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

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

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

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

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

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

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.