writing

Adjusting to Light

| kirsteenbellblog

October has brought a changed air, crisping and cooling in a gentle precursor to the onslaught of winter wind that comes from the north. Sunset has crept further into the day, and now, with the changing of the clocks, the balance of our days is shifting earlier into evening.

Less light however rarely means total darkness. The northern lights called us out just before the new moon, a faint green wash that could almost be imagined flickering above the hills. We switched off the house lights in an attempt to see them better, blending the garden and ourselves back into the night.

The departing light also takes with it the stream of noise emitted by our human world: voices, phones, TV, music, all fading from the air. From the glen over the water, we can hear the belligerent bellows of rutting stags. A pair of oyster catchers peep up from the nearby shore, while a female tawny owl haunts the trees behind us. Her solitary keewik remains unanswered, one half of twit as yet missing a male’s twoo refrain.

Writing in The Living Mountain on her one night sleeping outside under an October sky, Nan Shepherd told of ‘a night of the purest witchery, to make one credit all the tales of glamourie that Scotland tries so hard to refute and cannot.’ On a practical level, I know that we’re watching sun particles collide with the planet’s atmosphere. The shadowed flittering hints of Na Fir-Chlis, the nimble men, feel like a glamourie all the same: wisping movement and colour just beyond the realm of vision, just out of sight of my too-slow eyes.

Our eyes have evolved to function best in daylight, and it takes around ten to thirty minutes for sight to adapt enough to see those particles of light that filter through the dark. In the first few seconds, our pupils expand to let in as much available light as possible. Then, over the next ten minutes, the colour-gathering cones in our retinas reactivate the light sensitive chemicals left dormant during the day. If we stayed out for longer to watch that faint aurora, the rods in our eyes responsible for black and white vision would increase their sensitivity over several hours, opening further to the hidden magic of the night.

A quick snap with my phone camera would confirm the sight of those skybound dancers straight away, but just one glance at the phone screen would reset  my eyes back to their default daylight settings. So instead we wait for the shifting green light to brighten, and for the stars that were there all along to emerge.

Sighting wild boar

| kirsteenbellblog

Anyone who drives the roads around Lochaber at night will have caught glimpses of wildlife in the verge: headlights glancing off the gold line of a woodcock’s beak, or the twin green reflections of a pine marten’s eyes – not to mention those glimpses of antlers or a soft brown back that send your foot to the brake pedal in anticipation of a stag or roe deer running out.  Driving home late last week though, just before Invergarry where the forest grows close to the road, my foot hit the pedal. Not at something running towards me, but at an unfamiliar long dark shape climbing the bank away from me.

I reversed back up the stretch of empty road, window opening to the night, trying to sharpen my eyes into the shadows to confirm what I had seen. The movement had been too low to be a deer, too black, and the way its weight shifted against the slope reminded me of pigs we’ve kept on the croft. Boar.

A growing population of wild boar call the woods of the Great Glen their home, but I have never seen one.  Huge they may be – an adult can be almost a metre tall at its shoulders, with immense strength behind their elongated snouts and short tusks – they are known to be secretive beasts.

Once a keystone species in woodland habitat, boar had dropped out of our collective consciousness for centuries. They can be integral to healthy and balanced woodland regeneration, disturbing undergrowth to allow new trees to take root, and creating space for wildflowers like bluebells to reach through to the light. However, they are not wholly welcome in the human landscape.

Sightings have been recorded in the south at Leanachan Forest, on trail cameras in Glen Loy and Loch Arkaig, and north by farmland and estates near Drumnadrochit. Each time I drive the road between Fort William and Inverness my peripheral vision keeps an awareness in the trees, hoping out the corner of my eye to snag on a heavier presence in amongst the scrubby understory of birch and oak, or the quiet emptiness of the conifers. I never really expected to see the wild pigs so close to the road though.

The numbers of wild boar in the Great Glen have reportedly been increasing in recent years, with more anecdotal evidence of sightings from walkers on the Great Glen Way, particularly on the approach into Inverness.  The messages on Facebook walking boards are mostly of warning, and many farmers and crofters see them as nothing short of a nuisance, as they can dig up land used for grazing.

Like so much wildlife in the Scottish Highlands, there are multiple ways in which we can interpret the boars’ presence, for good or bad. I gave up staring into the dark forest and resumed my journey home, knowing the boar had far more patience with which to outwait me. It will carry on trying to live its life and we will carry on our trying to live ours. Whether we can find a happy medium that allows both human and boar to co-exist remains to be seen.

January dark

| kirsteenbellblog

It is easy to romanticise the past lives of Highland landscapes in summer, when hillsides are light-filled and lush with green. I daydream then about reroofing the tumbled stone ruin in front of our own new-build home, imagining its empty windows filled again with warmth. In the book Romantic Lochaber, written in 1939, Donald B. MacCulloch describes the houses on this side of Loch Eil as ‘snug little Highland cottages’, ‘reposing at the foot of gently rising green hill slopes’. January, however, tells a harsher story.

Walking against the wind, up the side of the knoll on which the ruin sits, ‘gentle’ is the furthest word from your mind. Instead of a roof, long oak branches sway wildly above the open walls. From the windows of our house nearby, light spills in great splaying rectangles that only just reach the thin edges of the oak tree and the lichen-crusted stone beneath. Inside the old home is black.

The walls of the ruin are thick, almost three feet across. In daylight you can see their construction: two dykes of heavy grey stone held together by their own weight, the space between them filled in with smaller rocks and shards. I enter the dark space of the doorway, finding a seat by memory – a big lump of stone that has fallen into the one-room inner. The ground underfoot is soft with grass and dank with leaves. Sitting, my back rests on the cold and wet of moss. From here I can see out into the night, across the loch to the wee lights of houses on the opposite shore, just as the woman of this house must once have done too.

The only two window openings are north facing, so the corners now exposed to the elements would always have been in shadow, even in the day. I try to imagine where the hearth would have been, how far a fire’s heat would have radiated. How much warmer would these walls have been in January’s past?

Over the course of the month, sunrise will creep earlier a minute or two each day. But as January closes it will still be well after eight in the morning before the darkness lifts, and it will return before five in the afternoon. Average temperatures are usually around four of five degrees Celsius, and gales scour us from the west.

Despite this home’s ruined state though, the wind can’t travel through the walls. It must push at the sides, climb over the open top, bend round the still sharp right-angles of the door-less entry. I wonder again at repairing the stone, cladding it over, fitting a door, and windows with shutters. ‘Snug’ may seem a stretch, but it is possible to imagine how this home held the light close against the January night.

Magic raven feather

| kirsteenbellblog

All day we have been under an oppression of heavy grey cloud, and beneath it the gusting eastern wind has turned the usually clear loch into a tempest. One thing I am learning though, as I pay more attention, as I read more, is that the ravens love the wind; so, despite being scunnered and tired, at the back of 5 I don boots and trudge up the back of the croft, heading westwards towards the neighbouring crofts where I suspect the ravens are roosting.

Perhaps it’s the day it’s been, but I am not soothed by my footsteps as I usually am. Insecurity as to what direction my writing should go in, fights with wee Lawrie about sitting in a different car seat, about what boots to wear, Keir breaking half a dozen eggs all over the kitchen (Lawrie is allergic to raw egg) and subsequently pulling the shower off the wall, toy throwing, nipping, screaming (them, not me), forgetting to buy milk – all of these things accumulate like the purple bruise of sky sagging over the pale blue-gold sunset faraway in the west. The winds have brought litter: caught in the net of birch, willow and hazel that grow along the banking are marge tubs, poly bags, takeaway packaging, bottles, cartons, shredded letters… I video a trail of blue plastic, American Beauty style, caught on a branch and twisting in the wind.

I am really only half-heartedly looking for the ravens; in truth I am just trying to get away from my mood. Nonetheless, I bother to scrawl a few notes as the ravens register me, a group of twelve taking turns to swoop round silently and pull up short in the sky above my head, held there in the wind, until they disappear as one, issuing a single croak as they go.  I spook the group again as I tramp about the undergrowth, as well as a couple of roe deer, feeling the thud of their escape through the ground and hearing their warning bark in the distance, but I still can’t pinpoint where the birds might settle. Eventually the failing light sends me homewards (and the knowledge that I should really go and help with the bedtime routine), the grump in me as heavy as the leaden skies that contrast so sharply with the white hilltops to the south.  I cross the fence at a point where it has been knocked down, and there is my gift. A single black feather. I have to double back over the fence to pick it up, but I know now that I am on the right path. I walk home clutching my feather like Dumbo, suddenly lighter. Just write about the ravens.

img_7780