Limits

Day 4; 605 miles from Oxfordshire (I should have stuck to km - it's not quite 1,000km, but if I measure the distance by road it is) 

We started with a ferry north-west, then a drive further north-west to camp (!) close to the northern end of the Outer Hebrides. Yes, it's cold; yes, there are midges; but it's not raining at the moment, so everything is great. This is the turning point; if we wanted to go any further from here, it would be the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland or North America. Not this time! 

The drive across the island is a continuous blanket bog of tree-less sphagnum moss, decomposing into peat, interupted by brooding pools of black water. In close up, I expect the moss is complex and fascinating; as a landscape it looks like an enormous, stained, lumpy, feather mattress, bleak and forbidding, unwelcoming and hostile. It is scarred by old peat workings, and some peat is still being taken on a micro scale - individuals with the right to cut for personal use, probably. Of course, we now realise it an enormous carbon sink; doing it any further damage feels like folly

We stopped, at a restored 'black house' - the stone built cottages used here for centuries. It's the first I have seen one with a roof. Stone walls are topped with driftwood or whalebone rafters. The lower part of the roof is sealed with turf, then the entire roof is covered with reed, held down with ropes, weighted at each end with stones. There is no chimney; a peat fire burns constantly; the house is filled with smoke that percolates through the reed - hence 'black' - everything coated with tar, laced with carcinogenic phenols, including the lungs of the inhabitants. It beggars belief that these death traps were still being built into the 20th century

Here on the coast, the land is a little kinder. There is some agriculture; ancient strip field patters, though most of the walls are derelict; some small settlements. We found this tiny beach and warmed to its generous curve, matched by the curve in the waves breaking on it. We tossed around for a while how that could come about (waves don't know what kind of shore they will break on to). We are (or were) all scientists, you see; that is how all this started, 50 years ago, talking about how stuff works and how things came to be, sharing good, solid, reliable facts - pushing into the background the scary stuff about emotions, dreams and fears. We try to be braver, these days, but the old reflexes still kick in a lot of the time