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.