ASSYNT
The old ways are the best ways, my father says, and he should know. His life was spent in the dark, in the deep places of the earth, following coal seams that ran like black veins through the rock. Now, retired, he walks the high places, the wide-open spaces of Assynt, a man revelling in the sudden, glorious light. We walk together, his pace still steady, a miner’s gait on the mountain’s spine.
Assynt is a landscape stripped back to its bones. The mountains here – Suilven, Canisp, Quinag – are not the jagged, arrogant peaks of the high Cairngorms. They are islands in a sea of moorland, their flanks scoured by ice, their summits lonely and remote. They are mountains of great age, their Lewisian gneiss and Torridonian sandstone telling a story of deep time, of pressures and upheavals that my father, in his own way, understands. He runs a hand over the rough, pinkish rock of Suilven’s flank, a geologist’s caress from a collier’s hand. ‘Good stone,’ he says, a simple benediction.
We follow a stalker’s path, a faint trace on the vast canvas of the land. The air is sharp with the scent of bog myrtle and wet peat. Below us, lochans glitter like scattered mercury, their surfaces ruffled by a wind that has travelled a thousand miles of open ocean to be here. My father points to a distant ridge. ‘We’d have called that a fault line,’ he says, ‘a weakness in the strata.’ He sees the land in terms of its structure, its hidden architecture. I see the poetry; he sees the engineering. We are both right.
The climb is a steady rhythm of breath and boot. My father, who spent decades on his knees in the claustrophobic confines of the pit, now revels in the vertical. He moves with a quiet determination, a deceptive relentlessness,his body remembering the effort of the incline, the strain in the thighs, the burn in the lungs. For him, this is not a conquest, but a conversation. He is speaking to the mountain in a language of muscle and sinew, a language he has known all his life. The summit is a reward, but the true communion is in the journey, in the slow, deliberate act of placing one foot in front of the other.
Up here, on the roof of this ancient world, the silence is profound. It is not an absence of sound, but a presence. It is the whisper of the wind, the cry of a distant eagle, the beat of our own hearts. My father stands, his face to the wind, his eyes scanning the crumpled, chaotic beauty of the land. He has swapped the darkness for this immensity of light and air, the confines of the seam for the freedom of the summit. He has come up from the deep places, and in the wild, elemental grandeur of Assynt, he has, I think, found his way home.