IMIR FADA
The world had dissolved to grey. Not the soft, shifting grey of a dreich day in the glens, but a dense, saturating whiteness that erased the boundary between earth and air. Ben More Assynt had vanished, leaving only the steepening ground beneath my boots. To climb into such a mist is to walk off the edge of the map, to trust not in sight but in older, deeper senses. My compass became a third eye, its needle a sliver of true north trembling in its liquid housing. Each step was a measured beat, a slow rhythm against the mountain's silence, as I paced out the distance, ticking off the land in hundred-metre increments.
The ground was a rough weave of quartzite scree and sodden sphagnum, a terrain that speaks through the soles of your feet. I was navigating by memory and magnet, my mind holding a ghost-image of the OS map while my body did the work. It was in this state of heightened attention, this deep listening to the landscape, that I almost missed it. A flicker of movement at the edge of my vision, a shape that resolved itself from the lichen-spattered rock. A Golden Plover, its plumage a constellation of moss-gold and peat-black, stood stock-still. It stared, a bead of wildness in the void, before melting back into the terrain. I followed its line of sight and there, nestled in a shallow scrape, lay four perfect eggs, exquisitely camouflaged, their shells whorled with the colours of the mountain itself. A small, fierce pulse of life in the immense, cold quiet.
Leaving the nest to its wild secrecy, I recalibrated, took a new bearing, and pushed on. The air grew colder. Then, shapes began to loom from the whiteness, not of rock, but of twisted, skeletal metal. Fragments of the Avro Anson, scattered like thrown bones. Here, a spar of wing, there, a radial-cylindered engine, the wreckage strewn across the shoulder of the mountain, a scar held by the hill since 1941. At the heart of the debris field stands the stone memorial plinth, with a crew of simple weathered wooden crosses standing at ease before it. The mist swirled around it, muffling the world, creating a cathedral of cloud and silence. I stood there for a long time, the only sound the wind's low keen across the wreckage, paying my respects not just to a memory, but to the presence of the young men who fell from the sky and became part of this mountain's long story.