It’s a slog at the start. The heather’s high and the grass is tussocky and the deer flies chew my bare legs relentlessly. I’m going up Beinn Spionnaidh, following a burn up its eastern side from the head of Loch Eriboll, and, even by mid-morning, the sun’s heat is intense. The forecast was for a cooling breeze, but it hasn’t materialised yet and I wonder about the wisdom of setting off up a hill on a day like this.
I consider sitting in the burn to refresh myself, but there’s not much water. There is some shade, though, and its rocky bed is probably easier to walk on, so I climb down onto its dry floor. Once in, I’m surprised by how deep it is. The banks are over my head at times, and I feel like I’ve stepped into a different world, a secret seam of pure pale rock beneath the rich green and brown of the hillside.
Its course is straight at first, alternating between wide sloping pavements and steep sets of steps, which in wetter times would carry flowing cascades but today convey only shallow trickles. As the burn climbs, it narrows and bends and the pavements give way to heaped blocky boulders which choke the burn’s corners. What’s consistent throughout is the stone: it’s that white quartzite with the slight rosy tinge, the kind which is usually mottled with patches of dark or yellow lichen but here is rinsed clean, glowing radiantly like naked skin. Just looking at it is calming to my eyes, and, like skin, it beckons. I place my hands on it here and there as I walk, absorbing myself in its cool, collected smoothness.
As the gradient of the slope eases off, the ground becomes more bouldery, so I clamber up the bank and onto the open hillside. Now the walking really begins. It’s not just the height but the stoniness underfoot which is exhilarating. I love walking on rock, the austerity of it, the visual and tactile simplicity, the sense of being on an elevated plane. And I love the physical challenge of figuring out where to place my feet. It makes a game of walking, a three-dimensional puzzle which my brain enjoys solving. Until recently, this would have made me feel sick: the visual scanning required would have been too much for my vestibular system to cope with after I bounced the side of my head off a rock a few years ago and damaged my brain and right inner ear. The fact that I can now relish it is a great joy and a great relief. I step lightly, leap a little, dance.
The further up I get, the more extensive the boulderfield becomes until the hillside is a mass of slabs of bluish-grey quartzite. The boulders are no longer bedded individually into the turf but piled on top of each other, and I have the vertiginous sensation that I’m clambering upon an infinite regress of stones with nothing substantial beneath. Even some of the most massive slabs shift when I stand on them. In placing my feet here, I have to understand whether a boulder is well supported by the stones around it, and if not – if it might have some play – I have to gauge if it’s balanced and will thus rock only slightly when I step on it.
Stepping across boulders on Beinn Spionnaidh
This is where I notice the effect of the walling. For the last couple of months, I’ve been learning how to build dry stone walls with a professional waller. At first, the impact of this on my hillwalking was to make me perceive all the rocks around me in terms of the role they would have in a wall. When I went up Ben Hee two weeks ago, passing lovely little waterfalls and with all of Sutherland opening out around me, all I could see were good builders (large and squarish with clean faces), fine pins (long and slender) and some excellent tapered and triangular wedges. Today, I notice that I’m no longer perceiving the stones in terms of functionality. Instead, I’m looking at the way the boulders rest against each other, hold and lean in to each other. I take this as a good sign, an indication that I’m developing an eye for the structural relationships of stones, which is not only essential in walling but also useful on this increasingly precarious summit. It’s also an indication that I’m able to learn again – another great relief. My short-term memory was so badly affected by the concussion, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to acquire new skills, so it’s reassuring to observe myself making progress.
I reach the final ridge and meander over to the trig point. It’s an impressive panorama: the golden sands of the Kyle of Durness and Balnakeil Bay, the flowing green moorlands, and all the Sutherland hills, from the crests of Ben Loyal round to the sweeping skirts of Foinaven and the tilted ridge of Cranstackie, which looms across the bealach to the south. I find a comfortable slab to lie down on. My brain needs more rest than it used to, but I’ve always enjoyed lazing around on hills. I’ve always relished heights in general – mountains, monuments, top-floor flats – anywhere space falls away around you. Most of all, though, I love those spells when you become completely absorbed into the landscape, when there’s no sense of separation. I used to experience this when I lived in Edinburgh, where I’m from, but now I get it mainly when I’m out on the hills, particularly here in the north-west and, now I think about it, on the quartzite hills: Conival and Ben More Assynt, Arkle, Canisp, and Spidean Coinich on Quinag.
This attunement to rock has definitely heightened since I injured my brain. I’ve wondered if it’s due to the loss of weight I’ve felt psychologically, the strange spaciousness I feel within, if it’s a means to balance that. But I suspect it’s more that I feel an affinity with stone. Having the accident was like being stripped back to my bedrock. I had to shed all my plans and projections and go back to basics: eating, drinking, rest, recovery. It’s been hard to deal with, but I’m more durable as a result, more obdurate. Being with stone now feels companionable and confirming. It’s certainly key to my healing. I’ve noticed already how walking on rock consolidates and strengthens me, and the walling builds on this.
When I first started learning, I was nervous about my capacity, yet my brain seems to like constructing walls. It takes naturally to the challenge of it: assessing and sizing the stones, negotiating the evolving balance between finding a good stone and making a stone work, all the while taking care to hearten the wall, to establish a sound interior structure. It helps that our main job is in a breezy field by the sea – a beautiful location which so far has remained midge-free. And the waller himself is a therapeutic presence with his kindness and patience and artistry. I enjoy observing his selection and arrangement of the stones, the practical intelligence expressed through his hands, and developing this mind-eye-hand coordination myself is profoundly satisfying. As I work, I feel my brain integrate and knit itself together. The waller asked recently if I’d started dreaming of stones yet. I have, and my waking thoughts, too, are stonier, denser and more substantial. I handle them attentively. Even the little stones have their uses, like the hearting in a wall, supporting and securing those of larger dimensions. Nothing is wasted.
Working on Balchladich wall
I have some lunch and wander southwards along the broad ridge, swithering whether to climb Cranstackie as well. I have to conserve mental energy for the descent, so I probably shouldn’t, but it rises so enticingly ahead, beyond such an alluring green saddle, that before I know it, I’m bounding down the mossy slopes towards it. Now I’m in a different kind of beauty, generous and verdant. Clumps of thrift grow here and there, their pink heads quivering in the gentle south-easterly, and I’m filled with a warm gladness. Accompanying it is a growing sense of familiarity – not for the scene itself, which is new to me, but for the gladness: this is how I used to feel walking on a summer’s day. I remember now. It’s an unusual sensation because, since the injury, my long-term memories haven’t felt like mine. It wasn’t that they seemed to belong to anyone else, but they didn’t feel attached to me. It’s only in the last six months that they’ve started to feel connected again, and it’s an ongoing process. Each time a perceptual correspondence deepens into a remembered experience, it surprises me, and my heart aches in a way I can neither understand nor describe.
I reach the far side of the saddle and begin my ascent. The boulderfield begins suddenly and quickly steepens. It’s an even more perilous heap than Beinn Spionnaidh, the stones more loosely arrayed, and as I place my small weight on them, they rock alarmingly. I’m using my hands now at almost every step. The pleasure I take in using my hands is one of the reasons I enjoy walling. I wear gloves when I work so my skin isn’t shredded by the constant friction, but the shapes of the stones imprint themselves into my palms and fingers, and when I dream about them, I can feel them: the even grain of Torridonian sandstone, the sheer faces of Cambrian quartzite, the lumpy curves of Lewisian gneiss.
I return my focus to the rocks in front of me. In some places, there are faint trails of pale sand where others have threaded a route before me, but they soon peter out, so I slowly find my own way up. It’s tempting to scamper up more boldly, but I can feel the mental fatigue starting to creep in and my balance and coordination faltering. It’s as if my brain can’t quite reach into my body, as if its signals are becoming muffled. I know what I want to do, but the execution is subtly delayed.
Ascending Cranstackie
Steadily, I reach the top. Strath Dionard begins to open out before me, the quartzite ridges and spurs of Foinaven floating beyond, faint in the heat like a ghostly mirage. It’s such a beautiful mountain, and the long wide ridge that flows away from my feet towards it is deeply appealing, too. One day, I’ll follow it, but today I need to take the shortest and easiest route back down. I clamber carefully back over the boulders, then cut across the upper slopes of Beinn Spionnaidh to meet the burn I came up and find a nice boulder to sit and have a cup of tea on before the final descent.
I gaze over at Ben Hope standing directly ahead, at the long blue tongue of Loch Eriboll lying before it and the quartzite mountains ringed around me and suddenly feel utterly at home. This is a rare feeling: since the injury, I’ve been living with a pervasive sense of detachment which has only recently begun to abate. I’m also aware of a surge of love – another novelty – for these stunning mountains, and for this chunk of quartzite I’m sitting on. I press my palms into it and regard its rosy countenance, its finely textured faces. A stone is always complete. Even when you break it, as I sometimes have to when walling, to knock the tail off or to make hearting, it simply becomes a smaller complete entity, and this brute block is a handsome specimen.
I close my rucksack and prepare to head down, but I’m reluctant to leave. This quartzite country really has a hold on me. I visualise its extent, its cool white swathe cutting through the grey gneiss and psammite, all the way down the west side of Loch Eriboll to Foinaven and Arkle and beyond. How beautiful it must have been after the ice retreated: a bare, scoured landscape, pale and luminous.
If only I could go back in time – although I suppose, by walling, I’m getting as close as I can. After all, I’m building with the same materials these mountains are made of. Yes, I’m breaking and shaping a few of the rocks, but the stones going through my hands are essentially unaltered since the last ice age or before; some of the sandstone is rippled from its formation on a riverbed a billion years ago. With my diminished sense of continuity, it’s grounding to be handling rock that’s older than I can imagine, and to be raising structures on the land which will outlive me. I haven’t been here in the north-west long – I blew in on a boat ten years ago. Yet in climbing these mountains and building these walls, I’m anchoring myself here; I’m settling into place. I’m being heartened.
Lead image: Kristin O Karlsen on Unsplash
In text: Alison Roe