The North West Highlands

At last week's funeral of Andrew's wife, Rosemary, there was a reading of a delightful 'prose poem' that gave a flavour of Rosemary's love of the North West Highlands:

Extracts from a prose poem posted from Red River Croft, Wester Ross, in the summer of 2016.

Midsummer: inner sounds and outer colours.

Annie O’Garra Worsley.

Since the summer solstice sunshine and showers have been passing quickly across the croft, hills and sea. The bright warmth of recent weeks still clings to the North West Highlands and the air is filled with countless trillions of tiny water droplets; when the sun bursts from behind the clouds they sparkle and dazzle, so all the world seems to be filled with effervescing light. 

Rainy days have come sharply and gone floodily, their showers soaking into the dry dusty ground and then releasing, in a shamanic sweep of aromas, the sap-green essences of growing and the black-peat juices of bog and hill. Breathe in and the mind fills with colour and scent, breathe out and the body releases its stress. 

Even when storm clouds and showers gathered across the Minch and Inner Sound hiding the horizon with dark, thunderous banks of cloud, the sea waters have glowed and pulsed with energy, eye-aching in their formidable beauty. As clouds and showers drifted north west they covered Skye and the Hebrides in drapery of mauve, indigo, and grey as if voile curtains were being pulled gently across by unseen hands, perhaps to shield the islands from the coruscating light. 

There is much magic in this elemental place; crystal-bright light is seeping into every living cell while myrtle-scented and resinous breezes swish around us all like balm. Land, sea and air are suffused with enchantment; it is hard not to become infused oneself and laugh with sheer pleasure of it all. 

The romance of midsummer will pass. This beautiful edgeland, where sky meets sea meets land in a maelstrom of inner sounds and outer colours, will quieten and soften. Although the nights will be high and white for a while longer, change is on the way; the days have begun to shorten and in a few short months these moonstone, mother-of-pearl and turquoise days will have diminished and I will rely on memory, photographs and paintings to bring them back.

It turns out that this prose was part of a blog entry from Annie's excellent blog, Red River Croft. Well worth a read.

Sue and I also love this part of the world, though in recent years we haven't got as far north as we would like. I have many memories of the area, including numerous sightings of sea otters.

The picture at the head of this posting is of Dave Oliver on Quinag, looking down to the Lochinver road on 22 March 2005. A picture of John Clark in the same spot in better light won me a photographic competition (and a shiny new Zenith camera) about 30 years earlier. That was on slide film that I must get around to scanning!

The picture below is of another favourite view of mountains lined up on the horizon - Canisp, Suilven, Cul Mor and Cul Beag, with Stac Pollaidh just out of view to the right..

What a wonderful part of the world...