Erraid An Island At The End Of The World

History

2011-10-20T06:08:00.000-07:00

Image Above: John the shepherd and dogs
Location: Isle of Erraid, Mull, Scotland

The line will move and I will move with it but for the moment I wait perched on a granite tor watching the shepherd and the dogs move sheep between the valleys that hang below the island’s south east corner. It seems an age since I have just sat with the island and felt the slow rumble of its granite pulse through the wadding of peat and heather. People ask me about the remoteness of the place but I am not entirely sure what they mean. Remote from what? When I look on the map I understand their concerns as I trace a thin spit of land out into the North Atlantic. Still there is a feeling that I am closer to something than I have ever been.

The line has not yet moved, I look back to Ben More as it emerges from the clouds holding a net of snow cover. To the north, south, east and west black squalls are moving over the ocean dappling the waters with both light and dark. Moments pass when the island’s granite shines like teeth and then the curtain is drawn and the shadows fall. Sometimes I feel like there is no sense in investing in the present or the past here everything feels as if it is at that moment of creation like a dream filling sleep.

The line has not yet moved and I am not sure if I am waiting now. This morning we helped pull one of the shepherd’s cows out of a ditch. On route to the animal I thought about the other times I had helped with other cows and other ditches and wondered if history was repeating itself or just my expectations. If I could only stop and forget myself instead of filling the landscape with memories of conversations and plans.

The shepherd has past the line and a hand goes up. I leave the ridge picking a route that will bring me across the valley floor in full view of the sheep on the far side, they will move, my presence already worries them.

Night Fishing

2011-09-10T14:17:00.000-07:00

It is dark outside the tool shed, the light from the doorway creates a very solid space as if bounded by glass. A little further up the track pier cottage is putting on a similar display, its rear windows casting light, soft footed into the damp grass of the garden. A breeze is knocking the pier gate against its wooded latch ringing out a tone that would not be out of place in amongst the chants and gongs of a Buddhist temple. Beyond the gate the bay is silent, night has returned to the northern reaches of the hemisphere. The endless light of summer has ended and the oystercatchers now spent, no longer echo their calls into twilight but huddle on rocks in the blackness amongst the kelp.

I lean my fishing rods just out of the light under the whale jaw bones, the arch above the doorway, and set my tackle box down on the tractor’s mud guard. The whale bones came from a small bay on the northwest corner of the island, other parts of the skeleton were scattered around the settlement. One such vertebra lived in the small yard at the rear of my neighbour’s cottage, still holding much of its oil* it sweated a foul odour through the warmth of spring and summer. Eventually we dropped it off the pier back into the sea, it haunted the bay for a week drifting with the tide along the strandlines and then it was gone.

Inside the tool shed the work bench is a mess, things left over from other jobs crowd the surfaces. There is no repetitive production here, every job is new requiring its own compliment of tools its own mess and often experimentation to repair, remould and return into service. The ribbon of water that surrounds us deters waste and the disposal, fixing something often requires less effort than bringing its replacement to the island and disposing of the old.

I clear some space, half-heartedly returning tools to draws, shelves and reuniting others with their shadows painted on the board above the bench. At the rear of the shed a smaller room of shelves holds the island’s collection of things that may be useful; there is no one person to say what these things may be useful for, so it is at best a collection of things thought useful by past and present members of the community. There are the prosaic items common to all tool sheds nails screws, nuts, bolts, wire, old door handles, taps, pipe, paint, plumbing fittings and then there are the other things. I am looking for corks amongst the candles, seat belt webbing, dissected hot water bottles, rings of keys to unspecified locks, bits from a fish finder, bits from a tractor and divan bed legs complete with castors.

I am not entirely sure who began the wine bottle cork collection. One ex-resident of the island told me that when his young son had been unable to sleep through the night the local midwife had advised him to put a couple of corks in the child’s bed. I find the catering sized tin of olives that now hosts the collection of corks, it still holds enough to guarantee a quiet night in an orphanage. So I rifle through the remnants of other peoples evenings sat around the fire drinking wine and talking or eating. I find a large champagne cork that once flew marking some celebration or other perhaps a birthday or the launch of a boat and wonder who would have tracked it down to bring it here.

I fish out four corks that kind of fit together to make two pairs or two fishing floats which is the real reason for my visit to the tool shed. I drill a hole through the length of each cork a little more accurately than those left by the cork screw and then glue the pairs together. A long bolt that used to hold a bed together serves as a spindle and I slip a pairof corks over over it and then fasten the bolt into the chuck of a drill. The drill is clamped to the vice on the bench; I find gloves although not a matching pair, goggles and a mask. When I turn the drill on the corks spin and I have a lathe. Using coarse sandpaper I roughly shape the corks until the body of a fishing float emerges. I stop the drill and check the float for cracks, it is all good. With a change of sand paper to a finer grade I start the drill and begin the process of smoothing, another change of sand paper and the surface looks clean cut again.

With the shaping complete I remove the float body from the drill and spindle and then slide it over the thinnest piece of cane I could find in the garden sheds. The cane tapers, its thickest end is a little larger than the drill used to make the hole ensuring the stretched cork grips the cane. Rolling the cane under a Stanley knife blade scores it deeply enough, so when forced it will snap cleanly. I score a couple of centimetres up from each end of the body and then snap it away. Mixing glue up with cork dust that has gathered in the vice makes up a filler to pack out any gaps left where the cane meets the cork. I repeat the process with the other pair of glued corks.

It is not late when I leave the shed but the darkness out beyond the door well is impenetrable, I turn the lights off and step out into the night. Pier cottage is no longer sharing in the display, leaving the route of track as something to be recalled from memory or discovered under the dim glow of my mobile phone. I clutch the unfinished floats in my pocket and shuffle off into the night.

Image Above Right: Floats drying above the rayburn

Image Below: A mackerel on the line

The hind

2011-07-27T13:26:00.000-07:00

Image Above: Clouds over Ben More
Location: Viewed from the Isle of Erraid, Mull, Scotland

The hind moved as I entered the field. She had stood, ears pricked, below the cliff and oak wood where a thin rivulet emerges from the clipped grass into patches of wet bog. I watched her accelerate cleanly as if her motion bore no relation to the terrain or obstacles placed to impede the movement of less agile creatures. She crossed the drover’s track below me where the rivulet finds the beach in its own thin cut of a valley. The willows never parted or felt their twigs bowed by her passage but they took her and she was gone. When I caught up there was nothing to see, if the hoof prints where there they were spaced too widely as to make any kind of sense. I waited in the still evening air for the snap of a twig or the sound of hair pushing against bark but the valley was quiet holding its own confidences.

I left the track and the rocky shore for the soft sand of the beach and the route home, the tide was out and water hung low at the entrance to the bay. The rivulet seeped away into the sand, its course marked by a smoothness, as the water, now moving beneath surface undermined the ripples of the beach. A little way off it drained into the larger stream that cuts the bay and meanders to join the sound.
Ahead the island lay in a wide brim of sand with the cottages shouldered below the wide dome of granite. To my left the long arm or narrows reached out to the distant islets that mark the lagoon on its southern edge. I hung back a little, not wishing to intrude on the depth of stillness that had settled as the sun slipped behind Iona.
When I moved, I moved knowing that the sand would be wiped clean of my footprints by the returning tide, the grass of the drover’s track had already sprung back and the air that carried the sound of my breath would eventually muffle it. Everything that has passed would be erased or folded into the white noise of the surf.

A week ago I had stood below the massive bulk of the pier, at low tide fixing a ring into the granite. Working with an ear close to the rock I picked out a distinctive rasping sound, a limpet its shell half- cocked was grazing the thin film of algae that had bloomed on the tide. The sound was only one voice from a chorus and as I leaned away from the rock-face I began to hear them all, a thousand mineral tipped tongues working like masons on the granite. The noise was almost deafening in the same way as a ticking clock that hammers out the passing seconds in the silence of a room.

Looking over the face I spotted individuals moving in slow motion tilting their shells like ladies hooped ball gowns. I ran my fingers into the spaces they had vacated small ovoid impressions in the rock ground out by the shell until the two parts matched each other allowing the limpet to seal itself against the face, should the sun creep around the pier. I snatched a shell before it had a chance to clamp down and placed it over its mark, turning it until the riffles and contours of its edge locked into position with the surface.
I held it there half expecting a doorway to open, but the limpet wouldn’t take hold and I left it on a ledge just below.

The bay is littered with the spent shells of limpets and other molluscs.

The Pint Glass Aquarium

2011-06-22T14:54:00.000-07:00

Image above: Shrimps chasing shrimps
Location: Below the pier, Isle of Erraid, Mull, Scotland

The Pint Glass Aquarium

There is a soft edge to the water almost as if it has taken on the sombre mood of the sky. The day is poised on the edge of a raincloud that looms over the bay and island. It adds a thickness or a density to both the air and water, hushing activity like a hand placed on a drum skin. Small wavelets ‘phawp’ and collapse into the sand while the calls of oystercatchers have lost their echo.

The full moon has rolled up the ocean like a rug, draining all but the lowest fingers of the bay. I am waist deep, pushing a shrimp net and small wave through what remains. I look back at the island and see it as if through the eyes of a seal and draw breath from that same film of air that sits over water, still and damp. The surface has begun to dimple as the rain moves in. I am mesmerised by ripples that move within ripples and the shortened perspective my viewpoint affords. If I was to chose the life of a seal, the surface world would be always for-shortened by the next wave, beach, cliff face or the curvature of the blue earth; maybe unlike a seal I would miss hillsides.

The net is heavy now. At the far end of the long pole I am pushing, a wide board planes over the seabed disturbing the top few millimetres of sand and the life held therein. Behind, the net gapes inflated by its drag and content, mainly of loose weed fronds that have drifted into the bay, shrimp and a cross section of life too large to pass through the mesh or find a route out of the tangle. I push leaning into the pole until the weeds bring me to a stop and then turn the net over sealing its contents in until I return to the beach.

In the long reach of the shallows where the wavelets race each other I roll the net back over and it opens like a purse or the crop of a giant bird displaying its contents. I work my way through what is immediately visible, picking the larger shrimps for the bucket and releasing smaller. Amongst the haul immature flatfish lie upturned their translucent undersides clearly displaying their small pouch of organs. Righted and placed outside the net they skitter away leaving puffs of sand in their wake like badly aimed rockets. I inspect old winkle shells and find the striped clown legs and claws of hermit crabs tucked neatly out of harm. They retreat from every experience whether it is my touch or contact with the sand as I return them to the sea.
Tugging at the netting rolls the seaweed mass up like sushi in bamboo leaving me to unpick what remains. Peeler crabs soft bodied like kid leather flop motionless still waiting for their skeleton to harden. A larger shore crab raises its pinchers in threat fixing its eyes on me it weaves from side to side ready to lay one on me if the opportunity should present itself. Not looking for a fight I toss it back into the sea and it scuttles off to tell its friends that it could have had me. The strands of kelp slowly unwind revealing the flicking tails and twitching antenna of the shrimp. Some I loose in transit to the bucket as they summersault out of my hands under their own propulsion and quickly bury themselves in the sand.

As the weed thins out I find a small member of the cuttlefish family and place it in the shrimp bucket, it hovers gently above the shrimps undulating its ghostly fins. When the net is empty I am done for the afternoon and make my way back up to the street. The cuttlefish finds a temporary home in a pint glass on the windowsill. In the cottage’s small kitchen I drop the shrimps into a pan of boiling water for a couple of minutes, drain them and return to the windowsill to peel them under a watch-full gaze. The cuttlefish changes colour eventually blending with satin white finish of the woodwork. When I am done with the shrimps I provoke it by introducing a black towel to the background and it responds with browns and blues.

When the school-boat returns I carry the pint glass aquarium down to the pier and show it to my neighbour’s kids; they are unimpressed and tell me they had found their own when they were shrimping at the weekend. Back in the sea in changes its colour almost instantly taking its cue from the reds and browns in the granite pebbles.

Image above right: Orlando shrimping

Image Below: Cuttlefish

Mackerel Evenings

2011-06-08T14:14:00.000-07:00

Image Above: Rainbow Amongst The Mackerel
Location: Isle Of Erraid, Mull, Scotland
Mackerel Evenings

The lines stretch away either side of the stern, weighted and rigged with feathered hooks that swim like sand eels as they are pulled through the waters of the sound. The sun has set beyond Iona but there is still light enough, if it is only the half-light of a summer’s evening in these northern latitudes. The nights no longer darken to a blackness that properly separates or measures out the days, instead summer’s shell-sand light fades into dusk as the sun briefly skirts below the horizon. Sometimes it is hard not to believe that the island doesn’t lie at the centre of this orbit, the sun moves around that hoof print of land as if held within reach and the tilted axis of a discus throwers spin.

I am running the outboard engine at its lowest speed, the boat is gently pushing through the flat water and the ebbing tide. Orlando has the bow seat, nodding his fishing rod with a rhythmic motion that pulls at his trailing line and the lures. I hold the other rod and stare into the wake, watching jellyfish undulate as they pass like the ghost of drowned ballerinas.

I am following a course between Easter island and the channel-marker buoy in the hopes that we will pass over a small knoll that rises five or six metre from the sea bed. Shoals of fish often congregate here drawn from the featureless plains of the ocean floor. If the tide is running fast enough water is often pushed up from the depths breaking the surface in a slow boil untouched by the breeze that ripples the surrounding water. Most often it is the line weights touching down or snagging in the weed that signals a change in depth.

Orlando feels the tug of fish first and is already reeling in his line, my feathers cut through the shoal seconds later and I am in, hooked. I put the engine in neutral and wind, four mackerel a piece, we unhook the fish and return the feathers to the water as quickly as possibly, it is all about speed. The boat, the tide and the shoal are all moving and it is largely guesswork as to which route will bring us into contact again. We drop our lines vertically into the depths and bring up three stragglers that had probably followed the other hooked fish towards the boat. We unhook and return our lines to the water but there are no more takers and I slip the engine into forward and let the lines trail from the stern as I make a wide circle.

With the excitement over, we count our catch and the total stands at fourteen. We then count up the population of the island which including guests, residents, children, friends and visiting family members stands at somewhere round twenty-four. We knock off two, one vegan and one vegetarian, twenty-two and only fourteen fish. A fillet each and we can pad it out with some rice or potato salad. Orlando suggests a barbeque and we discuss recipes and whether to smoke them or not. Our lines find another five mackerel but it is late now and even the rainbow glow, that shimmers along the flanks of the silver bolts of lightening can not keep me from longing for a good night’s sleep. With the engine and boat idling near the buoy I gut and toss the heads of the fish to a herring gull who as if performing a side show swallows four and still floats, maybe a little lower in the water. We tidy the boat and then set off for home, watching the lights of houses on the island’s small street sway in the half-light.

Malin

2011-05-28T07:57:00.000-07:00

Image Above: The bay from under the boat

Location: Isle Of Erraid, Mull, Scotland

There are warnings of gales in Malin, ……………

The storm was beyond merely waves, gusts of wind and rain; it had taken everything for its own. Ocean and air mixed in equal parts with spray and rainwater moved as if a single solid entity bending what could be bent and beating the unresponsive. We had made what preparations we could, clearing debris, weighting gates and taking our boat out of the water, but still there was an expectancy that something would give.

In the bay a single boat tugged violently at its mooring like an unbroken horse plagued by the unfamiliarity of captivity. I watched it from the cottage doorway, through windows, from the street, the pier and as I moved about the settlement. In truth I was waiting, but to some extent we were all waiting, all those who had seen the boat, and stepped out or in from the storm. Our concerns had become common currency, we asked or informed those we met about the boat in the bay until it became a greeting of sorts.

I know little about storms, for the most part I find them unfathomable, they lack the curve of sanity. To unpick their crime scenes is often senseless, who would take a block of granite weighed in the tonnes and shift it like a child’s toy while leaving the fragile heads of daisies un-cropped. To some extent nothing matters, faced with these odds, everything becomes at best just a guess or superstition, people have tied gates only to lose a shed or the bonnet of a tractor. Trawler men, out in the north Atlantic have rules for these days, and they tell their wives not run washing machines or stare soup, everything can be counted in or equally disregarded. I like the idea of hanging washing out as if it could prevent the felling of a tree, but all bets are off, and still the boat pulls at its anchor.

By mid afternoon the tide, which had been pushed by the wind until it had passed far beyond the chart predications, had begun to ebb. The swell from the sound no longer passed as cleanly into the bay as it had, as the shallow water kicked up waves into breakers. It didn’t help that the wind was following or that the boat was moored in the channel where the confused waters of the bay empty back into the sound. The boat no longer had the chance to recompose itself between crests and cut its bow cap through the top of every fifth or sixth wave scattering spray horizontally. This would be the hardest time.

The power cut came as the storm reached its peak, a few moments later the bars on my mobile phone disappeared and then the voices on the battery operated radio turned to hisses as the signal was lost. The world was shrinking back from the island we had broken our mooring cables and drifted into the eye of the storm. Phil came to find me and we headed into the garden to retrieve the doors from the poly-tunnel which had somehow spun their frame, ripping the plastic cover in the process and leaving them flapping in the grass. We wrestled them back into position and I left Phil hanging on to them while I went to find a hand drill and some screws in the darkness of the tool shed. We fixed the doors, Phil tapped over the gash and then we added fish boxes filled with soil to weight the frames.

When the dinner bell finally sounded on the street its tone was almost lost to the storm or maybe it was just someplace further off. I watched people braced themselves against the wind holding on to hoods that ballooned like spinnakers as they made their way up the street to the community’s dinning room. Despite the lengthening daylight and the room’s large windows, candles had been lit along with a fire in the grate, winter had returned. We ate and talked about the storm, other storms from the past, the swell in the sound, the cows who had spent the afternoon pushing their weight into the granite walls for shelter or to lend support, and then we talked about the boat.

Later when it felt as if the storm had began to ease I walked down to the pier to check on our own boat. The tide had not dropped as it should and I was concerned that as it turned and came back in it would rise and continue to do so until our boat, which had been pulled far above the high tide mark, would re-float. The electric winch, moaned a little as the last few yards of steel rope were wound onto the drum, pulling our boat further from harm. I walked to the end of the wide pier as if it was a tightrope making sure each step held contact and grip. The boat still out in the bay had made it through the worst of it and now it was just a case of hanging on. I watched out of compulsion and then in a brief moment its anchor rope went slack and it drifted with the wind and waves. I waited, unsure if it had just pulled its anchor a little, but the rope continued to sag and the boat gathered pace. I waited a little longer.

Collecting myself I ran back up to the street along the track watching the boat move like a balloon freed from its handhold and then the wind and tide took it from view. I found Steve on the street and he grabbed his wellingtons and followed. We half ran down the track to the bay. The boat was rocking gently on its keel in safety of sandy shallows. We bailed and then tethered the boat once again as a small group arrived from the street. Some had just come out for a walk others had seen the boat was missing from the bay and followed the wind and waves. It was safe now, and the watching was over.

An atlas of remote islands

2011-05-22T14:57:00.000-07:00

Image Above: An evening storm clears from Iona

Location: Viewed from the Isle of Erraid, Isle of Mull, Scotland

The boatshed has almost emptied, as guests retrieve walking sticks and dogs that had been left bedded down for the afternoon in the sheep-clipped grass of the pier. I hold Finley, propping him on my hip as he attempts to bury his head in my open jacket. Below, a shoal of sand eels are sheltering in the lee of the pier, holding position with bursts of activity, that look more like synchronised wriggling than true swimming. They are sandwiched in the shallow water between the bright shell-sand and the sky. But still, the ocean holds a dullness for all fish, it surrounds them as the distance scatters light to a uniform, faint green glow like a far off driftnet, hanging.

I look back to the boatshed, there is little movement in the doorway and only a few of our guests remain ambling individually or in small groups around the pier. An hour earlier they had been dancing, traditional English folk dances on the varnished boards of the large boatshed. A group of about thirty devotees exile themselves every year, for a long weekend on the Isle of Mull with the promise of afternoon’s dance in Erraid’s boatshed. We lay on tea and scones afterwards, sell a few candles and some veg from the garden.
As usual I had missed the main event and managed to arrive as the crowd dispersed.

The eels haven’t moved, my neighbour, who is waiting to take the band, which consists of a guitarist and a fiddle player, back to Mull by boat, asks me about my leaving the island long term. I had mentioned earlier that I had been thinking about the possibilities of life after Erraid. Caught off guard I am a little vague with my replies and my attention has returned to the eels. Another shoal is moving in from deep water, they are larger greater sand eels as opposed to the lesser sand eels below the pier. I understand the inevitability of the situation. The larger eels rise with the sharp slope of the beach and accelerate bursting in amongst their smaller cousins, now prey, there are flashes of silver, some large and some small. The shoals regroup and the dance begins again amongst flickers of silver light and delicate splashes as the preyed upon break the surface and fall back like soft rain. It is soon over and the larger eels return into the green glow, leaving the shoal of lesser eels a little depleted by the experience.

A guest joins us and asks if I live here with my son, I confirm the answer and he tells me he once lived on the island, when his children were young and they loved it. I ask which island, not thinking much beyond the horizon and he answers, Ascension isle. So we talk about Ascension island and his children running wild, and I tell him I have always wanted to go there, maybe after St. Kilda. He says the landscape was dark, barren, but beautiful and that some mountain slopes have patches of green, but when you get close, they are just green stems pushing through volcanic ash. I think of the horsetails I had seen growing in the tarmac wastelands of a supermarket car park. As he talks, I can see he is back there far out in the Atlantic. As if breaking the spell I ask where they went after they left and answer jokingly for him, “Swindon”, but half expecting him to answer St Lucia, Dubai or somewhere else on the Ex-pat trial. He seems to shrink back and sag a little before answering.

I am left wondering how it feels to lose or leave an island, how it would be to live without that weight of ocean. I once left a mountain and that was an island of sorts, if only in the clouds or as a haven from the mill towns and industry that clung to its slopes.

Clam Diving

2011-05-16T13:25:00.000-07:00

Image Above: RAF Helicopter, Taking off from the garden
Location: Isle Of Erraid, Mull, Scotland

There is the clatter as the flat surface of the front door makes contact with the wide granite jambs. I wait as the children fight to remove their wellington boots in the hallway before they rush the lounge waving giant scallop shells and buckets of things dredged from the ocean. Their voices join in a cacophony of questions and stories woven in excitement. From the live scallop Bea is waving in my face I gather they have bumped into the clam divers I had seen earlier in the sheltered waters between the island and its outer reefs and islets. The children, my neighbour’s and one from a little further down the street have been off island visiting school friends on Mull, their return must have coincided with divers unloading their haul.

I am used to them bringing me the things and in honesty as I can seldom interest any of the adults on the island in toads or wasps nests I rely on them to share my enthusiasm for poking sticks down holes and goading creepy crawlies. I have my moments of performing impromptu royal society lectures on natural history subjects and then I remember that kids are only interested it the bits that include pooh, death and eating. Celia, Bea and Isaac’s mother hasn’t made it through the front door, instead we hold a conversation through the living room window. Who is to cook and how? More importantly when and not least who is going to look after the kids?

I grab a cookbook and we head up the street to the last cottage in the row, which houses the communities’ kitchen and dining room. Phil is cooking risotto and luckily the kids have disappeared in search of a DVD player. I quickly knock up a sample of razor clam, fried in a bit of oil and garlic, it is hard to describe the taste and texture, maybe somewhere between squid and scallop and all good. With twelve adults and five children expected at the dinner table it is obvious that despite the generosity of the divers we might have to settle for a side dish, of flash fried scallops with an accompaniment of razor clams.

In the prep sink I am struck by the absurdity of it all, my life seams to be made up of random events that are only connected by my part in them. I suppose that is the nature of the island, its exposed shores welcome the flotsam and jetsam of experience as well as abandoned fishing gear, and plastic bottles.

Earlier in the week a RAF helicopter, shaped like a malformed double-decker bus landed in my front garden. It had come to collect a guest who had broken her arm and was unable to move due to an earlier injury. I told the injured party that despite the obvious pain she was in, her stay had managed to bring some excitement to the community.

On Friday I waved to a power glider on the wild side of the island, the plane tipped its wing back and forth in answer. Circling once it climbed out into the sound of Iona before banking away in the clear sky ahead of the dark thunderclouds marching in from the Atlantic. Last summer the same plane had flown low over the gardens signalling with its wings. A couple of days later its Dutch owner and pilot came on foot to visit the island where he had once stayed in the late seventies.

Occasionally on summer weekends he taxis on to a runway somewhere in Holland and takes off headed for the mountains, lochs and the small islands shooting the gaps in the rolling summer storm fronts. I had never thought to wave at planes until I came here, they had always seemed so far off and remote.

Image Above Right: Bea and the scallop.

Fishing For Free

2011-05-02T12:40:00.000-07:00

Image Above: Observatory
Location: Isle of Erraid, Mull, Scotland

The sea is still rough despite the run of fair weather, it doesn’t help that I am fishing amongst the island’s outer reefs and islets. Every wave that strikes the rocks in deep water gets the chance to echo into the following wave, sometimes briefly doubling their height as they merge. I am at the top of the tide and like a thrown ball reaching its apex I am waiting for the pull of gravity to lay claim to its own.

The fish have been small but catching and returning them safely to the sea is reassuring, a bit like inspecting investments for the future. If they come up repeatedly undersized I’ll move and try again, some days this can be a little annoying even though I still find a rod twitching under the strain of a fish mesmerizing. The fish are mostly half pound Coley and Pollock underlings that haunt the island in vast shoals, the relatively shallow margins keep them out of reach of larger predators. Sometimes when the incoming tide coincides with the onset of evening they venture into the sandy bay overlooked by the cottages, filing past the pier in a steady stream. As the tide retreats through the narrow opening to the ocean for a short while it runs as a river; I once looked down into these swirling waters from a drifting boat and saw a shoal overpowered by the current and stirred up like leaves as they were carried back to open water. Despite their size they fight above their weight eager to outpace the rest of the shoal in the frenzy to feed. Often in the process of unhooking them they regurgitate partially digested sand eels onto the deck of the boat. These needle like fish are not true eels but occupy the unfortunate position of being at the top of the menu of most the oceans fish and the birds that share their territory. They are the potato, rice, or wheat of the sea, even their larger cousins, the greater sand eels, prey on them.

The sand eels apart from their incalculable numbers have a trick up their sleeve, when pursued they can literally swim into the sand. It is not unusual to uncover them while raking for cockles in silty sand of the bay. They too haunt the pier and bay through the summer months, hiding in broad daylight and shallow water while making the most of the smaller creatures. Lacking teeth they suck at the court bullion of life that is the ocean, creatures barely visible to the naked eye yet ,dense enough in numbers to colour the water and top the boat’s wake with a phosphorescent glow. The plankton, both plant and animal, larva and adult, seed and tree, swimming whip tailed blind and stupid, kicking, eating, reproducing, dying, developing, absorbing, exchanging.

In the summer giant fish, the basking sharks, come to gorge themselves as the sun powers up the plankton, these barrel mouthed monsters cruise the waters of the sound sieve netting dinner as their fins cut the breeze like sails. If I turn off the boat’s engine, curiosity often brings them within a hand grab and the realisation dawns, that if you stack up enough small parts, you can make an awfully big pile.

The piles I am fishing for today are a little smaller than the sharks but old enough to have spawned in the depths of the ocean. I know its early in the season but hopefully the larger Pollock and Coley have begun to return from deep water having spent their seed. For bait I have sand eels made from wrapping ribbon with hand painted eyes that stare back like those of the corpses scattered on the deck. When the first proper strike comes, it bends the rod down to the gunwale, arching to the tip until it almost touches the water, I pull back and wind in but it has gone. It felt like a good sized Pollock, and I guess it is waiting in ambush on the reef below. I drop the lure again and begin to jig, once the weighted end of the line touches down, bang again, but as I wind the line goes slack. On the third drop the fish runs with the eel snagging the hook firmly into its jaw. The rod is bent double and dancing like a diviner’s willow, I adjust the tension on the real not wishing to hand out any more line and begin to lift the fish from the reef.

When it breaks the surface I reach over the gunwale and lift the fish into a waiting box, there is always a moment when I pause and check myself, as if the events of the last few moments were some other reality. What was once fish needs to become food and with a heavy well honed knife I cut in from behind the pectoral fin, following the line of the gills to the spine which breaks with a crunch. Turning the fish over I cut again from the other side and the head comes away with most of the guts. It only remains to open up the organ cavity, a slit away, the small piece of flesh, where the guts are attached via the anus. I toss the head and guts back into the ocean as gulls slip from the rocks eager for a free meal. With a little rinse back over the side of the boat the fish is laid on icepacks in a cool box.

I have fished here long enough to know that odds on landing another are slim unless I wish to remain out for the evening. Luckily the boat belongs to the community and I have no overheads to pay off with my catch so I can turn tail and head for home. I take the long route out into the sound of Iona and clear water where the swell rides in off the Atlantic, almost undisturbed by contact with land. Amongst the jumble of islands a familiar but reassuring sight greets me, the small cone topped observatory. Its blackened windows stare out to the sea, past the boat and sound, to the lighthouses that lie on the edge of the horizon. Sometimes in the evenings I wander up the winding granite steps and watch the sun return to the ocean.

Image Above Left: Basking Shark in the Sound of Iona

Image Above Right:A Pollock in the box, Sound of Iona

The Shepherd

2011-04-25T13:41:00.000-07:00

Image Above: John the Shepherd and his dogs.
Location: Isle of Erraid. Mull, Scotland

The ewe had no intention of being cornered despite the firm tether of briars that anchored her to the ground limiting her movements to a tight radius. I had heard her earlier from the back door of the cottage and assumed she had or was about to lamb. It was Phil who finally grabbed her and I took the horns with both hands as the shepherd had once shown me. With all four legs she bucked and pushed and I felt like I was holding onto the handlebars of a bicycle on unfamiliar terrain. Phil always the gardener took out his pruning knife and cut the briars out of her fleece, I waited until I was sure she was clear and then released her. We were out early to roundup the sheep from the rear of the cottages and meet the shepherd as he brought in the smaller flock that grazed the lower northern shores of the island. While we were waiting for Roger to come down from the quarry the ewe we had just released turned back towards the cottages. I ran and she ran, so I ran faster. There was an inevitability about it and I stopped. She walked on behind the cottages backtracking over our route, we left her and moved on.

When Roger caught up we made a spartan line across the heather, enough to push the hand full of sheep that remained towards Christine’s bay, the croft and John the shepherd. He was still a way off waiting with his dogs on a knoll, as we came into view he moved pushing the flock he had already gathered into the gap left between our line and the waters of the bay. The flock passed us and fences took over limiting the options for the sheep under pressure from the dogs. We fell in behind John on the track from the beach. The line of sheep past the bottom of the front gardens until channelled by the walls of the settlement it turned towards the pier and the fank*. When the gate was closed behind them John set off to retrieve our ewe which was now braying on the hill behind the cottages as it looked down on the flock from which it was now separated.

*fank: an enclosure for working with sheep.

Sanctuary

2011-04-16T14:24:00.000-07:00

Image above: Reliance on the morring
Location: Isle of Erraid, Mull, Scotland

I should be meditating; the windows of the sanctuary are stiffening like glass sails caught in the same breeze that is pushing the waves in the sound. The structure rocks slightly, creeks and settles back into a steady rhythm that rides out the whispering tone of the singing bowl as my breath falls away.

The sanctuary stands a little apart from the street, up the hill above the wood with a view down over the pier, the bay and sound. It was built as a sun lounge from pine, larch sidings and an expanse of glass. I once found an aerial photograph of the island that dated from the nineteen sixties, the woodland was missing but the building stood rooted in the landscape. The community arrived almost two decades later planting the wood, turning gardens and using the lounge as a meditation space, they christened it the sanctuary. Like everything this far north that is close to the ocean it has not escaped the slow sandpapering applied by the elements that ware at corners and soften the patina of varnish.

In the lower side panel of the doorway the rear of the goose, the island’s longest serving resident and sanctuary guardian, is just visible. He is preening his wings, running a greased bill over his primaries with his neck extended and writhing like a pitch forked snake. For most of the day he occupies the position of doorman, counting in, counting out and occasionally dissuading the half hearted with honks and threats. In the twenty odd years he has enjoyed this roll, there has been much speculation as to his motives and unswerving dedication, some have concluded he is a returned soul. The glass of the sanctuary is low to the ground and the goose may not be contemplating his inner self but a reflection, narcissism or possibly envy of the goose behind the glass to whom many have made pilgrimages.

Inside the glass walls of the sanctuary the candle is flickering and those that kneel have begun to sway as if teetering on the edge. On far side of the bay Jimmy’s quad bike is drawing out a white line of sheep as he moves between pastures. I follow seagulls out into the sound, and oystercatchers back into the bay, the diversions are endless. And then for in a moment I am forgotten and absorbed in the detail and the magnitude.

The Bird

2011-04-09T03:25:00.001-07:00

Image: Three Rocks
Location: Isle of Erraid, Mull, Scotland

The Bird

Finley is watching a bird on the chimney pot of a neighbouring house, he has only just discovered small birds and seems pleased that another part of the world has revealed itself. The bird, a starling is imitating the call of a buzzard although lacking the conviction of a predator. Last year a pair of these tricksters began exploring the nesting possibilities of our bedrooms’ disused fireplace, for a few days the dawn chorus began with a selection of electronic gadget impersonations. Ironically at the time we owned an alarm clock that sounded with a recording of a blackbird, the birds left after a few days maybe the competition was too much.

The starling slips from the pot and swoops into the front garden, Finley follows its line before looking up to see if anyone else has shared in the display, he smiles. I trudge up the street into the mêlée of guests and abandoned footballs all waiting for the dinner bell to sound. I am returning from the island, the island beyond the street and cottages.

The Fire

2011-03-28T06:46:00.001-07:00

Image Above And Below: Burning Moorland
Location: View from the Isle Of Erraid, Mull, Scotland

The Fire, Sunday 27th March

By six o’clock the afternoon had lost its depth of colour and evening seemed more of a certainty. Over the bay thin ribbons of smoke trailed from patches of burning moor, rising to become indistinct from the low mass of grey cloud. The burning season is nearly at an end and there have been few days when the air has been still enough to ensure these fires remain a tool rather than a threat. The object of the burn is probably heather, as plants age they become woody and largely unpalatable to sheep, burning effectively prunes out the old growth leaving space for new, more nutritious shoots to regenerate. Maybe this is one of our oldest forms of land management, give a man a stick and he can beat out a piece of land from the jungle, add a flame to the end of it and the job becomes a little easier. It would be easy to congratulate or equally vilify ourselves on having discovered another use for fire if it wasn’t for the fact that the world burnt long before we ever got to strike a match. Some plant species like the American monterey pine are so keyed into fire being a natural part of the environment, their reproduction almost depends on it, with cones opening to release seed in the heat of a forest fire. Mankind does have a habit of overusing its magic tricks.

By seven o’clock an amber glow had just become visible as evening descended, at eight we worried a little. Before nine the rim of fire shone like a crack in the earth and I phoned a neighbour on the mainland. She asked about the baby, my youngest son, three weeks old and offered her congratulations. I asked about the fire and she said her husband was away up the hill to retrieve his tractor and help to get the blaze under control along with other volunteers.

By now headlights were moving around the bay as vehicles navigated the pitted road from Fionnphort. It became obvious that tying up the phone wasn’t the cleverest of ideas and I quickly thanked her and said goodbye. I walked the street back to the house feeling a little like Nero as the moor burnt.

By ten the glow had gone from the bay and with it the fire.

The Return

2011-03-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

Image Above: Reliance retuning to Erraid in the mist.
Location: Isle Of Erraid, Mull, Scotland

24th March

The Return

The cable is humming or buzzing or possibly vibrating on the edge audibility like the whining noise of an old television set. I wonder if it’s the breeze or the billions of electrons charged and crackling their way down the line. If it wasn’t for the high voltage I would be tempted to climb the post and place my ear against the wire to listen in on the world. If my hearing was better I could separate out the strands of noise into the conversations of power plant workers at the furthest reach of this piece of string.

Maybe the grid spans the country like a wed or metal brace on wayward teeth, soaking up waves as sounds cycle; snatched conversations, barking dogs, a school yard at break time, car alarm, ring tone, a gate on rusted hinges, a child muttering beneath his breath, or sheep pushing through tall moor land grasses. Every bird that lands or springs into flight from a line no matter how remote plucks a chord. Everything that vibrates adds something be it wave or particle even the last bolt of light from a dying star. Here, as the line crosses high over the sand onto the island the fog is condensing into droplets that tap like tiny glass hammers, the rattle of a cough escapes my chest but not the high wire.

I am stopped weighted to the spot with feet sunk into the soft sand listening to the cacophony. I have come home and in the silence of a drawn breath the wire and world are one.

Off Island

2011-03-03T15:05:00.000-08:00

Image Above: Looking from the Island to Iona
Location: Isle of Erraid, Mull, Scotland

Off Island

There seems little point in ignoring the pull of the tide after all I am mostly water separated by membrane, a bubble wrap of cells hung on an unfortunate frame. Below me the Mersey basin is filling under a roar of water that tugs at the navigation buoys while the sandbanks slip beneath the waves like the long arching backs of whales. So I have made it far from the island and feel the disconnection keenly. Each movement here seems to fold up my memories and sense of the island like a piece of origami until I am left with something I could slip into my pocket.

As the tidal race subsides the roar begins to dissipate and the buoys relax against their chains like scrap yard dogs in the warmth of the afternoon sun. Although far from the island I am still within the reach of the sea but the separation of promenade, railings and green baizes of grassland are too much for me to out imagine, if I could only touch or wade in water.

There are no gaps here, the world has been improved, the paving slabs, back garden walls, street corners and factory roofs all meet up as individual visions in a collective consciousness. Even the river has been corseted its spine a little distorted by the contact. I suppose it is pointless to rail against it all, yesterday I realised that the green spaces in the shopping complex’s car park were the result of Astroturf rather than grass. I know I lack the faith to live here, I would have to believe in ready meals, fashion, television, pvc fascias and all the voices that tell me this is a reality. More importantly I lack the stories that could make it all work, so this is not my place, the stories I tell are of another place, they are no better or worse, just different.

Image above right: Doll’s House, Sudley House, Liverpool

Sparrowhawk

2011-02-15T12:56:00.000-08:00

Image Left: A stray sunbeam on the Street
Location: Isle of Erraid, Mull, Scotland

The Sparrowhawk

I step out onto the street dodging the collection of footwear that has accumulated on the doorstep; ,Wellingtons, sandals, clogs, different shoes, different jobs. A little way down the street, perched below the railings of the garden wall, a female sparrowhawk is waiting. She is close enough for me to see the detail in her eye stripe and the olive green plumage that extends like a cape from her crown to her tail feathers. There is a pause, as if in the moment before a car crash, when the inevitability of an impact dawns. First the crouch and then she pushes low into the air, extending her wings and breaking the connection with the ground. Her legs trail, useless and ungainly, their weight swinging as her body arches through the wing beats that bring her to flight speed. Now the glide, the broadness in her wing allows her to draw out a cushion of air. Three more wing beats and another glide, she runs below the copping hidden from the finches chattering in the neighbouring garden. Three more wing beats, she swings over the wall sending up a cloud of small birds. I am left in the wake and already the details have begun to fade, I try and hold on to the colour of the plumage re-sampling my memory but the image that comes is out of a guide book, generic.

I suppose it ought to mean something in the scheme of things but not everything is a harbinger and neither should every second be pressed into the service of announcing the next. I walk the island this afternoon with a jumble of feathers and other minutia for company.

Later in the boatshed I brush up sawdust until it gathers in the slots of sunlight and the cupped hands of empty swallows’ nests.

Arandora Star

2011-02-06T13:21:00.000-08:00

Image Left: Enterprise awaiting a fresh coat of paint
Location: Boatshed, Isle Of Erraid
The Arandora Star, 2nd February 2011

We looked back and in the time it took to watch the sky darken to within a shade of night the fronds of the storm slid over the wall of the island. The lightening came first, strikes barely drew breath before claps of thunder echoed between the granite faces eventually muffled amongst the backwash of sound. We watched the sky and talked of glass fused from grains of sand and the heat of a lightening strike and all the time a little nervous of the flatness of the beach and our little group. The wind followed pushing ahead of the cloud and raging through the low trees, out across the sand to meet the waves, spray trailing as it danced amongst the breakers. The first of the hail stones burst like popcorn kernels or ping pong balls from the hands of a magician. Our enchantment was short lived as the seemingly benign hail gathered strength in the wind and began pelting the landscape and anyone unlucky enough to be abroad. We retreated to the rocks turning our backs to the storm, at its height everything became hail or a surface to impact; the ridges in the sand filled, even the ocean was beaten flat by a million tiny hammers until it looked like a sheet of worked metal. And then in a moment it was gone, the sky cleared and hail petered out and I was left feeling as if I had watched the events of a whole afternoon compressed by time lapse.

We left the beach following the sandy track through the tightly clipped grass of the low headland. The path ran through a small corridor in the granite. I picked out a thin fault in the rock that had been in-filled with a rose hued quartz, what had once been a crisp line now sagged a swayed as the rock had been jumbled by time. The passageway opened onto to the upper section of Knockvologan Beach where it emerges between low wooded hillsides of oak with stands of hazel, the reason for our little excursion.

Ahead near the top of the sand what looks like a disused gateway is marketed out by two posts backed by giant hooks. These are all the bones that remain from a lifeboat that once hung like a Christmas bauble above the shear sided Atlantic liner the Arandora Star. The ship commandeered into war time service was on route to Canada with a human cargo, mainly Italian and German internees who were viewed as a risk by Churchill should Germany launch an invasion. Coincidentally if such a thing could be said about war she was sunk by a German u-boat 75 miles off the aptly name Bloody Foreland, a stretch of Ireland’s Atlantic coastline A little less than half of the prisoners and crew survived, the lifeboat was probably emptied of its survivors by the shipping that responded to the SOS. Those men that were lost like the empty lifeboats drifted with the Gulf Stream and the prevailing winds until the sea began to give up its dead. Bodies that failed to make landfall in Ireland journeyed on to the Hebrides washing up on remote beaches and like returning sons buried amongst the family graves in the small hilltop cemeteries common in these islands.

On the beach I wrapped my hand around the hook that had once been used to lower away the lifeboat, it was still smooth and untarnished by its encounter with the ocean or the salt winds that scour beach. We moved on to the trees.

Hazel

2011-01-27T13:29:00.001-08:00

Image Above: Bringing Home The Hazel.
Location: The Narrows, Erraid
\Hazel, 26th January 2011

The tide is ebbing and draining a rivulet from the sands of the narrows; the strip of sand that keeps us anchored to Mull. I wade through, shuffling my feet to avoid a bow wave topping my Wellingtons. Despite the expanse of sand this is a trench cut between faces of rock, it is here Erraid lays claim to its island status, emerging from the sand to present a toothy grin to its larger brother. The sea only makes good on the bargain for a few days a month when spring tides race to fill the gap. Between times it becomes a highway of sorts for cows, sheep, otters, deer and on rare occasions wild goats. I place my own prints into the wet cement and join the list of other stars.

As I walk my eyes follow the contours of the low cliffs, here stunted oaks, birch and aspens hide out from the herbivores. I am looking for hazel to make some low hurdles for the garden, but it is not until I am about to run out of island that I find a small stand of bushes above a rough hewn wall of boulders. The pruning saw slips easily through the thin sheath of life and bites into the bone whiteness of the wood. I cut three or four poles from each bush, trimming out the crown ends to release them from the tangle of other branches and then throw them to the sand. The cuts will sprout again and the limbs re-grow in profusion like the split brooms of the magician’s apprentice.

On the sand I bundle up the rods with the belt from my trousers, twisting it as a Spanish windlass to add tension. Lifting one end, it seems bearable but I am aware, looking back over the sand, that distance adds its own weight. I move off covering my tracks Indian style as the trailing branches scratch out my foot prints. Behind in the lagoon the seals have gathered to watch, extending their heads, clear of the water, as the strange half man half tree shrinks into the distance.

The lie

2011-01-22T14:03:00.001-08:00

Image above: Fog moves through the narrows

The Lie

The snow that had remained clung to the shadows or was scattered over ground less popular with cars and foot traffic. I wandered into the ferry terminal and bought a cup of tea from a kiosk that would of worked equally well at the end of a dole queue. Conscious that silence had marked my entrance and feeling a little uneasy I retreated to the gallery to watch for the ferry.

His grandfather spoke first, the story was about the snow plough that keeps Mull’s central glen open; over the last few days the plough had packed the roadside snow so tightly that the route had begun to look like a bob sledge run. His grandfathers friend relayed another story about a local youth known for pushing the speed limit who had ditched his car and abandoned it to the snow.

Sat between the grandfather and company the grandson had been waiting for his turn in the conversation and when a natural lull presented itself he began with his own tale. I knew he was lying from the onset, and so the story of a friend of a friend who had crashed in some place a while ago filled the small waiting room. The grandfather played devils advocate asking those awkward questions that made the lies more obvious to the rest of the room. Answers were given that became even more dubious but none the less he pushed on until he had used up all the available words.

The snow has long gone but I am still haunted by that story. I like that he tried; the story was never about cars and snow or the truth but about fitting in. Recently, when out walking the island I have found myself turning it over in mind, not so much the lies but whether the truth is any better or distinguished only by its commonality.

Image Above right: Running Mooring

Miracles On The Sand

2011-01-20T04:48:00.000-08:00

Image above: Orlando collecting mussels from the bay.

Miracles On The Sand

Wednesday January 19th

Out of the breeze the bay has warmed, I follow Orlando who has equipped himself with a bucket and a staff borrowed from a biblical epic. The waters have already parted and the retreating tide has left a deep mat of kelp. I pad through to meet my wife and our neighbour who are returning over the sands from a trip to the doctor’s. In the haste to check the post and any news they are carrying I forget to ask about the new doctor.

Orlando has been slowed by the kelp and I wait. He catches up and we walk on fording the stream and checking rocks for mussels as we go. In amongst the stonewalled fish traps he answers his mobile and is away in conversation as I walk on towards the corner of the bay. I make exploratory kicks at empty shells hindered in my movements by youngest son who is perched in a carry frame on my back. When Orlando returns we are in the thick of mussel territory, the bucket takes only a few minutes to fill.

As we walk back he talks about the phone call; news of an operation that he has been waiting for to correct the vision in one of his eyes. Later he jokes that the operation should miraculously halve the island’s population ; at least through his eyes.

Image Below: Orlando collecting mussels from the bay.

2011-01-06T10:39:00.001-08:00

Images: Candles shine along the street as we bring in the light.

New Year’s Eve, New Year’s day

The health centre’s waiting room was almost full, we took the final spaces joining the ranks of those looking for a cure before the turn of the year. The locum boomed out the name of the next patient as if he had worked all his career in a much larger practice, I looked to see if the waiting room had somehow been extended while my attention had wandered.

With the doctor returned to his consulting room and a respectful pause given, those who remained felt compelled to share their view of the temporary doctor or more importantly his manner. Briefly I felt like a local as this proxy parliament swung into debate. Our ‘old doctor’ who is still confusingly referred to as the ‘new doctor’ by those who can still remember the previous occupant of the position has retired due to ill health. And so we await the arrival of another ‘new doctor‘, who shall carry this title until he or she faces their retirement. Every initial greeting will be prefixed with , “you must be the new doctor,” as if somehow those of us who still qualify as tourists having not been born on the island of Mull will have gained some history with the place. Conversations beyond the health centre will begin with “have you seen the new doctor?” and answered with, “do you remember the old doctor?” Older residents will of course secure their positions as community elders by correcting their youngers and referring to the old doctor as the new doctor and the latest arrival as just the ‘latest doctor’.

There is a weighty duty on all of us to practice our appraisal skills. Undoubtedly our opinions will be sought in pubs, on fishing boats, in the local shops, over fences and fields, in the huddle of parents that haunt the home time bell, and when all is said and done in a crowded waiting room.

2010-12-26T07:34:00.001-08:00

Image Above: Light On The Bay
Location: Erraid Sound, Erraid

The Thaw

Christmas Eve 24th December

Around the gutters and windowsills the movement of water had begun, every projecting surface held a drip tapping out its rhythm on the wet surface of the snow. By late afternoon the drips had found rivulets running unseen under ice. The world had begun to sag uncomfortably, where the snow had concealed it now clung to the skeleton of the island like a piece of linen blown from a washing line. I felt a little sad as if woken from a dream or finding myself falling out of love and realising despite grasping hands that it had slipped through my fingers.

And so the mask has fallen and ordinary objects return to their duties freed from the burden of being a sculpture. The chaos of human existence is revealed in misplaced sandals, spades lodged in garden borders and bags of rubbish abandoned on route to the bin store. I am still not used to snow, it comes from some other place that seems to be governed by pure whimsy. I take comfort that there are still things that even on my best day I could never have imagined.

When the blizzards had began a little over a week ago I had watched the water of the bay stilled and softened by the lightest of touches. I rowed out between snowfalls and felt the change in density the melting iced fronds had brought to this salted lagoon. Beneath the boat a translucence touched with the grey of snow clouds obscured the sea bed. The low water sands and the strand lines of kelp had also fallen for the spell, leaving only the brine as a counterpane to the monotone depths of the sky. The ocean eventually reclaimed the bay. Each incremental rise of successive tides redefined what was given to the water and what belonged to the land leaving a sharp line drawn beneath the whiteness.

While the snow and ice was barely passable and the tides ran under a full moon we waited for the bay to drain. The sands lent passage and we could deliver Christmas presents to our neighbours, returning with news and mussels plucked from weed drenched rocks. Yesterday I wandered the shallows in the afternoon sunshine as a creature of the tidal race with the hermit crabs and sand gobies for company enjoying the warmth beneath that cold band of snow. Today all has changed and the world seems almost ill-defined, the land runs with water, while the tide carries away small bergs of frozen beachfront.

In the late afternoon the cows return to the byre, their coats wet from a shower trail vapours in the darkness as afternoon turns to evening.

Image Above Right : Coils Of Pea Fencing
Image Above Left: Hay Loft Floor
Image Below: Hermit Crab

The Zed Bed Sled

2010-12-22T07:44:00.000-08:00

Image Above: Bea And The Zed Bed Sled
Location: Isle Of Erraid
The Zed Bed Sled
Sunday 19th December

I chased Isaac out of the tool shed before dropping the mask’s visor and drawing an arc of molten light over the final joint in the steel. Isaac waited in the snow displaying his impatience with well timed questions as children do marooned on the back seat of the longest journey. Eventually I slid the bent steels out of the shed and let the welds hiss in snow. We found a seat sized piece of plywood amongst the remnants of the zed bed I had abandoned earlier on the pier. A little over an hour ago it had been silently rusting in the corner of the boat shed, with a little effort and a cutting disc its days of torturing spare room guests were finally over.

The rope came from the ‘rope trailer’; named cunningly because it holds the island’s collection of old rope in what could only be described as the world’s biggest knot, rather than pull at threads in search of an end I wisely took a knife. Celia fetched oil and a rag from the garden shed, old vegetable oil used to put a sheen on spades and a slickness on steel runners. We gathered on the street, kids, neighbours and trudged through walled in whiteness of grass gardens pausing at the gate to look out over the bay. The moon had risen out of Ben More and hung over the silence of the snow rimmed bay in ownership of the late afternoon like a benevolent soul.

I had forgotten about the simple pleasure of sliding down a hill and felt ashamed that somehow I had not devoted enough of my life to this pursuit. It was rumoured that a local shopkeeper who had displayed a sledge for the last six snowless winters had exaggerated its annual inflationary rise as the first few inches had begun to settle, never mind that he was dealing with a sacred object. All objects travel in space and time but few instantly transport what it is to be a child as seamlessly as a sledge . It is not the past that rushes up to meet me but a freedom in the moment and the pure joy of it . But I am not the first of my family to build time machines. My great uncle went to night school metal work classes and furnished my childhood winters’ with a sledge that seemed to run equally on air as snow. And then my father and his metal imagings, sledges crafted from junk that could hold a street full of kids and send them hurtling down the rolly polly field.

Once again It was my turn at the top of the hill and lifting my feet I let the world rush by. Later I wondered if the zed bed had ever imagined such an afterlife.

Lights

2010-07-31T15:06:00.001-07:00

Image Above: The Burg, Mull

Saturday 31st July

The light has almost gone now, I waited in the quarry and watched gaps in the clouds deepen into crimson. There is so much sky here and so much is made ridiculous by that blanket of light. Earlier in the Sound of Iona I watched a wave suddenly enveloped in an amber glow, there is no reason for this, who chooses a wave out of ocean full of movement? My line snagged a mackerel and I looked away briefly to the rod, boat and the silver life that hung from the hook. The fish I returned as tribute but the glow had moved on leaving me in the shadow of a squall. These random acts of beauty are the local currency and wealth is often afforded merely by a cliff top perch or an open boat.

Fishing

2010-05-03T13:21:00.000-07:00

Image above: A yacht moored in Tinker’s hole
Sunday 11th April
Fishing

The day had begun under a band of vaporously thin pink light that hung over the northern horizon. With altitude the pink graduated through white into the blue spectrum before deepening to meet the edge of the night that still clung to the dome. From the cottage doorway I traced the line of Mull’s central mountain range to the cliffs of the Burg and then out to Iona; a strip of landscape separating the sky from its counterpart, the waters of the bay and sound. This view is the reward for a street that presents itself to a northern sky, some mornings I walk collecting reflections from the cottage windows, each a new vision of perfection.

Having passed the vernal equinox the daily position of the sun’s rise and decent had begun to make the slow march north. Gradually the idea of a sunrise and setting becomes folly, for by midsummer at this northern latitude the sun briefly dips below the horizon before continuing its seemingly unending orbit of the island.

By nine the sun was beginning to make its presence felt although it was struggling to burn away a mist that had resigned some of the distant islands to familiar outlines. I collect fuel, fishing tackle and slip away from the pier in reliance heading towards the sound. As the boat settles into its hull speed an arc of clear water spreads between the bow and stern waves distorting the shallows beneath. Visions of the sandy seabed come briefly into focus as if viewed under a magnifying glass or through a seer’s ball, before vanishing with the wake. Over the starboard bow the long arm of Easter Island’s beach has been exposed by the falling tide. The sunlight scattered by the sherbet sands and low water shines as if the island itself is still being forged in white heat. The tide still has an hour or so to run its ebb before the two halves of the island will briefly be reunited, the dividing waters having shrank back to form a central lagoon. Ahead the thin mast and low-slung hull of a yacht shelters below the shaded granite walls of Tinker’s Hole. As she swings on her mooring the sun catches her broadside, highlighting her like a gull against a passing squall.

At the far end of Tinker’s Hole I finally slow the engine to meet a heavy chop drummed up by the distant swell. There seems little point battering a course through the crests so I slip into the shelter of American Island before bringing the boat out to meet the swell in open water. She rises and falls comfortably despite my apprehension, I wait looking for a sheltered spot to fish but the current chooses for me as the boat drifts into Hell’s Kitchen, its outer reefs for once providing some protection.

In a single action I swing the tip of the fishing rod over the gunwale and release the guard from the reel. The weighted line and lures smoothly pull away from the spool as if unravelling a cashmere sweater. Ten or twelve meters below the lead weight touches down and I imagine a thud or the dull clank of metal on rock but in reality the only clue given is a slack line. Winding the reel I draw in the slack and lift the weight a couple of feet of the bottom. Now the work begins as I lift the rod and let it fall back, a simple movement I repeat with the relentlessness of a nodding oil derrick.

My vision of the world beneath is at best a montage of Jacques Cousteau’s films, memories of snorkelling, depths inked on charts and the time it takes for my weight to reach the bottom. I construct a map based on this rudimentary data and hold it more as something to aim for than fixed like the reefs or rocky shores. In half imagined gullies fish lurk or maybe stacked up in formation over some knoll as they hang in the tidal currents that whip around the island. Into this world I cast my line as a small act of faith.

Just as the weight serves to carry the lures into the depths it also gives tension to the line, a couple foot up from the lead a knot sends a small branch of line three inches out to a lure, a hook dressed with packing twine, insulation tape and nail varnish. Another eight inches up and the next knot repeats the pattern, altogether the rig holds four lures. Ignoring the translucent line the lures should appear like a small shoal of fish, all that is required to bring them to life is animation. Ten metres above as I lift the rod the lures spring to life rising and falling like an aquatic puppet show; this is fishing.

I drift in the current searching for an audience, the first tug comes as a wake up call and then bang another hit. I am connected, the urgency transmitted through the line and rod. I pump the rod back and then lower it to reel in the slack, after for or five strokes a silver flash emerges from the gloom beneath swinging pendulum like against the pull of the line. Clear of the water the fish becomes languid as if momentarily in awe of the this strange new world, unhooked in the fish box it briefly tries to swim but finds no density in air to aid its propulsion. I return the line to the sea.

Image above right: Reliance on the move
Image Below: A box of saithe

2010-03-28T09:31:00.000-07:00

Image Above and Below Right: Red Deer Stags grazing.

Scenic Route
Thursday 25th March 2010

I am off island, the location only serves to heighten my sense of disconnection, off island, off line. My mobile phone has joined the conspiracy, even if the battery hadn’t died the chance of a signal on these barren shores would at best be slim. This is my day out on Mull, an island and yet not my island home, but then place can be a small thing maybe a tossed pebble. I have stopped the van halfway along a route described by local sign posts as scenic, this almost implies that all other routes on Mull are somehow commonplace.

Below me, a beach of dense basalt pebbles stretches away to meet the mountainous walls that guard the entrance to the sea loch. I walk down to meet the water and prospect for oysters but the tide is high leaving me only spent shells, stripped of their cushion soft, enamelled mother of pearl. Above the road a sheep fank* nestles into a low cliff and I wander back to take a closer look. The collection of drystone walls with rooms and runs almost has the look of an Andean ruin, a city laid out and forgotten. I lean over the stonework pushing my elbows into to a deep carpet of moss, and look up to find a pied wagtail watching me from across the enclosure. I turn my attention to the moss and pretend to hunt for something in the hopes of raising the bird’s curiosity and draw him closer, it works for robins but my friend may be a little wiser and bounces off into the distance.

I walk through the pens and find a toilet positioned with some architectural sensibility and yet almost surreal in its application. So this is the world today a little less than serious, I return to the van .

The road swings in and out of the cliff faces as it rises sharply from the loch shore. The height of the van’s driving seat only adds to the sense that I might have stumbled onto a fairground ride. Ahead the Burg a monolith of basalt sits like a impenetrable fortress, its walls holding back the sky. The sun has reached far enough into the afternoon to run its fingers over the shear sides picking out the layers and faults in the rock. I slow as the road nears the pass and glance along the northern wall of the Burg, a moment later all is forgotten as the landscape opens into winter scorched moorland, golden in the afternoon sun. A group of twenty or so stags are grazing near the road, I pull into a lay-by, cut the engine and reach for my camera.

Fank* an enclosure for working with sheep

Image: A Fank with facilities.

The Quarry

2010-02-27T08:29:00.000-08:00

The Quarry, Sunday 21st February

Image above: The Children’s House, built by the Findhorn Foundation’s Youth Project, Erraid Quarry

I pace in the quarry, the camera rests on a tripod and I watch the clouds. I have come to wait on the landscape for a gift, a small rectangle of light. The sun has already made it into the island’s afternoon, its rays trimming the patches of snow back into the shadows of the rock faces. Below, the spoil heap artificially extends the quarry workings out into a plateau that crests over the island’s small pine plantation, the bay and the sound. A few years back the community laid out a spiral of rocks amongst the thin turf on the seaward edge of the heap. Even in a relatively short time it has become imbued with a feeling that its creation was in a more distant past, the Celtic symbolism fits with the wider landscape.

Over the sound, Columba’s abbey is side lit rendering its grey walls with deep shadows like folds in the sombre cassock of a monk. Behind the bell tower the rocks look down on the abbey’s thirteen hundred year history with little reverence, their presence stretches back into such inordinate vastness that even to say two and a half thousand million years doesn’t begin to describe its magnitude. I wait and wonder what my part in all this is.

I’m telling stories, I suppose it is something I have done my whole life. And then there are things to be done that don’t require a story, things that need elbow grease or the swing of a pick. Sometimes I confuse the two and think that stories stack roof slates and dig ditches, but they don’t. So what use, these stories?

Maybe I am just sending postcards to some future self, when I look back over my old writing I find time has erased my memory of the creative process leaving me to read the words anew, as if they were penned by the hand of a stranger. This is not unique to writing, sometimes I pull the kitchen draws out and inspect their dovetail joints in an attempt to keep the memory of making them alive but it has already been lost, so I wonder at another’s skill.

The island is littered with the handiwork of others, some good and some not so, but it matters little I live with it all. When Robert Louis Stevenson came here as a lighthouse engineer in training, he wrote of Sabbaths when the stone masons tools fell silent. They have been silent along time and yet Stevenson’s words almost carry as much weight of proof as the blocks that litter the quarry’s spoil heap, or the Dubh Artach lighthouse that guards the southern horizon.

Image below: Abandoned Blacksmith’s, Erraid Quarry

Beach Casting

2010-02-11T05:24:00.000-08:00

Image Left: Fishing on Balfour Bay
Tuesday 9th February
Beach casting

The island’s central valley is soaking up the fragile warmth of the winter sun. I descend from the ridge carrying my youngest son in his sling and swinging a fishing rod like an oversized gentleman’s cane. Beneath the granite walls the breeze has been hushed, it passes high overhead and for a moment I wonder if I haven’t stepped into some alternate place, an island within an island. Eventually the valley bottoms out into a wide bog cut with drains. Thick layers of peat topped with heather have infilled the spaces around the granite monoliths which seem to rise like leviathans from a becalmed ocean. The land climbs a little to meet the sands of Balfour Bay, which have been pushed up into a half dune by the prevailing winds.

I slouch through the soft sand before crossing the small stream that winds itself through the bay. The sun is almost at twelve o’clock leaving little in the way of shelter on the wide pan of sand. Once again the bay has been remodelled by the ocean, the sands have shifted and the pitch of the beach has increased dramatically, forcing the waves to pound as they break and explode over the sand.

I tell myself that I haven’t come to fish and then make a long cast out into turquoise depths. The fishing line makes a graceful arc through the sunlight, spooling out the memory of its tightness on reel in loose coils. I wind in making the lure dance unseen beneath the waves and then move on casting again and again until I have worked my way to the far side of the bay, the surf erasing my footprints as I go. Finley wakes and I stand the rod up amongst the rocks and find a place to sit, we watch the waves break, before a spinning lens cap draws his attention away. Two summers ago I swam here through a vast shoal of small fry, a shoal that filled the distance like snow flakes in a blizzard that had stalled. Today, summer or at least the idea of it feels tangible and I return to the surf casting again in the hopes of snagging a season.

Later as we leave the beach an anomaly in the acoustics of the bay carries the immediacy of a wave as it thuds into the sand. I turn around expecting to catch the backwash of some monstrous ninth wave but find no evidence in the distant rippling foam.

Image below: Lonely Cloud, at Balfour Bay

The Eagle

2010-02-02T08:35:00.000-08:00

Image Left: Wheelbarrows, hiding out of the wind
The Eagle
Friday 29th January

Out on the street the bell is ringing, I tighten my grip on the duvet hoping to stall my inevitable departure. When the sound begins to subside I venture out from under the covers and dress quickly. The bell ringer has probably returned to the far end of the street and the island’s occupants will soon be gathering for the morning meeting. Still in the hallway and fighting with wellington boots I can hear the clack as cottage doors are swung open, slapping against the wide granite jambs. The lighthouse builders knew which way to hang a door; when the gales blow from the north we force our way out of the cottage doors rather than welcoming in the weather.

Outside the day is bright but cold, the wind has moved into the northwest carrying the arctic unhindered across the North Atlantic to race down the street. My neighbour rushes from his cottage gripping binoculars and pointing at the sky. Its an Eagle, the size alone gives it away but the movement or lack of it is a better label. High in the uncertain currents thrust up by the island’s jumble of granite fists the eagle hangs like an astronomical feature: Orion, Polaris or Mars. The smallest flex in its wing almost imperceptible to our rude eyes edges the bird along the street. I follow its line and find a small crowd of islanders stalled outside the meeting room looking to the sky. We join them and a consensus forms that it’s a golden eagle as apposed to the larger sea eagle; both local to the island. The eagle moves off drawing in its wings as it rises over the quarry. Despite the grace of movement this is a raggedy bird, its primaries extended like the fingers of a scarecrow grasping the wind from under an old jacket. Maybe that’s its mythology, a wandering tramp, a bird of the waste lands.

The crowd drifts away to join the meeting, the day needs to be planned: wood to be split, seaweed to collect, lunch, dinner and meditation. I spend the rest of the working day glancing upwards hoping to see the tramp again.

The Web

2010-01-27T09:17:00.000-08:00

Image above: The mark left by a hawk's beak in a seagull’s feather
The Web
Thursday 14th January

A sparrowhawk rises from the jumble of rocks that make up the shoreline. Its wings are stiffened, thumb feathers drawn in like the hand of swimmer pushing water. It tilts its body as if a sudden gust has caught it off guard and in doing so flashes the white of its chest against the darkness of a rain shadow. Its a female and she puffs away over heather hugging the contours until she is out of sight. I amble over wondering if I had disturbed her while she was with a kill, although her talons had been empty. I find only sea tossed debris, polystyrene and plastic bottles.

Forgetting the hawk I move on enjoying the unfamiliar softness of boggy ground after a month of hard labour on frozen earth. The Sound of Iona is all chop, waves beating relentlessly again the rocks with all the ineffectualness of child’s tantrum. A hundred yards on and lost in thought the first feathers of a kill go unnoticed until I stumble into the midst of what looks like a pillow fight gone wrong. I look for a carcass or a trace of bloodied flesh but it has gone, only the feathers remain. I collect some primaries for identification and guess the victim was a seagull. Today is not the day for unpicking a crime scene, the hawk may only have been responsible for the idea of a kill rather than the culprit.

Back at home, I retrieve the feathers from my pocket and place them in order of size. Five are from the right wing with one stray from the left; its camber arcing in opposite direction. Superficially they appear to be in good condition, their quills still intact despite having been grasped and ripped from the wing. The soft parts are pock marked and I remember the shape of a hawk’s bill from other encounters. This is frenzy, each tiny mark is the jabbing of a beak as it searches for a lever to grasp. There a hundreds of these punctures in my small collection of feathers to have plucked the whole bird with one beak seems almost a labour of love.

I fish out my microscope from the bottom of the bookcase and set it up on the windowsill table. Outside dusk has begun to gather about the mountains. Ben More the highest of the range has spent the day shrouded in mist and there are no fireworks this evening as the sun leaves the bay to climb the heights. Even on a low magnification the feather gives up its intricacy. Each tiny filament that branches away from the central quill is fringed with rows of fine barbs that mesh with those of the neighbouring filaments; creating a web both strong and yet flexible. I move the feather and find a puncture and imagine the shape of the bill its hollow triangular section indelibly marked into the web. Part of me understands the hawks frustration, grasping at something so apparently solid that it can cradle the wind and yet still be so insubstantial. Despite the hole the web stands, but other feathers have almost lost their rigidity under the assault.

I look for the marks left by the beak’s final grip on the shaft as it pulled the feather from the flesh and find a delicate pinhole. On others the force exerted by the tip of the bill has shattered the translucent quills like a biro crushed underfoot. I pack away the microscope non the wiser as to the culprit, higher magnifications always expose the gaps both physical and in my understanding of the world. Tonight the wind is already erasing the drama from the landscape and feathers will reclaim their anonymity freed from the burden of being evidence.

Under Ice

2010-01-21T07:02:00.000-08:00

Image above: Seal Paw In The Sand
Under ice
Sunday 10th January

Yesterday’s tracks remain undisturbed, overnight a sheet of ice has consigned the wanderings of the beach’s devotees to a museum exhibit, a world behind glass. I follow the prints of a rabbit to the grassy margins of the sand and lumber up over the turf to find the bleached skull of another. It seems that death stalks the land while the world waits under ice. There is always expectancy to be found in the drip of an icicle under the sun or the soft lapping of salt water at the ice. Already the wading birds have begun to think about territories, lapwings stride over the grass in ownership and take to air in its defence squawking at trespassers. I remember the plans I had made for a hawk’s nest box and wonder whether the return of spring will once again confirm me as a procrastinator.

Below, the triangle of a beach nicknamed the Little Caribbean stretches away to meet a constellation of rocky islets and outcrops. The sand occupies the white part of the spectrum, its crusted ice coating almost phosphorescing in its brilliance. The water sits easy in shallow lagoons thinning out the oceans depth of colour until it appears only tinted but dense like toughened glass. The sky touched by scattered cloud still holds to its nitrogen blue. Today vision is all elemental as if hues and subtlety have been banished and replaced with industrially applied colour; this is paint by numbers for the numerically challenged.

I walk on out to the islets and their accompanying shallows and find myself transfixed by the interplay of light each wavelet brings to the beach. But I am no casual observer, the refracted and the reflected sunlight only sparkles for me. If I move, the light moves with me and so like everyone I get my own personal sunbeam.

From over the wide expanse of beach death travels on the breeze and I follow, finding a claw half buried in sand and ice. It takes my eyes a few minutes to adjust and then comprehend my vision, at last an image emerges of a seal lying like a child at rest from making snow angels. This is white on white, bleached fur, seashell sand and a shroud of ice. I resist the urge to kneel and take the paw within my hands. The smell returns as the air eddies; the carcass has been punctured and emptied leaving the skin to tightened over its ribs like the canvas of a canoe, I move away.

Image below: Golden Plover, Preening

Fishing for Erraid

2010-01-07T05:23:00.000-08:00

Image above: Scorpion Fish
Fishing for Erraid (The Weird Windowsill Fish)
Monday 4th January

The wind has started again and like a jukebox brought to life by some otherworldly coin it has begun to rattle out melodies on the cottage windows. I walk across the sand of Christine’s bay with a bucket in hand trailing a garden rake as my youngest son nods in his sling somewhere in the outer layers of my winter clothing. Occasionally the rake hits a solid object in the sand and I stop to investigate an empty shell or a stone. I walk on towards the narrows and a spot where a couple of days ago I had stopped the tractor between firewood runs to hunt for cockles. The picking’s had not been great and later after watching an old documentary about Morecambe Bay’s cocklers I realised just how poor my takings had been.

I find the tyre tracks and the marks left by my previous excavations, the tides have softened and healed the scares. Leaving the bucket on the sand I begin to rake and after half a dozen strokes the blade clunks against a shell and I roll a cockle out onto the undisturbed sand before scooping it into the bucket. I wonder how a tool so rudely made could carry the resonance of a hard shell and soft body as perfectly as a tuning fork reaches pitch. Iron-handed I work my way between the high and low water marks. I image striking a seam of densely populated sand, but still it is ten or twelve strokes between cockles. A little disheartened I move down to the river and find the low banks littered with empty shells. Here the sand gives way to deposits of gravel carried as bed load, each pebble a single piece of mountain. In places live cockles dislodged from the sand and gravel lie on the surface decorated by the sun with patches of algae. I leave these to the hooded crows who drop them on favoured rocks and then daintily pick at their lunch.

The afternoon has moved on, and I look up to find the sun has left the bay for the mountains. Away over the sand I spot my wife, I wait toying with a bank of gravel and we walk on together up the river. Deep in the corner of the bay we find one of the fish traps the local shepherd had told us about, it consists of a dwarf wall in a crescent shape with a small outlet or shoot. Rising tides bring fish from the sound like mullet and flatties as well as salmon and sea trout although the latter are generally headed up river to spawn. If the shoot is blocked or netted it effectively cuts off the retreat back to the sea. We never asked about the history of the traps but a part of me wonders about future use.

Out of the sun the wind begins to bite and we head back stopping randomly to prospect. My wife draws me back to patch of gritty sand that makes a small island in the river. With little more than a starter’s worth for an afternoons work I decide to give it one last go. Every stroke brings up two or three cockles and after five minutes we have collected enough to half fill the bucket. We wander back in the gathering dusk, up on the hill behind the cottages the cows are silhouetted against a mackerel sky. I carry on down the street to the main kitchen to collect some milk and stop to look at a pair of scorpion fish in a windowsill fish tank.

A guest who had stayed with us in the summer asked in worried tone one morning whether it was normal to see fish crawling out of the sea. An explanation about the walking fins of scorpion fish seemed to put him at ease. Later I wondered whether he had been slightly disappointed as I imagined he had been harbouring the belief the fish had come to talk.

From the windowsill the scorpion fish look on in abject boredom as if the street was the least interesting rock pool they had ever had the misfortune to be stumble into.

P.S. The scorpion fish were rescued from an abandoned creel and released later that evening after a photo shoot, unharmed if not a little bored; the cockles weren’t so lucky.

The Tree With Lights

2010-01-01T09:12:00.000-08:00

Image left: Ice On Balfour Bay
The Tree With Lights
Christmas Day 25th December 2009

The low winter sun had failed to reach into the depths of Balfour Bay leaving the sand with a thick coating of ice. Where the curtain of light has reached the margins it lies crumpled, bejewelling the frosted sand and chasing icy fingers from the rocks and foliage. I walk the ice bridges over an entombed stream until their fragile backs break and the granite walls of the valley echo under the sound.

Up in the sunlight the island shines, bracken and heather gilded and woven into the finest of tweeds. Even the ocean has been subdued and laps at the island’s shores sending small riffles through the shallows. Below the island’s high point a hen harrier is sailing on thin current of air while its shadow is projected almost horizontally onto rock faces by the low sun. Mid way though the bank of a turn it folds its wings and drops into the heather like stone wrapped in a handkerchief. I wait for it to emerge and it duly flaps over the ridge and out of sight.

I remember it is Christmas day and naively expect the universe to make some kind of seasonal grand gesture; maybe piped music, lights and a tree. Back on the ridge a kestrel has taken over patrolling from the harrier, I stand in the half light of the bay looking into a dome of blue as the wings of the hawk flicker.

Ninth Wave

2009-12-04T05:51:00.000-08:00

Image Left: The Croft Landing
Saturday 28th November

There are no waves to count today, the bay sits like a shard of glass thrust in amongst landscape. The storm has past and the dawn has erased any memory of it as if it was somehow an unpleasant part of my psyche rather than a physicality. A couple of days ago I watched the Iona Ferry take blow after blow from a force nine, the waves crashed high over its front trailing spray down the sound, eventually it turned tail and retreated to the safety of the Bull Hole*.

I walk through kelp fronds piled knee deep at the high tide mark of Christine’s bay and think about fishing. Even today the stillness of the bay says little about the open ocean or even the sound for that matter. On my last fishing trip of the season I sat in the valleys of a giant swells and while I was momentarily becalmed the world shrank back, only to surge forward again as the engine pushed on. So my fishing rod lies idle while I pursue tracks in the sand, and the rest of the landscape.

*Bull Hole, Natural harbour in the sound of Iona

Interludes

2009-11-06T04:34:00.000-08:00

Wednesday 4th November
Interludes
Image Left: Moon over the bay.

Sometimes when I close my eyes I find myself rerunning old business trips, I can almost feel the gravity of the car against the camber of the road. These are the interludes of my old life, as if somehow I am reliving the spaces between events, the boredom. I know the junctions, the by-passes and lay-bys but the rest is lost to me as dull ache. Memory is hardly a reliable witness, all that remains of my childhood Sundays at church is a feeling that religion is about passively restraining people in their seats. How may hours of preaching, communions given and taken , hymns sung and demons exorcised to be left only with the resonance of fidgety legs?

This evening I walked the island’s small street of cottages tapping on living room windows and inviting the occupants to watch the moon rise out of cliff faces and mountains of Mull. People hung in the warmth of doorways while the brave made it onto the street their camera flashes flickering in the dusk.
At the last house I collected my son and wrapping him in a sling walked down to Christine’s bay. The rising tide had reclaimed the estuary for the sea but the ocean swells had not been invited. On the edge of the sand I watched the moon in its mountain home and traced a pillar of light over stillness.

Later at dinner people thanked me for the moon and I wondered whether somehow I was responsible for its presence.

bible black

2009-10-20T08:10:00.000-07:00

Image left: A flautist brings in the Dusk at the Sanctuary
Location: Isle of Erraid, Mull

Bible Black
Sunday 18th October
The sun, sea and wind have scorched my already over-sensitive eyes; I retreat under a hat pulling it down to seal my blindness. A reaction to a hand cream has brought me a temporary secession from the visible world, so I hang up my eyes and enjoy the painlessness of the dark while strolling arm in arm with my wife over the sand. We are walking back from the far end of the Narrows* and I am measuring steps out against my visual memory. Already the white noise of breaking waves has begun to fade to be replaced with the compression of sand under my footfall. Without clues to my position I loose faith and peek out from beneath the hat. Three hooded crows pick amongst the wind scattered debris of the beach; when I close my eyes again they are gone and I am back with crunch, crunch beneath my feet. Today the crows only exist is the visual world, their crawks and scratchings have been carried away on the breeze. I wonder if the crows could blank me out similarly; just as I have my world I suspect they too enjoy their own.

Slightly ahead of me and to my left I hear the clap of thousand tiny hands applauding the wind and remember the line, “willows whiten aspens quiver”** . My eyes confirm the words of the poet, the cliff faces like football terraces hold a swaying crowd of yellow gloved aspens. In the spring I greet even the smallest bunch of daffodils by reciting to myself the opening verse of Wordsworth’s most popular work. Just as Adam or Karl Linnaeus got to name everything so too the poets own my emotional responses. The call of a buzzard brings me back as it echoes between opposing rock faces. A visitor to the island who had worked in the film industry told me this was the standard sound used to accompany shots of wilderness. I imagine all that it is to be wilderness, all that it has meant to those who new of it, who lived within and without and then see the distillation of that intangible vastness to an image of mountain and the call of a hawk. I suppose no one has the whole bible as a bumper sticker, just the sign of a cross or a fish. So I have become a blind man wandering in the wilderness with half remembered poems and snatched conversation with which to build my world.

* a narrow stretch of sand that separates the tidal island of Erraid from Mull
** taken from The Lady Of Sharlott, Tennyson

Coming Up For Air

2009-08-10T02:33:00.000-07:00

Saturday 8th August
Coming Up For Air
Image Left: Bottlenose Dolphin

The sky has already begun to darken. I watch an orange glow fill the spaces between the cloud on the horizon. The swell is hitting a small reef on the other side of a wide gully that runs through Erraid’s outer skerries. Pleasant domes of water draw themselves up into foaming monsters before petering out in the backwash of other islets. The sea is a mess, in the distance the mast of yacht swings like the arm of a metronome as it motors its way towards the shelter of Tinker’s Hole.

I cut the engine and put my faith in the ocean and Archimedes. My fishing line drops to the sea bed and I wind the reel up a little before jogging the lures up and down. The fish come thick and fast, mackerel and saithe of equal size. I toss them into a fish box while they are still flicking their tails against the air. And then the fins come and I forget the fish and watch as a pod of dolphins bounce out of the gully through the crests. In the turbulence they appear and disappear as if by magic sometimes within an arms reach of the boat then away as tail lost on the far side of a wave. This is too easy, fish on the line and dolphins for company.

I can’t be sure but this is probably the same pod we saw yesterday out in the Sound of Iona. At the time my oldest son temporarily forgot his sea sickness as they neared the boat. The weather had been better and sea more readily gave up its secrets. At a guess I would say there was between ten and fifteen dolphins in the group including a couple of juveniles. Close up their fins and skin give up detail in form of nicks, bite marks and blemishes; its a hard life being a dolphin despite the fixed grin. They moved through the sound gathering a flotilla of pleasure craft drawn from both shores; we left them to the crowd.

Tonight I have the ocean and the dolphins to myself, so I drift under a darkening sky. A grey seal joins the fun stretching his head out of the water to view the contents of my boat as it tilts on a wave. The dolphins eventually move off out into the larger swells beyond the island. I start the engine and turn tail for home leaving a phosphorescent wake in the darkness of the sound.

Image Below: Coming up for Air (Bottlenose Dolphin)

Space

2009-06-28T06:49:00.000-07:00

Image Left: Sitting with the stones

Space , Friday 26th June

My wife walks on ahead to the spiral and her sitting stone. I scramble through the bracken lifting patches of roofing felt, hoping to catch a lizard taking in the last of the days warmth. I have no luck and follow my wife to the spiral. The sun is making its evening descent towards Iona and has already begun to shoot out colour into the horizon. As my wife sits, I bounce round the rocks of the spoil heap photographing orchids, ferns, thyme and tight bunches of stonecrop.

The island is one mile by one mile, but what surface and what intricacy. Living here is like unfolding a lung. I have to ask myself what scale should I use to measure? Do I run a tape over points of the boulders or down into the crevices where hard ferns and stonecrop shelter? Maybe the surface of a leaf counts or the delicate inlayed scales that surround a lizards eye. If I look closely these details too give up their own structure and inversely the space that marks out their components. I once tried to grasp the size of mountain; in the dark of a winter evening I drove over its shoulder and understood the blackness against the streetlights of the villages and towns that clung to its foothills. Here there are few lights to give contrast and daily tidal surges make the ocean a less reliable yardstick.

Some days I go a little deeper viewing the world under a microscope and finding red splashes of blood in the body of a tick, blood that was once mine. Is everything just membrane, there are only boundaries and separation. When I draw caricatures two circles with dots at their centre become breasts or eyeballs dependant on viewer; a simple act of defining space. Am I only interested in defining space?

Image below: Common Lizard

A Rare Thing

2009-06-13T08:28:00.001-07:00

Image left: Common Sandpiper
Sunday 7th June
A Rare Thing

I turn into the Narrows under a sky filled with the siren like calls of oystercatchers. I quickly find the empty cup of their nest seated in a heather topped boulder: It had originally held three eggs, but two of these had been lost early on leaving only a single chick to face the rigors of life on the beach. I move off and their calls subside.

The recent run of neap tides have failed to dampen the expanse of sand leaving it littered with sea borne debris. Even the small tidal stream that skirts island’s side of the sand has disappeared leaving only the fossilised indents of running water. On the opposite bank the oaks of John’s Wood have filled out their canopy still holding to the glass ceiling created by the prevailing winds. Below on the edge of the sand a patch of Irises are just beginning to flower, the distance lending them the feel of impressionist’s sketch with hastily thrown yellow dashes amongst the green fuse.

For the island’s rocky margin life has also moved on apace, the low cliffs hold wooded tufts, with oak, birch, aspen and hazel all in leaf while the rowans had started to blossom. Even the shear faces of rock are dotted with tight bunches of thrift like unfurled anemones. Where ledges and fissures afford some shelter ferns, penny royal and heather bring their own colour to the patina of lichens. I drew myself into this world with deep breaths , someone had painted over the surfaces with life.

From a low stand of birch the call of a bird brought my attention in from the beach. The tone was melodious enough to be a songbird but it had a distinct resonance that marked it out from the thrushes and warblers. Its calls pulled me from bush to bush while my quarry gave up only tantalising glimpses. I was been played for a fool and when the bird had taken me far enough from its nest it made a long arc back to were the game had began. I too returned to the start but instead of replaying the chase, I waited. A small wading bird emerged from the thicket calling to its mate who answered from the top of rock on the edge of the beach. It flitted off the ground and threw its legs forward to grapple with a low branch on which it intended to perch, it took a couple of second to find its balance. I waited with them as they moved from branch to rock through the small valley dipping their tails and calling all the time. What I took to be the female made occasional sorties to the base of a hazel, where I assumed her nest lay. The species of the bird was only something I could guess at and these guesses ranged from rare passage migrants to species I had seldom found the need to look up in my field guide. I suppose life is a rare thing in itself and intimacy with it, rarer still.

On The Street Where I Live

2009-06-03T09:01:00.000-07:00

Image Left: The Island

Monday 1st June

On The Street Where I Live

I woke early to full sunshine and the thinnest of breezes. In the summer here, daylight begins about the time nightclubs are sending patrons home, darkness becomes a brief interlude in an endless summer day. My neighbour remarked yesterday that she could live another whole day after dinner, and I remembered I had a whole day to live before breakfast.

I met the small party on the street about half past six and we found coffee and a clear blue sky framed in the small panes of the kitchen window; we made our way down to the pier. I hauled on the mooring ropes breaking the inertia of the boat and the day in general. The engine sprang to life primed by the warmth of the sun and we idled out into the breeze of the sound. Ahead, Iona’s cliff faces hung like a wall in the distance and behind us Ben More crested out of a blue mountain haze. I felt a little uneasy about breaking through the quiet presence of the island and ocean with the rattle of hum of the engine at full throttle. We eventually turned towards Tinker’s Hole and found a small flotilla of yachts moored across the narrow gap, their masts glinting scimitar like against the horizon.

Overhead terns called as they flitted between the islets occasionally diving almost butterfly like to meet the water. Where the falling tide had exposed a long stretch of white sand on Easter Island, the striking patterns of male eider ducks jarred at my vision as they sat with their drab mates in the sun. We glided into seal bay finding a single grey seal hauled out on the rocks, he quickly dismounted and slipped back into the sea. I cut the engine and we drifted a little downwind of Seal island, the smell of seal’s breath still tainting the morning air. After a few minutes the seal reconsidered and returned to its perch lumbering out of water and the grace afforded by that medium. We sat hushed by the presence of the seal as if waiting on a guru for some words of wisdom, none were forth coming.

Our little boat trip was to give a couple long term guests a last look around the island and so far all the actors had willing taken to the stage. Leaving the seal, we cut back into the sound and visited Jimmy’s lagoon, a large sea trout bolted over the sand as we navigated through the monoliths. The tide was too low to afford the boat access to main lagoon. I took us out and hugging the opposite shore from the island made my way down to our jetty on Mull. I tied up and we stepped out to look back to the island, the summer sun was still lighting the face of the street, picking out the brightly coloured doors with a frame of shadow.

The distance hid any of the morning’s activities giving the place the look of a model village. My eye moved from the pier and sheds past the tractors and up the hill towards pier cottage and the byre. Above, the sanctuary topped the small wood and higher still the quarry and observatory. My eye took me back to the street and gardens, a perfectly formed miniature world that rested motionless in the morning sun.

When we finally returned to the island we found the world had woken, I handed the boat over to Phil and the children for the school run. The cows were already making their way back along the track their udders a little lighter after milking while their calves called from the front garden of number two. On the street two empty chairs, a laptop and a guitar looked to have been hastily abandoned by a unlicensed busker , while doorways held guests and residents that had come to look out over the bay at the wider world beyond.

Image above right: Street Life

A Shallow Scrape In The Sand

2009-05-28T05:03:00.000-07:00

Image Left: Oystercatcher chicks

A Shallow Scrape In The Sand
Wednesday 27th May

After dinner we walked onto the low grassy headland above the arc of the beach, the Oystercatchers where already up swinging around us with alarm calls while keeping some distance. I had found the nest earlier today on a walk across the bay to collect some guests who had been visiting Iona for the day. At three o’clock the shallow scrape in the sand was occupied by to two fluffy chicks and a single undamaged egg. At five, on the way back from a visit to the croft a small beak could be seen as it broke through the shell.

I guessed by now the chick would be out but wasn’t entirely sure if the little brood would be mobile enough to have scarpered. Once on the move finding highly camouflaged wader chicks becomes almost impossible especially when their parents’ warning calls seem to encourage them to remain as motionless as any of the other three million pebbles on the beach. A couple of years ago I nearly flattened a lapwing chick that had decided to patrol a stretch of road next to a Pennine moorland. What had been conspicuous while running on flat surface of the loose road completely disappeared when seated.

After walking backwards and forwards over the same ten feet of road for five minutes and finding nothing I glanced down at my feet and saw what I thought was frog that had been unlucky enough to encounter a car. Realising it was the chick I took a deep breath before bending down, luckily the flat appearance was partially an optical illusion created by the mottled pattern of its down. I lifted the chick and its legs dropped down like the oversized landing gear of an aeroplane. When I placed it back in contact with the ground it new its cover was completely blown and made a break for it in style of Road Runner.

I took the precaution of checking and setting my camera before we neared the nest so as not to spend anymore time than necessary disturbing the chicks and their parents. We dropped onto the beach cautiously studying the ground before every step. We found three chicks safe and well with half an egg shell in a small cup of sand. The latest hatchling was still sporting the wet look and nestling into the down of its slightly older siblings. All in all we stayed at the nest for a little over a minute before walking the short distance back to the street and out of danger zone for the worried parents.

Image Above Right: Nest Amongst The Pebbles
Image below: The Conception

A Toilet At The End Of The World.

2009-05-25T15:26:00.000-07:00

Image Above: The compost toilet

A toilet at the end of the world.
Sunday 24th May

The weather could only be described as ‘bank holiday weekend’, weather. I was milking in the morning and then supposedly heading round to the other side of the island by boat to collect rubbish from a group of beach cleaners. The sea, having picked up over the course of the morning was shrouding the feet of Iona’s cliffs with breakers making a boat trip out of the question. I contemplated braving the drizzle for a walk down to the narrows before wisely deciding against it.

In the end I spent the afternoon in the compost toilet annoying two queen wasps that have begun nest building. For most visitors to the island the idea of having to use a compost toilet is enough to get used to without sharing the space with a burgeoning population of stingy things. Having personally come to consider the flush toilet as a luxury item to be marvelled at when visiting the mainland I must admit I am still not in favour presenting these creatures such an easy yet vulnerable target.

The huts are not exactly air tight and every year a queen or two starts out under the illusion that they have picked out the best location on the island for a nest. While I may share a toilet with my next door neighbour, sadly at some point I will have to withdraw the welcome to my striped friends. In the meantime I got to spend a wet afternoon photographing wildlife from the comfort of the throne.

Image right: Wasp Queen and Nest
Image below: The Other Queen and Nest.

Gifts

2009-05-17T02:43:00.000-07:00

Image Above: Cormorant’s skull, found by Sarah

Saturday 16th May

The day was bright but a strong south-easterly had brought with it a chill while managing to whip up the bay into a chop. Today’s job was transport, saying good bye to guests and hello to some new faces as well as ferrying the island’s long-term residents to the shop, collecting post, laundry, and delivering candles. I suppose I am not in the hotel and catering business, the guests generally go a little deeper joining the community if only for a week or two. Just as they take from the island they also contribute, whether that be energy, humour, new skills, perspective or challenges. But then I am also a guest here of sorts.

A poem brought by a guest

The Song Of Amergin

I am the wind that breathes upon the sea,
I am the wave of the ocean,
I am the murmur of the billows,
I am the ox of the seven combats,
I am the vulture upon the rocks,
I am a beam of the sun,
I am the fairest of plants,
I am a wild boar in valour,
I am a salmon in the water,
I am a lake in plain,
I am a word of science,
I am the point of a lance in battle,
I am the god who creates in the head the fire of thought,
Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain?
Who announces the ages of the moon?
Who teaches the place where couches the sun?
Who brings cattle from the house of Tara?

Irish Poem 1000bc Approx

Thanks Judith, get well soon

Log Run

2009-05-15T14:11:00.000-07:00

Image Left: Log Run
Monday 11th May

I followed the tractor across the bay, foregoing a lift on the trailer to enjoy the afternoon sun. The tides are still running under the influence of the recent full moon, pulling and pushing the water to both extremes at the highs and lows. The huge pan of sand the tide had exposed acted as a giant reflector removing the little shelter afforded by my hat. In the shallows a pair of herons hunted for flat fish and sand eels, the ripples from the sound barely making it up to their knees. Overhead a squadron of mergansers raced in tight formation while plovers and oystercatchers browsed the wet sand.

I paddled over a stream that meanders through the bay and serves as a dividing line between the island’s sands and those of Mull. Phil took the tractor around a longer route to the woodpile while I made a direct line through the rocks of the foreshore. In the Sound of Iona a cruise liner was occupying the main channel on a course to anchor mid way between the island of the abbey and Fionnphort the nearest point on Mull. I watched a kayaker who was following a parallel course only a little closer and laughed at the juxtaposition.

Looking back to Erraid, the little street, pier and gardens seemed equally absurd but still vital to my sense of the place. The lighthouse builders had brought Victorian order and industry, but had only imposed their will within the bounds of the settlement. Beyond the walls the wilderness and beauty of the island almost laughs at mans folly, like a leaning tower in the Grand Canyon. We loaded the trailer with logs, grunts, groans and the odd strain. The timber is the community's primary fuel and was felled about twenty miles away on Mull at a Forestry Commission plantation. We leave it a year at the pile to season before carrying it onto the island and chopping it into fire sized pieces. Phil left to collect the children from school and I drove the tractor back stopping to check on oyster catchers’ and lapwings’ nests from my portable hide.

Image Above: Broken Tap
Image Left: Oystercatcher on nest

Sheep Round Up

2009-05-02T14:18:00.000-07:00

Image Left: Hunter and hunted

Sheep Round Up

Tues 28th

I round the headland above the window,(a small cave that opens onto the sea) with three other volunteers. John the shepherd has taken his dogs over the dome of granite above, to search for sheep. This is a full scale round-up of the island’s flock and my job is to lead a small group around the worst of islands terrain pushing sheep ahead of us or just blocking off gullies, while John works with his dogs. We started over an hour ago as a line of about twenty people moving like beaters over the heather and the island’s high point. We passed as a wave pushing the sheep ahead like foaming crests. After descending into the central valley we formed a human corral before the group separated and our small team headed off up the side of Balfour Bay. In our absence the flock and the corral move along a side valley towards the eastern edge of the island where the await our return.

The main task for me, is not finding sheep but keeping pace with the shepherd. With only a year on the island against a lifetime’s experience I struggle. It seems at times that John and his sheepdogs almost flow through the landscape. As I trudge over rock and stumble through heather gullies the pack disappears only to remerge or overtake us as if somehow toying with the constraints of time and distance. Occasionally I find a route that enables me to dance over boulders, running on a earth of sharp points as if a little part of me belongs to the sky rather than the land. After another hour in the island’s labyrinths we come in sight of the human corral. I spot an unmanned flock a little further on and try and move around the rise they have chosen, unseen. They have moved while I am out of sight and I am not in the best position as they run on and I have no choice but to follow. While weaving through the terrain I loose my group of volunteers and have to push on alone. Soon they slow enough for me to catch my bearings and begin to turn them towards the route the rest of the flock will take to pier. I run, walk, jump and come to a halt like a dog spreading my awareness to the flock and the tiny movements that hint at direction. We sweep forward onto the gentle slope behind the croft and I pick up another couple of stragglers and a mother with new born lamb. Behind the corral and flock are on the move and I slow my sheep until they catch up. The two flocks are drawn to each other almost like drops of rain on a window.

We hold the flock behind the croft while John brings in another small group and then move off towards the beach before walking them along the track to the fold above the pier. In the afternoon the sheep receive the second part of their Blue Tongue vaccinations and a dose to discourage ticks. They slowly disperse over the afternoon to dot themselves once again amongst the rocks and heather.

Image Right: Holding the line in the heather

Landlubber

2009-04-26T09:17:00.000-07:00

Landlubber
Image Left: Pinnacle rock
Wednesday 22nd April

Sadly the recent run of calm weather has come to end making the boat a last resort for a morning’s escape. I head out early on foot for otter island, the street is empty, even the milking crew have yet to clang churns and buckets. Only Val has stirred for a baking shift in the community kitchen, the smell of fresh bread leaks from around the doors drifting down the street. I leave the cottages in sunlight and take the track up to the quarry before dropping again past the derelict blacksmiths forge.

The sunlight feels harsh and almost wintry in the stiff breeze. From the crest of a small ridge my silhouette is projected by the low sun onto a canvas of heather. I follow a chain of outcrops which until today I have completely overlooked, it carries me to a vantage point that offers a clear view of the otters’ regular haunts. I scan between breaking wave crests, kelp fronds exposed by the falling tide and sea birds. I pick out the shape of an otter’s snout trailing a small wake, it is joined by another and I scramble down over the rocks and heather. The wind is behind me and part of me acknowledges this disadvantage. The otters are still away off shore, I make use of their dives to move between the wave worn boulders playing a game of musical statues with my quarry. As they near their unease with my scent becomes apparent as they dive and fail to resurface. I wait ten or fifteen minutes but they are gone so I set off to retrieve my hastily abandoned camera bag and tripod. In the cleft of rock I find a clump of primroses hiding from the island’s sheep. Having moved a little way back from the shore I pick out the squeaks of an otter cub,the sound ringing between the faces of stone . I chance another close encounter but the wind is not with me today and once my scent reaches out from the shore they disappear.

I retrace my steps toward the blacksmiths and the quarry stopping to photograph a small stone pinnacle that lies half hidden in the network of rock, bogs and heather that cover most of the island.

Image Right: Primroses in the cleft of a rock

Into The Blue Again

2009-04-20T13:53:00.000-07:00

Image left: Porpoise and Soa Island
Friday 17th April

Today the sea is quicksilver infilling the space around the islands while its movement is arrested by its density. I am out beyond hell's kitchen heading towards Soa Island and a horizon that is obscured but hangs as a vagueness in the heat. The surface is alive with small groups of sea-birds, eiders, razor bills, guillemots, cormorants, shags and even great northern divers. I catch site of a fin and then part of tail as a porpoise does exactly what the name suggests. These are dainty almost delicate animals, although it is never easy to judge the size of anything from a moving boat. One eventually surfaces close by with a hiss from its blowhole before it disappears. It is hard to gauge numbers or even whether I am looking at a pod or one or two rapidly moving individuals. They move off and I follow short way before turning into the sound of Iona.

Holiday

2009-04-15T14:36:00.000-07:00

Image left: Collecting and cleaning mussels in the bay

Wednesday 15th April

So the sea is flat, and I make it through Tinkers Hole to meet the ocean and swell. I was here last night and for a moment I saw what I thought was outlying rock in the wrong position. It turned out to be the arch of a whale’s back; what the swell had revealed it quickly swallowed. I come out here to get wrapped in ocean, to be held by an intangible vastness. Some days the ocean is benign and the boat sits like a feather on water, buffeted by the gentle talk of the gods. There is no certainty and Tinkers Hole is more often a gateway to the maelstrom, a place to turn back from. As the granite walls open up a single swallow rises on the updraft of a swell; things are on the move.

I take the boat to Hell’s Kitchen and find my favourite fishing mark by following the line of a fault through the island and into the depths. The swell is confused by the skerries making the boat pivot on every axis. I drop some lures over the side and gently nod them up and down in the knowledge it is probably too early for fishing; never mind.

This is the end of my holiday, I never went anywhere in particularly, it came to me. Two of my sisters arrived a few days apart and brought my son with them. The weather improved for Easter we collected mussels, oysters and in the evening drank whisky while singing Dolly Parton songs. My son, Louis, ran feral with the rest of children on the island, he appeared at intervals either damp, dirty or just hungry. Occasionally we managed to persuade him to join in with our more ‘constructive’ pursuits but this is an island. It is almost traditional for children to go a little wild, there are no cars or ‘strangers’. Even the lighthouse keepers’ children had a reputation which often made it into the Northern Lighthouse Board’s official records and the island’s history. Coal must be thrown and garden walls must by walked on; adults who grew up on the island often follow these patterns of behaviour on subsequent visits. On Easter Monday most of the island’s residents and guests made it out to Easter Island for our annual picnic and barbeque. The island is named after the event rather than as a reference to any primitively carved monoliths. We hunched down in patch of grass amongst the primroses and granite boulders like a troop of mountain gorillas. A small fire powered the kettle, coffee pot and two frying pans of sausages. In the afternoon the tide dropped low enough to expose an almost pure white beach from the turquoise waters.

Today the sun is still trying to break out of the low clouds as I push on beyond the outer islands into pure swell. Above skeins of geese are moving north maybe in search of an artic summer and its unending light. Soon the mackerel will return to the sound and fishing will cease to be a sport and become a harvest.

Image right: Easter island

Too wet to play

2009-03-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

Image Left: Otter tracks, mother and cubs
Location: The narrows, Isle of Erraid, Mull, Scotland
It was too wet to play
29th March

I sit with the remnants of a meal eaten as a snack, the coffee table littered with candles, cups, butter and plates bearing toasted crumbs. The ever present wind dances within the stove searching for gaps to pull or press against. I wonder about the world beyond the front door and run scenarios that combine wind and rain to unprofitable ends.

Last Sunday I walked up the narrows following the prints of the otters between pools. My wife lay down in sands as I searched for the clearest tracks to photograph; the ravens hung back unsure if a large meal had presented itself to within a flap and glide of their nest. Later at the bay where the narrows end, we both lay down on the thin turf between the boulders and tried to spark the interest of the local seals with a tune. They largely ignored the songs from the shows preferring the Sex Pistols and Beach Boys. When the sun emerged shooting rays through the water, their bodies glided over the sand with the smoothness and uncertainty of scattering electrons. Seals are easily distracted, we drew a small audience from the rocky islands in the bay.

Today I am trapped behind the windows. Out in the estuary, banks of rain have obscured the cliffs of Burg and Ben More.

Image Right: Greenhouse, Salen, Isle of Mull

Jimmy's Lagoon

2009-03-20T06:51:00.000-07:00

Image Left: Juvenile Cormorant

Wednesday 18th March

Jimmy’s Lagoon

It seemed like I had spent the best part of the afternoon travelling backwards and forwards over the bay in Ella, our smallest boat. The island had largely emptied of guests and residents; the guests had gone to Iona for the day and the residents on a shopping trip to Oban. As ferryman I stayed behind and took advantage of a lull in passengers to visit Jimmy’s lagoon. Spring had swept in with clear skies and a gentle breeze that began to die as the afternoon wore on. The small swell out in the sound was almost a welcome percussion after the flat waters inside the bay. The sun was already hovering out over the Atlantic just high enough above the haze to render fully the contrast between the white sands, turquoise waters and the dome of a blue sky.

The lagoon or lagoons sit amongst humpback monoliths of granite giving the effect of an oversized zen garden. The rocks open via sandy channels directly onto the sound of Iona allowing the passage of the swell. I lifted the outboard onto its shallow setting and navigated a course around any patches of weed that broke the surface. I struggled to gauge the depth of water, its clarity was no help neither was the featureless sandy bottom. Cutting the engine, I drifted for a while, the breeze pushing me gently in the direction of a sunbathing cormorant perched on a rock. I wondered how close the boat would drift before it took flight, the answer came as one of the fenders began to gently rub on the rock. The cormorant a juvenile, watched me fish around for the boathook before it disembarked with a half hearted flap and graceless dive. Up until I had begun to wield a boat hook, the cormorant had probably decided I was somehow part of the boat, maybe a more vital extension but a part all the same.

When I take the tractor across the sand to collect logs the wading birds and geese in the bay seldom pay any heed until I am on top of them. Creatures that would skitter at the distant site of lone human, can almost completely ignore four ton of moving tractor. As a species we have managed at least to imprint ourselves within the DNA of other species as a threat but as yet we have not added the tractor. Maybe it is not the form that animals respond to but the ego, when I drive I am part of the machine the steering wheel or outboard gives me feedback like limbs and my awareness extends to width and depth of my larger body; I am a giant clad in metal or timber. Does the cormorant look on me as a benign giant? When I hold the boat hook does the mirage slip? Maybe he sees the ghost in the machine; I am man, destroyer of worlds. I spotted some returning guests making their way over Jimmy’s fields and headed back out into the sound and then turned towards the bay and the jetty.

Image Right: Kelp in shallows

Mussels

2009-03-13T08:45:00.000-07:00

Image Left: Jefferson, Cleaning Mussels
Tuesday 10th March

I dropped Jefferson outside the Iona ferry terminal and bus stop in Fionnphort, he was heading in the other direction for an evening in Oban before travelling on to Forres. We walked onto the slipway and I pointed out the abbey while explaining that St. Columba its founder was supposed to have been the first missionary to bring Christianity to Scotland. Our conversation was interrupted by a middle-aged man who stepped in to correct me, apparently St. Ninian beat Columba by a hundred years in the race to convert the pagan Scots. The man was obviously employed as a minor official in the corrections and errors department of the government. I imagined they had flown him in to stand on the slipway and correct any of the inaccuracies within the conversations of passers-by. We left the strange slipway man with his trench coat and brown leather brief case to point out errors for others, like the local fisherman who tie up here to unload their catches.

Jefferson had been staying for a week’s work exchange from another community based at Newbold House near Findhorn. Originally from Brazil he had lived in America for a while before moving to Italy and eventually Scotland. Having found out he was supplementing his income by working for an Italian restaurant we persuaded him to spend a bit of time in our kitchen. The results were almost too good and one point we thought about burning the boats to hinder his departure. When you have spent the best part of the winter eating at least four meals a week that include cabbage and then somebody comes along who makes it taste new and fresh, then praise is never enough. Before his departure he cooked a lunch for the community of fresh mussels and rice. We had collected the mussels from the bay on yesterday’s low tide and then cleaned them before leaving overnight in fresh water. With a morning of clear skies and light breezes it seemed appropriate to enjoy an alfresco lunch.

I warned Jefferson not to drink the local coffee before heading back to the small boat moored at Fidden jetty. In my absence the tide had raced in lifting the boat to the height of the stonework. I started the engine and chortled out into the becalmed estuary wondering whether to chance a fishing trip out in the sound. Instead I decide to spend what was left of the afternoon fixing the decking in reliance our main boat, which is still out the water for repairs and a much needed paint job.

From the shade of pier boat shed the beaches and small lagoons shone in the afternoon sunlight. I worked with my back to landscape occasionally catching glimpses between saw strokes. At four o’clock I was back in the boat to collect Phil and the children from the school run. A photography student we had been expecting had also arrived with her friend and mound of equipment, I made two trips and then showed them a place to camp. Inspired by the presence of another photographer on the island I took an after dinner stroll to the observatory as a full moon rose over the heather.

Image Above Right: Heather painting Reliance
Image below: Full moon at the observatory

Clockwork Cows

2009-03-07T16:27:00.001-08:00

Image Left: Bran
March 8th

Sometimes I wish the seasons could fast forward a little; I long for mornings when the sun cuts the room with blades of light focused through a gap in the shutters. Today it feels as though the world beyond the window has been replaced by a accountant’s office, leaving a phosphorescent glow of strip lighting to creep round the frame. If I don’t wake to sound of the wind dancing about the windows and doors, I lie a little uneasy wondering who’s bed I have woken to. I pick out the shape of a buzzard’s forewing clutching a medicine wheel pendant as they both hang over a joint in the wallpaper and know that I am home.

This morning I am out early to milk and muck out the ‘clockwork cows‘. A gate at the end of the small row of cottages marks the point where the street becomes the track; from here its course descends in a long curve past the woods and byre before straightening to meet the pier and sheds. I pass through with the milking bucket, vegetable peelings for the cows and leftovers for the chickens. The byre cats generally take their cue from the clang of the latch to roll at my feet and test my balance with full hands. Then the chickens emerge from woods and gaps in the fences looking for breakfast and spurred on by the group dynamics of the flock. The island’s longest resident Gustav Gans, a goose who’s age is reckoned to be somewhere between twenty five and thirty begins his lazy descent on foot from the meditation sanctuary he guards on the hill.

For the winter months the island’s cows spend their evenings in the byre bedded down in straw and safe from the squalls the North Atlantic is fond of dishing up. I click the latch and work through the pens and loft, shunting, cleaning, feeding and if the cows are happy with the rhythm they respond with gentle movements taking up their part in the dance. Milking is a brief affair, at the moment we are only milking Movern, the head of the herd, Jeanie, our other milk cow is drying off as her calf is weaned. The heifer Jessie joins the two calves to forage on the hill while I take to the stool and bucket. I call them the clockwork cows, but some times in a forgetful moment I half close a gate or a misplaced spade throws a spanner in the works and the pattern is lost. Today Movern left the byre and headed in the wrong direction; despite my words of encouragement and cajoling manner I had to wait for her to see the error of her ways. A friend of mine maintains that if cows had brains they would easily take over the world.

The chickens are in moult and finding eggs for breakfast is more of lucky dip than a guarantee. I drop a handful of corn on the track for Gustav and he responds with mock attempt to get airborne like Howard Hughes’s spruce goose. When the cows are out and the feed buckets washed I get to stop, take a moment to look down to the pier and the stretch of water that confirms I live on an Island. Today the landscape is grey, its shadows removed by the diffusion of a blanketed sky. The cliff faces of the Burg appears to be dropping mist like the foam spray of a waterfall. Ben More is lost in a ring of cloud its mass still palpable. Out in the sound the heads of seals bob up and down like creel floats as they too satisfy their own curiosity about the shape of the world this morning.

John`s Wood

2009-03-02T09:46:00.000-08:00

Image Left: John’s Wood
Location: Ross of Mull
February 22nd

At the entrance to the Narrows I met Phil and Celia who where trailing their children Beau and Isaac over the sand. I offered to show them some otter prints I had found earlier that morning and a holt that appeared to be in regular use. The otter had made use of a natural cavity under a jumble of rocks that had fallen from the small cliff-face above, they had scraped the floor clean leaving a patch of bare earth visible from the opening. The small terraces of grass that covered the shortest route to the sand below had been marked with piles of spriants, the most recent of which looked to be less than a day old. The tracts lead away some distance, always hugging the rocky edge of the island before they disappeared into the high tide mark. Further on I found other prints, rather than a lone adult it looked like the marks a family group had left, the mother’s larger gait and less hurried movements set against the scramble of smaller cub prints. I could almost see the mother sat in the sand watching her cubs at play.

I left Phil and Celia and the kids after pointing them in the direction of the local ravens’ nest which had been topped up with fresh twigs for the spring. Crossing the stretch of sand to Mull I wandered up to the small wood that shelters another rock face. Here the trees form a canopy that fills out what would otherwise be shear side to a rock outcrop, the flow of the wind almost creates the impression of a glass ceiling to the wood. Oak makes up the bulk of the trees leaving the margins and more rocky places to the hazels and birches. The long arch of branch forms what seemed like a natural gateway to place that was more redolent of another world. Every surface in the wood had been soften and padded by deep carpets of lichens, ferns, mosses and liverworts even the braches trailed the fronds and tufts of these hangers on. From inside, the network of limbs pushed back the landscape beyond the wood and held my senses within the space they had created. Above the call of a buzzard rang out and I looked up as it hung in the air flexing its wings like the arms of body builder while it maintained its position overhead until it had satisfied its curiosity. I
ambled up to the rock face which like the rest of the wood had been softened, the giggling call of kestrel echoed of the stone as it left its perch and headed out into the fields.

Image Right: Otter Print

Ella

2009-02-18T14:42:00.000-08:00

Image Left: Common Seal Pup

Sunday 15th February

Much like myself the day had so far struggled to get going, the sun limped weakly between fog and low cloud never really fulfilling its promise of good day’s sunshine. I decided to take advantage of the light breeze and flat water out in the sound with a boat trip. The boat in question Ella was named after the medium Ella Horsey, who had it built when she lived on the island in the 1950`s. Whether any of her former owner’s powers have rubbed off is hard to say, she at least gives me a sense of confidence beyond my normal competence. The only problem with Ella is that someone has fitted a 5hp two stroke engine to her , having spent two days of the week taking a two-stroke chainsaw to be repaired, I have little faith in anything that requires an oil and petrol mixture for fuel. Today surprisingly the engine started first time and I headed out into the sound towards Iona and then half a mile out made a turn to the left heading for Tinker’s Hole. I stopped into the small lagoon where our resident population of common seals hauls out and cut the engine. A single adult and pup which looked to be one or two months old lay perched on their sides and doing their best to ignore me. I drifted past on a light breeze and out of curiosity the pup decided to follow me watching as I failed to restart the engine and began to fumble with some impossibly large oars. I rowed back into the lagoon passing Seal Island with my companion in tow and sheltered in the stillness of tidal pool. The engine eventually restarted and I made it out into the main channel that leads to Tinker’s hole, a fog descended briefly obscuring the world beyond Easter Island and rather than push on into the unknown I turned round and headed for home. The engine took this opportunity to go on strike again, I tried as best as I could to restart negotiations and then opted to sneak up on it before descending into words or encouragement that are generally offered by fish wives and Dockers. In the end I rowed back hugging the shoreline past Otter Island and picking a course between the shallow reefs. To the north, Iona’s cliff tops emerged from the fog creating the illusion of an island in the sky, and I drifted a little peering through the turquoise water to the white sandy bed of bay.

Full Circle

2009-02-10T13:05:00.000-08:00

Image Left: Otter Cubs in the Kelp

Sunday 8th February

Full Circle

Sometimes I look for signs and wonders but more often they find me: the arch of a mountain peak, a line in the sand or the flicker of a hawk’s wing over the heather. I don’t like the word omen it sounds too wishy-washy, too subjective; I tend to think of these small moments as tracks or way markers. When I look for otters it isn’t the big splashes but the tooth marks found in the discarded bodies of crabs or the scats and trails through the wet grass that give proof of life. I collect and compare incidents hoping to eek out some meaning or understanding of the world based on experience rather than the fall of the cards or patterns left by tea leaves.

When I have collected and sorted then I weave my own world, which is no less ethereal than that of other mystics. Yesterday I found a circle in the sand carved by a single blade of grass that had been spun around its anchor point in the wind, I took as a sign. I once photographed the side of barn that bore similar markings left by a sycamore that had been felled prior to my visit. Once on a mountain I found solid rock cut by the same process and again while waiting in a motorway traffic jam my eye was drawn to a grime covered concrete embankment, scoured by trailing brambles . I have a history with patterns, sometimes it works in my favour and then it doesn’t.

A permaculturist once told me that when dealing with a new garden or landscape the best practice is to do nothing for a year and just observe; get to know your land before turning it under the plough. In a couple of weeks I will have lived on the island for a year, I don’t know whether I have served my apprenticeship but I have a feeling it is an on going process. Before I came here I was following other patterns that led to other places, dark places and an end that I didn’t want. I left and chose life in a new landscape, with new possibilities and new patterns. So I take this circle as a sign, a proof of life.

This morning I walked into a world of patterns and in amongst the familiar nodding of kelp fronds on an ebbing tide I spotted the flick of an otter’s tail as it dived. The sun broke through the cloud as I scrambled over the rocks to watch a female otter and her cubs hunt the rocky margins of island.

Image Above Right: Ghost Sycamore
Image Below: Circle in the Sand

Going To Meet The Mountain

2009-02-03T13:04:00.000-08:00

Image above: Sheep fank (fold) and Ben More

Location: Isle of Mull, Scotland

Sunday 1st February

I used to have a mountain but the ownership was unclear although, I always assumed it had laid claim to me. The mountain was the Black Hill and I said good bye to that landscape over a year ago. After skirting its foothills for eight years I climbed only once into the cloud base that normally haunts its summit and exchanged a few parting words in the silence.

Now I have an island and once again it exerts a claim over me, but sometimes I miss the density of mountain. Today I went to meet Ben More, a peak which dominates the small estuary the separates the island from Mull. It often lures me from the cottage doorway and sometimes in the dark of a winter’s evening, if the moon hangs low enough it seems to rest within the mountain’s shoulder. If I need another mountain there would be little reason to look any further but the ritual dictates a proper courtship, there will be know marching to summit and planting a flag.

The route from the island to base of the mountain is a little over ten miles, obviously once you have made it onto Mull. This morning the weather had made a change for the better, a stiff southerly wind had cleared all but a few patches of cloud from sky. I paddled through the ebbing tide at the narrows and then made the short climb to the barns at Knockvologan; the winter home for the van. From the comfort of the vehicle the world passed by at an easy pace, each bend bringing a new vista or a change in perspective. Occasionally I spotted a herd of deer out in the autumn tinted grasses or a buzzard hunting from a post. In the flat sunlight the cresting sea had taken on a steely blue tone flecked with white breakers or the flash of a seagulls wing. From the Ross of Mull the mountain shows its best side, its snow capped ridge half hidden in shade throughout the morning renders some form to its presence. I drove past Pennyghael and the turning for Salen to view it from the other side.

Just as I began to lose sight of the mountain in my rear view mirror I stopped and turned back to meet it again. Back at Pennyghael I found an empty sheep fank and left the warmth of the van to make some images. Is it my mountain? I don’t know maybe I will kept the island instead.

Image Above Right: Buzzard