Turning Point

Today we walked on the wild side of Mull. We saw eagles, we saw dramatic waterfalls, we saw deer, we saw mountain peaks bathed in cloud, we saw vertiginous cliffs falling to silver sea, we saw deeply incised valleys winding up to heather moorland, we saw cattle more nimble than seems reasonable for such ungainly, calm beasts

In fact, I got us fairly comprehensively lost, and we found ourselves on an unfeasibly steep valley side, rather uncomfortably close to a rampaging, swollen burn below us, forcing our way with exhausting difficulty through dense, twisted and tangled birch shrubland

But Mull, it seems, has a forgiving nature, and rewarded my incompetence with all the gifts I described above. Eventually, we scrabbled our way to higher ground, cheerfully abandoned our over-ambitious objective and enjoyed the soft grass, the showers we could see blown across the islands, clear air and the sense of having dug ourselves out of a bit of a hole. Rather randomly we fell upon this enclosure. The walls served as useful shelter to tackle sandwiches, English apples and Tunnocks wafers

This one picture shows two sides of the clearances. Behind the structure a few stones are still visible through the bracken and heather - the remains of the houses that once occupied this sheltered, secluded spot, still present as a collection of rectangles on a map, but hard to find on the ground. The structure itself is a 'fank' - sheep handling pens - built using the very stones of the emptied houses, in order to support the new farming that had motivated their forced abandonment. Salt upon the wound

Blipper Treshnish has devoted herself to researching, finding, recording and photographing to a high professional standard all the fanks on Mull. See her blips and her web site for lots of information

We simply enjoyed our chance find, the ghosts were kindly to us and we found an easier path home