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Authors: Robert Macfarlane
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then back down to the bealach again. We rested there for a while, in the wind shelter of the ridge. I sat quietly, trying to work out what had just happened. Where had that sudden fear come from? It had been more than a feeling of physical vulnerability, more than a vertiginous rush - though that had been part of it. A kind of wildness, for sure, but a fierce, chaotic, chastening kind: quite different from the wildness, close to beauty, of Enlli.
The clouds to the west of the bealach were moving quickly and complicatedly, like sliding panels, parting to give a view back out over the Atlantic, then sealing it off again. In one gap, I saw out to the island of Rum and far beyond it the long low boundary of the Outer Hebrides, running from Barra Head to Lewis in the north. Another opening gave me a glimpse back down into the Basin. It would have been, I thought, somewhere just like this bealach that the first of the Skye glaciers would have formed - the glaciers that had ground out the great valley space of the Basin itself, during the Pleistocene period: from two and a half million years ago, until the last glaciers receded from Skye around 14,700 years ago.
For as a river begins with a droplet falling on a slope, so a glacier begins with a snowflake settling in a hollow. The snowflake becomes a drift, and the drift sinters under its own weight into ice. The ice overflows the hollow, and then, following the impetus of its own gathering mass, it runs down the ledges and scree slopes of the mountain, pursuing and widening the channels that have already been carved by water run-off. At the height of the last glacial period, the ice would have filled the Basin, and only the highest mountain-tops - the Inaccessible Pinnacle among them - would have protruded, like nunataks , the rock spires that jag out here and there from the snows of Greenland and the Poles.
Fowles had been right, it seemed to me then, to locate the ‘old nature’ in places such as Coruisk and the Cuillin. If the wild were to come close to extinction, its final fastnesses would be the mountain-tops, and the valleys they protected. These were places that, in the main, still kept their own patterns and rhythms, made their own weathers and their own light. But there were warnings here too against dreams of purity or invulnerability - in the plastic debris that gaudied the beaches, in the oil that slicked the kelp and the seabirds: evidence of incursion and change. Subtler warnings, as well, which took the form of absences: cleared glens, treeless hillsides.
Later that day, back down in the valley, we stopped and swam in the wide blue river which gathers the waters of the headwall and ridge, and fills Loch Coruisk itself. Richard found the spot: a long flume of smooth rock, perhaps ten yards long, down which the river rushed before pouring into a deep clear pool. The perfect swimming place! Roger would have loved it, I thought. So too would my father, who had always swum outside: in waterfall holes, in rapids under stone bridges, in sea coves. During my childhood, whenever we drove from our home in the Midlands up to the Highlands, which we did most summers, he would stop the car at the same bay on Loch Lomond’s western shore, and plunge into the water for a few minutes, regardless of the weather. Then - smiling, damp, restored - he would get back in and drive on north.
Richard and I took it in turns to launch ourselves into the flume, letting the current whizz us down, arms held high, before dropping into the pool. Rain teemed on the water’s surface, and midges bobbed in the air around us, settling and biting if we stayed still for even a few seconds. By the side of the river were firm podiums of green moss, and I remembered Sweeney’s beloved Glen Bolcain. But you never mentioned the midges, Sweeney, I thought reproachfully . . .
As we were walking the final miles back down the side of the loch, the weak sun seething in the water drops still on our skin,
The clouds to the west of the bealach were moving quickly and complicatedly, like sliding panels, parting to give a view back out over the Atlantic, then sealing it off again. In one gap, I saw out to the island of Rum and far beyond it the long low boundary of the Outer Hebrides, running from Barra Head to Lewis in the north. Another opening gave me a glimpse back down into the Basin. It would have been, I thought, somewhere just like this bealach that the first of the Skye glaciers would have formed - the glaciers that had ground out the great valley space of the Basin itself, during the Pleistocene period: from two and a half million years ago, until the last glaciers receded from Skye around 14,700 years ago.
For as a river begins with a droplet falling on a slope, so a glacier begins with a snowflake settling in a hollow. The snowflake becomes a drift, and the drift sinters under its own weight into ice. The ice overflows the hollow, and then, following the impetus of its own gathering mass, it runs down the ledges and scree slopes of the mountain, pursuing and widening the channels that have already been carved by water run-off. At the height of the last glacial period, the ice would have filled the Basin, and only the highest mountain-tops - the Inaccessible Pinnacle among them - would have protruded, like nunataks , the rock spires that jag out here and there from the snows of Greenland and the Poles.
Fowles had been right, it seemed to me then, to locate the ‘old nature’ in places such as Coruisk and the Cuillin. If the wild were to come close to extinction, its final fastnesses would be the mountain-tops, and the valleys they protected. These were places that, in the main, still kept their own patterns and rhythms, made their own weathers and their own light. But there were warnings here too against dreams of purity or invulnerability - in the plastic debris that gaudied the beaches, in the oil that slicked the kelp and the seabirds: evidence of incursion and change. Subtler warnings, as well, which took the form of absences: cleared glens, treeless hillsides.
Later that day, back down in the valley, we stopped and swam in the wide blue river which gathers the waters of the headwall and ridge, and fills Loch Coruisk itself. Richard found the spot: a long flume of smooth rock, perhaps ten yards long, down which the river rushed before pouring into a deep clear pool. The perfect swimming place! Roger would have loved it, I thought. So too would my father, who had always swum outside: in waterfall holes, in rapids under stone bridges, in sea coves. During my childhood, whenever we drove from our home in the Midlands up to the Highlands, which we did most summers, he would stop the car at the same bay on Loch Lomond’s western shore, and plunge into the water for a few minutes, regardless of the weather. Then - smiling, damp, restored - he would get back in and drive on north.
Richard and I took it in turns to launch ourselves into the flume, letting the current whizz us down, arms held high, before dropping into the pool. Rain teemed on the water’s surface, and midges bobbed in the air around us, settling and biting if we stayed still for even a few seconds. By the side of the river were firm podiums of green moss, and I remembered Sweeney’s beloved Glen Bolcain. But you never mentioned the midges, Sweeney, I thought reproachfully . . .
As we were walking the final miles back down the side of the loch, the weak sun seething in the water drops still on our skin,
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