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.