The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (18 page)

Eventually, late on a windy sunlit day, he drove me down the thin west-coast road that leads from the great sands of Uig through the crofting township of Breanish to Mealasta, where the road petered out. All that survived of Mealasta was a ground-plan of stones, but it felt oddly like the blueprint of a future village, rather than the trace of a near-vanished one.

The road ended at a wide cove called Camus Mol Lìnis: the Bay of the Boulders of Linis. I hugged Finlay goodbye, and he drove off north, waving out of the window as he went. I walked onto the little peninsula that jutted south of the bay, and found a smear of grass on which to pitch my tent. The peninsula was a
beirgh
, or
a’
bheirgh
, a loan-word from the Norse that designates ‘
a promontory or point
with a bare, usually vertical rock-face, and often with a narrow neck’. Its cliffs were pinkish with
feldspar
. Inland, near Griomabhal, I could see a golden eagle, its primaries extended like delicate fingers, roaming on a late-day hunt. A tern beat upwind: scissory wings, its black head seemingly eyeless, its movement within the air veery and unpredictable as a pitcher’s knuckle-ball. Creamy waves moshed and milked on the beach and rocks, making rafts of floating foam just offshore and sending spray shooting above the level of the tent. Wave-surged infralittoral rock, tide-swept circalittoral rock,
micro-terrains
of lichen and moss. Far out to sea there were breaches in the cloud through which sun fell.

I boiled up a cup of tea and sat drinking it and eating a slab of cake, glad to be alone and in such a place. A seal surfaced – a fine-featured female, ten yards to my north. I tried to sing a seal song that Finlay had taught me a year or two previously, but it turned out that I couldn’t remember either the tune or the words, so I switched to early English folk music, a Vaughan Williams setting of one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Songs of Travel’. The seal ducked its head under water and out again three times, as if rinsing its ears clean of the noise. I changed to the only other song I could remember – ‘Paradise City’ by Guns N’ Roses. The seal dived and never came back. I felt rather embarrassed.

The sun set over the Atlantic. The water a sea-silver that scorched the eye, and within the burn of the sea’s metal the hard black back of an island, resilient in the fire, and through it all the sound of gull-cry and wave-suck, the sense of rock rough underhand, machair finely lined as needlepoint, and about the brinks other aspects of the moment of record: the iodine tang of seaweed, and a sense of peninsularity – of the land both sloping away and fading out at its edges.

A sea mist crept up the coast, cutting visibility to fifty yards, so that my narrow-necked cape of rock seemed to have become an island. It felt as if anything might be going on under the mist’s cover, and soon I experienced the peculiar illusion, with a light westerly wind moving across my face from the sea, that I was on board a boat beating outwards into the ocean and that I would wake the next morning far out into the North Atlantic. Then in a meteorological magic trick – like whipping away the tablecloth and leaving the crockery standing – the mist dispersed to reveal a cloudless sky and the coastline still intact. Inland was the half-dome of Griomabhal, and near it hung Jupiter again, bright as a lantern, while clouds juddered westwards across the moon.

It was the next morning that I followed the deer tracks up into the glen of stones that ran beneath Griomabhal’s north face, with the wind rushing from the east. I searched the glen for almost two hours, moving inland and uphill, losing hope of finding the path.

Right beneath the north face, where the rock dropped 500 feet sheer to the moor, was a pool called the Dubh Loch – the Black Lake – by whose shore I rested. Tar-black water, emerald reeds in the shallows. The surface of the loch was being stirred by the wind in vortical patterns, rotating in sympathy with the wind-shear flows coming down off the north face of Griomabhal. This was a miniature cyclone-alley. Griomabhal’s summit was finally cloud-free, and looking up its face, with the clouds posting far overhead, the mountain seemed to be toppling onto me. The face was tracked laterally with seams of quartz, hundreds of yards long, standing out like the veins on a weightlifter’s arms. I glanced uphill and into the wind to pick my next line – and there was Manus’s path.

Click. Alignment. Blur resolving into comprehension. The pattern standing clear: a cairn sequence, subtle but evident, running up from near the Dubh Loch shore. The form of the cairns was the
rùdhan
, the three-bricked stack, though there were also single stones standing like fingers and pointing the way. I jumped up from my resting stone and followed Manus’s path, eastwards over the slopes of gneiss.

Mostly, the cairns were thirty or fifty yards apart. But near the pass, where the ground flattened off, I found seventeen cairns, each no further than ten yards from the next. Malky had been right: Manus’s path really was a Richard Long sculpture, created long before Long, and similar in form to his
A Line in the Himalayas
. I stepped into the path of the cairns and looked along it. One end pointed off towards the summit of the pass. The other ran towards Mealasta, dropping out of sight over a shoulder of gneiss. Above me, ravens muttered their hexes.

At last I reached the crest of the pass beneath Griomabhal’s north face. I stopped to look out over one of the last great wild spaces of Britain – the deer forests of South Lewis and North Harris, hundreds of square miles of (privately owned) moor, river, loch and mountain. The cairn stones at the pass were decisive, and they led the eye and the foot down over the back of Griomabhal and towards the wilderness of the moor.

I was grateful to the
rùdhan
for their guidance, and followed them steeply down towards the head of Loch Hamnaway. The sun was breaking through the cloud, bringing a redness to the moor. I stopped to drink at a river pool, its water bronze and gold. In its shallows I could see several rough white pebbles of quartz, and I recalled a word that Finlay had taught me, one of the many poetically precise terms that Hebridean Gaelic possesses to designate the features of the moor landscape. ‘
Èig
’
referred, Finlay said, to ‘the quartz crystals on the beds of moorland stream-pools that catch and reflect moonlight, and therefore draw migrating salmon to them in the late summer and autumn’.

I walked for the rest of that day: happy hard miles over moor and rock, past loch and river. I stopped to fish here and there, catching small trout and carrying them with me, heading south-east towards the beehive shielings Anne had pointed out on the map. Once I saw a quick double flash of sunlight from the side of a distant hill: the binoculars of an estate watcher, checking me out, assessing whether I was a deer or salmon poacher. I didn’t like being under surveillance in that open space, and moved into the cover of a rise of land.

When the day was at its warmest, and the peat at its spongiest, I took Anne’s advice, tugged off my boots and socks, and walked barefoot for an hour or so. The peat was slippery and cool, and where I stepped on sphagnum it surged up and around my foot, damp as a poultice.

‘
Walking barefoot
has gone out of fashion,’ wrote Nan Shepherd in 1945, ‘but sensible people are reviving the habit.’ Such walking ‘begins’, she observed:

with a burn that must be forded: once my shoes are off, I am loath to put them on again. If there are grassy flats beside my burn, I walk on over them, rejoicing in the feel of the grass to my feet; and when the grass gives place to the heather, I walk on still. Dried mud flats, sun-warmed, have a delicious touch, cushioned and smooth; so has long grass at morning, hot in the sun, but still cool and wet when the foot sinks into it, like food melting to a new flavour in the mouth.

I recognized from my own mountain days Nan’s inclination not to put her shoes back on after a river crossing. Over the previous few years, I’d been experimenting with my own barefoot revival. I’d walked five miles across the White Peak in Derbyshire: over water-worn limestone that felt glassy as marble, up terraces of wiry grass littered with the striped shells of snails, over hilltops of thistly pasture and at last down on a warm footpath to a river, in one of whose bankside pools I gratefully bathed my feet.
*
In the Black Mountains of Wales I walked for most of a summer’s day along paths of Old Red Sandstone, worn to an ultra-fine grade of dust that was soft as rouge powder. I spent half a day barefoot on the chalk downs and beech woods of south Cambridgeshire with Matt, an archaeologist friend. Early on, we both picked up on our feet a blackish tree-sap or resin, tar-like in texture. The resin acted as a sampler of the ground over which we walked – as the wax in the bottom of a lead-line samples the seabed – and we both acquired a layer of seeds, dust and leaf fragments on our soles. And in Essex’s Epping Forest, wandering through glade and shade, I began to feel the changes of habitat underfoot: the different plants that populated each zone according to the available light, and the different temperatures of the leaf-litter. Then I trod on a holly leaf, and in trying to get away from the holly leaf I trod on a sprig of hawthorn, and so I spent five minutes tweezering bits of the forest from my heel.

It is true that I remember the terrains over which I have walked barefoot differently, if not necessarily better, than those I have walked shod. I recall them chiefly as textures, sensations, resistances, planes and slopes: the tactile details of a landscape that often pass unnoticed. They are durably imprinted memories, these footnotes, born of the skin of the walker meeting the skin of the land. I remember a hot path across boulder clay: the earth smooth and star-cracked by sun, so that I walked with constellations and fault-lines underfoot. I remember crossing a freshly ploughed field, where the harrow had crushed the soil and the sun had warmed it, such that stepping into it was like treading ash from a fire several hours dead. Walking barefoot, you are freshly sensitive to the
nap
of a landscape. Grass suddenly feels wide and burnished: its blades flattened together to create a cool surface.

Not all of my barefoot walks have been pleasurable. Trying to cross a heat-baked ploughed field, with its rows of sun-hardened
sillion
, was like walking over a sea of swords. One August my friend Leo and I tried walking a stretch of Suffolk ling-land unshod. It looked like the most benign possible terrain for such activity: a dry sandy heath. But we were hopping in pain within five paces: the heather and moss concealed a widespread miniature gorse. Going on would have been like trying to stroll across pincushions or hedgehog backs.

The super-sensitivity of the bared foot is what has given rise to the ‘Reek Sunday’ climb of Croagh Patrick in Galway by Catholic pilgrims. That barefoot walk is founded upon the conviction that mortification of the sole leads to amelioration of the soul. This is barefootedness as penance, maceration, test: the stones cut the pilgrims’ feet so badly that blood oozes up between their toes and stains the path.

Others have found a more benign connection between barefootedness and awareness. Between 1934 and 1936 the Scottish naturalist Frank Fraser Darling tracked a herd of several hundred red deer in Wester Ross, north-west Scotland. The breakthrough in Darling’s understanding of their behaviour came when he decided to take his shoes off. ‘
During the summer of 1935,’
he wrote in
A Herd of Red Deer
(1937), ‘I went barefoot, and after a fortnight of discomfort I had my reward. The whole threshold of awareness was raised, I was never fatigued, and stalking became much easier …’ Darling’s unconventional methods transformed modern ethology: instead of considering the deer as reflex creatures, displaying learnt but unversatile reactions to their environment, he proposed a dynamic model of the herd in which each deer’s sensed experience of its landscape shiftingly informed their ways of living. Darling’s contention, in short, was that deer ‘
were capable of
insight
’,
and his insight into
their
insight emerged from his decision to go sympathetically barefoot. What Darling’s work proved was that there are kinds of knowing that only feet can enable, as there are memories of a place that only feet can recall.

Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one, and the soles of our feet, shaped by the surfaces they
press
upon, are landscapes themselves with their own worn channels and roving lines. They perhaps most closely resemble the patterns of ridge and swirl revealed when a tide has ebbed over flat sand. Our heels have marks that look like percussive shockwaves. The arch, where the foot’s flex is greatest, is reticulated with shallow folds. The ball carries non-intersecting ripples. The whole foot is a document of motion, inscribed by repeated action. Babies – from those first foetal footfalls, the kneading of sole against womb-wall, turning themselves like astronauts in black space – have already creased their soles by the time they emerge into the world.

Anne had been right about the pleasures of the barefoot walk, and she was also right about the difficulty of finding the beehive shielings. Just before dusk, with the weather worsening and my legs tiring, I stumbled up a valley to where the shielings were marked as black dots on the map.

But where the map told me I would find them, I could see only hummocky
moraine
: dozens of outsize grassy molehills or moguls, eight or ten feet high at most. I double-checked my map-work. This was definitely the right place.

Then I understood. The shielings
were
the hummocks, or rather were disguised as the hummocks. It was the doorways that gave them away. There were two dome-roofed rock huts next to one another, almost completely turfed over, but with low lintelled entrances at ground level, just large enough to admit me. Their form rhymed so closely with the hummocks that I couldn’t believe they weren’t influenced by them: architecture as camouflage and local vernacular.