Species list, Scotland August 2013

Name: Peterson's Birds of Britain and Europe (North American Name) Scientific name

Gaviidae

Diver sp. (loon) Gavia sp.

Procellariidae

Fulmar (Northern Fulmar) Fulmarus glacialis

Manx Shearwater (Manx Shearwater) Puffinus puffinus

Sulidae

Gannet (Northern Gannet) Morus bassanus

Phalacrocoracidae

Cormorant (Great Cormorant) Phalacrocorax carbo

Shag (Eurasian Cormorant) Phalacrocorax aristotelis

Ardeidae

Grey Heron (Grey Heron) Ardea cinerea

Anatidae

Ferruginous Duck (Ferruginous Duck) Aythya nyroca

Canada Goose (Canada Goose) Branta canadensis

Graylag Goose (Graylag Goose) Anser anser

Mute Swan (Mute Swan) Cygnus olor

Eider (Common Eider) Somateria mollissima

Shelduck (Common Shelduck ) Tadorna tadorna

Red-breasted Merganser (Red-breasted Merganser) Mergus serrator

Accipitridae

Osprey (Osprey) Pandion haliaetus

White-tailed Eagle (White-tailed Eagle) Haliaeetus albicilla

Buzzard (Common Buzzard ) Buteo buteo

Golden Eagle (Golden Eagle) Aquila chrysaetos

Falconidae

Merlin (Merlin) Falco columbarius

Peregrine Falcon (Peregrine Falcon) Falco peregrinus

Phasianidae

Red Grouse (Willow Ptarmigan) Lagopus lagopus scotica

Rallidae

Coot (Eurasian Coot) Fulica atra

Charadriidae

Ringed Plover (Common Ringed Plover) Charadrius hiaticula

Lapwing (Northern Lapwing) Vanellus vanellus

Haematopodidae

Oystercatcher (Eurasian Oystercatcher) Haematopus ostralegus

Scolopacidae
Redshank (Common Redshank) Tringa totanus
Whimbrel (Whimbrel) Numenis phaeopus
Curlew (Eurasian Curlew) Numenius arquata
Turnstone (Ruddy Turnstone) Arenaria interpres
Sanderling (Sanderling) Calidris alba
Dunlin (Dunlin) Calidris alpina 
Snipe (Common Snipe) Gallinago gallinago

Stercorariidae

Great Skua (Great Skua) Stercorarius skua

Laridae

Herring Gull (Herring Gull) Larus argentatus

Great Black-backed Gull (Great Black-backed Gull) Larus marinus

Black-headed Gull (Black-headed Gull ) Larus ridibundus

Kittiwake (Black-legged Kittiwake) Rissa tridactyla

Common Tern (Common Tern) Sterna hirundo

Arctic Tern (Arctic Tern) Sterna paradisaea

Alcidae
Guillemot (Common Murre) Uria aalge
Razorbill (Razorbill) Alca torda
Black Guillemot (Black Guillemot) Cepphus grylle
Puffin (Atlantic Puffin) Fratercula arctica

Columbidae

Rock Dove (Rock Dove) Columba livia

Wood Pigeon (Common Wood Pigeon) Columba palumbus

Stock Dove (Stock Dove)Columba oenas

Collared Dove (Eurasian Collared Dove) Streptopelia decaoto

Apodidae

Swift (Common Swift) Apus apus

Muscicapidae (Old World Flycatchers)

Pied Flycatcher (European Pied Flycatcher) Ficedula hypoleuca

Corvidae

Jay (Eurasian Jay) Garrulus glandarius

Magpie (Black-billed Magpie) Pica pica

Carrion Crow (Carrion Crow) Corvus corone

Hooded Crow (Hooded Crow) Corvus cornix

Jackdaw (Eurasian Jackdaw) Corvus monedula

Rook (Rook) Corvus frugilegus

Raven (Common Raven) Corvus corax

Hirundinidae

Swallow (Barn Swallow) Hirundo rustica

House Martin (Common House Martin) Delichon urbica

Paridae

Blue Tit (Blue Tit) Cyanistes caeruleus

Great Tit (Great Tit) Parus major

Coal Tit (Coal Tit) Periparus aler

Certhidae

Tree Creeper (Eurasian Tree Creeper) Certhia familiaris

Troglodytidae

Wren (Winter Wren) Troglodytes troglodytes

Cinclidae

Dipper (White-throated Dipper) Cinclus cinclus

Turdidae

Robin (European Robin) Erithacus rubecula

Stonechat (European Stonecat) Saxicola rubicola

Northern Wheatear (Northern Wheatear) Oenathe oenathe

Ring Ouzel (Ring Ouzel) Turdus torquatus

Blackbird (Common Blackbird) Turdus merula

Mistle Thrush (Mistle Thrush) Turdus viscivorus

Sturnidae

Starling (European Starling) Sturnus vulgaris

Motacillidae

Pied Wagtail (Pied Wagtail) Motacilla alba yarrellii

Grey Wagtail (Grey Wagtail) Motacilla cinerea

Meadow Pipit (Meadow Pipit) Anthus prateusis

Calcariidae

Snow Bunting (Snow Bunting) Plectrophenax nivalis

Fringillidae

Goldfinch (European Goldfinch) Carduelis carduels

Chaffinch (Common Chaffinch) Fringilla coelebs

Passeridae

House Sparrow (House Sparrow) Passer domesticus 78

Retrograde

In the station at Corrour, I watched as Mike boarded the Northbound train to Fort William, waved as his face, then his window slid from view. Then I pulled out my camera, and began to thumb through the pictures I had taken, beginning with the station, where I now stood, as an isolated building surrounded by rugged moorland. And back to our campsite, the night before, and the long walk through Glen Nevis. A retrograde of our journey.

When it arrived, I boarded the train for Glasgow, settled into a window seat and watched the landscape slip by. There a pair of hikers, waterproofs donned against the day's pervasive mist, headed up a track through bracken and moorland. Sheep, high on a hill, crowned their kingdom of terraces. A haircut of grazing trails patterned into the hillside.

The tea cart stopped at my elbow, and I asked for a cup of tea, counting out the pound sixty while the server poured hot water.

At Crianlarich we hitch to the train from Oban and my mind wandered to the sun on the water, to the bagpipers along the quay, and the Isle of Mull ferry churning into the terminal.

The train lurched into movement and we continued south. We paralleled the stone wall that edged the West Highland Way. There were the ancient Caledonian pines, their crowns twisted with repeated breakages and new growth, and there the high point where we paused for lunch and watched the train pass.

We streamed south along Loch Lomond's western shore. We passed Castle Island, the white house with it's boothy, and the grand hotel at Inversnaid, traversing in an hour and a half what we took three days to walk.

At Glasgow's Queen Street station I changed for the train to Edinburgh. In the waste places along the tracks, only the upper reaches of the fireweed steeple held their pink blossoms. The rest of the plume had gone to seed. We skimmed just south of Sterling and I remembered its castle, flags flying stiff from the battlements.

I emerged in Edinburgh a bit discombobulated without my traveling partner. I headed across North Bridge and uphill to a small café, and settled in for a pint of ale and a good supper before navigating the now familiar streets to Leith and my home for the night. How different the city seemed on the eve of my farewell, than it had on our arrival.

And in the morning, my retrograde would conclude as I boarded the plane to the place my ancestors had learned to call home.

Wild in its Way

"Like so much of Scotland's wildest land, this is not an empty landscape, but an emptied one." Robert MacFarlane

We lost the track in Glen Nevis and forged on across the moorland. We were not, ourselves, lost, as our route followed the River Nevis to its origin and then descended along the Abhainn Rath. The silver ribbon of the Nevis cut through green and russet grasses. Valley walls swept up to surrounding peaks in a gentle slope carved by glaciers. On the high terrain, green gave way to stone and then to sky. Just this, grass and stone and sky. The rush of water and startle of a pipit. The land held no trees.

The land I call "wilderness" at home, is forested, for the most part, except for exposed peaks and open water. In New England, land left unmanaged, turns to trees.

We climbed a small rise to lengthen our view. As we climbed, we came across a channel where water cut down through black peat. From the mire, silvery bones of pines glinted. A graveyard trees. They told a different story then the one we encountered on the surface: the story of an ancient forest, felled. The clear reach of human habitation on this remote and rugged stretch of Scotland.

My home ground was not always wild. The decayed stone walls and veteran trees of the Northeast whisper of another landscape. But here, in the Scottish Highlands, called by some Europe's last wilderness, the cleared land remains treeless.

There were gifts to be found in this incarnation of landscape to be sure. It held wildness in its own way: in the protesting flush of a merganser taking flight, in the last blooms of wild thyme carpeting the gravel bar of an older riverbed, in the shifting light across the felsenmeer, in the sweet juice of an early blackberry.

We walked on, circling back to avoid the worst of the muck. And as I leapt from tussock to tussock, I thought about the stumps. What must it have looked like, this landscape, forested? How long ago? Yet, despite the lurch of loss in my gut, I savored the long open views of ridge and glen, the sweeping summits, now obscured by mist, now clear. The high open land drew me onward.

Pilgramage

"Daddy," asked the girl in front of us on the foot path, "is Ben Nevis the tallest mountain in the world?" Her blonde pony tail swung as she looked to her father for confirmation.

"No, not the tallest."

"The second tallest then?" She piped up, in her perfect aristocratic accent. Ben Nevis is certainly the tallest mountain in her world. At 1,344 meters (4,409 ft), it holds the title as the UK's tallest peak.

We passed the family, and worked our way up Nevis's shoulder, pausing to catch our breath or for a sip of water, but always pacing ourselves to keep ahead of those moving more slowly and allowing faster walkers to pass. We were two of a hundred? Two hundred? Five? that streamed to the summit. So many different languages, ages, levels of fitness and preparedness. Families climbed, dogs climbed, single people, couples, and groups climbed. People in jeans and people decked out in trekking gear climbed. We passed a family speaking German and then stepped to the side as three men wearing black belt uniforms passed us. A man climbed in a kilt, sporran, and knee socks; and another in a leather jacket, cowboy hat, aviator glasses, corduroy shorts and Keds. Some climbed slowly, some plodded, some ran, all moved steadily upward. The night before we had watched the parade of ants as it crawled down the mountain, and now we were a part of it. A communal society formed around the sugar bowl of the summit.

The path turned and climbed more steeply past blooming heather and wild thyme. We passed the Half Way Lochain. Starry Saxifrage bloomed from the shelter of a rock. Down below us, the pilgrims climbed on, a serpent of aspirants, single file. The flowers gave way to sedges, then ferns, and finally lichen. We climbed through a meadow of rock: felsenmeer. The exposed contours and subtleties of color enchanted me. Fog swirled around us, parting to reveal a glimpse of Fort William then the curtains drew closed again. The mist thickened. Cairns marched into the gloom, centuries along the avenue, guiding our way.

I've never been to India or Nepal, but it made me think of the pilgrimages to a hilltop temple or shrine, and I wondered what we were all seeking up there in the clouds together. But I'll tell you, it was something. As we neared the summit, those heading down met our eyes and smiled broadly, their faces alight.

At the summit, the pilgrims held a party. They scaled the summit marker and snapped pictures, drank wine, pulled out picnics. They ducked into the once-observatory, shrugged on outer shells of bright nylon, and kept moving. They peered into the cloud as if they could summon a view from force of will. Then they turned and headed downhill, leaving their crumbs to the snow buntings. We turned, too, shouldered our packs and started down, smiling brightly into the faces of those who climbed toward us.

Adventure Holiday

We woke to a punishing wind and the tent billowing and shuddering around us. The wind had shifted in the night and the meager protection of the outcrop to our west was no longer sufficient. By 4:30 am, we decided there was no more sleep to be had, and we broke camp by headlamp. We are a good team and packed more quickly than we'd anticipated, so we paused, spooning granola into our mouths by headlamp in the lea of a south facing boulder and waiting for the sky to grow light enough for us to see our way.

By 5:15 we had our packs on an were headed to the main trail to assess the conditions. Our plan had been to rejoin our original trail, and continue on to Elgol, five or so miles further, much of the way wending along the coast. But by the time we reached the main trail, in the full force of the wind, a steady soaking roan was falling. A hundred meters down the trail, we paused by a boulder, blocked from the wind, but not the rain. We hovered over the bus and ferry timetables weighing our options.

When we reached our trail junction, we half turned, the hoods of our raincoats blocking us from the needles of rain and bid Elgol farewell. The next four miles, which we'd hiked in a rapture of sun and long views the day before was equally astonishing on our return. The mountains, by the slight-of-hand of the clouds, had vanished. At their trunks, we watched waterfalls form like ski-runs and tumble their way to the river that surged through the valley. And then we began to crossing. We waded through stream after stream of ankle and shin deep water. The wind was impossible, and we played with it, even as it played with us. We giggled at the way it plastered our clothes to our bodies, the way it arrowed across open water in gusts, ogled at the curtains of rain it pushed across the valley, even as the gusts slid our uplifted feet and packs in unexpected directions. We disturbed pipits and frogs sheltering in the incised path and sorrowed at their labored flight and chilled crawling to safer ground.

As the valley broadened, streams collected more water before meeting our trail. We approached each crossing with greater focus and communication. Always glimmering in our minds was the main tributary that we'd have to cross before reaching the road. At last, from its bank, we scouted the shallowest point to cross, looking for the wide braided riffles. We paused to unclasp the waist belts and sternum straps from our packs. Then, stepping into the swift current, we clasped hands, and faced up stream. Side-stepping, our feet found purchase on the upstream side of rocks. One of us anchored in place, while the other inched across the stream to a new anchor. Back together, we repeated the dance, all the while bracing against the current. I was grateful for Mike's expertise, and pulled him into a bear hug, when, wet to the thighs, we clambered out on the opposite bank.

By the time Sligachan came into view, pockets of sun slid through the clouds, but still, steadily, the rain continued. My raincoat, while offering an extra layer of warmth and some protection from the wind, was wet through. I could sense the full saturation seeping into my base layers.

The bus came soon enough and carried us on to Armadale. Where, on the advice of the ticket agent, we hurried to catch the ferry that was boarding. Calmac, it seemed, was considering canceling the next crossing due to the weather. So we squelched up the gangway and settled in as the ship pitched across the channel to the mainland. Once underway, I eased out of my wet clothes, turned my raincoat inside out to air, and headed to the cafe for a cup of tea.

Out there, our plans float like milkweed fluff held lightly in the palm. On this day, a gust had blown them away, and there, snuggled into our booth we wove plans anew; a campsite, a meal, a mountain. We wrapped our fingers lightly around them, knowing better than to hold on too tightly.

Skye Magic

I don't believe in magic.

I believe in the possibility of shifting weather that allows us to wake to a sweep of blue sky and unveiled mountains.

I believe in the majesty of a landscape quilted with blooming heather.

I believe in time, the time it takes for a slow seepage of magma to push through the earth's surface, and the eons of erosion, grain by grain through wind and water.

I believe in humility. In the ability of the mountains to diminish not only my stature, but my importance in the great systems of the earth as well.

I believe in the serendipity that brought us here, rather than there, at this moment.

I believe in wonder, the slack-jawed passage I made, stopping to look, to breathe, to be, to listen to the wind on the high mountain, the roar of water, and the piccolo of a rill rushing across stones.

I believe in the lessons this landscape has to offer and willingly let it instruct me in awe, patience, and the power of wind.

Call it magic if it sounds like that to you. Me? I call it gratitude for the world unfolding just the way it does and for my own capacity to witness it all.

Old

 "I had passed through lands that were saturated with invisible people, with lives lived and lost, deaths happy and unhappy, and the spectral business of these wild places had become less and less ignorable." ~ Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

We headed up the hill under a heavy sky, stepping around the boggy places where too many feet had cut through the heather. We angled up over the brow of the hill and came upon the cairn, circling it to find the entrance. We lost sight of each other across the dome of loose grey stones flecked with white that loomed above our heads. One of the chambers had collapsed, leaving entry unwise, but we peered inside using our headlamps. A long stone lintel rested across the pillars that created the entrance. Inside, rocks, shone with condensation. The cairn dated back 5000 years, but archeologists know little except that it houses the remains of an important chieftain or warrior. If ballads were composed in his honor, their words are long lost.

Two days before, at my request, we'd cut in off the ocean to see the chapels at Tobha Mor. The name Clanranald had drawn me, as one of the possible derivations of my name. We came into the village, now called Howmore, on a farm road at the dune side, passed the new church and turned onto the main road. A sign directed us onto a footpath behind the hostel, and there, tucked into a lot in the middle of town stood the head and footboards of celtic chapels. Each of the structures was thick-walled with a casement that narrowed to an arrow-slot like window. Lichens, plumped by mist and rain, festooned the stones in green, silver and vibrant orange. The mist hushed the village sounds, and made me feel all the more that we were walking in a sanctuary. The Clanranald chapel was the oldest of the bunch, dating back to 1200 CE, though a few stones and crosses in the yard, offer evidence of an earlier Christian presence. 

 The more recent history of the Highland Clearances had haunted our walking since we'd arrived. Empty house-shells strewn across the landscape left us asking again and again, "what happened?" Begun in the 1790s when sheep farming became a more profitable venture than tenant farming, land owners began to clear their land of its inhabitants: crofters, families, and highlanders, most of whom had called their crofts home for generations. In addition to the abandoned homes that stood on the land, the clearances ravaged the celtic and highland culture as families moved to cities or overseas toward jobs and new lives.

As I understand it, this forced emptying of the land was, at times, brutal and cruel, but so, too, was the life lived by many of those who worked the land before the clearances began. The houses were small, and provided shelter for large families. Open fires of peat served as cookstove and hearth, the smoke of which gave the dwellings their name, blackhouses. They were, for the most part, windowless, dark, and smokey. The land, long-ago cleared of trees, was marginal for farming. This history lesson accompanied us everywhere. Along Loch Lomond we waked by hollow buildings with roof thatching replaced by sky. On Mull, stone walls marked out once-domains, and out here, on the edge of the earth, sorrow seemed to draft from empty doors: sorrow at a hard life, and sorrow at the impossibility of leaving a place called home.

In each of these places, along highways and lake shores, in villages and farm fields, I began to wonder what it must be like to live shoulder-to-shoulder with history. For me, a visitor in this place, with eyes for which everything is new, the stones stirred an understanding of the depth of time. My own third of a century seemed a small, neat package in the face of fifty centuries. And deeper than our human time, lay rocks whose age was counted in millennia. In these lands, Earth became elder, and I walked more lightly upon her.

The Crofter and the Post Man

Mike has a way of getting people to talk. It may be his thoughtful questions, or perhaps the way he turns his full attention on the answer. Our hostess at the Balranald preserve, was a crofter, working the land around us with her husband. The land they had inherited from his father who, in turn, had received it from his uncle. She spoke in the gaelic lilt, softening her "ch" from the hard "k". We'd walked her land that morning, following a dirt track that cut out into the bouquet of the machair, and through fields of oats, barley, and rye. We had passed through a cattle gate, and shut it behind us, securing the bolt and the line. The headland, rocky and tree-less, was pasture for cows, but also for the wheatears, dunnocks and pipits that flitted away from us as we walked.

Crofts are small farms, worked by tenant farmers. While the Scottish Government owned the land at Balranald, the North Uist Estate, she told us, owned the majority of the island as a gift from the queen. But for the crofters, the rent wasn't high, and after a tumultuous history, their place was secure, unless they abandoned the land or let it lie fallow. It wasn't meant to be a big money maker, just a few animals and crops to see them through the winter. As she saw it, there wasn't any benefit to owning. The landowners retrained fishing and shooting rights, but otherwise the land was hers to work and pass down to her children and her children's children.

She handed us our scones slathered with butter and

black current jam, their warm weight easing through the paper napkins that held them, and gave directions to the bus stop. We left, reluctantly, and headed up the driveway to wait for the post bus.

***

The regularly scheduled 10:09 Royal Mail truck pulled over at the bus stop to let us in. We paid our fare and took a seat behind the driver next to cartons of mail. Our route took us past post boxes and offices, where the driver hopped out with his ring of keys to collect the mail.

He grew up in Edinburgh, he told us over the engine's rattle, but moved out here fourteen years ago with his wife. It was a good place to raise a family: safe and tranquil.

The mail he collected was headed down to the main office at Barra, where it would be sorted and flown to the mainland from Barra's sand beach. The flights are tide dependent, as the high tide covers the runway, and so the flight schedule changes daily. I tried to imagine it, I'd seen the air strip from the ferry. But then, here I was in a mail truck doubling as a public bus.

The postman dropped us off at Clannach where we changed to the bus for Langass, but he promised to collect us at half-two and take us the rest of the way to Lochmaddie. Though off of his scheduled run, he'd be passing by that way on his way back to town. The time allowed us two hours to explore the 5000 year old cairn of Barpa Langass and the stone circle of Pobull Fhìnn. And collect us he did, greeting us warmly, and ferrying us the last five miles into town. The red truck offered shelter from a driving mist that had just begun to fall. We quickly fell into conversation.

On the Machair

While the full bloom of the machair was past, the grass still held a mosaic of color: yellow asters and purple thistles, small violets. Here and there a poppy still clung to its petals. Unique to the Outer Hebrides, this grassland ecosystem relies on the sand dunes augmented by a multitude of shell fragments. The calcium enriched sand hosts a diverse array of endemic plants: the machair. 

A sandy track lead us out past the ancient remains of round houses, circular stone foundations excavated from a bowl in the dunes. And then on, out to the sea. We looked across the North Atlantic into the wind. The sloping white sand beach softened the surf. Oystercatchers, plovers and stilts probed the piles of kelp on the falling tide, looking for morsels.

We turned northward eschewing the blazed trail of the Machair Way for hard-packed beach and the ocean's company. 

The sweep of dunes, and inscribed tracings of blowing grass reminded me of Cape Cod, just there, south and west across the sea. I remembered walking on that Atlantic shore for hours, as the wind whipped through the insufficient protection of my clothing. But the sun here, was warm; the breeze refreshed rather than chilled.

 

A dead gannet caught my eye, feathers wet and sand-caked, set in a still life of kelp and drift wood. My aunt, a photographer, captured such scenes of found sculpture on film, and offered the viewer a chance to see through her eyes. I followed the wrack line searching for treasures. I toed a fishing float, bent for a feather, a limpet shell, a bone. 

I searched the wrack line for wishing stones, remembering my dear friend Jen who spent hours seeking out the palm-perfect rocks, traced clear around with a vein of some other mineral. It was these she offered as favors at her wedding. I stooped to pick one up, brushing off the sand and sliding it into my pocket to give her upon my return.

Walking mesmerizes. Objects spark memories and the mind wanders. And then something else, the ebbing tide, the glimmer of light on water catches the eye and draws this moment into focus. I watched the shift of clouds and light, the antics of wading birds and gulls. I breathed in the 4,000 miles of sea air, clean and cold and full of the tang of salt. Gazing out across the Atlantic, perched on this outer rim of earth, I was suffused with gratitude this sweet, simple life, for all the places my feet have walked, and for the company I have kept.

The Crossing

As we pulled out of Oban's harbor, I felt the ferry breathe. It rose, I thought, on the small waves of a calm sea. But the breathing began with Mike, his head resting on my thigh, and translated through my forearm resting across his shoulders.

We passed the light at Lismore, which gleamed like an ivory minaret calling the seals to prayer. The island slid into the distance behind. We motored on, out of Loch Linnhe, and into the Sound of Mull, a channel narrow enough to see houses on both sides. Then out to sea. The small islands of Eigg, Muck, Rum and later Canna were erased and re-written by passing squalls that pulled rainbows in their wake.

On the open ocean, between Coll and Barra the ship began to breathe in earnest, rising and falling on the great lung of the sea. Gannets arrowed into the water from above, creating spray that rivaled the white caps. 

We travelled in comfort and safety, nestled into the observation lounge couches. A great window offered a view, and sheltered us from the spray. Mid crossing, I eased from our booth, and rolled across the cabin and down the stairs, clinging to the hand rail. I ducked into the coffee shop, and bought tea and cookies. I balanced the hot water gingerly as I returned to our seats, still fighting the swells. 

As I sat, watching the sea, I thought of other crossings. The sailing vessel that carried Sir William Alexander's son to Nova Scotia travelled out of sight of land for weeks, not hours. He likely travelled in relative comfort, but salted meats and fish might still have been his fare. And David Scott who made the crossing in 1913 on a steam ship? His own crossing lasted a week. How were his seas? How did he travel? What fear lay in the open ocean for these men, even knowing, as I do that the destination lay ahead? 

And earlier? Saint Columbia and a small band of monastics, legend holds, washed ashore in Iona, a small island to the south of Mull, in 563, traveling in a small skin-on-frame boat, a curach. But the earliest archeological sites on these Hebridean islands date to 4000 years BCE. How, and from where, did these first settlers arrive?

I was glad, at last, to see the island of Barra rise from the sea, and gladder still, some time later, to see the lights of Lochboisdale harbor gleaming in the long northern twilight. We shouldered our packs, disembarked, and, following the advice of a couple we'd met on the Ferry, sought out the post office, behind which, they suggested, we might find a small patch of flat ground that we could call home for the night.

Routefinder

One of Mike's favorite pastimes is sitting down with a map and seeking out a route by land, or land and water through the terrain under his fingertip. The route may use existing trails, but more often paths and tracks serve as a loose template for larger possibility. Its amazing to watch, fun to dream along beside him, and, occasionally, to execute the journey -- seeing on foot what contour lines and landscape symbols showed from a birds eye perspective.

So when he said 'OK, you plan Mull'. I lost myself in wildlife, standing stones, castles, cairns, and, of course, mountains. I learned quickly that we could spend our few weeks on Mull alone, but I had three or four days to connect a handful of features. And so a route began to form.

Mull has three major settlements and two main roads that connect them. Bus service is relegated to these roads, and beyond that, travel happens, for those of us without cars, on foot, or by the generosity of strangers. The route I saw sampled the remote, central section of Mull, offered opportunities for bird watching (I hoped), and progressed steadily toward Mull's best preserved circle of standing stones. 

I was rather astonished and humbled when we went over the route together. Mike checked the mileage (oh, right), looked to see if there might be flat, dry camping at the half way point. He looked at ground cover and topography, and spotted a (very) steep section I had missed. He saw buildings and river crossings (some easy, some more difficult). I felt like I was having an exam graded and some of my guesses were very lucky indeed. 

We got off the bus at Salen and headed south. Under the first drops of an approaching rainstorm, a couple on a birdwatching holiday from Glasgow picked us up and went out of their way to drop us off at the trail head. Loch Bá was beautiful, but home to sheep and salmon farms rather than birds. We followed an old jeep track along the river to several long-abandoned homesteads. Fireweed grew from the tops of walls, now roofless. Rowan sprang from the fireplace, and windows held sky in both directions. And here, the track ended. But Mike reading the map like a landscape and the landscape like a map, found our pass and our route and we moved on. 

I had always romanticized moorland, and wanted to walk out in it, having no idea what that actually meant. It means wet feet. It means a maze of tussock and bog, rushes that hide the ground and sphagnum moss that disguises depth. In my first tentative steps, I felt like I was back on the Sula Beag. The ground did not behave as I expected; my foot slid one way and pitched my body in another. A step that appeared level sunk into ankle deep muck. 

Once, brought to my knees, I saw a different aspect of bog: a spotted pink bog orchid and the yellow stars of bog asphodel dotted the grasses. Carnivorous sundew gleamed from between sphagnum moss. I regained my footing, but moved more carefully with a new respect both for the challenge of walking, and delight in the diversity of life. 

We switch-backed up to the pass at Mám Bhreapadail following deer trails etched into the hillside. Above us, silhouetted against a greying sky, a red dear buck and his harem flowed along the ridge line. We pitched our tent on a patch of level, dryish ground, and cooked our dinner gazing back through the folds of green hills to the two crofters houses at the valley's mouth.

***

According to our map, and in truth the reason for the trek, three single standing stones and a stone circle lay at the terminus of our path. We scanned the farm fields and pastures from the last ridge and spotted the first stone. The stone stood taller than I, pointed at the top, covered in a great display of lichen.

We walked on following white washed stones across a field and through a gate to the second and third stones and to the ring itself. Sheep grazed the land around these stones and seemed as comfortable within them as outside. Mike and I circled the stones and then walked among them, hesitantly, searching for answers to the same questions that these stones have sparked for traveler after traveler. I expected to be awed, with a sense of the sacred I encounter in great cathedrals, Buddhist monasteries, groves of old growth or mountain tops. But instead I found merely curiosity and wonder. Why was it here? A navigational marker? Ceremonial? Astronomical? What had all the generations of farmers and sheep herders thought of the ring in the years they worked this land? They thought enough of it to let it be, apparently, though it stood in the way of their haying scythes and later tractors. 

And then, out of respect or perhaps futility we withdrew, wending our way to the sound, a finger of the Atlantic in the soft shush of waves on the shingle. In the cry of gulls and the grey mirror of sea and sky, I found respite from the questions of the stones, from tired ankles and soggy feet. I had passed the test indeed.

Wee Beasties and Great Beasties

"Minke whale, 7 o'clock!" Binoculars snapped up, passengers swayed to the stern of the Sula Beag. I scanned the waters looking for a fin, or a blow.

Summer whale watching is a tradition my family began when I was very little, and one I've kept as an adult, making an annual pilgrimage to the coast, Newburyport, Gloucester or Provincetown. So when I learned that August was peak season for whale watching in Scotland, and that the Island of Mull was the epicenter, I added Sea Life Survey's Whale watch Explorer to our itinerary.

As we motored out of Mull Sound, Guillemots (Common Murres) and their chicks paddled away, crying to each other. Gannets patrolled the air above, occasionally plunging into the sea for a fish. On 

the cliffs of Ardmore Point, a white-tailed eagle soared. 

A fin broke the surface and a long sleek back followed. "And again, left of the lighthouse!" 

We lingered there by the Cairns of Coll watching three minke whales surface to breathe and feed between occasional deeper dives. As the whales moved on, we motored toward the shore where one of the naturalists had seen a basking shark. This, the world's second largest fish, spends sixteen or more hours a day cruising through the sea with its mouth agape grazing on zooplankton. Their dorsal fins, for two more had joined the first, reminded me of the folded wings of ebony jewel-wing damselflies, swept back and slightly rounded. Behind the dorsal fins, a tail fin occasionally broke the surface giving us the full length of the animal. One came in close enough to the boat that we could see its full body including the white gape of its mouth.

All around us rose the purple islands - to the north the small islands of Rum, Eigg, Muck and Canna, over Rum's shoulder the Cullin of Skye stood craggy against the sky. Mull lay back to the east and the low-lying Coll and Tyree spread southward. Seals lined the rocks that spilled from Coll's northern tip, and arctic terns wheeled overhead. European shags surfaced from the clear water below.

As we started back, the naturalists lowered a plankton net overboard "to see what those sharks are eating". Inside, under a microscope, its image projected onto a large screen, "Professor Plankton" sorted through the sample zooming in on a medusa, the larval form of a jellyfish; copepods, elongate crustaceans with long handlebar antennae; and an arrow-worm. Larval forms of lobster and sea urchins, brittle stars and mollusks, all begin their lives as free-floating "wee-beasties" that feed on algae and in turn provide sustenance for minke whales and basking sharks. 

We came for the great beasties: the whales and puffins, sharks and skuas, but seeing the plankton in all their bizarre and diverse forms, reminded me of what a small portion of the life on our planet we remember to observe. And, too, the astonishing beauty that thrives all around us when we take the time to look.

Into the Highlands

"By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomond. Where me and my true love were ever wont to gae. On the bonnie, bonnie banks O' Loch Lomond."

Though our ancestors brought us to Scotland, it was a song that lured us to the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond. Far from the heartbroken lament of a Jacobite soldier awaiting his fate, fearing that he will see is homeland again only by the "low road" of death, our travels were light-hearted, a greeting, rather than a farewell. On the West Highland Way, we met Scotland.

The West Highland Way starts at Milngavie, a northern suburb of Glasgow, and meanders 96 miles north to Fort William. The light was low, dancing off of the water when we stepped off of the ferry at the Balmaha Boat Yard, and joined the foot path. While I had enjoyed the bustle of Edinburgh's Festival Fringe and Stirling Castle's revelry, I welcomed the chance travel on foot.

We took time to identify the trees along the path, smoothing their leaves between our fingers, sorting sessile from English oak. We ducked inside the visitor information booth at Milarrochy Bay, to ask about the trees. From the rangers, in their soft brogues, we learned that the maple we'd identified as field maple, (Acer campestre), was actually a species introduced by the Romans, the sycamore maple, (Acer pseudoplatanus). We had a good chuckle that that, we Americans whose non-native species originate with the arrival of European settlers, hundreds, not thousands, of years ago. But in evolutionary time, both are recent arrivals.

Our talk shifted to other species. We began to trade names and ecological niches the way kids trade baseball cards. The fireweed we'd seen in full, riotous bloom was native to both our homelands, but our grey squirrel, introduced the 19th century was wrecking havoc on the red squirrel population. Ready to spot a red squirrel, we walked on.

We stopped for the night at Sallochy Bay, making an appetizer of the blueberries that grew wild along the path, and watched European wrens and a jay after dinner in the long summer twilight.

We met Scotland's history as well, at Rowchoish the trail passed an old homestead, the remains of two structures sculpted of rock and emerald moss. I paused at the threshold asking permission to enter, then stepped lightly onto the carpet of moss and wood sorrel. Branches of the encroaching spruce plantation served as the only roof. A nearby boothy, or traveler's cabin, offered that in 1759, the settlement, with the boothy and our ruins, had included nine families. Where had they gone? Was this the work of the infamous highland clearances? We walked on.

Just before Rowardenen, a Red squirrel revealed itself as it chattered between mouthfuls of pine seed. One of only 121,000, we were lucky indeed to see it. An osprey, the first of our trip, wheeled and plunged into the lake after a fish. A rare sight here as well, but the same species that also calls New England home. Across the narrowing loch, we got our first taste of the highlands. To the north, the Munros (the Scottish name for mountains topping 3,000 feet) of Ben Lui, Ben Oss and Ben Dubhcraig. rose to craggy peaks. We walked on.

That evening, we sat out on the pebble beach tending our small cookstove, and watching the light redden on the far shore. A pair of fishermen trawled by, tossing words toward us over the boat motor. He tried again.

    "Aren't there any midges biting ye?" Though later encounters with midges would send us scrambling for long pants, long sleeves, and DEET, tonight we sat unmolested.

    "Nope" we shrugged.

    "No midges?" He pantomimed the pests with his fingers, assuming our negative response meant we hadn't understood. The boat motored southward.

    "Nope, none" we tossed back, beginning to grin.

    "Bastards" he shook his head with a slow smile, waving away the cloud from in front of his own face.

Our trail the next morning brought us to the mouth of the River Falloch, which feeds into the north end of Loch Lomond, from there we wove along the river. We walked past feral goats, who regarded us from their perches on a stone walls, long-haired and imperious. We walked above a series of waterfalls and rapids, and wandered under old, old oaks to the high country. On the slopes above stood scattered pines, their contorted, mammoth shapes revealing them to be old-growth remnants of the ancient Caledonian forest. We had walked, at last, into the highlands.

Inchcailloch

My shoulders dropped, and my breathing depend when we stepped onto the dock at Inchcailloch. Around us the oak trees spread their branches above a carpet of sedge and bracken fern. Mosses and lichens softened limbs, and added to the verdancy. But we were not the first to find sanctuary here.

We had arrived on Inchcailloch, an island in the southern reaches of Loch Lomond aboard the wooden Lady Jean (built 1936) after a full morning of travel by bus and train. We climbed a small rise from the shore, and slipped off the trail to stash our backpacks in the bracken, before heading off to explore the island.

Of course the high place drew us first. After a short climb we rested on a bench at the summit. There we watched bumble bees pollinate the blooming heather. A robin redbreast flew to a perch on a nearby scots pine, and watched us with its head cocked. Across the water, Ben Lomond rose, its head shrouded in mist, and its flanks coloring with the first fingers of autumn.

As part of the Loch Lomond National Nature Reserve, Inchcailloch offers sanctuary to its inhabitants, from the more common European robin to the endangered capercaillie. Though the oaks (planted at the end of the 18th century to support the tannin industry) and the forest eco system they anchor were fairly new to the island, the diversity of breeding birds they host is among the highest in the UK.

Before the oaks, farmers called the land home. Then wheat and oats would have blanketed the island. The perimeter trail wound past the old farmstead, where piles of stone, now mostly swallowed by ferns, and a few moss-encased walls are all that remain of their life here.

Mourners, too, have found sanctuary on the island. As the farmers worked the land, grazed sheep, and felled and planted trees, the MacGregors brought their dead to be buried in the small church yard on the ridge that serves as the island's spine. Here Gregor MacGregor, uncle to Rob Roy lies marked with a carved stone slab dated to the 13th century.

Earlier still the Irish missionary Saint Kentigerna found refuge here in the early 700s CE. I walked the outline of the church built in her honor five hundred years after her death, and I began to feel the weight of history settle into my bones. My own handful of decades seemed a puff of dandelion seed in the magnitude of human and geologic forces that had shaped this island.

A venerable oak stood outside the cemetery wall, spreading its branches to shade MacGregor's grave. Its smooth bark and thick twisting limbs showed the tree to be old. Old enough to have witnessed church goers attending services before the chapel fell out of use in 1770. Old enough to have witnessed the funeral processions. Old enough to have witnessed wheat and oat harvests, and the shift to farming oaks. And now she saw the comings and goings of tourists and picnickers come to steep themselves in the island's history.

Quotidian

Antony Gormley's 6 Times, Leith

Without David Scott we wouldn't have come to Scotland. A constable in south Leith, and a bobby during the coronation of King Edward VII, David Scott, Mike's great-grandfather, immigrated to Hoosick Falls, NY in 1913. One hundred years later, we made the return journey.

After calling on my more distant relative, David Scott's beat lured us southward again. This time our route from Waverley station carried us down hill and north, toward the Port of Leith where the Forth of Frith empties into the North Sea. We strolled down Leith Walk, the main artery from Edinburgh center to the port, past take-out shops and bars, florists and pharmacies. Pastries in a steamed window caught our eye, and at the counter we sifted through pence and pounds trading the coins for a paper bag already browning with a butter stain.

At Grand Junction we worked our way north and west past the South Leith Parish church, onto Tolbooth Wynd and out to the Water of Leith. And the river, finally, led us to the sea. We followed the harbor out to Ocean drive, past the government buildings and behind the terminal that berths cruise ships and the Royal Yacht Britannia. We rested on the sea-wall, gazing out across the entrance basin. The day was fine with a breeze off of the water, but David, and his Leith eluded us.

Perched on the end of a run down pier, amidst roosting terns and cormorants, stood a solitary figure, cast in solid iron, gazing, as we did, out to sea. Here, for us, was the emigrant David, looking to his new future, his back turned toward home. Why did he go, we wondered, when he had a good job and family here? What drew him away? What yearning so vividly written on this sculpture stirred his own soul?

We left "David" and meandered back, following the footpath along the Water of Leith. Couples strolled arm in arm, families sat tossing bread crumbs at ducks waiting in the current below. Men fished resting their poles on the stone wall. People walked dogs, rode bikes, and jogged. But 100 years ago, when David resigned his post as constable, and carried his letter of good conduct to the docks? What was Leith like then? Did he walk here along the waterway for work or for pleasure?

Below, measured along the route, several more cast iron figures posed; David followed the current to the sea. And with him, this silent solitary figure carried the unknowable answers to our myriad questions.

Per Mare, Per Terras

We went to Stirling to pay a call on Sir William Alexander, 1st Earl of Stirling and Viscount Canada, himself.

We began at Stirling Castle where Sir William was a favorite at the Court of King James VI. The castle perched on the remnants of an ancient volcano, high above the surrounding plain. William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, and a long succession of Jameses called Stirling home. Mary Queen of Scots was born here, and Oliver Cromwell used it as a military stronghold. For us, the portcullis was raised and we walked through the gatehouse and onto the ramparts.

It did not take much imagination to see the castle and lands below as they appeared in the 1500s; at the base of the north wall, a patchwork of farm fields stretched across the valley of the River Fourth. Small copses of trees and hedgerows marked the remnants of the King's hunting grounds, now more open and manicured: a golf course. The Royal Palace has been restored, the carved Stirling heads brightly painted, and the walls of the Queen's inner chamber hung with replicas of the original tapestries showing a unicorn hunt. (The photograph I used for "Ancestors", incidentally, was an original now on display at the Cloisters Museum in NYC. I had no idea, when I took the picture, nor when I used it for the post, of its origin!)

Docents in period costume strolled through the royal chambers answering questions, in character, and time, of course. When the jester asked, we told him we came from New York. He screwed his eyes shut in concentration and corrected us quickly. "Florida, you mean, that whole coast line from where Ponce de León landed up into the colder bits. We have no interest in that land, at two hundred and fifty miles wide, a good horse can cross it in five days." He pulled his lute from behind the Queen's dais and began to croon mis-sung covers of Led Zeppelin and Golden Earring. Then he brought out the unicorn horn, "used," he told us in a whisper "to cure poison, or those troubles of older male courtiers.. just scrape a bit off, dissolve it in wine.... Some folks say it comes from a mighty beast that lives in the ocean, but we know better." When Sir William walked within these walls, did he find the same amusement in the circuitous ramblings of the court jester?

We were directed to Argyle's Lodging, the house just down from the castle that housed Sir William and his wife the Countess, before James VI moved court to London, and became James I of England.

There stood his coat of arms carved above the entry way, with the family motto Per Mare, Per Terras enscrolled above the beaver and oak. The high dining room and cozy parlor where the nobleman and his wife would entertain. He was, I learned, a prolific poet, his longest work, Domes-day, or the great day of the Lord's Judgement strides across twelve volumes. King James, his patron, undertook the drafting of a new version of the bible, and as a poet and advisor to the king, Sir William surely had a hand in its writing.

Fair poet and courtier, yes, but Sir William was a poor businessman, and died in London, bankrupt and indebted in 1640. His body was returned to Stirling for burial. The Church of the Holy Rude was closed for the day, but we walked by its massive stone walls and through the church yard on our way to the walk outside the town wall.

High Places

We took a wrong turn out of Waverly Station and ended up at the base of Caldor Hill, and so, of course, we climbed. To the north, the cranes marked the harbor of Leith and the Forth of Frith. To the west, the North Sea, dressed in a pewter gown, shimmered, under a thinly veiled sun. St. Andrew's house and the towering Gothic spire of the Scott Monument rose to the south west. But Holyrood Park to the southeast held our gaze. The ramparts of Salisbury Crags encircled the higher point of Aurthur's Seat and lured us down from our perch.

This city is old, having been continuously inhabited since the 7th century, but the foundation of the city, extinct volcanoes that created the high fort or "Eidan", is older still. Three hundred and fifty million years ago, two volcanoes vented ash and lava onto the surrounding plain. Through time and the patient work of ice, the land wore away leaving the cooled and hardened cores. Mike and I were not the only ones drawn to these high places. Both hills hold evidence of pre-Roman forts, and a succession of Britons, Romans, Angles and Scots have held it ever since.

As a species we seek out high places, yearning for the commanding view that puts our position in perspective and offers safety through far-seeing. But throughout our travels, though neither lost nor attacked, we climbed. Sitting on the Salisbury Crag with the quilt of city life spread at our feet, we found both the majesty of the high seat, and, at once, felt our own insignificance in the magnitude of all that surrounded us. It was to become a theme of our travel, the quick ascent to higher ground. And upon gaining higher ground, seldom did we find ourselves alone.