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wild is the wind

I was afraid at first. Radio Scotland had talked all day about ‘Storm Bram’, the Met Office had upgraded its weather warning from yellow to amber, and XC Weather and Windy were in agreement, for once, that by midnight, when the wind veered to the south-west, Lochinver would be subject to winds close to 80 mph.

I’d done my best to prepare, tightly tying down the cover on my woodpile, taking in the hanging bird feeders, charging my phone, lamps and laptop in case of power failures, all the while anxiously eyeing the three tall ash trees near the south-west corner of the caravan.

By teatime the wind, still in the south-east, was picking up, its pitch intensifying and the caravan beginning to rattle. I waited for it to escalate, obsessively checking my weather apps to see how the low-pressure system was progressing, but instead there followed an an eerie lull.

At 11 o’clock, worn out with anticipation, I went to bed and waited for the onslaught. Now, as I lie in the darkness, I hear the wind rising and feel the caravan shuddering. My nerves tighten expectantly.

With some gales, like the unnamed south-easterly we had last week, the wind seems creatural, prowling around, probing and pouncing, snatching at the caravan or the corrugated plastic sheets on my woodpile, howling as it snaps twigs and branches from the ashes and flings them at the caravan where they strike with alarming resonance, the slightest glance of a twig amplified into a booming blow.

I brace myself for this but hear not the faintest clunk, nor any tearing bursts. In fact, there are no particular sounds at all—only a general roar, noisy but sonically diffuse, an unspecified loudness. Its volume continues to increase but with steady strength rather than fitful gusts. It, too, is a presence but an impersonal one, a great motion moving through the world, high and wide, so huge in extent it seems boundless.

I can feel it all around me, in the flexing of my flimsy walls, in the subtle lift in the floor, in the shaking of my bed. It’s like being in a small earthquake but instead of being beneath my feet, it’s everywhere: above, below, in all directions; an oncoming immensity, a great mass, enveloping, engulfing. And lying still, held in its surround-sound, I’m becoming part of it. I’m within the wind, in communion with it. For the first time today, I’m at peace.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
9th December 2025

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company

the wind, well-travelled,
the sheltering sun,
a pebble,
        waiting in our shadow

Ullapool River, Wester Ross, Scotland
8th September 2025

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flow

This is the greatest happiness, moving foot by foot over flowing rock. There’s so much of it, I’m spoilt, running upward and downward, alternating between following smooth tributaries and stravaiging over the wide plains of the full lithic flood.

And it is a flood, a huge bed of quartzite formed from the sands of an ancient seashore, deposited upon Torridonian sandstone, formed from the sands carried by ancient rivers which once flowed over the even more ancient bedrock of Lewisian gneiss. In the intervening millennia, this layered mountain mass has been repeatedly shaped and sculpted by ice and, although it’s been thousands of years since it was last glacially scoured, in places its faces glow like freshly scrubbed skin.

Not much grows on quartzite, so much of its surface is clean: it produces little soil and nutrition, and moss, grass and heather encroach only slowly. However, it’s its tone which brings it to life. It’s a pale stone, creamy-white, grey, or bluish, but is often stained with iron. The tenderness with which the iron tints it continually surprises me, from delicate tinges and marblings of peach and rose to bold stripes and swathes of thick mauve. I can’t help but lay my palms out along it, lie down on it, press myself into it.

I meander my way up the long slow slope to reach the bealach and sit on a flat stone in the largest of its shallow lochans. A huge blue-and-black-striped dragonfly beats around the reedy fringes. It’s so large its wings make a buzzing sound, like a miniature chainsaw cutting about, noisy even over the heavy drone of the bees. Although thinly grown, the quartzite is inhabited. Dor beetles are clambering about, humans too, hiking in serious silence or chatting breathlessly towards the summit, the odd dog scampering ahead. I let them all pass. I’m not going to the top today. Today is for communing with quartzite.

It’s technically not true metamorphic quartzite but quartz arenite, a sandstone comprised almost entirely of quartz, and it’s beautiful. Whatever I’m doing, out walking or building drystone walls, my eyes and hands and feet are drawn to it. It may be hereditary. Stonework runs in my dad’s side of the family, men from the three generations before his being stonemasons and quarry masters, building houses and roads across the Highlands and Perthshire. For a while, my great-grandfather built roads and airstrips with quartzite which he quarried near Onich.

I get up from the lochan and find a boulder to shelter behind. The stiff southerly wind holds a wintry coolness, carrying ravens and sea eagles, and whipping my whitening hair around my face. I find a slanted north-facing shelf and settle myself there, propping a flat stone with a couple of wedges to make a horizontal seat. From here, I look directly ahead to Arkle and Foinaven, the greatest of the quartzite mountains, an extensive complex of ridges with sweeping skirts of scree. I flew over all these mountains in a small plane on a clear winter’s day earlier this year. The sinuousness of their forms is much more apparent from the air as they curve and weave, rising and subsiding like petrified waves. This mountain I’m on now, Quinag, is also a beauty from above, its huge ridges and corries dropping away vertiginously at improbable angles.

What to do with it all? I’m always caught between flight and groundedness, between a rock and a high place. Maybe we all are, living somewhere in the in-between, in the alternation, rising and subsiding, passing through time.

pale grey quartzite with scattered small boulders, edged by bronzing heathery grass

Spidean Coinich, Quinag, Assynt, Scotland
5th September 2025

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the cage

old steel mounted cage on rocky reef in calm blue sea with the shore of Lochinver and Suilven and Canisp blue in the background

It looks as if it should be worshipped. It looks like a warning. It looks like a maritime version of The Wicker Man. I’ve been staring out at this cage for years, from the harbour, from the rocky beach on the north shore, from a sailboat gliding or bouncing by. I’ve even flown over it in a tiny plane, but I’ve never been this close.

Down level with its feet, I gaze up reverently. Whatever else it is, it’s a testament to the value of older skills and sensibilities. The engineer steering the boat I’m on remarks it’s as sturdy as the day it was made, that we don’t make steel like that now, if we make it at all. Other old markers have been dismantled (with difficulty) and replaced with modern flimsier structures, all lights and bells and whistles. I’m glad this one remains intact, a welcome anachronism, a sound navigation aid in treacherous times.

Loch Inver, Assynt, Scotland
17th July 2025

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shoreward

I walk round to the headland beyond the harbour looking for solace.

And what do I find?

A carpet of Lady’s Mantle in a backlit yellow haze;
a red deer hind and bambi-spotted calf stepping quietly behind me;
a gannet circling over the spread blue waters in front – the sudden dive!;
a heron flapping low and level across the loch;
the cries of oystercatchers, terns, hoodies, gulls;
the blue humps of Harris on the horizon;
and in the north-west, the sun, pale gold, shining.

Is it enough?
Or is it too much to countenance?

I wrote once that oceans begin in our hearts.
I make my way tentatively towards the shore.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
5th July 2025

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asphodel

We were nine women walking, tramping over bouncy heather moorland above the steep shores of Loch a’ Chàirn Bhàin, when one of us stopped to point out a bog asphodel which was just coming into flower. We gathered round and marvelled at its starry yellow blooms and another of us remarked that, in addition to the Elysian Fields of Greek mythology, those blessed green meadows of the afterlife, there were said also to be asphodel fields, though she noted this probably did not refer to bog asphodel.

I looked this up online when I returned home and found that, while the Elysian Fields were reserved for the righteous (along with gods and nobles) and a hellish land called Tartarus was set aside for the wicked, the fields of asphodel were allotted to ordinary folk.

The significance of the asphodel is debated. Some Greek writers felt the paleness of the petals evoked a pallid, ghostly quality, while others drew on its more ancient connotations of fragrant fertility.

Even in the latter case, however, I sense these asphodel fields are not for me, nor the endless blessings of Elysium. In the afterlife, I want for my part only a rolling peatland, grown over with purpling heather and green and gold grasses, with viridian clumps of moss glowing in the fine northern sun, and everywhere the pure yellow stalks of bog asphodel standing upright like tiny sentinels of joy.

Perhaps, for those of us of Scotland, we can spend our eternity meandering in such a place, gazing into lochans and reflecting in the clear summer light. When I think of it, however, I find myself imagining not a summer moorland but an autumnal one, the grasses turning amber and bronze, the dried heather flowerheads becoming that lovely muted mauve, and the bog asphodel vivid orange, its little tongues of flame everywhere sparking, everywhere speaking of warm hearts and hearths in the cool oncoming dusk.

And no more midges.

Torr a’ Ghamnha, Assynt, Scotland
6th July 2025