February on the Isle of Harris, Pt II
"Magic"
There is a magic to the Outer Hebrides that seeps into every stream, every grain of sand. It fills up the gaps inside of me. Each individual has places they’ve experienced that become something other than ordinary, but instead a fixture, a place where they long to return. I have places other than Harris that feel like this. My Taid (Welsh for Grandfather) was a slate quarryman who worked for most of his life at Dinorwic in the shadow of Snowdon. Standing where he once stood gives me a feeling of arriving home, despite the fact he died before I was born. Yet, places that feel like home don’t necessarily have to have a familial connection. Some places become home, and by that I mean the place where I feel the quiet call of freedom. Connections are made, spinning out into the Universe. When Rach and I decided to get married on Harris in 2019, we didn’t honestly think many of our friends and family would be interested in making the trek north. How wrong we were. Almost everyone we invited enthusiastically accepted and we ended up with a core group of 50 or so people on the Island. To share this wonderful place with the people who mean the most to me solidified Harris as one of those places where I feel most at home.
There’s a narrative around wilderness that can sneak into writing about remote places such as the Outer Hebrides. I read Robert Macfarlane’s ‘The Wild Places’ recently and I’m reminded of a review of the book by Kathleen Jamie that exclaims, “What’s that coming over the hill? A white, middle-class Englishman! A Lone Enraptured Male! From Cambridge! Here to boldly go, ‘discovering’, then quelling our harsh and lovely and sometimes difficult land with his civilised lyrical words.”
Prose about Harris can become tainted with the same difficult and somewhat ‘othering’ language. Ideas of Harris being a wild place, with wide swathes of beaches devoid of people. The notion of ‘emptiness’ is problematic, not just for it’s connotations with the history of clearances in the Scottish Highlands. People live here, and have to navigate the negative side of tourism as well as the positives. I’m merely a guest, trying to leave no trace and not irritate too many locals along the way (and heck, even make friends with a few). There is wildness here, but it is never far from a road, or people and their livelihoods. Each day I watched the cattle trundle along the road to Scarista and back again, a traditional way of farming which surely gave form to the phase, ‘when the cows come home’.
Even I struggle to abide tourists who don’t pull over to let locals pass and instead blithely trundle along the single-track roads at 20mph without so much as glancing back at the queue of traffic they‘ve created. I remember one local jokingly telling me that they should make people reverse off the boat and if you’re unable to, then straight back to the mainland with you! I’m getting off topic… There is magic here, and wildness. But not in isolation. It exists in connection. A symbiotic relationship between the land and those who tend it.
Week two brought me my fair share of both isolation and connection. I’m happy in my own company, but after 10 days or so I was even happier to see my wife, Rach and one of our oldest friends, Rich arrive. It seems they also brought the light with them from the mainland. Wild light. The kind of light photographers dream about. When the clouds shift, and rays break through, illuminating unexpected parts of the landscape. If you’ve ever experienced a moment like that you’ll know how exhilarating it is, and how it can elevate even the most mundane of moments into magic.
Magic was my dad’s word. We’d often drive out early to the east coast to watch the sunrise. It was our thing. Whenever I showed him any of my work he’d say, ‘that’s magic, Vem!’ Our trips began as birdwatching excursions. We’d go birdwatching whenever we could when I was small. I recall my mum being in hospital after her hysterectomy and dad allowing me to skip school so we could go to the coast instead. There I saw an Avocet for the first time. I was the first in the hide to spot it and felt elated that I’d made my dad proud.
I always have to caveat these moments with the warning that my dad was far from an ideal human, and we struggled to understand each other, but magic was his word for me, and magic means more than the sum of it’s parts.
Magic can also come in the form of the unexpected. I wanted Rach to see Uig Bay. There is a song by Karine Polwart entitled ‘I Burn but I am Not Consumed’. Written to Donald Trump from the perspective of the metamorphic rock of his mother’s homeland, Lewis, it’s a tour de force, and worth a listen. It contains the line “From Uig Bay to Luskentyre…” and during lockdown, when we were dreaming of the islands my beloved and I would sing that line to each other. We drove out, through relentless drizzle, and I considered turning back as it’s by no means a short drive through the Harris hills and back down to Uig bay. Once arrived, the weather had not improved, but it seemed a shame to waste the drive so we walked out to meet the tide. My favourite part of Uig bay is the dunes. They are wonderfully undulating and make for great compositional elements. For reasons I cannot fathom we popped back up into the dunes from the sand much earlier than I usually would. If you read my first post on Harris you’ll know that I had a brief encounter with a Golden Eagle high up on the thermals early in my trip. However, I doubt anything could have prepared me for what I found in those dunes…
At first I thought I’d spotted a large piece of eagle shaped driftwood hidden in amongst the grasses and I joked about it actually being an eagle with Rach. Then, the closer we got, the more I realised it actually was an eagle. Standing there, motionless… I popped down my camera bag and quietly changed lens, creeping forward, expecting it to get spooked at any moment and take to the skies, but that didn’t happen. Once it became uncomfortable with my presence, it began to hop rather than fly. Then it dawned on me that this bird, this majestic creature of the skies was injured badly enough that flying was no longer an option. By this point I was certain it was Golden Eagle, possibly a juvenile, although that didn’t stop my anxiety nagging at me, trying to convince me that I was actually wrong and it was a buzzard. I called the SPCA and explained the situation to the lady on the line. She too was a little sceptical at the eagle identification, but was willing to send someone down. Rather amusingly she had to tell me not to handle the bird and the idea of just marching up to a Golden Eagle with its enormous and powerful talons rather tickled me.
The SPCA chap was coming down from Stornoway, a good 90 minute drive. I wanted to keep eyes on the bird, which was now on top of a dune, crouching low against the marram grass. The rain continued to move in sheets across the landscape, and I braced myself against it and the relentless winds as I kept eyes on the eagle. All the time, it watched me too. We sat in vigil with each other.
When the SPCA chap arrived, he was surprised that we’d stuck around and I explained there was no way I was leaving the bird to disappear back into the dunes. The rescue was almost comedic. The poor chap had forgotten his heavy duty gloves and it took a team effort to get the eagle into the cage, beak wide and yellow eye meeting mine. We were told that they don’t give updates, which I understand, so I don’t if we saved it’s life or just saved it from a slow and painful death. Either way, we did the right thing, and those 90 minutes will remain indelibly fixed into my memory, and heart.
As a kid I was fascinated by Golden Eagles. I would read adventure books and wildlife books, dreaming about seeing one. Dad, too, had the same ambition. It crossed my mind as I stood there, no more than 5 - 10 metres from this glorious creature, that he would have really got a kick out of this story. He would have grinned and said, ‘that’s magic, Vem.’
Thanks so much for reading this instalment. I intend to post pt II next Sunday. If you’re new here, please consider subscribing. If you like any of the images and would like to purchase a print, let me know. If you enjoyed reading this, please consider sharing. It’s difficult to start something new, and it would mean the world. Hopefully I’ll see you again next week!
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Awesome pictures. I should be writing about some of my pictures, if I could come up with a readable enough atory lol.
Finding, guarding, and helping to capture that eagle was such an amazing experience. Words can’t really express (but yours get the closest and ‘Magic’ pretty much sums it up)❤️