Dun Telve, Dun Troddan

I left Sandaig Bay most reluctantly.... Sandaig, with its beautiful but tragic memories of Gavin Maxwell and Kathleen Raine...

... Sandaig, with its razorshells and coiled lugworm casts and enormous jellyfish (some of them 1 and a half ft in diameter) on the beach, and its rockpools, and islands, and hard clusters of baby mussels...

Before heading further north, away from the unspoilt, heavenly Glenelg peninsula, I took 2 more walks - the 1st in Gleann Beag, one of the loveliest of all the Scottish glens. Here you can find 2 of the best preserved brochs in the whole of Scotland, both within half a mile of each other. This is Dun Telve...

... and this is Dun Troddan...

Brochs are drystone, hollow-walled structures of circular design, found only in Scotland - mostly in the far north (lots in Caithness), and in the Northern and Western Isles. Their function is unclear to this day. Defensive forts? Places of refuge? Homes for those high up in the social pecking order? What's beyond dispute, however, is that they were built in the Iron Age - between 2000 and 3000 years ago. They're astonishing, atmospheric places (later I saw another preserved broch - Dun Carloway, on the Isle of Lewis). Another broch-visitor, whom I'd been chatting to earlier, suddenly called out from 50 yards down the road: "Look up!" 3 golden eagles were soaring majestically above the topmost crags of the glen, each in a different part of the sky...

For my 2nd walk I took an overgrown, little-used path which snaked north-east from the small watery settlement of Glenelg. First I battled through 7 ft high ferns (some plants seem to grow taller on this western coast - which is bathed in warm Gulf Stream waters). Then I squelched across high, boggy moorland. It was all unbelievably lonely and remote. I met no other walkers. Finally I joined a forestry track which led steeply down to Ardintoul on Loch Alsh.

Returning along the narrow strait of Kyle Rhea - which separates Glenelg from the Isle of Skye - I passed a solitary sailing boat drifting in the middle of the channel. Loud music blared from the boat and echoed round the hills - I think it was an Elton John song, played over and over - but I saw no one on board. It reminded me of the Mary Celeste...

I roamed through a paradise of wild flowers - tutsan, heath spotted orchid, eyebright, bog asphodel, ragged robin. A yellow mist of meadowsweet. A froth of purple-tinged wild angelica. Ravens cronk-cronked, oystercatchers piped and a stonechat flew out of a gorse bush. A seal barked from far away. Then the rain, which had been threatening for hours, poured down. I scurried back to the car under a dripping blanket of pines. It had been a tiring but wonderful day...

Ring Of Bright Water

He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water/Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea,/He has married me with a ring of light, the glitter/Broadcast on the swift river. KATHLEEN RAINE. From The Marriage Of Psyche.

This is Sandaig on the Glenelg peninsula - halfway up Scotland's indented West Highland coast. The writer and adventurer Gavin Maxwell lived here with his beloved otters during the late 1950s and 1960s. The old lighthousekeeper's cottage where he used to live no longer exists, for it burned down in 1968 (Maxwell's otter Edal died in the fire). The site of the cottage is the patch of long grass you can see centre-right in my 2nd pic. The 3rd pic shows a different view of it - the patch of long grass is now centre-left. (In Maxwell's day the slopes behind would not have been covered with larch and sitka spruce as they are now.)

Part of the time Maxwell lived here with the poet, critic and scholar Kathleen Raine. (The title of his famous book Ring Of Bright Water comes from one of Raine's poems, The Marriage Of Psyche. This 'ring' of water, made up of freshwater stream and saltwater sea, almost encircled their cottage - in my 2nd pic you can just make out the course of the stream, which runs behind the site of the cottage, beneath the grassy headland and into the sea.)

Raine was besotted with Maxwell - she's on record as saying he was the love of her life - but their relationship ended tragically. Despairing of his homosexuality, she laid down a curse: 'Let Gavin suffer in this place as I am suffering now.' Not long after that she accidentally 'lost' his otter Mijbil which he'd brought home all the way from Iraq. This led to Mijbil's death at the hands of a roadmender. And Raine also blamed herself and her curse for the cancer which killed Maxwell in 1969. He was only in his mid-fifties.

Forget the film starring Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna. Go back to Maxwell's book - it's a classic of natural history writing and romantic autobiography. Maxwell is an eternally intriguing and controversial character, a man full of contradictions: a loner yet possessor of numerous, diverse friendships; a despot whom many described as unfailingly generous and kind; a homosexual who was nevertheless drawn to women; a restless adventurer and traveller, who tried to create a permanent home for himself and his otters; a passionate conservationist ahead of his time, yet also a harpooner of basking sharks. (He once owned the island of Soay off the Isle of Skye, where he attempted but ultimately failed to set up a viable shark fishery business. Basking sharks are sadly prized for their their huge livers, which yield copious amounts of oil, and for their fins, which are used in shark's fin soup. Scotland's basking shark population has still not recovered.)

On the site of Maxwell's former cottage stands a boulder, scattered with shells and stones which pilgrims have placed there...

... and in the centre of the boulder there's a simple slate memorial...

A World Within This One

Hindus believe in a great soul or spirit, called Brahman, or God. Brahman has no shape or form and cannot be seen but is present in everything. Each of the thousands of Hindu deities represents an aspect of Brahman. From The Atlas of World Religions (2002) by Anita Ganeri

For days I've been haunted by the quote from Paul Éluard, the French Surrealist poet, posted recently on Old Girl Of The North Country's blog: There is another world, but it is in this one.

What better example of this truth than the life and work of the great visionary mystic William Blake (1757-1827).

Blake wrote: If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. He believed that mankind allowed itself to be bounded by perceptions, and that it is the unseen mind (or understanding or soul or spirit) that truly perceives - not the 5 senses. One could say that this mind or soul "looks through" the window of the 5 senses.

There is an "Internal" and "External" world, a "Within" and "Without", in every bird, beast, flower and insect, every living thing - and also in stones and rocks and all inanimate objects. The physical form of these bodies, which we perceive with our senses, is the "correspondence" or "signature" of the soul.

Blake turned these concepts into the myths which permeate his work - his poetry, his paintings and his drawings. Nature is seen as a "veiled" goddess. She is mythologized by Blake as the moon goddess, Vala. You can also find her in the figure of Persephone, who, according to the Greek myth, wore a veil for Demeter when she fell into Hades. The Roman Minerva and the Egyptian Isis, wife of Osiris, are other personifications of this veiled goddess of Nature.

Man falls in love with Vala, is deluded by the world of phenomenal appearances, and from this follows every evil of the Fall - a story resonating in the Biblical legend of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The veil is the cause of war, materialism, all human vice and wrongdoing. The veiled face of the goddess is forever hidden from all but those few who have attained Enlightenment.

Blake also wrote: To me this World is all one continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination. Once more he's referring to another world intertwined with this world...

All such ideas and many more are discussed in the poet Kathleen Raine's erudite and exciting 2 volume work Blake and Tradition.