Full Moon At The Knife's Edge

I learned to layer the fire this autumn and to pick the right kindling from the wood pile. To listen to the wood stove spitting to know when it is time to change the flow of air.

At dusk this evening I took a walk where the wind drove me forward with such force that turning back was impossible.

I am so alive here on this Isle named Skye, Isle of the mist. My desk overlooks a bay where it is said an ancient Warrior Queen Sgathaich trained only those that could cross the perilous bridge in two strides. Half a mile inland Bronze Age burial cairns line the boggy fens. Dunscaith Castle built at the water'e edge still stands abandoned and ruined and once, during my week here I will cross it and stand bruised by the wind, challenging my inner critic to lay down her arms.

Today I woke early and donned waterproof gear, it seems as though it never stops raining here and it is a biting rain that stings and stops you breathing. The crofter approaches me, a resolute white bearded Scotsman with a good open face and a wide natural vocabulary. It is exactly the time he said he would arrive and my hand is on the door for the crunch of his boots. We set out from Fior Skeig named after the reef at the eastern end of the bay. Here the old language is not always Gaelic but often Norse. Skaer is the point of a knife and I can see the rocks sharp and unsympathetic disappear and rise again from beneath the surface with the tide.

Andy is talking rapidly and managing to breathe as we ascend to the top of the road. At the brow, we veer off into an unkempt space where a recent track has been cut revealing a bank of top soil. There is a tall style that begs clambering. In Scotland Andy reminds me that I am free to roam, I may come here anytime and explore whenever I wish. I thank him and he swiftly reminds me it's not his doing but my right, everyone's right to wander freely.

I am here because I asked to have a tour of the Ancient Woodland that Andy and his partner Dorothy are regenerating. This is a complex mechanism of leaving well alone and running interference. The interference has involved keeping the deer, sheep, and cattle out by fencing the entire croft. The success of this is in a new field of Oak, Birch, and Rowan as well as the small oaks sprouting, rising randomly. We have one hour, so my questions slow us down and shorten the circumference of our journey. I am for example, very interested in the word sward having never heard it. Sward is a large area of turfy grass and it sounds as it is experienced. The sward is dense and springy and I want to stop and dig in it, but Andy is keeping us moving along at a pace.

"Oak, Hazel, Oak, Oak, Oak, Hazel!" he calls, all foreign to me. I am trying to identify as fast as we move. Soon enough I have got Hazel and Oak and I am settling into a rhythm just as a new variety of saplings appear. I am in the middle of reciting my favourite Yeats poem "song of the wandering Aengus' which is short circuited by the cry of "Elm!" So much for a hazel wand. I am now being shown the difference between the Elm and Alder leaves.

If Andy only understood how in heaven I am. My shoes which are not for boggy swards are soaked through and I longingly look at the warm knitted cap he takes out of his back pack for his head. He also whips on a pair of rain trousers, prepared it seems for any eventuality. I however am woefully unprepared, but what I lack in knowledge and preparation I make up for with an exorbitant amount of enthusiasm.

These ancient woodland are entered through golden bracken which has turned with the season. The ground is wet underfoot and full of native ferns, the woods are draped in lichen, their bushy beards are grey green, and the variety and colour of fungus and algae a mysterious relationship we are only beginning to understand. Lichens themselves are a symbiosis of fungus and other organisms, usually algae, and are exceptionally sensitive to pollution. Entering a grove of oak my body immediately responds by breathing in deeply. Here the lichen is abundant and more delicate, the air cooler.

When the forest is disturbed so too are the lichens that grow slowly and steadily in partnership with the ancient wood. This is part of the magic of the woods where myth and legends of fairy folk still live, undisturbed, unique, and complicated. It is the reason that these 'Wodekyepers' came to Skye ten years ago, purchasing 70 acres with the intention of regenerating the forest but the only way they could do it was to make Skye their home. So they stayed.

Parts of this croft have corners designated as 'of scientific interest' due to ecological diversity and the existence of some rare forms of mosses and lichens. This all fascinates me and I make a plan to come back and cross three wooden styles following the land diagonally to where two burns meet beyond which I will find a bog and the bronze age burials, and beyond this, the rare form of liverwort.

Later Dorothy tries to plot this on a map for me as she hesitates telling me that this is known as 'The Land of Bones'. She pauses several times and there is an inference, something that I can't quite catch and her voice drops as she shakes her small frame and says, ‘Well I like it there, although the energy is very different.’

It is exactly this combination of steady, secret mystery that pervades the woods, the mist and the landscape here. I hear it calling me back to a place of belonging where there is something I know that I can't remember. Something dense and forgotten. It is though I am asleep, and when I stand on the land I am awake. I cannot shake the yearning I feel for this place in the dense forgotten and unremembered parts of me. Somewhere some thing ancient calls my name. When my friend says on my leaving 'May the land of bones release you gently', she is not joking. She knows that the land possesses me.

Returning to my cottage barely inside, Dorothy greets me with two jars of crofters honey which I have been asking to buy since I first tasted its sweetness. I peel off wet clothes and light a fire, slipping a teaspoon slowly into the nectar as I boil the kettle for tea. I hang my wet gear to dry and put my toes to the heat.

Tonight the moon will be at its fullest above Tokavaig Bay and I too am at my zenith. There is a part of me that belongs here, that knows this place, that hears the whisper of the woods calling me. I know now it's smell and I breathe it in, the salty seaweed as slippery as seal skins. I hold my breath and listen. I hear the tide swell, the moon pregnant and about to labour, she pauses. I watch as the ocean slides over the reef and the fierce edge of the knife slips deeper and deeper beneath the surface.

Gratitude

Looking out over the Inner Scottish Hebrides to the Isle of Mull and Iona, I can trace my ancestors to one of the oldest Scottish Clans and to the Celtic people. Over the last few hundred years the woods that first appeared under the ice thousands of years ago would be felled and sheep and cattle would be reared, the land cleared for monoculture of one kind or another.

Everywhere, even near you, there are those who are making sacrifices who are trying to take care of what is beautiful, to keep alive diversity. They are exhausted and sometimes driven to despair by the challenge. We have not after all, as a rule, prepared ourselves well - and it is easy to be hopeless. I think of the generations before us who would have felt hopelessness and yet carried on. Tried to make what is good, better.

Tonight I will light a candle to this new moon, give thanks and then drive my hope forward.