Firth as if attempting to appear elegant while drinking tea from a china cup.7
The pleasing lighthouse, with its broad red bands, was commissioned after sixteen vessels were lost in a November storm in the Moray Firth in 1826. At 130ft high with two-hundred-and-three steps to the top, it is the third tallest lighthouse in Scotland, after North Ronaldsay and Skerryvore.8
I can see bluebells in amongst the abundance of bright yellow gorse covering much of the headland. A heady, meady smell permeates the air.
Prior to the arrival of the lighthouse, witches and their covens would meet in the darkness at this remote and otherworldly foreland, at least until the Great Scottish Witch Hunt of 1597, which scourged the common people from March to October.
The passing of the Witchcraft Act 1563 made witchcraft, or consulting with witches, capital crimes. The Scottish monarch at the time, King James VI, was an enthusiastic persecutor. In 1597 he published a three-part book called Daemonologie which explored the practice of necromancy: magic, witchcraft and communication with the dead.
Fear and suspicion of people, mainly women, who were accused of making the diabolic pact (a deal with the devil), lead to thousands of people (both men and women) being accused. More than one-thousand-five-hundred were executed: most were strangled or burned.
The mass murder of women is a sinister reflection of the culture in which it takes place. The earthquakes sometimes reported at Turbot Ness, which shake the shades and rattle the lighthouse lamp glass, should perhaps be read as a deep protest and seismic warning from the underworld as to these grim injustices committed by men.
Before dinner, whilst clambering over rocks down on the shore with Thor and Oak, a pod of dolphins emerges from the deep. Oak spots them first: quite far out, probably bottlenose. He’d seen the rise and fall of their curved backs breaking the water. As we watch them together, swimming north across the Moray Firth, a silence descends and something timeless settles on us like a blanket. We are collectively calmed, reverent.
In the evening, when I’ve finished reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to North, the lighthouse flashes on automatically just before nine o’clock. The red and white building, tall and proud, growing out of the glowing gorse is the view from my bed as I settle in for the night.
Thursday 9th May
Tarbat Ness Lighthouse, Highlands of Scotland
The wind gets up this morning on Tarbat Ness: a cool sou’westerly.
Walking early I see skylark go up high at the cliff edge. Martins are jinking and diving.
The sky is purple and blue. Shafts and slits of yellow-orange light come through bruised clouds in the east.
The gorse has a hallucinogenic glow. The sea, initially flat and black, starts to sparkle in the sunshine as the sun comes out. A little sailing boat bobs on the water.
I think I can hear a dunnock and there's also a yellowhammer: its song starts with several fast chirps rather like a grasshopper, followed by one or two long notes. It is traditionally described as: ‘a-little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese’.
Pied wagtail is searching for crumbs back at the car park. Robin redbreast and female blackbird visit briefly and a lovely linnet plays a varied, tuneful song which includes some buzzy notes.
A young German couple have parked their muscular pick-up truck nose to nose with our van. They have a slide-on pick-up camper on the back which is housing both parents and their breastfeeding baby. This morning he goes off with a fishing rod while she nurses the infant up top. The little one is restless and I can hear it mewing and crying. I am reminded of the four times I have been through this caring of babies with Tara leading the way and I realise that it is behind us now, consigned to our past.
With our growing children we clamber down to an old jetty at the bottom of the cliff which seems to have been made half by man, half by nature. We strip and swim in the clear blue shallows.
Oak is in first. Thor dives in and achieves total immersion. Red is noisy. North is refusing. This all conforms to our family pattern. Sitting in the sun on the stones afterward the sun feels burning-hot on my skin. It is the first time this year that I have felt such sunburn.
Afterwards, some of us beeline for the bench-with-the-best-view up on the clifftop to sit and read in the sun, wistfully searching the horizon for more dolphins.
After lunch, we unexpectedly see them again. I am in the van making chai and Tara comes running to tell me. They are much closer this time, two pods by the looks of things, swimming past, looking relaxed and playful, in their element. One or two perform a few lazy side jumps with accompanying splashes on reentry.
In the evening, rain is coming on. Everyone else goes down to make a fire and drink cocoa underneath a rocky overhang on the stoney beach. I stay in the van for a work call.
When I finish I’m called down to help Oak, who has climbed up the cliff face and got stuck on a ledge. I haul myself up, hold on tight to a fissure in the rock, and he climbs partway down my body before jumping back down.
Friday 10th May
Tarbat Ness Lighthouse, Highlands of Scotland
‘A-little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese.’
‘A-little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese.’
I awaken to yellowhammer, who is first up this morning.
Overnight, the great haar has come in.
The haar is a cold sea fog which occurs most often on the east coast of Scotland between April and September.
Its origin is related to Middle Dutch haren, a cold, sharp wind, which rolls in when warm air passes over the cold North Sea.
It’s made everything damp. Snails abound, enjoying the lush wet grass. Four curlews fly over while I’m fertilising the soil.
Down with the haar comes a decline in my mood, something a Scottish friend of mine would dismiss as metaphorical drivel: it’s just weather.
I can’t concentrate, write, or be in close proximity with any of my kin without getting irritated.
But when I return to the bench-with-the-view, I am given gifts as ‘the-thing-in-itself’9 makes itself known to me in fleeting, magical moments: the martins coming and going from their nests in the cliffs, the stones that have inexplicably congregated on a high rock shelf, the close eeriness of the haar, the gulls emerging ghostlike out of the mist, the sun occasionally burning through the fog and warming my face, the sound of the calm lapping sea, the smoky-blueness of the middle distance and the sheer death-drop off the cliff metres in front of me.
By midday, the meteorological miasma has started to retreat. I lay down precariously on the edge of the cliff and doze in the strengthening sun. It develops into one of those quality sleeps: deep, warm and restful. On the brink of a long drop I can really let go, it seems.
In the afternoon, the curious and ineffable impulses that compel us to move on from any given place arise from their secluded source, so we gather in our things, pack up and drive away from the lighthouse.
On the way we see rapeseed10 sprawling in roadside fields. A sweet nectar smell wafts through the window, accompanied by the first flush of hay fever.
Saturday 11th May
Kiltearn Burial Ground, Cromarty Firth, Highlands of Scotland
We are sleeping beside the graveyard of an old ruined parish kirk which stands on the shore of Cromarty Firth. We don’t know it yet but we have slept through a rare and extensive display of the Northern Lights across the UK.
Songbirds in the burial ground and surrounding trees begin their morning worship at 4:30am. My eyes ease open.
My forehead is throbbing and glowing after I exposed it to the sun yesterday. I was a wee bit peely-wally11 in the morning, but by the evening I was sporting a red glow that was warm to the touch.
There were a few fellow sun-chasers down by the water, including a young Scottish lad sporting a white singlet. Pale and skinny, with a painful pink burn across his shoulders and the tops of his arms he outstripped my efforts by some margin.
The church here has been around since at least 1227, when the first pastor was documented. It is now a ruin. Its roof was removed in the 1950s and the congregation within is made up of undergrowth, small animals, insects and birds.
I rise and walk down an old track that has been used for centuries by local people. The footpaths at Kiltearn and Balconie date back to medieval times, crossing the lands of the former Balconie Estate. The original lands were home to one of the most powerful Houses in Scotland.
Tramping the recently restored Glebe Path I think about the generations of peasant folk who have trudged this route before me, no doubt carrying their own burdens, literal and metaphorical. I walk with the ancestors of the past along the edge of the firth to the footbridge over the River Sgitheach, pronounced skee-ach: Scottish Gaelic for hawthorn river.
Gazing down at the shallow water, old friend curlew calls to me. The sun is rising downstream of the road-bridge crossing the firth. It has some warmth to it. I shed a single layer of clothing.
There are hordes of shiny black insects bobbing about with their legs hanging down lazily beneath them as they drift along above the vegetation: St Mark’s Fly, so called because they emerge around St Mark’s Day (April 25th). They land on me and are sluggish when I encourage them to move on.
This path runs along the top of the sea wall, built to protect the parish land from incoming tides. In his 1762 journals, Right Rev. Robert Forbes described it thus:
‘We arrived at Balcony half an hour after 6 o’clock, upon which place Nature has luxuriantly shed her Beauties.’12
It is a beautiful place and I luxuriate in it a little longer before heading back to the van.
It’s hot, so I sit and lean against the wall of the church in the sunny graveyard, dappled with shade from the trees. Tara comes over and we discuss the dispute and disagreement which came about when we were at loggerheads earlier in the week.
We consider our position and acknowledge the achievement we’ve made: moving our family-of-six into a van and driving away from a conventional life, leaving much behind, discovering more. We’re still holding it together nearly a year later and that is a feat in itself. The tension softens a little.
The heat persists so we collect the children and go into the water of the Cromarty Firth, wading out into the shallows, cooling down before bed.
Sunday 12th May
Glengeoullie Bridge, Cawdor Estate, Scotland
There is lots of cow parsley by the side of the road as we drive out and away from the old church ruin, along the A9 and over the Cromarty Bridge, straight back across the Black Isle and over the Cassock Bridge into Inverness.
It is jarring to be back in the thick of capitalism and commerce, but it’s also how we’re going to resupply with food and gas. After doing what we need to do, we point the van towards the forty-two-thousand acres of Cawdor Estate and set off.
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In the evening we hear of a close friend who has had a severe stroke. It’s serious. She’s fighting. Survival is uncertain. Death hovers. We try to give the news time and consider what it all means in between making dinner, treating cuts and bruises, extracting ticks and attending to the usual van jobs.
Before bed I walk with Red and North down the path into the woods. On the way North greets individual plants as if they were long-lost friends. I spot a clump of fern fronds, coiled and ready to unfurl.
We find a dangerous footbridge which has been sealed off: the steel framework is rusting and the wooden walkway is rotting.
Monday 13th May
Glengeoullie Bridge, Cawdor Estate, Scotland
Monday morning and the dawn chorus is now consistent every morning.
There is a glimmer of a sunrise behind the trees at the edge of Cawdor Wood.
Cuckoo calls. Woodpecker’s percussion rebounds. I’m sitting outside trying to write but the mosquitos (not midges) are after me.
A mother duck and four or five ducklings emerge from the treeline just down the way and waddle across the road. Thor spots them first.
Down the path there is hazel to be had and the children are scheming. There will be cutting, carving and craft: staffs, javelins, bows and arrows.
Later I breach the dangerous bridge, crossing with care, risking injury and dancing with death over the deep abyss.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.13
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Sasunnach - In Gaelic, Sasunn is England. And a Sasunnach is an Englishman. The words are apparently never used as compliments.
Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain published by Reader’s Digest.
The historical information, descriptions and excerpts which follow are taken from The Highland Clearances by John Prebble.
Man Was Made To Mourn by Robert Burns.
Ad Radicem: To the root! by Darren Allen.
From the 16th century Latin phrase ‘pro et contra’: ‘prō' for and ‘con’, from ‘contrā’ against. I didn’t know that till just now, did you?
It has been said that sticking your little finger into the air when drinking tea makes you appear elegant and regal but where does this derive from?
I’ve read that the masters of the house believed their servants to be unclean and didn’t want to touch anything they had handled so tried to use as few fingers as possible when eating and drinking.
Additionally, when in court, if a lady saw someone she was sexually attracted to she would stick out her little finger to indicate her interest in him.
Scotland’s tallest lighthouse, the 156ft Skerryvore, lies off the Hebrides on a treacherous reef of rocks. ‘Skerryvore’ means ‘the big rock’ in Gaelic.
In second place, at 139ft, is North Ronaldsay Lighthouse, on the northernmost island of the Orkney archipelago.
Tarbot Ness Lighthouse, where we stayed for a few days, stands at 130ft.
Darren Allen again.
The word rape in this case comes from the Latin word rapum meaning turnip: mustard, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, rutabaga (swede), and turnip are all related to it.
Peely-Wally is Scottish slang meaning off colour; pale and ill-looking.
Borrowed from the Kiltearn Footpath Network information board.
Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda.
Hello Gina, thanks for your message. Lovely to think of you leisurely dipping in and out of my writing. I hope you enjoyed reading. Thanks for being engaged and feeding back to me. I always enjoy hearing from you.
Thank you too, for introducing me to John Clare. I hadn’t come across him before, but just look at this beautiful craft below:
Much love, Ben
I often pulld my hat over my eyes to watch the rising of the lark or to see the hawk hang in the summer sky & the kite take its circle round the wood I often lingered a minute on the woodland stile to hear the woodpigeons clapping their wings among the dark oaks I hunted curious flowers in rapture & muttered thoughts in their praise I lovd the pasture with its rushes & thistles & sheep tracks I adored the wild marshy fen with its solitary hernshaw sweeing [heron swinging] along in its mellancholy sky I wandered the heath in raptures among the rabbit burrows & golden blossomd furze I dropt down on the thymy molehill or mossy eminence to survey the summer landscape as full of rapture as now
Finally getting chance to catch up with your writing What a journey you’ve been on and this is just a week. Love how it shows the ebs and flows of navigating live. Hope your all doing ok!