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Getting up at 6 am, my first priority was getting my clothes into the tumble drier, then breakfast – muesli, malt-wheats, toast – and making sandwiches. Finding that my clothes were no drier, at all, I looked for the cause – no warm-wet-air outlet with clogged filter – ha! a condenser drier – locate the condenser outlet or tank? – a panel with a slide out plastic tray – brim full and yucky – empty it and rinse it – try the drying process again – check after 15 minutes – progress is being made – get the van ready for off – by then, the clothes were dry - water, loo, over-trousers, and up to the north of South Uist again.
Parking at the turn to Carnan (799467), close to the causeway to Benbecula, at 8:45 am, I headed west. The weather was looking grim again – bleak and grey. Just as I started to wonder why I was doing this drab walk, a skylark sung overhead, adding some cheer, and I heard the snipe aerial displays to the north, so I waited and watched. The snipe was there, ‘skylark high’, wings flapping madly, then short glides with tail feathers edged to the wind making its ‘whorr-ing’ sound, circling about with occasional semi-diving ‘whorr-ing’ repetitions, sometimes still flapping, sometimes not; then plummeting to the ground – perhaps for a rest? So, at last, I had seen and heard the snipe display at the same time while standing in a rather unlikely spot – between two metal posts, one with a wind-turbine unit on top, swishing gently, the other with the top unit missing. As I continued my walk, the skylark sound was all around me, I could not count the number of contributors to this melodic cacophony. A bird, larger than a snipe, but rather like one in colour, markings and shape; smaller than a curlew, with a snipe-like bill crossed my path to the right. I couldn’t figure out what it was, but that is not unusual. (Maybe it was a large snipe!) Then there were meandering lapwings, strangely silent, flying erratically in the breeze, followed by a lethargic heron passing overhead.
On my right stood a forlorn cottage, with stone walls and curved corners in the old black-house style, with the last remnants of its thatch and turf roof – part yellow with old hay and last year’s roof grown grass and part green with this year’s growth, blackish remnants of heather that had grown and died in the thatch, and stripes of the silvery wood of old roof timbers where the thatch was gone – wires over the top of the thatch supporting an adornment of boulders hanging around the perimeter, just at the top of the walls. Very little stone-colour showed on the eastern walls, which were mostly green with algae and yellow with lichen, but also blotched white with firm encrusted lichen. Quite out of character, a geometric, grey-rendered, square-cornered porch with a corrugated iron roof had been added to the middle of the long, east wall of the cottage. Exploring around the side and back, I discovered a lichen encrusted stone bench outside an open window; a rebuilt chimney with resident dandelions and a 1970’s aerial; a west facing wall, so well pointed between and over the stones it was almost rendered. The struggle to keep the cottage habitable had apparently been maintained until quite recently, but the questions surfaced in my mind: What happened to the last resident? Would the cottage be left to decay in slow, dishonourable stages? Would it be offered for sale before it was too late - to be restored or converted to a traditional looking house with modern habitable standards?
North of the cottage, the tidal mud-flats abutting the flat grassed land held a shallow mirror-like layer of sea-water, streaked with lines of rocks. Looking west, my eyes rose gradually from hyphen-striped silver-grey water in repeated layers between dark silhouetted rock lines until they met the light-grey sky, which faded through still lighter shades of grey, until I was looking upwards A corncrake grated, a snipe ‘whorred’, gulls cried in the distance, starlings and sparrows, nesting in the roof, buzzed and chirped, but the space all around seemed to swallow the sound, making it mellow, gentle, relaxed and peaceful.
Returning back to the road and moving westwards again, another house, perhaps of 1920's construction, had the noisy conversations of a host of starlings emanating from its open windows and gaping roof.
It was now 11 am – I’d spent a fascinated two hours dawdling, covering a straight-line distance of about one kilometre. The corncrake’s grating call was repeated; black and brown cows faced me and stared; one swung away warily as I approached, but the rest stood unmoved, chewing the cud and a calf fed from its mother’s teats, tail swinging. A heron, barely rising from a pool of water, flapped slowly with heavy wing beats, gracefully glided and landed on the pointed rock already taken by another, the first moving aside to stand on the waterside fine carpet of grass. The single-track tarmac changed to two lines of gravel centred with a continuous line of grass. Two more herons moved off, giving me more space. The salt-marsh became more uniform and I picked up my pace. The road changed back again to tarmac, crossed a causeway across a minor estuary. Lapwings pip-pip-pipped, then squealed like car alarms and cried. A heron rose. A flock of small sand-birds passed, swung about, glided and dipped together as a murmuration. Two or more corncrakes grated and a dog, sensing a stranger, barked. Bearing slightly right at the junction (773465), following the minor road, one corncrake and then another, and another called from the reeds in front of me, and three pristine white swans flew across. Then a goose, head curved down like Concord, cut its determined path across my route. Taking the left turn to Aird na Monadh, the sound of corncrakes, left, fore and aft, accompanied me, while I travelled the flat road, with an expanse of remarkable flatness to my right – a bleak, almost featureless area, designated “Danger Area” on the map and reserved for military use. I followed two kilometres of flat road past stark newer homes, each sited within a bare flat rectangular plot; then small, smart farmsteads with dilapidated huts, barns and sheds; a scatter of still used containers among abandoned ones; wood slats, implements, and rusty vehicles submerging into the surface of the ground. Every building seemed to have at least one forebear alongside – rounded stone houses with walls but no rooves or chimneys; square-cornered stone houses with chimneys at one end or both, and roofless stone outbuildings, now looking like chest-high sheep pens. The skylarks sang on – their music had not stopped all morning – not Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Lark Arising” – one lark in its own world. Here I moved from a blend of quite a few, to quite a lot; the changing wind and the miss-timed lack of synchronisation yielding melodic anarchy.
After a section of unsurfaced track, I reached the main road around 12:30 pm. Occasional whirrs and drones of tyres and engines interfered with the sound of buzzing starlings and skylarks. I walked south to go to Loch Bi and back again, almost linking up my walks – linked by sight at least. Turning back at Loch nam Breac Mora, with Geirinis in clear view, I regreted doubling my walking distance on a section of drab main road. To cheer my thoughts, red-shanks appeared and stood sentinel on posts and fence-tops by the next road junction (793452), orange-red legs, distinctive as they stand, trailing behind their tail feathers as they flew, justifying their name. They circled and stood again, repeatedly, making ‘teeu-teeu’ calls and loud ‘chee’ cries.
After a visit to the store near my parked van, I drove up to Benbecula’s western coast road and parked within sight of a jetty and a long unsheltered beach (763522), made coffee and ate my sandwiches.
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| West coast beach, Benbecula, near Griminis |
Since it was now stormy, with rain, strong wind and low cloud, I stayed reading in the parked van for most of the afternoon. Moving to the carpark at “Stinky Bay” (763544) provided an improvement in shelter for overnight, being set behind the dunes. (Named “Stinky Bay” by local residents on account of the huge quantities of threshed, thrashed and puverised seaweed deposited on this storm-facing beach, where it ferments and decays in a brown porridge like sludge.)
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