The Fire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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