*
Jubilee had made it safely to the Rock, but she had to make it safely back as well – and the gales were coming. So we set our bearing to 180 degrees, and began the day-long journey due south to Port of Ness, back down the sea road.
Our wake showed cream and mint. Sula Sgeir retreated behind us, from mountain to eave to thumbprint. The sea smelt silver. The day grew and the air thinned until we could see Suilven, Foinaven, Arkle and the other Sutherland hills away to the east.
‘The water ahead might be a wee bit jabbly,’ said Ian as we came back into Port of Ness harbour that evening, and so it was: six- or seven-foot sharp peaks of wave where the cliff protruded, and then a big sloshing swell in the harbour itself. We ghosted in between the breakwaters in a manner that left me light-stomached and Ian exhilarated; David helming delicately, and Diyanne and I leaning out like twin figureheads from the bow, watching for depths and distances from the rock and the concrete, calling urgent nervous warnings – ‘To starboard a touch!’ ‘Just over to port!’ – until we nosed alongside the high quay, and threw out plump pink fenders that were squeezed like hearts between hull and quay, and so came at last to a halt.
I climbed the rusty-runged ladder of the breakwater and staggered along the quay. That night I lay in bed in Stornoway with a dream sea still rolling over and through me and gannets flying across the ceiling, while the real gales rose as promised outside over the north, from Iceland all across to Norway.
Peat
An alley of stones — Cutting for sign — Route as rumour, route as folklore — Peat & gneiss — Manus’s Stones — Finlay MacLeod — Libation & fornication — Functional land art — Holding eras in plain sight — Geography & history as consubstantial — Phobus — Place-learning & path-following — Disturbances to the expected — Anne Campbell & Bran — A swan’s wishbone, a plover’s egg — Toponymy & close-mapping — Songlines for the moor — Night on the beirgh — Seal-serenade — Jupiter & Griomabhal — Discovery — Decisive cairns — Quartz crystals — Barefoot walking — Beehive & moraine — Tapetum lucidum : the bright carpet — Paths to Geocrab.
Gneiss
The Hanging Figure — Beef as body, mane as hair — Skulls, skin, sperm, stone — Cryptozoology & shamanism — The aura of inner spaces — The hand-held, the held hand — Magus, murderer — Seal oil, baleen, cochlea — Unicorns? Hippogriffs? Dragons? — ‘The stuff that the world is made of’ — A mummified sparrowhawk — Atticus atlas — Swan-murder & pigskin mannequins — Black Lamb and Grey Falcon — Laputa, the gannetry — A path to the sacred landscape — Erratics — One hundred kilograms of best German lard — Frozen light — The last kist.
I find I incorporate gneiss & coal & long-threaded moss … & esculent roots.
Walt Whitman (1855)
On the south-eastern coast of the Isle of Harris, in a three-house village called Geocrab, behind a fuchsia hedge, in a chilly thin-walled workshop, hanging by a meat hook from a rafter is a human skeleton. Its 206 bones are held together by sinews of braided seagrass, which, as they pass through the vertebrae, are knotted alternately left over right and right over left. Stitched onto the bones are patches of meat cut from a dead calf, which together form a rough over-body. At the time of their first sewing – when they had been recently preserved using a solution of formaldehyde and sodium fluoride, administered with a horse syringe and prepared according to a mix-ratio perfected by the members of a mid-1920s zoological expedition to the Amazon – the meat patches were still plumply muscular. They have dried out over time, though, and wizened, their fibres bunching and separating such that their texture is now that of well-used hawser. Set within the hollows of the skeleton are a gnarled heart, a liver, two dried eyes
Jubilee had made it safely to the Rock, but she had to make it safely back as well – and the gales were coming. So we set our bearing to 180 degrees, and began the day-long journey due south to Port of Ness, back down the sea road.
Our wake showed cream and mint. Sula Sgeir retreated behind us, from mountain to eave to thumbprint. The sea smelt silver. The day grew and the air thinned until we could see Suilven, Foinaven, Arkle and the other Sutherland hills away to the east.
‘The water ahead might be a wee bit jabbly,’ said Ian as we came back into Port of Ness harbour that evening, and so it was: six- or seven-foot sharp peaks of wave where the cliff protruded, and then a big sloshing swell in the harbour itself. We ghosted in between the breakwaters in a manner that left me light-stomached and Ian exhilarated; David helming delicately, and Diyanne and I leaning out like twin figureheads from the bow, watching for depths and distances from the rock and the concrete, calling urgent nervous warnings – ‘To starboard a touch!’ ‘Just over to port!’ – until we nosed alongside the high quay, and threw out plump pink fenders that were squeezed like hearts between hull and quay, and so came at last to a halt.
I climbed the rusty-runged ladder of the breakwater and staggered along the quay. That night I lay in bed in Stornoway with a dream sea still rolling over and through me and gannets flying across the ceiling, while the real gales rose as promised outside over the north, from Iceland all across to Norway.
Peat
An alley of stones — Cutting for sign — Route as rumour, route as folklore — Peat & gneiss — Manus’s Stones — Finlay MacLeod — Libation & fornication — Functional land art — Holding eras in plain sight — Geography & history as consubstantial — Phobus — Place-learning & path-following — Disturbances to the expected — Anne Campbell & Bran — A swan’s wishbone, a plover’s egg — Toponymy & close-mapping — Songlines for the moor — Night on the beirgh — Seal-serenade — Jupiter & Griomabhal — Discovery — Decisive cairns — Quartz crystals — Barefoot walking — Beehive & moraine — Tapetum lucidum : the bright carpet — Paths to Geocrab.
Gneiss
The Hanging Figure — Beef as body, mane as hair — Skulls, skin, sperm, stone — Cryptozoology & shamanism — The aura of inner spaces — The hand-held, the held hand — Magus, murderer — Seal oil, baleen, cochlea — Unicorns? Hippogriffs? Dragons? — ‘The stuff that the world is made of’ — A mummified sparrowhawk — Atticus atlas — Swan-murder & pigskin mannequins — Black Lamb and Grey Falcon — Laputa, the gannetry — A path to the sacred landscape — Erratics — One hundred kilograms of best German lard — Frozen light — The last kist.
I find I incorporate gneiss & coal & long-threaded moss … & esculent roots.
Walt Whitman (1855)
On the south-eastern coast of the Isle of Harris, in a three-house village called Geocrab, behind a fuchsia hedge, in a chilly thin-walled workshop, hanging by a meat hook from a rafter is a human skeleton. Its 206 bones are held together by sinews of braided seagrass, which, as they pass through the vertebrae, are knotted alternately left over right and right over left. Stitched onto the bones are patches of meat cut from a dead calf, which together form a rough over-body. At the time of their first sewing – when they had been recently preserved using a solution of formaldehyde and sodium fluoride, administered with a horse syringe and prepared according to a mix-ratio perfected by the members of a mid-1920s zoological expedition to the Amazon – the meat patches were still plumply muscular. They have dried out over time, though, and wizened, their fibres bunching and separating such that their texture is now that of well-used hawser. Set within the hollows of the skeleton are a gnarled heart, a liver, two dried eyes
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