Mingulay
Here on Mingulay is the first place I feel really on the edge of something. On Canna the continuous presence of people over thousands of years is palpable. There’s evidence of habitation from prehistoric times right through to the present day – shell middens, and an old Celtic cross, weathered and worn, broken by cannonballs when it was used for target practice during the Napoleonic wars. Now it is fenced off, with the National Trust for Scotland wondering how best to protect it, but I like the idea of its weathering and gradual decay back into the land. On it, and on the fence posts, all over the islands, are lichens; delicate barometers of good air quality and beautiful in their own right. This trip gives you this space to pause and look, and really see a long view. On Mingulay, once we walk west, up past the deserted village, we are outnumbered by teaming birdlife – off the east side of the island, in Mingulay Bay, where we are berthed, there have been several basking sharks, occasionally breaching, and it seems thousands of puffins, who in the evening, land and circle, land and circle round the bay to and from their burrows, always, last night at least, in an anticlockwise direction. On the west side are spectacular sea cliffs, which even though we stand above them dwarf and overwhelm us. A sea eagle flew from a cliff ledge off to the south towards Bernaray and there are skuas, yet more puffins, razorbills and guillemots, and on one part of the islands, hundreds of butterfles. Here, it is easy, for a time at least, to forget about the dearth of wildlife or the speed of life in some of the other places that we inhabit.
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