THE FAIRY LOCHS
The path begins as a promise, a soft track winding from the road near Gairloch, but it soon becomes a question. On a day of high, bright summer, with a sky of impossible blue, the ground remembers water. It holds it in the deep, dark cups of the peat, releasing it with a sigh under the weight of a boot. To walk here is to learn the land’s language by foot, a grammar of bog-myrtle and sphagnum, of granite bones showing through thin, heathery skin. I was climbing towards the Fairy Lochs, though the name, with its fey whimsy, felt ill-suited to the day’s purpose: a pilgrimage to a place of sudden violence and long memory.
The track dissolves into a hundred possible ways, a negotiation with the wetness of the earth. You follow the drier lines, the faint traces left by others who have made this same ascent. The air is sharp with the scent of pine and the peppery tang of the moor. Below, Loch Gairloch is a shard of fallen sky, and the Torridonian giants stand clear on the horizon, their sandstone flanks ancient and unweathered by the passing concerns of men. But here, the focus is smaller, more intimate. It is a landscape that draws you in, demanding attention to the particular, to the small, dark lochans that begin to pock the plateau.
And then, you see it. Not the memorial plaque at first, but a piece of the story itself. An engine, rusted but defiant, sits half-submerged in the peat, its intricate mechanics exposed to the slow, patient work of the Highland weather. A little further, a propeller blade, bent and twisted, rises from the dark water of a lochan like a strange, metal reed. These are not just fragments; they are relics. The bright, unblinking sun of this summer’s day does not diminish their power but sharpens their edges, making them starkly present. They are a clitter of memory, a scattering of an event that tore a hole in the sky on the 13th of June, 1945.
I walked to the simple stone cairn that bears the plaque. Fifteen names. Fifteen young men, far from their American homes, who survived a war only to be claimed by this hill on their journey back to it. The B-24 Liberator, ‘Wee Willie’, lost in cloud, found the unforgiving rock. Standing there, the silence is profound. It is a quiet composed of wind skirling over the water’s surface and the hum of insects in the heather. I read the names aloud, a quiet litany against the vastness. To speak a name is to summon a presence, to insist that a life is not erased by its ending.
Leaving the site, the path down feels different. The landscape is now charged with a new resonance. The bright day no longer feels like a simple expression of summer, but a kind of illumination, a light shone upon a hidden sorrow that has become part of the very substance of this place. The wreckage will continue its slow return to the earth, the iron leaching into the peat, but the story is held here, in the water and the stone, waiting for those who make the climb to listen.