Northern Beach, Isle of Barra

Incredibly beautiful – white sand is being blown under the tip of my pen, small white breakers underlining emphatically the green, green ocean. Squeals of children playing in the shallows of the frigid water. The temperature is about the same as Stewart Island back on the 1st of March this year: icy but bearable. There are ridges in the sand in the shallows. Nothing on the horizon – out there is the coast of Labrador or further south, where I stood at Cabot’s Landing, Cape Breton Island and looked east to here, where we all came from.

Off Vatersay to the south, an emigrant ship went down in the 19th century with the loss of 333 lives. Was that any worse, for those who stayed, than the parting already endured?

Castlebay, Isle of Barra

There is a funeral on at present here so the cycle hire man is not in his big brown shed. Two ladies walking up the path were speaking Gaelic on their way to the church. I understood “tha mi gu math”. Thought of saying “tha I brèagha an-diugh”: very appropriate on this beautiful day – it must be mid-20s °C. The accent of the Gaels is not usually Scottish when speaking English – it is very soft, so soft as to be indistinguishable from the Gaels of the west coast of Ireland.

I love this place (the sun is shining!). “Quiet found no more within” rules here. You can make as much noise as you like, it will be swallowed, annihilated by this place. I think the whole adult population of the island is in the church at the moment! The pipes have begun – singing a son or daughter home on his or her last journey. Clear and proud in the August sunlight – sailing the final time to the place of the ever-living, Tìr nan Òg.

Death is something these places have plenty of, the old ones taking the old ways with them. It is the stories of the Sons of the Gael that survive here – of Fionn mac Caoul, Cuchulainn and the Tuatha de Danaan: the Norse came and ruled and faded again, leaving only a few placenames. So too is the future for the Sasannach perhaps.