Picture this. A beach – not sand but weather-strewn slate-grey and rose-pink shingle. Unkempt-looking, if truth be told: a flurry of shale here and there, a swathe of seaweed and slimy ledges on one side that impedes human access to the water and leaves the shallows around as a domain for seals, ruins rimming the foreshore – remains of those who tried once to forge a life out here and gave up because of the utter isolation. The other beach-goers a pair of grizzled beaten-by-the-climate goats that lock stares with me for what seems like forever. It’s not exactly hot. You couldn’t even call it clement. There is blue in the sky but it’s overwhelmed by murk. A view from this ruggedest side of Rum behind into the crags of the Cuillins, ahead out over Canna and, occasionally glimpsed through cloud backlit by a thin band of lurid light, the Outer Hebrides appearing like a conjuring trick.
My accommodation tonight is in one of those ruins. By the standards of Scotland’s bothies, Guirdil is high-class. It has a separate kitchen, two sleeping areas, tables and chairs, basic ingredients to fashion together a meal if you had to take refuge here from the weather suddenly and without provisions. But it’s only en suite if you count the walk through the sopping grass and the blood-greedy midges to the waterfall, my bed on boards with a mat and sleeping bag alone on top and my dinner looks like being packet chicken korma and hip-flask whisky.
So why, I think, am I so happy here? Happier than if I was in a 5-star hotel in the Caribbean. Why does the weather, even if it’s gloomy, make my heart glad? Why, though my long-hiking feet are soaked from days of bogs and my clothes the same as yesterday and this time last week? Why, though my seat by the pool is a misshapen boulder by a rockpool with staring goats?
I don’t know why. Inner Hebrides of Scotland, I have never known why. But I’m going to keep coming back to you. Again and again and again, shunning comfort and warmer climes for you for reasons I cannot and perhaps do not want to put into words.
Categories: Adventure Travel, Budget Travel, hiking, Musings, UK Travel
Luke and his Words... 