Sarah-Jane Dobner takes a trip to the fringes of the Scottish isles...
Skye and the Outer Hebrides win. Passionate as a chess game. Laid bare to light and dark and wind and rain. So unmarked by modernity you could be in any era, any epoch, any time of your life. Where desire and grief seem one and the same. A place of reckoning and memory and beauty and bogs.
Deer (Rannoch Moor, Highlands)
The Ice Age was a while back
You wouldn't know it
looking at these textbook
U-shaped valleys, the moraine
Expect to see mammoth and
sabre-toothed tigers. I've laid a bet
over who'll be first to see deer
A car game along with
I-Spy and Twenty Questions
You choose illumination, I pick latex
Eventually we get here
after miles and miles and miles
of wind and rain. A field in Devon
might welcome you with buttercups
Even North Wales slips into pasture
Not here. In the Highlands
mountains block the road
far to the distance, a hinderance
Better, perhaps, to walk and sit
Maybe then a deer could approach
Washing (Invershiel, Highlands)
Being driven alongside a small clear-bed stream
Between Altnafeadh and Ballachulish
Tell the story of bathing in a nearby brook
Naked, rinsing out hair with a camping saucepan
One April. My Ex and I sprucing up to be wedding guests
Washing off the grime from a climb in Glencoe
A long time ago. I'd lost track of days
On the road between Cluanie and Invershiel
Receive WhatsApp photos from my adult daughter
Dressed impeccably, gold earrings, perfectly made up
Attending the marriage of my Ex with his new partner
Today. The Highlands have a way of not letting go
Rack (Neist, Skye)
The nearer we get to the crags, the less we know about them
too southern, too city, too accustomed to peacetime
too used to technology: wifi, 4G, phone reception, apps
for tide times, bird bans, sea state, weather predictions, access arrangements
None of that. What you see is what you get. A fight over the sopping
earth and muck. Prospect of hand-to-hand combat. Gaze
at the mizzly windblown clifftops, waterblack
dolerite, rent patches of silver light. And rack up
Jelly and Ice Cream (Neist, Skye)
1999, took the ferry across to Armadale on Skye
Was astounded by the fairytale, dreams-come-true beauty
Disembarked. By the time we'd driven to Portree
Clouds had pressed down as if smothering an infant
Throwing us in a Mr Whippy machine. Didn't see
A view again, failed to climb a single route
It was my birthday that week. Made the trip with a guy
On spec. Kind of liked each other. Nothing came of it
All those years I swore never to return to Scotland
Unless Met Office guaranteed wall-to-wall sunshine
How is it, in 2019, I'm parked at Neist Point, the van
Lurching in northerlies, raindrops wobbling like jellies?
Scottish Rock Volume Two and Skye Sea-cliffs and Outcrops
Closed on the bench seat. Set off north on impulse
When the guy I kind of liked went back to his wife
It's my birthday. Still making the same wishes
Peat (Skinidin, Skye)
Usually the earth is hard
A crust
I'm used to this
Where I put the past behind me
But on the Islands
Reach into the peat and
Your hands slide down through
Centuries
Spooky. The undead
Exes and myths
Clasp my wrists
From the black water
Chess (Mangersta, Lewis)
Bleak, the Highlands and Islands
No cover, no veneer, no hiding
What is important and meaningful
Standing alone like standing stones
Memory, sex, language, weather
Bones of a life laid out
In a gigantic, damp chess game
Half played. Knights
Pawns, a Queen. And, yes
Some pieces missing
Saltire (Lewis)
Flag of criss-crossed
White bones on a blue rectangle of water
Raised on the shoreline
Welcoming all the drowned souls
Pirate skull and crossbones
Lawlessness of a remote land
Scots will helm themselves
Piloted by birth and death and tidal streams
Slipped Christian cross
Crucifix for those drowned bones
Whitewashed Church of Scotland buildings
Square walled acres of gravestones
St Andrew's Cross
Saying No to the add-on ethic of St George
No to Westminster. Blue water and white cross
The sea. The dead. The barrier
Chicken Run (Aurora Geòdha, Lewis)
Nine foot swell smashing behind the belay and into the zawn
the whole geò boiling foam
a seal, alone, tumbling in the white water
Step across a chasm to begin
with each wave the void booms and sucks
very far below
The crack leads straight up
plumb as a water drop
rock velvet-black, warm as fur
An athleticism about it, acrobatic
nifty switches and side pulls, a slinkiness
revelling in the movement and gear as the sun sinks lower
It calls for a more glorious moniker
like Cnac Dol Fodhana Gréine
or Ciabhag Suela
Notes
Community Halls, village owned general stores, honesty boxes for eggs and honey, tea room run by the Historical Society, camping organised by the Mangersta Grazing Committee. Not a place for big business or quick bucks;
Watched a sea eagle above the headland at Geòdha an Taroin. The sheep all looked up;
Ancient peat digging scars all over Lewis. No footpaths here, just metalled roads. Beyond the tarmac everything is bog. Clifftop stakes in pairs at Neist, one behind the other, pressed into the soft ground;
Tree-trunk carvings of the Lewis Chessmen scattered around Mangersta. Dozens of chess pieces were found in a stone box on a sand dune nearby. Carved from walrus ivory and dated AD 1150-1200 from when the Western Isles belonged to the Kingdom of Norway. Most of them are now in the British Museum. I need to go to London;
The Callanish Stones, on Lewis, are nearly 5,000 years old. A dominant, chisel-shaped phallus and collapsed vault lie at the centre, then a close ring of uprights and, beyond, spokes at the compass points radiating out across a grassy lawn. We approach at 21:30, walking to meet the sunset. Topping a grassy rise before happening upon the circle, my partner reads, out loud, online posts from Julian Cope's The Modern Antiquarian. Of the assembled tourists, spectators and believers, everyone is careful to tuck themselves behind the standing stones so it's possible to get photos which look as if no-one else is there;
The rock of the Outer Isles is the oldest in Britain. It has been boiled and re-boiled, pressed and eroded, jammed under a kilometre of ice. The patterns are reminiscent of Liberty's fabrics: pitch black velvet, wide-banded regency curtain-cloth, thin striped cotton twill, grey tweed, crystal veins like a wedding dress dragging its train through the gneiss.
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