The human world grows more frightening, and those who rule it more unabashedly ugly, by the hour. All the more vital that we meditate in whatever ways work best for us on the beauty of life itself.
On the lovely Isle of Arran, say, in the Firth of the Clyde. To the east, Ayr and Kilmarnock on the Scottish mainland. To the west – and if a certain Paul McCartney toon doesn’t instantly pop into your head you’re way too young to be reading this post – Mull of Kintyre.
Camping of course …
… but with security arrangements firmly in place.
Standing stones, 2500 BCE. For a fascinating discussion on how we can measure evolutionary and prehistoric time – and triangulate the accuracy of our ‘clocks’ – see Chapter 4 of Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth.
… my weariness amazes me, I’m rounded on my feet …
“It is suggested”, says the tourist industry, that Robert the Bruce sought refuge below from the men of Edward I, aka Edward Longshanks, aka Hammer of the Scots – as played in Braveheart by Patrick McGoohan, cruelly denied an Oscar for Best Defenestration Scene.
It is further suggested that in this cave a depressed and downhearted Bruce was so inspired by arachnoid tenacity as to cast aside the blues and, though outnumbered four to one, go on – his 6,000 pikemen and archers augmented by a contingent of Norse-Irish galloglass 1 mercenaries and deployed in four divisions – to defeat the 25,000 strong force of Longshanks’ weak-minded son, Edward II, at Bannockburn in June 1314.
The stone piles are a more recent addition.
Meanwhile, on a rock close by …
Early morning from base camp
Above, the Shiskine Golf Course
The UK Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 makes it an offence to transplant Montbretia, or to let it spread, into the wild
Fuchsia, wild as its namesake in Gormenghast
From September in Indian summer, to the month showing her more sombre side. The weather turned on the day of our booked evening ferry back to Ardrossan on the mainland for the long, dark and rainswept – but thankfully shared – drive southwards and home.
Above and below, looking westwards at the Mull of Kintyre
* * *
- The merciless Macdonald —
Worthy to be a rebel, for to that,
The multiplying villainies of nature
Do swarm upon him — from the Western Isles,
Of kerns and gallowglasses is supplied.
And Fortune, on his damned quarry smiling,
Showed like a rebel’s whore. But all’s too weak,
For brave Macbeth — well he deserves that name
Disdaining fortune with his brandished steel
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like Valor’s minion carved out his passage
Till he faced the slave,
Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseamed him from the nave to the chaps,
And fixed his head upon our battlements.William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 2