A Walk to the West

When we want a short but bracing walk we scramble uphill from our house, through the croft land of Ormsaigbeg into the common grazings at the back of the township. Ormsaigbeg's common grazings, upon which each of the crofters has a right to run a fixed number of cows and sheep, extend for miles; it's wild, unfenced, broken land offering spectacular views - except that, by the time The Diary set off yesterday afternoon, a drizzly rain had arrived and a layer of stratus, broken in places to give fleeting sunny intervals, was down below 200m. This view looks back across Kilchoan Bay to the village and the lower slopes of Glas Bheinn.

Much of the walking is through knee-high heather, and working uphill through this is hard going. At times the cloud was all around, depositing droplets of water on the spiders' webs. There was little else in the way of wildlife, a few sheep, pipets, slugs, a toad, seagulls overhead, and, right on the edge of the towering sea cliffs of Maol Buidhe....

....a pair of noisy ravens which, when approached, dropped off the edge and soared away over the Sound of Mull.

From their vantage point at the top of the cliff the passing yachts are like toys far below, the humans in their bright wet-weather gear huddled in their cockpits against the rain, probably little realising that they are being watched. One of the purposes of the walk was to see if any of the Tall Ships were passing up the Sound on their way from Greenock to Ullapool but they seem to have given us a wide berth.

This picture, looking west along the coastline from Maol Buidhe, gives some idea of the wild loneliness of the place. There is another five miles of this spectacular coastline westwards between here and the lighthouse, the next place where one is likely to meet another human.

Not that there isn't plenty of evidence of past human endeavours. The high land above Ormsaigbeg is criss-crossed by broken, moss-covered stone walls, many slopes display the ribs of old lazy beds, and, in places, there are structures which are rather more mysterious, like these two small rings of stone, each about four metres across.

From the warmth and comfort of our civilisation it is like stepping out, albeit briefly, into another world.

A map of the area is here