by Raynor Winn
A few days in and we were beginning to feel more at ease with the idea of wild camping. We put the tent up on the deserted rocky shoreline of Lochbuie, still and dark in the twilight. We were totally alone in the remote wilderness, watching the stars as an insect repellent coil burnt inside Moth’s felt hat, the smoke percolating through, keeping us midge free and his hat repellent at the same time. In the dying light the oystercatchers came, gathering in noisy groups, but then, silently, as the last light dropped away, running together in lines along the shore, dipping their heads in unison, their orange feet flashing until complete darkness brought a stillness to the water’s edge. On the headland the dark, imposing ruin of the tower of Moy Castle, decaying silently under the onslaught of centuries of weather systems, became a silhouette in the moonlight.
Next morning, as the faintest dawn light caught the wind-rippled loch, we woke to the sound of a deep-throated roar, a noise of earth and heather, the call of bogs and rocky outcrops. Outside the tent, just below us on the shoreline, a red stag shook his wide multi-pointed antlers and bellowed out into the early morning, announcing the start of the rut, a guttural uniting of his life with the wild freedom of the mountains.
Days later, among the rocks at the summit of Ben More, the highest point on Mull, the island spread beneath us in an undulation of hills and glistening lochs. On every side a sheet of lush green draped over an ancient volcanic land, falling softly to the sea. And there in an upswell of air, lifting without moving wing or feather, the huge, terrifying, magnificent shape of a golden eagle. Glowing rust in the afternoon sun, his shape filled the landscape as he passed by at eye level, not even acknowledging us as present in his space.
We reached Iona having eaten our way through the bags of food, drunk crystal-clear water from the streams and felt a power in the silence of the hills that had filled us to the brim. Saturated by the empty environment we’d passed through, we had no words to hold the feeling, we didn’t need any, the sense of wholeness was enough. We headed towards the abbey as every visitor does, but for us out of curiosity rather than religious belief. A centre of Christianity, as it had been since the religion was brought to the island by St Columba in the sixth century, it’s a much-loved place of worship and contemplation. We shouldn’t have gone; it wasn’t a place for us.
‘Are you here to pray?’ A resident of the abbey approached us as we entered the cloister.
‘No, just looking.’
‘This isn’t just a tourist attraction, it’s a centre for faith, belief and Christian community.’
‘I know, but we’ve just come from Mull, we’ve had an incredible experience in the wilderness, something almost spiritual. And we were heading here; Iona was our goal. We’re back south in a couple of days.’ Moth, as ever, frankly saying what he felt without hesitation. I held back; I could sense where the conversation was heading.
‘There is no spirituality without God. You won’t find a thin place out there; it’s here in this building, where humans have worshipped God for centuries. This is where you’ll find what you seek.’
‘I don’t think I’m actually seeking anything. I’m just open to what comes. What’s a thin place? Is it geological?’
I had my hand on Moth’s arm; this wasn’t a conversation we had to have.
‘A thin place is where man can be close to the other world, to God’s realm. It’s here.’
‘Maybe for you.’
I pulled him away. There was no need to argue with someone else’s faith simply because it wasn’t ours. There was no right or wrong, just belief or not.
Beyond the abbey the road led us across the island, through the machair of lush grass and dry flower heads to a wide expanse of sand and pebbles: the Bay at the Back of the Ocean. There is no land beyond there, just the rhythmic swell of the Atlantic Ocean. We sat on the shore, the sun catching the waves as they broke out at sea, picking through the stones around us. Among the smooth, multi-coloured nuggets we turned in our hands were small, perfectly green pieces of millennia-old rock. We’d picked up a leaflet that said these tiny pebbles were known as St Columba’s tears.
‘These are the land itself, older than Columba, older than humanity. This is what we are, the land, this is where we come from. The thin place is right here, and it’s always here. This place between the stone and my fingers, this is the place where our conscience and the earth are inseparable.’ Moth held the green stone up to the sunlight.
I watched him lying on the shore, his face intense in thought, clothes worn and stinking from two weeks’ wear, a ragged half-grown fluff of beard merging with tangled hair. He was my thin place, though he would never know the depth of it, the place where it all became clear and there was no separation between worlds or time.
As we left Iona we didn’t realize that there wouldn’t be any more trips like this, or that soon it would be a baby carrier we would lift on to our backs, or that the next time we packed our rucksacks it would be twenty-five years later and under very different circumstances.
I walked back to the chapel where Moth was studying and we would eat another pea risotto. The notion of the thin place hadn’t entered my head for decades, but suddenly the time we’d spent on the Coast Path shone brightly in my memory. I could feel it now, the weeks of headlands and skies, the nights of stars and rain, the smell of the weather as it blew in from the sea. I’d sensed something then, a thinness between the wild world and the human, between freedom and containment. We’d walked along the barrier between those worlds and felt something of our natural state of being. Touched a wild connection with the land and held it in the dust on our hands. We weren’t the same people who had started that walk; we were changed in ways beyond measure. The echo of that feeling was at the core of the problems I was experiencing living in the village, it was in the cold dark soil under the pine trees on the estate when my mum died, it was in the little girl sitting in the tree watching the wild world go by. I’d touched a thin place and I couldn’t go back.
Moth was lying on the bed when I returned to the chapel, a strange thing at midday.
‘What’s going on? I thought you had to finish that assignment?’ I checked myself; I sounded as if I was talking to one of the kids who hadn’t finished their homework.
‘I’m so dizzy: every time I look at the computer screen it feels as if I’m travel-sick. I just had to lie down.’
‘You can’t do that! You’ve got to get up and do some exercise – it’ll help. I know it will.’
‘Don’t you get it? I can’t. I feel as if I’m going to fall over.’
No, this isn’t happening, get up, don’t let this happen, just get up. The doctor had explained that Moth’s erratic lateral eye movements were just another symptom of CBD, but we hadn’t realized how quickly the symptom would progress or what it would mean. As Moth tried to read the lines on the screen, his eyes juddered, causing a sense of motion sickness.
‘No, I’m making you some tea and you have to get up; we’re going to walk out of the village, into the sunlight. Just sit up.’ Cut in two by my own words, I desperately wanted to pull the blanket over him. I would have drawn the curtains, if we’d had any, made him comfortable, let him rest, accepted what was happening. I didn’t; I put the kettle on instead. ‘Sit up, drink this, we’re walking this afternoon, sit up.’
We stopped on a bench halfway up the hill, Moth sitting heavily down on the lichen-encrusted wooden slats. Gannets circled just off the headland, gliding smoothly through the sky. Circling, circling, then in one powerful controlled movement drawing their wide wings tight to their sides and shaping their long beak and yellow-capped head into one line as clean as a shard of ice, firing themselves into the water. Direct, immediate, a thought, an action, a fish.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘A bit better.’
‘Let’s keep going then.’
‘I think I’ll have to break up the computer work. No more than half an hour at a time, take a break then go back to it.’
‘Whatever works – and walk, you have to walk. Remember how much better you were on Golden Cap. When we started walking the southern section of the path, we thought everything was over and you were running out of days, but after just two weeks you jumped on that trig point and we danced. Don’t you remember?’
‘I don’t really remember Golden Cap.’
‘Of course you do.’ Don’t forget it, you can’t forget it. I could see those wild wind-shaped summers slipping from him like an ice lolly off a stick on a sunny afternoon. If we didn’t hold those memories together, would all the life they held slip from view, leaving only a faded picture behind?
‘This is a bit like that bench where we met the old men with the blackberries.’
‘Which old men?’
‘You have to remember those men. I remember meeting them as one of the most moving moments of the whole walk. I’ve held on to what one of them said ever since. Even now I feel that’s what our walk was, it summed up everything.’
‘I can’t picture it. Where was it?’
‘Just after Zennor, after that day of water when we thought we would drown by just breathing. When the sky was so low we were nearly in the clouds, you couldn’t see in front or behind, just damp air. The day after that, when it was still foggy, but felt as if the rain would return at any moment.’
‘I remember the rain, but even so … those men … no … it’s not coming back.’
‘We sat on a bench, it was early morning and we’d just camped on Zennor Head in the field of cows. Two old chaps walked up from the cove below and one of them had a Tupperware box of blackberries.’ Please don’t forget this. How can you let this slip from your memory? It should be a diamond in your pocket forever. Something to hold on dark days, a fortune in the bank of life. ‘He offered us a blackberry from the box, and we didn’t want to take them because the ones we’d eaten had been too tart and sharp. But that blackberry was like nothing we’d eaten before. It was rich and purple, autumnal ripeness in a bite, the most perfect taste. That’s when he said it.’ I sat back waiting for him to remember.
‘Said what? Don’t keep me hanging.’
My throat was tight with tears of loss and fear of loss to come. He had let go of a moment that hung so brightly on my tree of memory that I could find its glow in any dark place. But for him the light had dimmed and gone.
‘He explained how those blackberries were like no other, how they got their amazing flavour.’
‘How was that?’
I swallowed hard. This couldn’t be happening. If this was gone, what else was gone?
‘He said, “You need to wait until the last moment, that moment between perfect and spoilt. And if the mist comes right then, laying the salt air gently on the fruit, you have something that money can’t buy and chefs can’t create. A perfect, lightly salted blackberry. You can’t make them; it has to come with time and nature. They’re a gift, when you think summer’s over and the good stuff has all gone. They’re a gift.”’ Our path, our magnificent walk, was slipping away from him. Hold on to it, Moth, hold it tight; it’s ours, our bright light in the mess of our lives. Don’t let it go; it was ours, our gift of time and nature.
‘That’s a great story.’
‘It’s not a story.’ I watched the gannets, swift and sharp, my mind drifting along the path through the days between Zennor Head and Land’s End. We’d stood on those blocky granite cliffs beyond Land’s End with only a few pounds and a Mars bar in our pockets. Just the two of us, alone at the edge of the Atlantic, only the two wet sheets of the nylon tent to shelter us from whatever the weather systems threw at us. We could have given up then, got on the bus and headed away from the hardships of the path, to sofa-surf with friends and family and wait for a council house to become available. But we didn’t. Moth’s health had improved in ways we’d been told were impossible and the path had given us something we’d thought we’d never feel again. Hope. We’d held on to that feeling and carried on walking into a future we couldn’t see.
‘Shall we carry on?’
‘Yes, why not, while the sun’s still shining.’
Hope. I held it warm again in my hand, a smooth, round, sea-worn pebble of possibility.
I left the chapel in the early evening, only intending to walk to the Block House at the end of the street, an old lookout tower positioned on a fin of rock that points out into the mouth of the river. But as I closed the iron gate behind me, Gill walked past.
‘Hi! Haven’t seen you around for so long. Got to dash but I’m having a bit of a get-together at mine tomorrow. Would you like to come?’
‘I, er, I mean, well … okay.’
Standing outside the door of a virtual stranger with a bottle of wine in my hand made my chest pound erratically. I couldn’t seem to breathe normally and my vision was blurring. What was I doing here? I looked down the street at the gap between the houses where the passenger ferry chugged slowly into the quay, returning locals from the chemist and the butcher’s in Fowey and taking tourists to and from cream teas. I could be on that ferry; if I turned around right now I could run down the street and be on the boat before anyone knew I’d knocked on the door. Too late: the door was open.
‘Hi, come on in, have to say I didn’t expect to see you.’ Had I misunderstood some social code again, and the invitation was just a polite gesture, not a real invite and I didn’t actually have to be here? ‘Let me introduce you.’ Too late: I was in the house.
A room full of people. Dark heavy curtains against tall north-facing windows, pulled open but still forming shadowed corners. People on sofas and wing-backed chairs. People standing in groups, holding wine glasses, laughing. People at ease in the company. I stayed at the edge as Gill tried to guide me around the room.
‘Sarah and Marion, this is Ray, but she lives down the road from you so I’m sure you’ve met already.’
I’d seen one of them before, Marion, a delicate older lady with bright white hair, but not Sarah, the spritely lively woman in her fifties that she was with.
‘Oh hello, are you new? I haven’t seen you before.’ Marion stayed in her chair but extended her hand, not to shake mine, but to hold it in her cool gentle grip.
‘Er, not really, I’ve been here for quite a while now.’ I’d seen the white hair of the old lady in her garden on sunny days, but I’d hurried by, hoping she wouldn’t speak.
‘And this is Simon.’ A calm, smiling man in his sixties. There was something about the way he moved, something about the way Gill’s face lifted when she introduced him –
‘Hi. So Simon’s your partner?’
She seemed momentarily shocked and glanced around.
‘No, no, no.’
‘Gill’s a great friend. We’ve been friends for quite a few years, haven’t we, Gill?’ Simon moved away, smiling. There was something in the denial …
Sarah slipped among the group in a smooth movement that displayed the confidence of a person who knows their position in the gathering and immediately started a conversation.
‘So who are you, why haven’t I seen you before, where have you moved from, what do you do with yourself that keeps you out of sight?’
In one sentence – all the questions that I feared. These people could have been any of the people I’d met on the coastal path, any one of them could have been the person that drew in their dog on a retractable lead when I told them I was homeless, or poked me with their foot and called me a tramp when I’d dropped coins on the ground and knelt to pick them up. Assured, confident middle-aged people, secure in their position in society, the village, their own lives. How could I answer any of their questions without being afraid that what we’d experienced when we were walking would happen again? And I couldn’t walk away from these people as we had on the path; I’d bump into them in the village for as long as we lived there.
‘I’m … We …’ I couldn’t formulate the words. I couldn’t say, ‘I had a home, a place I loved and put my whole life, my wh
ole self into, but I lost it, and you haven’t seen me because I’ve tried to avoid just this moment. The moment when someone asks me to explain myself.’ There were three people sitting on the green velour sofa pushed almost back to the wall. I’d known a girl who would have squeezed behind there and hidden in the dark, avoiding talking, avoiding questions. As the room seemed to almost lose focus I desperately wanted to join her. Moth had been right, as always: I’d become that child again. ‘I came here from Wales with my husband. He’s studying for a degree at the university.’
‘And you? You must be really busy, otherwise I would have met you.’
Busy hiding. Busy struggling in the bricks, slate and concrete, when all I needed was greenness, and wind, and crows lifting from tall trees, and sparrows squabbling in a hedgerow of shifting sunlight. Meet me on the path and I could tell you who I am, why I am. But not here, not in a roomful of people that I’ve forced myself into to try to break this strange disconnection. What was I doing? What was I even thinking of doing? The pile of job rejections had grown to the point where there were very few vacancies in the area that I hadn’t already applied for and I knew I had almost stopped looking. But as I thought about her question I realized that tentatively, almost as if I was trying to hide it from myself, I did know what I was doing. I saw myself in the dark kitchen of the chapel, laptop keys smooth under my fingers, reading research papers, tracing patterns across the keys, tracing lives. The vision caught me in an uplift of air, a warm thermal buoying the outstretched wings of a gull until it turned on the wind and arced away from the cliffs, dipping out towards the open sea. And as I opened my mouth to reply the words came out, unexpected and unannounced.