The sgurr of Canna rises in rockjag, granite layered with larval basalt and dressed partly in a lush green. The late and welcome sunshine lifts it into a story, People have lived here for thousands of years, working with what they had. They climbed these cliffs, fed their sheep, their cattle, themselves. They had boats or didn’t but either way the only connection to ‘civilised’ life was over the water, the oftentimes complicata of tidal conflict, of adverse weather. They didn’t run out of milk because someone had a milk cow. They made butter, cheese, curds and more. They didn’t run out of green because they collected ‘green’ and made something healthy. They kept pigs, those who could afford one, and sheep and they shared. They had wool for carding and spinning, clearing off the lanolin in stored barrels of urine, and then washing the fleeces in fresh spring water from rushing burns, drying them on hillsides. They had clothes. All around them moved healthy air, sea blown, pure, unpolluted. Even today, this day, in times of human foolery and folly, this place breathes clean and clear. The island has a strong community ethic. We can feel it. Unlike so many ‘civilised’ places, with instant everything and an uber a quick call away, this place, like so many Hebridean islands has so much more to offer.

I watch those who live an island life with interest. Although I do live on one such island and have done for over 4 decades, these remote places, inhabitants from a mere 40 to perhaps 400, I notice things. No woman is bothered with her eyebrows, the shape of her nose, nor what she ought to be wearing. When life is paired down to what is actually important, such fricking nonsense is just fricking nonsense. It teaches me. Although the ‘patriarchal’ control is supposedly diminishing, it seems to me that women still uphold it, maintain it.

Where life is truly lived, engaged with fully and is tough, challenging and deeply fulfilling, may well lie well outside and beyond ‘civilised’ lies. I watch the sun light up a curve of cove on Rum, its tail fire dancing over the stacs of Canna and then gone in a cloudsnap. I see salt peppering the windows of the boat as we swing and sway at anchor in this bay. I feel stories, ancient stories flow in and out of me, words in gaelic, auld scots, and understand not one word even as I understand it all.