Wild Voices by Mike Cawthorne

Author:Mike Cawthorne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

Secret Waters

Leaving the stone circle at Calanais you could walk south and west for days and not see a house or cross a road, in a journey of lochs and low hills and peatlands that ends, if you so choose, at some raised beach by the Atlantic. Human echoes are found in placenames – Norse overlapping with Gaelic – in moss-covered cairns and dolmen stones and where old causeways cross loch and channel. I remember the moment I first saw this land for myself. Our boat moored at Tarbert, we’d gone up Clisham to escape the sultry air of that rare phenomenon, a Hebridean heatwave. From the summit we surveyed the aquamarine waters and white sands of the Sound of Taransay, swinging our gaze over the hills of Teileasbhal and Stulabhal to the curving finger of Loch Langabhat. At its tip the land opened to a strange piedmont half drowned in lochs and with gnarly hillocks among them like old magma come to the surface. Naturally I wanted to go there, but how? There was so much water.

The lochans of the Outer Hebrides were the first to interest me in the use of a canoe to explore such places and initially, with the map spread, I conceived an east-west route, effectively a crossing of Lewis by canoe. It was something of a grand gesture and a younger self would have left it at that and made preparations; but increasingly I saw the land-locked waters northeast of Langabhat as a world in itself.

I’d never before seen a system like it, an almost bewildering arrangement and I struggled to see a beginning. At first it seemed I was looking at a random scattering of lochs where natural dips and hollows in the gneiss bedrock had flooded after the last glaciation, but it was more that my map failed to present a deeper truth. Maybe the scale was wrong. It is strange to be able to cover a crooked mile of loch shore with your thumb, yet know nothing of its reality on the ground. Maps struggle to reveal more. They show composites – a hill but not a single rock, a burn though not its eddies or pools or where it runs deep or thinly over boiler plates. They caption a place, no more. I often think that I might one day do without maps altogether, finding my way from memory and the old clues of nature. How much more magical and fresh would places then appear.

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