Category: solas

This beach could be the end of the world. It isn’t, evidently: on all sides the horizon meets land – the dark spread lumps of the Summer Isles, the blue and white heights of Fisherfield, the tapering shelf of Rubha Reidh, the tall northern headlands of Skye, with the russet slopes of Isle Ristol, to my right, closing the circle.

It’s the light which gives this end-of-the-world sensation. It’s that northern light, that late November light, low, rare, and precious. I can see its source – the sun over the mountains there, maybe ten degrees above the horizon, filtered slightly through a smooth swathe of cloud – but the light doesn’t seem to have come from there. It seems to have come from some farther source, meeting us from great distance, or to be its own source, a light come mysteriously to rest here on these round pink boulders, on these frosted green mats of mossy grass, a light come, unbidden, to greet this quiet, aching heart.

I get up from my seat among the boulders and return to the little coastal path, following its slim line as it winds up and down over worn rocks and icy puddles and through the dark heather and crunchy bracken of the moor. As I approach Fox Point, the horizon opens: the mainland mountains extend themselves southward and in the south-west the Minch becomes visible, an empty line of cold silver. I walk round the headland to a narrow beach, a rocky cleft filled with boulders, and sit down at the back of it. The air holds a stiff chill and the frosted boulders glint softly in the pale gold shorelight. Across the water, the mountains – of Fisherfield and now Torridon – stand in a light of their own: a deep blue light, almost a dusk light, although it’s just past noon. The cloud is evenly drawn across the sky and the sun hangs in its upper stretches, white and ghostlike, almost translucent, behind its thin, striated veil. The mountains are only about ten miles across the loch but they look as if they exist in a different universe, on a coast utterly unreachable, a shore one could never sail to.

I stare over searchingly. It’s so unfathomable and beautiful that I don’t know what to do. I think of Kerouac’s phrase, ‘end of the land sadness end of the world gladness’. He wrote that in San Francisco, in a warm California summer night. This is another season, another century, another continent, another coast, but has anything changed? We’re still inexorably drawn to edges. In our hearts, oceans begin.

Fox Point / Rubha a’Mhadaidh-Ruaidh, Coigach, Scotland,
28th November 2024