by Adams, Max;
After a tranquil night of comfort that would have fooled a princess, the golden early light was enough to make one drunk: we gorged on it, and so did my new camera, acquired especially for the trip. We were treated to rich, saturated colours, a pulsating, dynamic range of tones and sharp lines: Arran in the distance, banks of pinky-grey and purple cloud capping it like a frown; Inchmarnock’s low humpback bathed in cadmium yellow; each palette scattering its colours in brilliant shards off the shimmering surface of the sea. And, as if to endorse our choice of pitch, the morning saw our friend the seal bob his shiny head out of the water to see what we were up to. Trail days mean early starts: light penetrates the tent; the world around wakes up and starts its racket—squabbling geese and ducks, lamenting oyster catchers and curlews; the rumble of distant tractors across the bay. Breakfast was eaten on the go while we packed the tent and stowed our gear. That morning a brisk offshore wind blew; for two days the weather had been looking menacing to the west but a spell of easterlies had kept it at bay. Now a line of cloud overhead seemed to presage change; but by midday it had dissipated and once again we got away with a dry day.
North, then, along Bute’s west coast. The map showed that at Ettrick Bay, more or less due west of Rothesay, there was a public loo where we could wash and replenish our water supplies. It looked like a good first stop, and nearby was the promise of standing stones and an early cross to look at. St Ninian must have been on our side that morning, for as we traversed the bay on an ebbing tide the loo morphed into a café. The Dark Age traveller takes comfort where he or she can. We ate their biggest breakfast and washed. I dashed off to the nearby hamlet of St Colmac (an otherwise obscure saint) to have a look at a cross; but could not find it in a huddle of farm buildings, slurry pits and byres. Sated by our unexpected feast, and clean-ish, we resumed the trail along the coast, past chambered cairns and small duns. Sarah noticed how many wooden benches we passed, set up to watch the sea with little plaques commemorating loved ones. Bute, it seems, if not truly an island of the dead, is certainly the island of memorial.
At Kilmichael, on the rugged and little visited north-west coast of Bute, the trail finally ran out. There is a small chapel here, perched on a grassy cliff overlooking the Kyles, with the small villages of Kames and Tighnabruaich (literally ‘the house on the shore’) sitting snugly a mile across the water. The Kyles of Bute is a flooded fjord separating the island from the western branch of the Cowal peninsula: remote, rugged terrain. There is no harbour anywhere on the west coast of Bute, nor fishing pier, nor ferry. The land rises and steepens, and those who venture here need to be lucky, well equipped, and—if they wish to make further progress to the north—have a plan for how to do so. After snacking with our backs to St Michael’s little chapel, soaking in the views of Cowal’s rocky, conifer-cloaked hills, we climbed down to a beach made up entirely of broken oyster and scallop shells (we spied a man in a small boat directing divers to live ones on the sea floor), whelks and clams. We set up the storm kettle for a cup of tea. Sarah stripped off and swam—endurance swimming is her thing; I prefer boats. I’ve no doubt that unencumbered by me or the rucksack she would have made it across easily enough, although I’m not sure what the natives would have thought; and for a moment I wondered how many Dark Age denizens took to the water for a dip. Bede tells of a monk, Dryhthelm, standing up to his waist in the icy River Tweed, close to freezing, so that he could be nearer to God in his transcendental semi-starved coma; but you don’t hear much of swimming monks.8
At three o’clock we gathered our things and walked to a prominent rocky point that sticks out into the Kyle. All was quiet and still. And then, right on cue, the small fishing vessel Morag steamed into sight from behind a bluff to the north and chugged gently towards us until she was no more than a hundred yards offshore. From her waist, Donald Clark, her owner and skipper, dropped into his outboard dinghy and plucked us off the beach as cool as you like. Donald—anyone, indeed, who might give us passage off the west coast of Bute—had been hard to track down. Today, as it happened, was Morag’s last day in the water before she was to be hauled up into dry dock for the winter. We felt very lucky to have run him to earth (via online shenanigans, emails and phone calls over the previous month); but the traveller grasps serendipitous moments like these without dwelling too much on what-ifs and what-might-have-beens. With a quick backward glance, we made our escape. Bede, Adomnán and other Dark Age hagiographers would have made much of such a story; portrayed it as divine providence, a miracle.
After three days’ walking and wild camping, we treated ourselves to a night at the Kames Hotel: showers, food, a beer in the bar, the closest we could get to Beowulf’s feasting hall. A reluctant (on my part) taxi ride first thing the next morning got us, with a few minutes to spare, to Portavadie on the west side of the Cowal peninsula. The ferry was one of those small flat-bottomed vehicular drive-on affairs in which the ramp is lowered as the vessel revs up against the sloping concrete shelf of the harbour. A brisk wind blew from the south up Loch Fyne and the ferry bumped around a bit as she carved a bow-legged wake across to the fishing port of Tarbert. I stayed out on deck, smelling the kelpy breeze and watching other sea traffic pass by, like a maritime version of a trainspotter. Our fellow passengers included a woman travelling to her holiday cottage on the island of Gigha and a solicitor on his way to the Sheriff’s court in Campbeltown. The woman who took our money carried small parcels for delivery on the other side.
Tarbert is one of those special place names. Several of them survive in Scotland and Ireland and they generally describe a narrow isthmus across which boats were once pulled or carried between parts of the open sea or great inland lochs. The portage here was about a mile, the narrowest point on the Kintyre peninsula; and if a mile still seems a fair way to drag a boat, think of the nearly one hundred sea miles it saved. In truth, if there was a system of runners or sleds and if one considers that only half the portage can have been uphill (and with a high point of forty feet above the sea not far uphill at that) it’s not quite so daunting a prospect. A tough day, yes; a Fitzcarraldo-style jungle endurance epic? No.
There was no time to explore or to shop. From the ferry ramp at Tarbert we had little choice but to dash for the once-a-day bus that runs along the east coast of Kintyre, until we could find a walking route across to our next destination. It felt like cheating. At Inverneil we were disgorged, the only passengers. Now we set our heads towards the south-west along a tiny B-road with rain in the air and low, cold, wet cloud skimming across the tops of the hills directly into our faces. Up through conifer plantations where over-stocking and wind-throw had left brutal scars, to a gentle col six hundred feet above sea level. After that a more benign and nourishing land of broadleaved woods, of oak, hazel and alder, drew us on and downward. Six miles along this road we reached the hamlet of Achahoish (Gaelic: the ‘field of the hollow’). Oak leaves turned golden brown fell in curtains across the road; a thin sun glinted off mirror-like lochans on the braes around us; rushing burns and limp bracken, stoical livestock and empty roads spoke for themselves of the coming season. We found no shop here in this sheltered hollow; and no prospect of another for a couple of days. The postmistress, who opened her front door to let a yapping spaniel out, was not available for consumer purchases; she only really posted letters for folk, she said.
We had almost walked our own unofficial tarbert here, north-east to south-west across Kintyre. Now we rounded the head of Loch Caolisport, whose waters lead on to the Sound of Jura and beyond that to the open sea, past a small chapel which proclaimed itself the parish church of South Knapdale (current population 2325). We sat for lunch on a damp sward next to a meandering river flooding under the moon’s influence as the high tide backed it up. A mile further on, along the west side of the loch, we stopped again so I could visit St Columba’s cave. My expectations were low: Columba, or Colmcille, is one of those celebrity saints, like Cuthbert and Ninian, whose name has become attached to holy places in Sc
otland and Ireland for all sorts of reasons, in much the same way that Arthur, Julius Caesar, the Devil or Robin Hood are attached to any mysterious landscape feature in England. Often this naming was an attempt to cement and expand the so-called paruchia, the zone of influence, of a great foundation like Iona; sometimes it reflects a fading memory of the true founding saint or hermit, too obscure to make it onto the A-list. The tiny medieval chapel here, whose walls stand almost to roof height, had been swallowed by trees, shrubs and tall bracken. Out here there is no Ministry of Tidy Monuments to cut grass, mend signs or point stonework. I wished, for a moment, that I had brought a machete. A small track wound up towards the escarpment behind the chapel and here was the real treasure: a tall, deep, dank cave with a mouth like a hungry fish, an odd little wicket gate before it and tentacles of ivy and honeysuckle draped across its dark entrance.
Inside, set on a rocky shelf some five yards from the entrance and built against the wall of the cave, stood a drystone rectangular altar. On its flat top lay the empty aluminium shells of tea lights, a little rustic cross made from withies, some pennies and a cheap plastic necklace. Above the altar, carved into the wall, were the remnants of two simple crosses; on the front of the altar the outline of a fish had been crudely painted in cheap emulsion. For some this is at best mawkish hokum, at worst mere vandalism; for others it is a touching revival of ancient faiths. I put on my anthropological hat and observed, trying to get the best photograph in terrible light. Above me, on the opposite wall, was a line of holes which may once have held beams for a ceiling of some sort or a shelf for a bed. The cave has been excavated, or interfered with, many times. There is evidence of Mesolithic hunter-gatherer occupation and of burials. A metre and more of material built up during long, ancient use of the cave included Roman Samian ware—the finest dinner service to be had in the Western Empire—and a Viking Age merchant’s bronze balance. If this was once home to a hermit, it was also, at times, something more. The very fact that St Columba’s cave is so far off the beaten track that no official pays it a visit more than once in a score of years, makes it special. Much more than at Kingarth, one feels the presence of the Early Medieval spirit, of solitude and retreat; of temporal remoteness and of peregrination: the great pilgrimage into the unknown for Christ.
A little further south-west along the shore we came to Ellary. A grandiose, rhododendron-infested Victorian estate, it did not welcome. Keep Out signs warned and gates were closed across what was left of the road, a barely metalled track. But Ellary boasted one of the most important Early Medieval cemeteries in the country, and we were not for turning back. It was late, though, and our feeling that the long-anticipated break in the weather was about to befall us suggested that the first priority was shelter, food and a good pitch: somewhere away from the eyes of any gillies who might be out on the hills patrolling for poachers. One feels the need to be discreet when camping wild; but we were dog-tired and footsore from so much tarmac-walking. Again we were lucky. Above Ellary, after a stiff climb we insinuated ourselves into the ramparts of Dun a’ Bhealaich (the ‘fort at the red pass’), another of those perched Dark Age fortresses, apparently never investigated, which watches over its saints. It occupies a rocky promontory looking across the loch and commands the route—surely an ancient droveway—across the peninsula. Its ramparts now seem feeble, colonised by birch trees and hidden beneath suitably reddish-brown bracken. But the site says something about prestige, privacy and privilege, which are the currency of elites. At any rate, when it comes to accommodation, location is everything: here was a pitch out of sight of the track, with sticks for the fire and the fresh, if peaty, water of a lochan just twenty yards or so below us; here too was a misty autumn evening closing in like a suffocating veil of net curtain. We pitched the tent in deepening murk, fired the stove and ate quickly—just in time. For the next fourteen hours the rain was unceasing. There was nothing for it but to retreat to the tent on our atmospheric ancient campsite.
A half-hearted dawn, tea and porridge and the stealthy drip of rainwater down the back of the neck; cold hands, frosted breath on the air and a horizon cropped on all sides to a measly hundred yards or so. I packed all my gear but the cameras and, leaving Sarah in possession of the castle for an hour, trudged off to find Cladh a Bhile, the ‘earthwork of the sacred tree’. Back down the trail to Ellary; a plunge into a boggy field and through a long tunnel of rhododendrons and yew trees, mud and running water up to the ankles; a fruitless search for a signpost or a path; then tell-tale signs, I hoped: a half-hidden Victorian iron railing and a little clearing. No sign here of any earthwork, but above me the precipitous massif of the dun where we had camped. I’d walked a long way to see this place. Neglect had beaten me to it. This age-old cemetery, with its unique collection of grave slabs, was almost impenetrably obscure on a day which was, truly, as dark as night. I spied a couple of Victorian stone crosses, one of them broken into fragments. And then, as my eye began to discriminate between scrub, bracken and stone, I saw a slab, upright, a metre and a half or so tall, encrusted with lichen and green with moss. The other side was carved, magnificently, with a Maltese cross below a marigold, or flabellum. These are very special carvings: the flabellum was a ceremonial fan, Egyptian in origin and used in the most intimate early Christian liturgies to ward insects (and evil spirits, perhaps) away from the priest celebrating mass. As the iconography travelled west and north, it found new life as a motif separated from any physical utilitarian object, and became more a sort of stylised cross. I have seen an example at Fahan in Donegal and they are occasionally to be found gracing the manuscripts of the illuminated Gospels. Stylistically they belong to the seventh or eighth centuries.
The Ellary stone was first brought to the notice of a wider academic community by two remarkable women, Marion Campbell and Mary Sandeman, who double-handedly surveyed and then published the archaeological monuments of Argyll in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when nobody seemed to know or care what an extraordinary rich heritage they represented. Campbell was a fervent nationalist, a novelist and author of more than eighty books, including many on Argyll, into whose monuments she was an indefatigable researcher. The historian and archaeologist Neal Ascherson, a friend of Campbell’s, described her as a ‘patriot antiquary’, but also as a formidable intellect, kind but tough, an inveterate smoker with a sharp sense of humour which she applied equally to herself and others. She lived in Kilberry Castle as a farmer all her life, much of it with her friend Mary Sandeman, and died in 2000.
The current state of Cladh a Bhile would sadden Marion Campbell. Many of the thirty or so stones in this important place were impossible to locate; others just about poked their heads through the dingy vegetation. I managed to photograph half a dozen, but in that light I could do them no justice. I felt a grim sense of anti-climax, sploshing and splodging my way back up the hill.
Grim, to be sure; but as Sarah and I went on our way again I experienced a growing feeling, barely describable, of the exultation that only the nomad knows; that in packing my entire current existence into a bag and leaving nothing behind, looking forward only to the day ahead, I was complete—as complete, perhaps, as a human being can hope to be. Saturated colours of bracken and rough grass, and bare rocks and silky water on reed-ringed lochans formed a serene aesthetic backdrop to the steady pace of our early morning trudging.
Even so, by eleven o’clock, now as wet inside as out, we were cursing the drenching squalls that came barging in off Loch Sween, one after the other. The view, if one could have seen anything of it, should have taken in St Cormac’s chapel on Eilean Mòr—a tiny medieval church used as an inn in later centuries and which still boasts part of a turf roof. Beyond that Jura, if only the cloud would lift.
At the tiny hamlet of Kilmory—a cluster of low drystone cottages wedged in against the wind-battered hillside, a telephone box and not much else—a sign pointed to a roofless chapel supposed to house some fine early carvings. Professional enthusiasm wavered. Sarah w
as all for going on despite the lashing rain, just to keep moving. We were footsore and stiff and after more than four days on the trail the heavy packs were taking their toll. But my conscience won. The chapel, of vivid orange drystone schist like the cottages, was set in a neat little churchyard with a view out onto the tousled waves of the loch. A small notice on the door invited the visitor to pluck the heavy iron key off its peg and enter (and to lock and replace it afterwards). Hardly worth the effort, surely. But there is something satisfying about opening an old church door with a great heavy key, and you never know what surprises might lie beyond. At Kilmory the saints (and the secular powers) smiled on us. Some enterprising bod from Historic Scotland had found the money to construct a glass ceiling to shelter the treasures within: here was dry land, a refuge, a sanctuary. Here, too, was an astonishing collection of stone memorial sculpture. I unburdened myself of dripping pack and waterproof, leaned out of the door and with a look, I dare say, of smug complacency, beckoned my drenched partner to share in the miracle.
Kilmory was more a museum than a chapel. Thirty-five crosses and grave slabs were arranged around and against the walls or standing upright on the gravelled floor. This was a homage to a grand cultural school of stone carving, the so-called West Highland tradition. It probably began on Iona in Colmcille’s day towards the end of the sixth century, and continued into later medieval centuries under, some believe, the patronage of the Lords of the Isles. The earliest and simplest, stunning in their unaffected piety, were grouped in a corner. These were either way-markers for pilgrims or memorial stones to early holy men and women whose own peregrinations led them here. My favourite was a lozenge with a round head; carved on it in relief was a splayed cross with hatches between its arms, as if it had been copied from a more elaborate original. The texture of the grey sandstone from which it had been cut was irresistible; I had to touch it, to read from its surface not just the skill and faith of the mason but the passage of the years as its neatly incised lines weathered and shed their detail. These lozenge-shaped grave markers are known as ‘leacht’ crosses. The shape allowed for the insertion of the slim cross base into the top of a leacht, an altar like the drystone affair at St Columba’s cave or St Ninian’s chapel. Beneath some of these the bones of holy men and women have been found: the crosses are symbols of their faith in life and their protective presence, their virtu, in death. Several of the simpler plain crosses here might date to the sixth or seventh century, although the church belongs to the eleventh or twelfth century.
