robin gillanders
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Cragaig, north-west Mull I caught the 10.15 a.m. ferry from Kilchoan to Tobermory the following day. The weather had changed again to a fine drizzle as I stopped on the colourful waterfront to pick up petrol and water for the van and provisions for its occupant. Sadly it was too early to sample fish and chips at the Egon Ronay-rated fish van on the pier. I headed up the west coast and decided to wild camp at Calgary, seduced by its glorious beach and in the hope that the weather would improve the following day. Thunderous rain woke me the next morning at 4.30 a.m. as it pummelled the roof of the van and I instantly felt sorry for my fellow campers in tents who had been trying to dry socks on guy ropes the previous evening. There being no point in attempting to catch early morning light, I allowed myself to fall asleep again, finally heading off late morning round fiendish cliff-top bends to the start of the track to Cragaig. The rain had abated to a gentle smirr and I decided optimistically to set off on the two-mile walk. This tiny village was abandoned, not due to the Clearances, as so many were, but voluntarily, when the plague arrived from Ireland. Much later, when I was back in Edinburgh, Dominic wrote to me in an email: ‘Maybe Cragaig itself is not important except as a representation of all the emptied Highlands. That beautifully built wall and corner which, at the time, was a skill of such necessity. Its beauty of line is much more than beauty for beauty’s sake: a beauty that was man’s vital attempt to dovetail himself into the harsher beauties of nature – for the corner of the building is both tapered and rounded so as to take the wind. The abandonment of these ‘remote’ world centres may be seen as the beginning of the abandonment of community, and of the self as part of community; as the beginning of the modern individual’s obsession with self and all material things. I have always felt that the loss of this community bonding, as well as the loss of our earthing in the soil, was the beginning of the disintegration of all natural happiness. And was the beginning of the necessity for psychiatrists.’ The photograph I made was of the house that Dominic chose for Alasdair Mor, the main protagonist in The Dead of Winter. Returning to Calgary, wet and dispirited by the weather, I determined to leave early the next morning and head up the west coast towards Shieldaig and Applecross.
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