sorts of ideas could have overridden other feelings in a monastic context with holy pictures (mostly bad ones!) on every wall. I did not want to go on a ‘retreat’. I wanted to explore what this profound pull towards silence might be about. I wanted to examine my conviction that silence wassomething positive, not just an abstraction or absence. I wanted to know what would happen.
In the end I rented a self-catering holiday cottage on Skye, more because I found a house there that met my slightly off-centre requirements than for any particular engagement with the island. I needed a small house that was genuinely isolated, and had a deep freeze and no TV – and in which I could smoke. My care in checking all these details in advance was rewarded, or else I was lucky – Allt Dearg 3 might have been designed for my purposes.
In all events in late October, my car fully laden with books, notebooks, pens, reading matter, foul-weather gear and six weeks’ worth of food and other supplies, I left my sister’s lovely and luxurious house near St Andrew’s and drove east to west the whole way across Scotland. It was a long, tiring and stunningly beautiful drive, in and out of sunshine and rain, and all the time I had a growing sense of moving away – the roads getting narrower, the houses less frequent, the towns more like villages and the villages tiny. I had forgotten that the ferry crossing from Kyle of Lochalsh over to Skye has been replaced by the muscular sweep of the new bridge and for a moment I missed that sense of being somewhere else , in a new and different place, that the ferry provided. But once on the island the bilingual road signs, in both Gaelic and English, provided a strong sense of strangeness. In Gaelic, which about half the population speaks, the island is called An t-Eilean Sgitheanach (The Winged Isle), which refers both to its curious shape and to the wild empty freedom of its terrain.
The Cuillin, the mountains of central Skye, are perhaps the toughest range in Britain, naked jagged rock rising abruptly from the sea, several soaring to some 900 metres. In the shadow and shelter of these mountains, facing west towards the mainland, was Allt Dearg, once a shepherd’s croft.
It was lovely. As I drove up the quarter-mile of rough track through yet another smatter of rain, I saw in the wing mirror of my car an extremely vivid rainbow, all seven colours in wide bands. It seemed a good omen.
Allt Dearg sat small, white and welcoming. Although it is nestled under the mountains there is nothing human above it, and below the land drops away to a long narrow bay with steep sides. I could not see the road or any buildings. Close beside the cottage is a burn that leaps and rushes, and makes a good deal of noise. Inside it is compact and tidy. I lived throughout the time I was there entirely on the ground floor, where a tiny bedroom opened off the kitchen-living room, so that I had a strong sense of containment inside despite the wildness outside. Outside, even in the evening light, the colours were extraordinary. Higher above me the mountains were grey; they were like teeth – craggy, broken, fierce. Behind the house is a croft field, still reasonably green, but everything else below those iron heights is gold, gold-bronze, punctuated by very white lichen on stones.
In the fitful sunshine driving across I had thought the colour was sun-on-dead-grass; now I learned it was the grass itself, and dead was not a good word for it. The wind moved fast across it, flapping it like flags. When it reached darker clumps of heather or bog myrtle the rhythm of the movement changed. I kept thinking I’d seen ‘something’, something alive, moving like an animal running for cover – but no, it was just the wind somehow haunting and energising.
I was exhausted by the time I had explored the house and the immediate surroundings, unpacked the car and settled in, but I also had a powerful sense of excitement and optimism,
In the end I rented a self-catering holiday cottage on Skye, more because I found a house there that met my slightly off-centre requirements than for any particular engagement with the island. I needed a small house that was genuinely isolated, and had a deep freeze and no TV – and in which I could smoke. My care in checking all these details in advance was rewarded, or else I was lucky – Allt Dearg 3 might have been designed for my purposes.
In all events in late October, my car fully laden with books, notebooks, pens, reading matter, foul-weather gear and six weeks’ worth of food and other supplies, I left my sister’s lovely and luxurious house near St Andrew’s and drove east to west the whole way across Scotland. It was a long, tiring and stunningly beautiful drive, in and out of sunshine and rain, and all the time I had a growing sense of moving away – the roads getting narrower, the houses less frequent, the towns more like villages and the villages tiny. I had forgotten that the ferry crossing from Kyle of Lochalsh over to Skye has been replaced by the muscular sweep of the new bridge and for a moment I missed that sense of being somewhere else , in a new and different place, that the ferry provided. But once on the island the bilingual road signs, in both Gaelic and English, provided a strong sense of strangeness. In Gaelic, which about half the population speaks, the island is called An t-Eilean Sgitheanach (The Winged Isle), which refers both to its curious shape and to the wild empty freedom of its terrain.
The Cuillin, the mountains of central Skye, are perhaps the toughest range in Britain, naked jagged rock rising abruptly from the sea, several soaring to some 900 metres. In the shadow and shelter of these mountains, facing west towards the mainland, was Allt Dearg, once a shepherd’s croft.
It was lovely. As I drove up the quarter-mile of rough track through yet another smatter of rain, I saw in the wing mirror of my car an extremely vivid rainbow, all seven colours in wide bands. It seemed a good omen.
Allt Dearg sat small, white and welcoming. Although it is nestled under the mountains there is nothing human above it, and below the land drops away to a long narrow bay with steep sides. I could not see the road or any buildings. Close beside the cottage is a burn that leaps and rushes, and makes a good deal of noise. Inside it is compact and tidy. I lived throughout the time I was there entirely on the ground floor, where a tiny bedroom opened off the kitchen-living room, so that I had a strong sense of containment inside despite the wildness outside. Outside, even in the evening light, the colours were extraordinary. Higher above me the mountains were grey; they were like teeth – craggy, broken, fierce. Behind the house is a croft field, still reasonably green, but everything else below those iron heights is gold, gold-bronze, punctuated by very white lichen on stones.
In the fitful sunshine driving across I had thought the colour was sun-on-dead-grass; now I learned it was the grass itself, and dead was not a good word for it. The wind moved fast across it, flapping it like flags. When it reached darker clumps of heather or bog myrtle the rhythm of the movement changed. I kept thinking I’d seen ‘something’, something alive, moving like an animal running for cover – but no, it was just the wind somehow haunting and energising.
I was exhausted by the time I had explored the house and the immediate surroundings, unpacked the car and settled in, but I also had a powerful sense of excitement and optimism,
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