Travel by Unknown Author

Author:Unknown Author
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

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By the time we made it to Oban snow was falling heavily. We immediately set off to find out if the ferries were running. It was good news: the town now had power and after a few days of storm-force winds the Sound of Mull was now completely still. We had a few hours to kill but would be on our way that evening. The sun would set on the hour-long journey to the island some seven miles away. We put our bags in the left luggage racks at the railway station and headed for a pub to eat seafood and drink local beer. Kev was feeling a little more chipper after this, especially as the sun had come out and the snow had stopped, so we set off to see the most obvious of Oban’s attractions.

McCaig’s Folly is the one thing in the town you can’t fail to see. A vast oval of lancet arches, in homage to the Colosseum of Rome, it overlooks the town on a hill immediately behind it. It was built by John Stuart McCaig, a banker who sought to create a lasting monument for his family, while at the same time providing the unemployed local stonemasons with something to do. It was constructed sporadically, but as with most follies the building is merely the bait that forces you to climb a hill and see a view. Despite having come to Mull via Oban for three decades, Kev had never seen the island from up there. The Bay of Oban looks out to the island of Kerrera, but from that vantage point it looks as though it’s connected to the mainland some way out of sight to the south. Mull hangs behind it, a range of white-topped mountains banking up and out of the Firth of Lorn.

Interestingly, the word ‘firth’ has the same origin as the Scandinavian ‘fjord’, which is something you can tell simply by being near one. You begin to understand where the mythology of the Highlands and Western Islands comes from when you start to inhale the language it preserves in words like ‘firth’, Toch’ and ‘minch’, and the new definition it grafts onto others like ‘sound’ — used here to describe an ocean inlet too wide and too deep to be called simply a bay.

Few visitors understand exactly what these words mean, but we manage to link them up with vague ideas in our heads. Perhaps it’s this space or vagueness that gives us the room to dream and the Highlands and Islands their otherworldly quality. At this distance, Mull certainly looked the equal of, if not superior to, any landscape of the imagination.

Kev chuckled, ‘Dan, there are at least forty-five breeding pairs of eagles on that island. I wonder whether we’ll see a single one.’ He patted me on the back and walked away. I stared at the vast peaks, feeling almost overcome, no doubt from lack of sleep and too much alcohol, but thrilled at last to have found a ‘Domain of Arnheim’ of my own.

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