BEALACH NA BA
To go up the Bealach na Bà in the late gloaming of midsummer is to feel the land tilt on its axis. The road, a tarmac ribbon on an ancient drove-way, leaves the sea-level world behind. In the low, slanting light, the Pass of the Cattle begins its catechism of rock and air. My car’s engine labours, a modern pulse against the deep, slow beat of Torridonian time held in the sandstone that crowds the verges. This is a road of absolutes, a vertical conversation. With every hairpin bend, the world below – the scattered crofts, the pewter gleam of Loch Kishorn – recedes, becoming a map of itself, a memory already forming.
The ascent is a geological lesson. You climb through deep time, past rock faces shorn and scoured by ice that retreated only yesterday, geologically speaking. The mountain holds its breath here. The air thins, sharpens. Lichen, in its patient cartography, maps the slow creep of years onto the stone. You are keenly aware of the drop, a dizzying vacancy that pulls at the mind. This path was not made for the internal combustion engine, but for the hoof and the foot, for the slow, deliberate passage of beasts and people moving with the grain of the seasons.
At the summit, the world opens. The constriction of the pass gives way to a profound vastness, and the wind, that old sculptor, is the only sound. And there, across the Inner Sound, is Skye. It is not the Skye of postcards, but a harder, older island. The Cuillins are a serration on the horizon, a dragon’s spine or a jawbone set against the un-darkening northern sky. In the lingering simmer-dim, the peaks are rendered in shades of violet and indigo, their gabbro bones stark and clear. They are not so much a range of mountains as a single, complex thought expressed in rock.
The sea between here and there is a sheet of hammered metal, catching the last of the light. A gannet, a white cross, dives far below. To stand here is to feel your own briefness. The forces that threw up these mountains, that carved this pass and gouged the sea-lochs, are still at work, their pace imperceptible to a human heartbeat. The light will hold for hours yet, a long, luminous twilight that denies the finality of night. It is a moment held outside of ordinary time, a communion with the hard, enduring substance of the world.
Starting the descent towards Applecross is a return, a slow falling back to earth. But the image of the Cuillins remains printed on the mind’s eye: a silhouette of deep time, a reminder of the wildness that persists at the edges of our mapped and measured lives. The pass has worked its magic; it has altered the perspective, lifted you up and set you down again, changed.