The Turn of the Year: Shieldaig November

My last post jumped the gun. In enthusiasm for snow & ice (a little of which arrived, then went away, at the end of October) I did autumn an injustice. I was even in danger of forgetting how special Highland autumn can be, so a few November days by Loch Shieldaig was a crucial reminder of a season's glories. (A reminder helped along by reading David Borthwick's excellent piece on the arrival of Barnacle Geese in the current issue of Earthlines). The forest round Tilda’s House has been transformed over the month since we were here last:

As autumn progresses, the downy birch give off a mouldering air, while every occupied steading pumps out birch-wood smoke. These combine (especially with a little fresh rain) to make the most autumnal aromas imaginable. With 5^th Nov falling in our stay, bonfires sprang up round the loch, sending sparks high into exceptionally black skies. Surveying this landscape from any angle, sky, sea & foliage just shouted 'autumn':

The season’s greatest attribute, however, is its birds & animals. The whole cast list of the area had changed. There’d been no Whooper Swans in September…

…no skeins of geese creaking their way across the sky…

…and no Purple Sandpipers swelling out the ranks of waders…

Somehow, autumn otters seem tamer too, willing to loll on their backs, paws in the air while they gnaw on fish & feign ignorance of intruders… 

This was an exceptionally warm November week (balmier, in fact, than when we were here in September), so autumn’s dramas went on without the usual frosty hardships.

Our first day was spent reacquainting ourselves with the area. We kayaked a few miles of loch, careful to explore each bay & islet. Little Grebes & Egrets hung around near the village...

...while an exceptionally successful otter caught fish after fish in the lee of Shieldaig Island. 

    I think the phrase is 'toothy grin'...

There are now two Sea Eagles here, the young one we saw on September paddles (first pic below) joined by an older bird (second pic) for the winter. I failed to get any good shots of the latter, thanks to a string of stupid camera-fails, including a moment when I somehow contrived to hit myself in the eye with the camera strap when faced with the perfect pic.

6 weeks from winter solstice, the whole day now feels crepuscular: broken cloud & low sun made the loch at lunchtime feel like the day was over:

Every day’s forecast was mixed, and most days' forecasts were wrong. Or perhaps, more charitably, the conditions in Torridon, Shieldaig & Applecross were phenomenally localised. So with no hint of what to expect, I set off next day for a night on Beinn Eighe - no plan beyond getting onto the huge ridge & seeing what happened. The sky was full of drama as I climbed, with cloud thickening, lowering & darkening all the time…

So I stopped on the first ridge I reached (Stac Cire an Laoigh), wondering if that’s where I’d spend the night. I sat & read one of Rebecca Solnit’s many wonderful books as the sun set & the cloud swirled…

…then, in the dark, watched thin veils of fog skirt the ridges, each peak just occasionally clearing. By the time I finished A Book of Migrations, the plough was hanging huge & bright over the nearest of Eighe’s many peaks (Spidean Coire nan Clach) while Venus peeked out behind the western arm (Coinneach Mhor). The sky had cleared, so it was time to take a nightwalk.

Nightwalking in clear weather is an extraordinary pleasure. Of all the websites giving gear advice, many suggest prioritising spending on lightweight tents & sleeping bags. Few note the equal (or greater?) benefit of a really good headtorch: one with the power to open up winter nights to exploration. On an ideal walk, such a torch might mostly be turned off, as eyes accustom to the darkness, but during difficult manoeuvres (a few of those at night on Eighe!) or under cloudy skies there’s enormous value in the security provided by an 80m beam.

As I re-packed my belongings, several meteors sped across the sky, one absolutely enormous & bright as magnesium. But there was greater excitement to come. Gradually, I began to question whether the hint of light behind the northern ridges was moonrise, as I’d assumed. It was moving: shifting slowly from West to East & gently pulsing as it did. My first priority was to get to a spot with uninterrupted northern vistas. I rushed onto the Spidean, and looked out onto a wide, gradually intensifying aurora. It was a modest enough display to look sometimes like a green-tinged glow from the recent sunset (a mildly discoloured simmerdim) but every few minutes its edges would fray, forming classic auroral patterns, and greenish flares would move like slow searchlights across the northern sky. I got a bit sweary with excitement as I began to take it in…

I spent around an hour at the peak, soaking in the meteors & aurora, while Cassiopeia seemed to move slowly closer. Then I walked on, traversing a few miles of mountain by midnight, before settling down in the sleeping bag on the highest point of the ridge: the huge saddleback of Ruadh-stac Mor. Eventually, the moon did rise – dimming the other dramas in the sky – but those first few hours had been spectacular.

I was woken at 6 by the onset of a cold E wind. Dawn was still some way off, but I could see from my airy spot that a huge wall of low cloud had begun to engulf the Beinn’s easternmost slopes. I packed fast (among the joys of sleeping without a tent or bivi) and made haste to be among the drama. I skirted the ridges; this pic, taken after sunrise, looks back along the ridge I'd nightwalked W to E, then traversed back this morning (the improbable hulk of Liathach is under cloud-siege in the centre, with the distant Cuillin to the left & N Skye & Rona in the low-level murk on the right):

The scale of the fluffy featherbed below soon became clear…

…this mass was moving quickly, pouring over bealachs…

...with the resultant cloud-cascades slowly separating then homogenizing again (pulsing like the northern lights a few hours before)...

…but at its western edge the cloud was simply dissipating, its front-line failing to advance. The W coast was the only clear horizon but it somehow stayed resolutely cloudless: a pocket of stubborn warmth as the cold front blew in:

For the hours I stayed on the ridge, the cloud wrapped three sides of the mountain - moving manically within but staying stationary without.

In the pic above, one of Scotland's finest mountains, An Teallach, peers over another classic, Slioch (the distinctive shape that gave it its name, 'the spear', not at all evident from this angle). The mountain in the next pic is one of the most coveted Munros, because both beautiful & inaccessible: A' Mhaighdean...

Many of these photos were taken before dawn, but the most breathtaking moments came when the sun's first rays lit the cloud-tops and the world turned high-contrast: 

I couldn’t stay too long (I’d promised to be back in time for us to spend the day in the kayaks) and every so often gaps in cloud gave glimpses of my route down. Here's Loch Clair far below...

So by 10.30 I was driving home, utterly exhilarated by an unexpectedly spectacular mountain night. A quick lunch later (not even time for a wash or coffee), boats were loaded on the car & we were heading to Applecross to kayak in the Inner Sound. Conditions were glorious as we passed postcard Highland scenes:

And the Cuillin seemed spectacularly close as we headed out from Camusterrach with the usual seal convoy…

Today we also had the company of several Great Northern Divers, some still transitioning from summer to winter plumage…

Every skerry here was full of waders: a few redshank & turnstone hiding out amidst crowds of curlew & purple sandpiper. Here’s one such turnstone:  

The presence of so many waders resulted in constant kayak fly-bys..

...which often provided games of spot-the-odd-one-out:

But as we drifted close to flocks, they’d carry on washing, preening & wandering through the breaking waves, apparently unconcerned by human presence. Watching this community in action felt like a kind of avian anthropology…

Heading further south, we found more otters, or rather, they found us. The first swam out from a skerry to investigate but I’d barely unpacked the camera before it dived…

…the second just popped up at a perfect moment, and lay back to juggle its catch, hands & feet waving around in apparent joy at the prospect of fish. Previous otter encounters have been wonderful, but this might have been my favourite - the pleasure expressed by those waving forepaws was infectious (wish I'd thought to switch the camera to 'film')...

…as so often, it only bothered to scrutinise us once every last morsel was consumed.

As we rounded the islands that we’d been aiming for, a blaze of sun broke the cloud above the Cuillin…

…and the clearer sky to the N, over Raasay & Rona, turned pink & reflected back from the dead-calm sea. 

Whenever we stopped paddling, we were met with perfect silence: it's strange to be on water with the only sound your heartbeat. Although we felt like we were miles from anywhere, we still caught occasional wafts of birch-wood smoke from isolated coastal crofts.

It was dark when we made landfall, and time to make for the Applecross Inn, which somehow manages – unlike almost everywhere else – to serve freshly caught shellfish through the winter. (It helps, I guess, that the man who catches the langoustines works in the Inn of an evening, while the scallops come from our old friend Andy Diver in Achiltibuie). Equally good, the Applecross Inn's sticky toffee pudding, packed with ginger & treacle, seems to embody autumn (as do the Red Skye ale & cask-strength Caol Ila at the bar). 

After this, some deliciously fierce weather swept the region and it was time to hunker down with coffee, fires & work. One of my tasks was to check the final proofs of my new book (on the shelves in Feb). But alongside this, I found myself working on two book proposals instead of just the one I'd planned. That's because my first effort at a nature book (provisionally called Intrusions: Fragments of Nature & Culture Out of Place) is  underway.