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.