Day 5: The morning arrived calm and bright. Our resident songbird was already awake and making certain everyone else was too. After packing up, we headed for Bealach na Bà, the highest road in the UK. It’s a single track with tight hairpin bends, the sort of route that comes with a police warning advising … Continue reading Where the Road Thins: Skye…
Day 4: Wind and rain. Rain and wind. After a mostly sleepless night on the cliffs above Durness, everything was damp, everything rattled and our spirits had taken a firm battering. But storms lose their power once you’re on the move again, and by the time we were packed up and back on the road, … Continue reading Where the Road Thins: Ullapool…
Day 3: The morning began beneath an impossibly blue sky. Our first stop was Dunnet Head, the most northerly point on mainland Great Britain. Seabirds crowded the cliffs, some of them nesting and others carried effortlessly by the wind. Puffins perched on rocky ledges in the distance, meaning binoculars were a requirement to properly appreciate … Continue reading Where the Road Thins: Durness…
Day 2: Our first stop was the Glenmorangie distillery. Which was closed. The first lesson of the trip: never presume. We laughed it off and continued north. The Whaligoe Steps were next. Rather than fight for a space in the tiny car park above them, we left the car in a layby along a quiet … Continue reading Where the Road Thins: Scarfskerry…
Day 1: The NC500 route officially starts in Inverness, but we’d been there before and it felt right to begin the journey beside water filled with stories, so we began our camping road trip at Loch Ness. The forecast promised rain, but it never arrived. Instead, something else hung in the air. Something heavy and … Continue reading Where the Road Thins: Loch Ness…
Spring merges into summer and days stretch further till evenings almost refuse to close out. In some ways it’s a welcome relief to feel warmth returning and to have more daylight hours. And yet there’s something about the light, isn’t there? It’s different. Stronger and more direct. Dare I say, less forgiving? It reaches into … Continue reading The Shadows of Summer…
I found it beside the main road, resting openly beneath a bush and gleaming white against the dark soil as though it had been deliberately placed there to be noticed. It was almost ceremonial in its positioning. It was also small enough to fit in my palm. So I brought it home with me. And … Continue reading Cranium Cuniculi…
There are places that feel different. Not immediately, and not in a way you can always articulate. It’s gradual, as though something in the air has shifted. You notice before you understand. Horden dene is like that. I’ve walked it many times. The same paths, the same turns, the same descent into green, where the noise … Continue reading Land Spirits…
There’s a tendency to give nature a face. To call it Mother, as though that makes it knowable. But nature doesn’t ask permission, it moves with an insistence that isn’t kindness so much as inevitability. The land remembers what it’s supposed to do. Season after season. Loss after loss. Growth returns not because it’s hopeful, but … Continue reading Mother Nature…
There are moments in stories where a woman is named a witch, not because she’s stirring something in a cauldron and speaking to the moon, but because she knows something she hasn’t explained. Or she lives alone. Or she simply doesn’t behave as she’s expected to. It doesn’t take much. She’s always noticed, observed too … Continue reading The Witch & Hare…
R. H. DIXON 