CAIRNS O'CAMSTER
To walk the Flow Country of Caithness as the light fails is to feel the land’s deep grammar. The ground underfoot is a lexicon of sphagnum and peat, written over millennia. You follow the old paths, the ghost-roads, drawn towards the low humps that rise from the moorland like sleeping beasts of stone. These are the Cairns o’ Camster, a long barrow and a round cairn, their shapes softened by the slow creep of five thousand years.
The air grows thin and cold. The last of the sun’s warmth has bled from the sky, leaving a bruised purple stain in the west. It is in this gloaming that the stones begin to speak. They are grey and silvered with lichen, each one a testament to the immense human labour that hauled it here, that placed it just so. To stoop and enter the low passage of the long cairn is to commit to a different kind of time. Inside, the world is muffled, the air still and heavy with the scent of damp earth and stone. You are in the belly of the land, a chamber built for the dead, a place of quiet waiting.
Then, climbing back into the open, you see it. The moon, nearly full, is shouldering its way above the horizon. It pours a cold, liquid light across the moor, bleaching the heather, sharpening the edges of the stones. The world is rendered in monochrome, a landscape suddenly alien and vast. The desolation here is no longer just an absence of people or trees; it is an active presence, a force. It is in this moment that the words of another explorer, one who walked a different, more distant wilderness, come to mind. Buzz Aldrin, stepping onto the lunar surface, saw a place of 'magnificent desolation'.
That is the feeling here, under the Caithness moon. A magnificence in the sheer scale of the emptiness, in the raw, elemental beauty of it all. The desolation is not one of loss, but of purity. The wind that scours these stones, the moonlight that floods this ancient tomb-scape - they strip away the noise of the present, leaving only the essential. The neolithic hands that built this place and the gloved hands that planted a flag on the moon were separated by an ocean of time, yet they shared a common impulse: to reach into a profound emptiness and leave a mark, a sign that says, simply, ‘we were here.’ The cairns, gleaming under the lunar glow, are our own silent Sea of Tranquility.