When you first encounter a landscape you start to piece it together in your eyes, ears and mind; piecemeal slowly becomes wholemeal.
I The names of places and their geographies
rubha
leac
druim
cnoc
beinn
càrn
sgeir
eilan
dun
loch
and coire and glac (but their geography must be inferred from less frequent translations)
The map first shows Rubha nan Gall,
rubha, a headland or point;
this named before the lighthouse
which merely stands in that place;
druim, cnoc, càrn, beinn,
glac low-lying, between,
relative by size, named relatively,
fixed in the landscape,
unlike those who gave those names;
dun, created as fortress, now
mostly become hill with
stones scattered, looking
over loch;
leac for those transient bodies
which became soil again;
eilan and sgeir, fixed points
for wildlife at ease
in water and air;
coire names abound,
in six adjacent grid squares,
(are corries or ridges)
named by an early close clan?
II Sound of Mull
water
water lapping
water lapping continuously
water without wave
water lapping between conversation
water as the content of conversation
water drinks and reflects light
water emits light
water sparkles nearby, glints away, shines beyond, sheens, distantly sheens
water until islands seen as hills
Sound of Mull to Ardnamurchan to Rum
sound of water
water lapping continuously
water lapping
water.
III The ground beneath our feet
Gravel from rock gives way to grass grown on rock
growing between rock; most rock is basalt
and much grass is rooted in peat, firm here
after so little rain for so many weeks,
and between grass become path and
basalt outcrops grow bell heather and ling,
the one the brighter pink
standing out in sharp sunlight,
the second the gentler lilac;
where the soil becomes moist
near a burn-trickle or a higher water-table
it gives more underfoot and in stretches
of more even ground meadowsweet
creams the landscape around
occasional intruding thistle;
paths across peat and rock worn
faintly by foot, not hoof, but the
long-view is heather, rock and
the ubiquitous lawn-, India- and emerald
green, neatly and efficiently grazed,
the life-work of the shetlands,
moving more freely after shearing;
where the path drops, angles in
diagonals, the ancient raised beach
grassed now, proud of the sea below,
the boulders, cobblers, stones and pebbles
part in situ, part placed, provide both grip
and trip and slip; less heather now, more
bracken, thistle, higher, less clipped grass
and bigger boulders; the basalt islands
offshore move as height and orientation
alter and the illusion further softens
the firmness of the ground underfoot,
balance falters as another
further horizon opens up.
IV Three months on, we add the words tràigh and allt, the former watered both by the latter and by the Atlantic Ocean.
V We went to touch the Atlantic Ocean
Wind from southwest, carrying ocean rain, dropping hour after hour,
full-week forecast, take it and be soaked or cower in the newbuild
beside the derelict; the dry dishonest beside the drenched but founded;
there is bracken on all sides, at all heights,
its own colour somewhere within a palette of red,
swelled and heightened by the stream from the layered clouds,
shimmering pink and orange and brown;
a gate leads to a track, more stone than mud, descends in arcs,
Loch Tuath always visible, its waves Atlantic water
from the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift;
two burns, Allt na Cille and Allt nam Ban combine
to mix fresh into salt water on the basalt blackened beach;
they cross the path and along that line of flow
small oaks rise a little, roots grappling for water
and space between rock, small oaks bend,
small oaks shaped sideways by the westerlies;
we stand on the black sand, bend into that wind
and touch the Atlantic water.
VI The ground beneath our feet across deep time
The Gribun Unconformity: we pack our geological box
with terminology; definitions and taxonomies
and process explanations nudge further evolution
or feed decline; do you seek understanding or control?
The Human Unconformity: the gap between real
and imagined stature, true and construed status
on the Earth.
The cliff rises above the beach.
On this beach the sand is submerged in a bay of rock:
pebbles and cobbles and boulders, many of similar rock,
many types of rock, pink with feldspar, orange with iron,
blackened basalt, conglomerates and breccias; smooth,
coarse, pitted with emptied chambers; limpets, lichen.
This a form of deep time revealed; rock fallen from cliff,
rock dragged by glacier, rock swept in by tides, rock
eroded by wind and sea after it was sedimented
by sea and wind.
The Moine a wall, immovable and
immutable which moved and mutated a billion years ago;
submerging below sediment, in turn, emerging
from a slow erosion, in turn, topped and pressed
unbearably
by a lava flow.
But now rising up in all its layers, both shamelessly and
still, quiet, in what some might tag as ‘modestly’, attesting
simply to a history so far beyond any species, this cliff
catalogues time on earth, its vastness and its petrifying voids.
Body of Writing 