A Toilet At The End Of The World.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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