The greatest of the sanctuaries, though, is Coruisk: the loch-filled valley which lies on the south-western coast of the Isle of Skye. Coruisk is an Anglicisation of the Gaelic Coir’uisge, which means ‘the cauldron of the waters’, and its isolation is legendary. On three sides of Coruisk are mountains, and on the fourth is a deep inlet of the Atlantic, Loch Scavaig. The mountains are the Black Cuillin, the most austere and gothic of all Britain’s ranges. They are the roots of ancient volcanoes, fifty-five million years old, which have eroded down into a six-mile battlement of smashed basalt and gabbro.
The only way into Coruisk on foot is over one of the steep passes of the Cuillin, or the walk of many miles along the brink of Loch Scavaig, which includes a traverse of the ‘Bad Step’ of Sgurr na Stri, an angled plane of glacier-smoothed rock that tilts twenty feet above the green waters of Scavaig. The valley is by no means inaccessible, but its solitude is formidably guarded. And its world is exceptional. Coruisk determines its own weathers, its own skies and clouds. Light behaves unexpectedly within it. The rock of the Cauldron’s sides changes colour frequently, depending upon the weather’s accent. It can be grey in cloud, toffee-coloured at noon, liverish at evening, and metallic in rain and sunshine.
At the heart of the sanctuary is Loch Coruisk, fed by the cold river waters that drain from the ridge. The water of the loch alters colour, too, depending on one’s angle of vision of its surface: black when you are beside it, sky-blue when you are on the peaks and ridges above it, and a caramel brown when you are in it. In Coire na Creiche on the far side of the Cuillin ridge from the Basin, there are deep river pools that contain underwater rock arches. On summer days, it is possible to dive down and swim through the arches, in the blue filtered light of the water.
There is something in Coruisk’s forms and its habits that has long attracted stories of wildness. When Murray first reached what he called ‘the basin of Coir-uisg’ in 1936, he found that his ‘wild dreams fell short of the wilder reality’. Walter Scott, the impresario of Caledonian wildness, visited Coruisk in 1814 and described it as ‘dark, brooding, wild, weird and stern’. Such a summary, coming from Scott, was a spur to the romantics and melancholics of the nineteenth century. Successive parties of Victorian artists, writers and explorers made elaborate efforts to reach the Basin. They travelled there in their hundreds, on foot and by boat, braving midges, rain and storm, and living in tents and caves, or on boats anchored in Loch Scavaig: aesthetes willing to tolerate the harshness of life in the Basin in order to celebrate its form. What a curious colony they made! Among them was the little red-headed Victorian poet Algernon Swinburne, and J. M. W. Turner, who in 1831 arrived to see the wildness that Scott had described, and nearly fell to his death while executing a painting in which the Cuillin are distorted into spindly peaks, resembling whipped egg-white more than rock.
I came to Coruisk from the south on a hot August day, along the edge of Loch Scavaig, with Richard, my oldest friend, with whom I had over the years climbed several hundred mountains. For hours, we followed a narrow path that kept to the loch-shore as neatly as a hemline. The Atlantic was always to our left, turning slowly to brass as the day proceeded and the sun lowered. Shags were perched here and there on boulders, staring out to sea. Some stood motionless with their wings open, hinged at the carpals, drying themselves off in the sun and wind: iron crosses. Foam, the creamy colour of writing paper, gathered between shore stones.
Four miles into the approach, we passed through a miniature forest, 200 yards long, and with no tree over ten feet tall. The steady onshore wind had warped the trees eastwards, so that they had taken the curved shape of the land against which they were pressed. We had to bend and sidle to fit through the narrow space between the wood and the hillside.
There are few trees left now on Skye, as there are few people. The island lost many of its inhabitants during the Clearances of the nineteenth century, and it had lost most of its woodland only a few centuries earlier, through burning and felling. One of the first surviving descriptionsof Skye, from 1549, describes it as an island with ‘maney woods, maney forests, maney deire’. Now the only real trace of Skye’s wooded past are the old paths through its remoter reaches, several of which were first paced out by foresters. Skye’s celebrated bleakness is a relatively recent acquisition, and one which speaks sadly of its past. Like so much of Scotland’s wildest land, this is not an empty landscape but an emptied one. On Skye, one recalls that ‘bleak’ comes from the Old Norse bleikr, meaning ‘white’ or ‘shining’; that it is a word through which the bone shows.
After we had traversed the forest, the path dropped steeply into a cove, and Richard and I stopped there to comb the stony beach. Lurid debris was everywhere, far more than in the coves of Enlli: blue milk-bottle crates, pitted cubical chunks of furniture foam, cigarette butts, bottle caps, aerosol canisters and Tetrapak cartons, printed with faded lettering in dozens of languages. Even here, on this remote Atlantic-facing bay, evidence of damage was unmistakable, pollution inescapable and the autonomy of the land under threat.
Thousands of tons of debris wash up each year on the coasts of Britain and Ireland. The amount is increasing annually, and the effect of this debris, beyond its visual impact, is severe. Whales, dolphins and porpoises are dying, their digestive tracts blocked by plastic. A minke whale washed up on the Normandy coast in 2002 was found to have nearly a ton of plastic packaging and shopping bags in its stomach. Seals and seabirds are becoming entangled in the ‘ghost’ fishing nets which - abandoned or lost from trawlers - drift through the sea. Loose oil, chugged out by the marine traffic or by offshore drilling, coats the forests of kelp, and fouls birds and seals.
I sifted through fragments of plastic, and found a shard that had been chafed by the rocks until it was rough and light as a shell. When I rubbed it against the ball of my thumb, it rasped like a cat’s tongue. I picked up a twist of rope, blue and black, its fibres plaited in interlocking rhomboids, like the pattern on an adder’s back. Oystercatchers stood about on the beach, neckless, in tuxedoed groups. A trio of eiders puttered around twenty yards offshore. The wind and water had woven heather stalks and grass into a mess of harvest wreaths, which lay along the tideline for miles. On a series of sloping rock ledges, the sea had arranged big stones into different calibres and gauges; the lighter boulders carried up on to the higher ledges, the heavier ones lined nearer the water.
Caught in a little ravine was the body of a seagull, recently dead, with its wet wings flung out. There were traces of oil on its wing feathers, like fretmarks, though it did not seem to have died from this contamination. Its eyes had misted over, so that they had the scuffed consistency of sea-glass. I bent down and folded its wings across its chest, and then we walked on towards the gateway to the sanctuary, with its black guardhouses of rock.
We reached the entrance to Coruisk at dusk. Cliffs on one side, and a cut wall of rock, waterfall-seamed, on the other. The sky was black out to sea: a storm was building somewhere over the horizon’s rim. As we passed between the cliffs I felt a strong sense of having crossed a portal, or stepped over a threshold. I remembered my grandfather telling me how, growing up in Switzerland, he had once managed to gain access to the mysterious Val de Susanfe, a sanctuary valley locked behind the Dents du Midi. Entry to the valley involved climbing to a high rocky ledge above a waterfall. The ledge appeared to terminate in thin air, but in fact led to another, broader ledge, and from there to the valley itself. ‘This secret way,’ he said, ‘was the door to a magical place,’ where edelweiss and aster grew in profusion.
Near the outflow of Loch Coruisk into Loch Scavaig, just above the point where fresh meets salt, we found the hut. Richard saw it first, and called out. It was well camouflaged, hunkered in the lee of a thirty-foot basalt escarpment, facing out over the Atlantic, barely visible in the twilight. In the calm air of the escarpment’s lee, midges gathered and danced in clouds, and settled maddeningly in their hundreds on our faces and hands.
A pine panel screwed into place above the fireplace recorded that the hut had been built in 1952, paid for by the parents of two young men who had died during a winter ascent of Ben Nevis’s Tower Ridge. It stood in memory of the two men, the board said, and ‘to assist those whose spirit of adventure, courage and good companionship finds outlet in the high hills’.
Around nine o’clock, the cold blue dusk gave way to full storm. There were volleys of rain on the windows, like handfuls of gravel being thrown at the glass. I went to the western window of the hut, cupped my hands round my eyes and stared out. I could see only the miniature landscape of the raindrops on the window pane: silver tumuli and barrows. The darkness beyond the glass was absolute and featureless. Except for the noises of the wind and rain, our hut might have been hurtling through deep space.
On a window-sill I found the hut’s guest-book. It held decades of comments from people who had been drawn to Coruisk. Fishermen, walkers, wilderness pilgrims, painters and solitaries had come here from all over the world. The Mensa Mountaineering Club claimed that they had failed to work out how to open the door. An entry for 21 April 2001 read: ‘Major Leek in water pipe near to burn.’ It was not explained how Major Leek had got there, or what was done to remove him, but apparently the water supply had been satisfactorily restored.
One group from Cornwall described how on a clear night they had seen the sea water in the bay shining with green phosphorescent light. They had all walked out to the shore, and thrown rocks into the bay, and watched emerald fountains spring up from the dark water. I read their description enviously, remembering the phosphorescence of Enlli and wishing for another such swift miracle of light.
When we woke next morning the storm had passed. Pale sunshine lay in stripes across the floor. Outside, big scarps of white cloud hung over the ocean, with blue between them. Gulls wheeled easily, gleaming as they passed through columns of light. Scavaig was tranquil, the storm forgotten. The only noise was the quiet talk of the waves floating in with the wind, and the lazy clack of lanyard on mast, from a yacht moored in the bay. It must have fled here from the open water during the night, seeking shelter. Seals basked on the rocks, prone and incurious.
We left the hut and walked further up into the sanctuary. Our plan was to explore the long northern coast of Loch Coruisk, passing through the land that lay between the base of the cliffs and the water. Then, from the loch’s end we would scale the headwall to the ridge, and finally try to climb the ‘Inaccessible Pinnacle’ of Sgurr Dearg - the shark’s fin of black rock that jags hundreds of feet out of the ridge above Coruisk, and which had long been, to my mind, one of the wildest points in the world.
Along the north shore, we traversed acres of soaked marsh, pocked with deep sink-holes. The steep ground to our left was a mosaic of brown rock, grouted with grass and streaked vertically with water from the previous night’s storm. The angle of tilt of the mountain’s face and the angle of fall of the light were such that every wet face of rock was set glinting - thousands of them at once, all on the same alignment.
The sink-holes in the marsh brimmed with water. The mild ferrosity of the rocks meant that the water in the holes was stained red around the edges: they shone like pools of drowned blood. Only faint deer paths showed us a safe way through.
The air was moist and smelt swampish, oozy. The ground was dense with plant-life: mare’s tails, among the oldest plants in existence, and the dark green leaves of a plant whose name I did not know. I reached out and scooped one of the leaves up from beneath. It felt heavy and limp as an old vellum map, drooping loosely over my palm.
Weather blew rapidly in and over us as we walked: squalls of sunlight, then rain, then a sudden fusillade of hail. Near the head of the loch, after three miles in the marshlands, we emerged on to a hard rock landscape of flat gabbro floors, each up to a quarter of an acre in size and punched with holes. Glaciers had flattened and rounded these off tens of thousands of years ago. In the bottom of each hole, I noticed, was a pebble or rock that fitted the hole snugly, like the head of a countersunk screw.
At the head of the loch, we began to climb. Around us, exploiting the unpredictable wind laws of the Cuillin, ravens practised their flying skills - stalls, rolls, flic-flacs, Immelmann turns - and their sharp calls rang off the cliffs like ball-bearings striking tin. Here and there were rugged rowans, their knuckly roots binding the wet scree together.
Progress was hard, and we stopped to rest by a flat-topped rock over which a stream ran. Hanging from the rock’s lip were three plump green hives of moss, the shape of weaver-bird nests. The water that ran over the rock was so smooth it resembled plastic, sheened and artificial. I put my hand just beneath the surface and watched the water flow over it and take its shape, like a second translucent skin. Looking up, I could see the fin of the Pinnacle. The wind up at the height of the ridge was strong, and shreds of white cloud were tearing over black rock. I felt a quick buzz of fear, remembering the description of the Pinnacle by one of its first ascensionists: ‘a knife-edge ridge with an overhanging and infinite drop on one side, and a drop on the other side even steeper and longer’.
As we climbed higher, we entered the cloud and the temperature plunged. The rock was slick with settled moisture. We reached a bealach - a narrow notch in the ridge between two peaks - then scrambled up to the false lower summit of Sgurr Dearg, and from there picked our way down the steep overlapping scales of basalt to the base of the Pinnacle.
A small circular refuge of rocks, like a rough sheepfold, offered some shelter. We hunched in it for a few minutes, sharing a chocolate bar, not speaking. I kept looking up at the Pinnacle’s black summit, hundreds of feet above me, angled up into the racing white cloud.
I stood, walked to the start of the Pinnacle’s incline, and laid a hand against its rock. It was so cold that it sucked the warmth from my skin. But this rock had once been fluid, I thought. Aeons ago it had run and dripped and spat. On either side of the Pinnacle, the ground dropped immediately away. I took a few steps up the fin. Suddenly I felt precarious, frightened: balanced on an edge of time as well as of space. All I wanted to do was get back off the ridge, back down into the Basin. We had talked of climbing the Pinnacle, had brought ropes to do so. But here, suddenly, there seemed neither point nor possibility to such an act. It would be dangerous, and impertinent.
So we retreated; back up the dragon-skin of the basalt, along the ridge, and then back down to the bealach again. We rested there for a while, in the wind shelter of the ridge. I sat quietly, trying to work out what had just happened. Where had that sudden fear come from? It had been more than a feeling of physical vulnerability, more than a vertiginous rush - though that had been part of it. A kind of wildness, for sure, but a fierce, chaotic, chastening kind: quite different from the wildness, close to beauty, of Enlli.
The clouds to the west of the bealach were moving quickly and complicatedly, like sliding panels, parting to give a view back out over the Atlantic, then sealing it off again. In one gap, I saw out to the island of Rum and far beyond it the long low boundary of the Outer Hebrides, running from Barra Head to Lewis in the north. Another opening gave me a glimpse back down into the Basin. It would have been, I thought, somewhere just like this bealach that the first of the Skye glaciers would have formed - the glaciers that had ground out the great valley space of the Basin itself, during the Pleistocene period: from two and a half million years ago, until the last glaciers receded from Skye around 14,700 years ago.
For as a river begins with a droplet falling on a slope, so a glacier begins with a snowflake settling in a hollow. The snowflake becomes a drift, and the drift sinters under its own weight into ice. The ice overflows the hollow, and then, following the impetus of its own gathering mass, it runs down the ledges and scree slopes of the mountain, pursuing and widening the channels that have already been carved by water run-off. At the height of the last glacial period, the ice would have filled the Basin, and only the highest mountain-tops - the
Inaccessible Pinnacle among them - would have protruded, like nunataks, the rock spires that jag out here and there from the snows of Greenland and the Poles.
Fowles had been right, it seemed to me then, to locate the ‘old nature’ in places such as Coruisk and the Cuillin. If the wild were to come close to extinction, its final fastnesses would be the mountain-tops, and the valleys they protected. These were places that, in the main, still kept their own patterns and rhythms, made their own weathers and their own light. But there were warnings here too against dreams of purity or invulnerability - in the plastic debris that gaudied the beaches, in the oil that slicked the kelp and the seabirds: evidence of incursion and change. Subtler warnings, as well, which took the form of absences: cleared glens, treeless hillsides.
Later that day, back down in the valley, we stopped and swam in the wide blue river which gathers the waters of the headwall and ridge, and fills Loch Coruisk itself. Richard found the spot: a long flume of smooth rock, perhaps ten yards long, down which the river rushed before pouring into a deep clear pool. The perfect swimming place! Roger would have loved it, I thought. So too would my father, who had always swum outside: in waterfall holes, in rapids under stone bridges, in sea coves. During my childhood, whenever we drove from our home in the Midlands up to the Highlands, which we did most summers, he would stop the car at the same bay on Loch Lomond’s western shore, and plunge into the water for a few minutes, regardless of the weather. Then - smiling, damp, restored - he would get back in and drive on north.
Richard and I took it in turns to launch ourselves into the flume, letting the current whizz us down, arms held high, before dropping into the pool. Rain teemed on the water’s surface, and midges bobbed in the air around us, settling and biting if we stayed still for even a few seconds. By the side of the river were firm podiums of green moss, and I remembered Sweeney’s beloved Glen Bolcain. But you never mentioned the midges, Sweeney, I thought reproachfully . . .
The Wild Places (Penguin Original) Page 5
