‘I guess you didn’t wake up suddenly remembering everything?’
My laugh is without humour. ‘I wish.’ And it occurs to me that I am being shaped now only by the memories I am making, and have made since yesterday. Who I am, or rather who I was, is lost. A new me is being forged out of the moment, and I wonder how different that new me is from the old one.
We drive in silence on a road that twists and turns and undulates around and over the contours of the land, glimpses of the beach opening up at almost every turn, vast and dominating. Even on this greyest of mornings the water is the most extraordinary blue, somehow generating its own light. Then, as we follow the line of the shore, the hills rise up around us, the summer green of the grass already fading towards winter brown.
It is a long way to the head of the bay, and I am glad not to have been walking it on my own in this rain. We encounter no other vehicles, and at the road end we hit the main A859, which turns north towards Tarbert and south to Leverburgh. On our left, a rain-streaked perspex bus-shelter harbours a single miserable soul waiting for a bus into town, a phone box next to it placed there, perhaps, so that passengers might call someone to pick them up when the bus drops them off. On the hill to the north, we see lines of lorries and road-rollers laying a ribbon of thick black tar on a new, wider stretch of road. We turn south, and the road here is still single-track, with passing places. Half a mile on, we pass, coming in the opposite direction, the bus that will lift the spirits of the solitary passenger waiting at the Luskentyre turn-off. Then the long, straight stretch of causeway that arrows through choppy sea until it curves to the right, and on our left a huge expanse of salt marsh stretches away to the north, a startling green, shot through with snaking ribbons of still water reflecting grey sky.
At the end of the causeway, at the Seilebost sign, we turn left on to a metalled track, past a tiny pitched roof over a circle of stones, an ersatz well with a crudely carved wooden plaque depicting a hiker and the legend Frith Rathad, the Harris Walkway. Opposite is a sign for a rural sewer project funded by the European Union, and I wonder how people would survive in a place like this without the European money that would never have come from Westminster.
The track curls up past a clutch of cottages, lifting gradually into the foothills, the salt marsh stretching away in the plain below, the sheer scale of Tràigh Losgaintir behind us becoming apparent as we rise above it. We abandon the car where the tarmac gives way to stone and grass and rivers of water running in the tracks left by farm vehicles. And we walk, then, up to a wooden gate where we have the choice to continue north, or turn east. We take the latter, following Bran, who makes the turn without thought. A familiar route. He bounds over a stile, and we follow him along the track, heading off into a sodden wilderness of grass and heather that cuts between barren, rocky hills pushing up all around.
There has been no let-up in the rain. We are more exposed here in the hills, wind rushing between the peaks, hurrying east, the same wind that must have blown rain into the faces of all those carriers of coffins across the centuries.
I notice for the first time that, although Sally’s parka is keeping her core dry, she is not wearing leggings and her jeans are already soaked through. A fair-weather hiker. I had dressed instinctively, donning those waterproofs I found in the boot room. Experienced in protecting myself from the elements. And Bran’s confidence in where we are going tells me we have been this way many times before.
It is disheartening to look ahead, because the track climbs endlessly into the distance, and so we both focus on our feet, avoiding potholes and boulders on which ankles might get turned. And when, from time to time, we look up, our hearts sink, for we appear to have travelled no distance at all. Until we look back, and are rewarded with the most spectacular view of the beach, far, far below, a luminous silver and turquoise.
‘Look!’ Sally’s voice makes me turn my head and I see where she is pointing, towards a small group of cairns gathered on the hillside. I see more of them ahead of us. Each one marking the place where someone has been laid to rest with the world at their feet. A view to die for.
Below us, on our right, a scrap of loch gathers in a hollow, reflecting the sky, its surface rippled by wind, and I check my map, folded into a clear plastic ziplock. Not too much further before my orange line comes to its end. We circumvent three large boulders strung across the track to prevent vehicles from trying to go any further, and the path starts to climb even more steeply.
The hills lift almost sheer now on either side, to peaks lost in cloud, the track winding away into obscurity, still rising to what might or might not be its summit. There have been many faux summits before now.
‘We must be nearly there,’ Sally says. She is breathless, her face pink from exertion and the sting of the rain. She glances away to our right. ‘Looks like they were quarrying here at some time.’ A cliff face is broken, seamed and jagged, with boulders lying in chaos below it, some of them as big as houses and canted at odd angles.
But I shake my head. ‘Explosions from a past ice age, Sally. Water freezing and expanding in the crevices until the rock shatters from the pressure.’ I find myself grinning. ‘Nature’s dynamite.’ And I wonder how I know this.
Sally grins back at me. ‘What, are you a geologist now?’
I shrug. ‘Who the hell knows? Maybe I am.’
I turn back to the track and stop. Two boulders, about the size of shoe boxes, but almost oval, sit balanced, one on top of the other. They are unusually shaped, and I can’t see how nature could possibly have arrived at this precarious arrangement.
‘What is it?’ Sally follows my gaze but sees nothing out of the ordinary.
‘Someone placed those stones like that.’
She frowns. ‘How do you know?’
I shake my head. It’s hard to explain. ‘It just doesn’t look natural. But I guess most folk would have walked right past without noticing.’
‘I wouldn’t have given them a second glance.’ Sally casts me a curious look. ‘So somebody put them there?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
A pause. ‘You?’
‘It’s possible.’ I pull out the map again, wiping away the rain from the plastic with icy fingers. ‘This would be about the right place.’
‘Where’s Bran?’ There is a hint of alarm in Sally’s voice. I look up and cannot see him anywhere.
‘Bran!’ I shout at the top of my voice. And I hear him barking before I see him. Then he appears on the slope off to our right, emerging from behind one of those huge boulders deposited on the hill, part of the spoil from that ice explosion thousands of years ago. A great slab of rock, split along one of its seams. ‘Here, boy!’ But he stands his ground, barking at me as if I am an idiot, and it occurs to me that he expects me to follow, as if that’s the path we always take. I turn to Sally. ‘Come on.’
I help her over ground that rises and falls beneath our feet, peat bog sucking at our shoes, soaking them in a brown slurry. I use my stick for balance, climbing slightly as we reach the first of the boulders, and watch as Bran turns and runs down into a hollow ringed by rock spoil, like giant headstones randomly arranged around a level area of beaten grass beneath the cliff, completely protected from the wind. And as we reach the top of the rise to look down into it, we are stopped in our tracks.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I hear Sally say, the words whipped from her mouth as she speaks them. Below us, completely hidden from view, and as protected from the elements as might ever be possible in this brutal environment, stands a large collection of bee hives. Square, boxlike hives, two and three levels high, some painted orange, others simply weathered, silver wood. They appear to have been positioned arbitrarily, raised off the ground on wooden pallets, roped down and weighted with small boulders on top. I do a quick count. There are eighteen, and I’m not sure that I have ever seen anything quite so unexpectedly incongruous in my life.