Winner of the 2025 Creatives Flash Nonfiction Contest, kindly supported by Fort William Mountain Festival and the Highland Bookshop.
Green is new; grey is old. To clamber this hill is to go back in time. The newest moment is in the lush emerald of moss and grass and pine bough. Pass then through russetty waves of fern and rushes that still hold recent summer light, heather pinks and purples clinging on through October winds, blips of sun-dappled memory. Scrambling upward, through the boulder fields, stones appear like so many grey marbles strewn by giants’ children, bearing chalky splotches of palest yellow, green, white. Near the summit, panting, breathing unending marble-blue sky, I reach the old grey hulk. The great stone feels cold and worn like some far-ancient past, now solid and steady. It sits gazing supremely toward invisible stars, from where each of its kin was thrown to this earth; those chalky patches marking distant kisses of starshine, the colour of time holding still.