9

WILD THINGS

In which our author seeks wildness, pays homage to an otter and his Maxwell, and finds joy in rain

We have come to a magical place, a place of wonder. A place of eagles, seals and otters; of heather, rowan and silver birch; of mist, lochs and sheep; of serrated ridges, looming hills and sweeping, U-shaped valleys; of six different types of cloud in one sky and four seasons in a day; of waterproofs, backpacks and walking boots; of sun, drizzle and downpours; of shafts of sunlight illuminating the ageless hills in all their majestic grandeur, heads in the clouds and thin ribbon waterfalls tickling their midriffs.

A place, as it turns out, of countless camper vans.

We have come to Skye.

The city dweller in me yearns for this kind of space. A population density of six people per square kilometre should ensure that encounters with other humans are few and far between. But the road to our rented cottage is single track, and we learn quickly enough that part of our daily routine will involve a fair amount of waiting in passing places while a clutch of vehicles – resembling nothing more than massive, evil, sentient freezers – trundles stolidly towards us, their drivers’ attention divided between keeping their behemoth of a vehicle on the road and glancing up at the relentlessly observable scenery.

This enforced slowing down does at least enable us to strike up friendships with several sheep, whose ability to add a level of picturesque rural charm to any tableau is matched only by their ability to trot out in front of cars at just the wrong moment.

What with the sheep and the camper vans and ooh look at the way the sun brings out the purple in that heather, progress around the island* takes a while. But there are worse places for a slow drive than Skye. It is a place of enduring ruggedness and beauty. If my adage that everything is 10 per cent better next to water holds true, you can add at least another 5 per cent if the water is fringed by hills whose immediate, in-your-face glamour gives way on closer inspection to subtler charms. Their true character is elusive, revealing itself piecemeal, and shifting according to the prevailing weather of that particular minute.

It would, in fact, be perfectly easy to spend our week on the island contentedly pootling around in the car, enjoying its delights at one remove, cocooned from the elements and experiencing the whole thing as if it were a muffled virtual reality travelogue.

But we are a family of at least moderate activity. While I don’t cycle up a hill with quite the relish exhibited by my son, and certainly don’t regard a mountain as an opportunity to grab my hard hat, ropes and crampons and clamber up it like a deranged ibex, I am at least a disciple of the ‘don the sturdy walking boots and see you at the top for a slice of Kendal mint cake and a wee dram’ school of outdoor experiencer.

Besides, it would feel like a betrayal of the island to flap around it at the edges. You can’t get to know a place without smelling its air, examining its landscape, experiencing its weather – and Skye has all three of those commodities in abundance. So we go for walks of varying lengths and strenuousness, ensuring each time that we are suitably equipped with water-excluding bodywear and a cheerful ‘what the hell, it’s only water’ demeanour. In the event, they’re barely needed. Skye’s weather, much maligned, treats us very well indeed.

It all depends, I suppose, on your definition of ‘very well indeed’.

My relationship with early mornings is mixed. On the one hand, there’s that heady feeling of being a conspirator in the hatching of a new day, the knowledge that whatever the ensuing hours may hold, I’m giving it my best shot and not missing a minute of the action; on the other hand, my eyes are glued shut and my brain mutters darkly at me for ruining a perfectly good dream. But victory goes to the part of me that wants to explore this new and intriguing place. It always does.

The air is fresh and clean, a positive invitation to breathe deeply and exhale with a satisfied ‘aaahh’. The hills in the distance are dark outlines, their silhouettes crisp in the early-morning light, detail obscured in shadow – they’re holding their secrets close to their chest just for the moment. In the foreground, the loch is a dull pewter, the ripples in its surface touched by the metallic peach reflection of the rising sun; off to the right heavy grey clouds foretell wetness, leeching their 4B pencil shading down onto the surface of another, more distant loch. Bubble of twite, chatter of goldfinch, caw of hooded crow. Over the hill behind me a buzzard mews.

Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in West Norwood any more.

Aware of the dangers of the instinctive urge to photograph everything in sight, I’ve been more reticent with the camera of late, but this scene is so blatantly snappable that I can’t resist. Besides, it will act as a perfect summation of the Skye experience, encapsulating as it does so many aspects of it. Loch, hills, sun, rain, a couple of islets poking their torsos above the surface – all in a picturesque tableau that positively begs to be photographed in the panoramic style that seems such a good idea at the time but never really comes off when transferred to the flat medium of your computer screen.

The walk from the front door of the cottage takes me to the end of the road, past the ruins of an abandoned village and beyond, onto a soggy path leading gently inland while maintaining extensive views of the surrounding ooh-ness. It’s a gentle, undemanding climb and I see no reason to curtail my walk. I look back across the loch. The clouds have, if anything, intensified, an effect explained by simple geography: earlier they were far away,* but now they are close. I estimate it’ll be half an hour before I’m subjected to a drenching.

Such easy confidence.

On the way back, I notice the effect the incoming clouds have had on the landscape. Shadows have shifted, silhouettes darkened and softened. The berries on the lone rowan tree near the ruined village, so bright before, have taken on a dull lustre. The sun, which ten minutes earlier had brought to mind such words as ‘pellucid’ and ‘luminescent’, is about to be engulfed by a moving wall of cloud, bringing to mind such words as ‘fuck me, I’m about to get soaked’.

I quicken my pace. Lulled into a false sense of security, I’ve left the house wearing nothing more protective than a pair of binoculars.

I’m stopped by a gronk. Or maybe it’s a grawk. However I might choose to transliterate it, it’s enough to stop me in my tracks and bring my binoculars to my eyes.

This is not a sound I know.

I find them quickly enough. They’re flying highish over the loch, heading towards me. Almost duck-like, but not quite. Almost gooselike, but not quite. A hint of cormorant.

Red-throated divers.

I’ve seen these birds just once before. Then, they were flying low above the horizon, at least two miles away over a turbulent sea off the Isle of Sheppey on the coldest day I have ever experienced.* I saw them that day only because my brilliant friend David, who can pick a needle-tailed swift from an avian haystack with his binoculars tied behind his back, showed them to me through his telescope. The memory of their shape, distinct even at that distance, and his pithy explanation of how he identified them – dumpy body, low-slung head – have stayed with me across the intervening three years, and now, at last, I have an opportunity to put that knowledge to good use.

They have a strange clumsy elegance about them, like someone speaking perfect French with a thick English accent. Fast but somehow awkward. And their oddness is reinforced, as they fly past and veer away from me over the loch, with another grawk.

Although I’m not familiar with the sounds of red-throated divers, I can tell you other things about them. Their scientific name, for example: Gavia stellata. Or the pleasing fact that, while we Brits resolutely adhere to the name ‘diver’ for this family of very much water-based birds,* the rest of the English-speaking world goes with ‘loon’.

I’m fairly sure of my identification, but the last thing you want is to be the kind of birder who reels off a series of misidentifications with misplaced confidence, based on little more than a brief glimpse and a desire to have seen the bird in question. Much better to err on the side of caution. Luckily, in this modern world of immediate gratification, I have in my pocket a device loaded with an application that has an encyclopedic collection of bird sounds, and it is the work of a few seconds to confirm that the gronk^† I heard was indeed the work of the bird they call the red-throated diver or loon.

The thrill I get from this sighting isn’t to do with rarity. Not entirely, at least. A sighting of an unfamiliar bird always has its own frisson, but the frisson alone can’t account for the particular quality these birds bring to the morning.

It takes me a few seconds to work it out.

It’s not just the birds, for all their unfamiliarity and weirdness. And it’s not just the hills, the loch and the sky, attractive though they are. It’s the whole package – all of the above, all tied up with my solitude and the strangely intimate moment with the red-throated divers into a neat little bundle of special. I can see it now. I would paint it, if I could.

And while it’s quite possible there’s someone a few hundred yards down the road sharing the sighting without my knowledge, I selfishly claim this moment for myself. They’re my birds, my hills, my looming, massive rainclouds, now overhead and heavily, ominously pregnant.

Oh dear.

It doesn’t stand on ceremony, this rain. None of that mizzle nonsense. Its opening gambit is a thick, heavy drop on the road in front of me, the kind that might ricochet and take out a small child. And immediately it’s backed up by a battalion of its compadres. This is proper, serious, professional rain. Rain that would have no qualms about breaking into your house, raiding the fridge, turfing the cat off the sofa and chatting up your girlfriend. It’s taking no prisoners.

I’m still at least half a mile from the cottage, and it’s not going to stop to let me get back.

With sinking heart and rapidly moistening clothes, I trudge onwards. The old argument of whether it’s best to walk quickly or slowly in a downpour is moot – it’s going to get me, whatever.

And then I stop.

This rain isn’t cold. I can change my clothes at home. I was going to have a shower anyway. What is it about the rain, I ask myself, that makes me want to avoid it? A moment or two’s thought, accompanied only by the sound of litres of water hitting tarmac, gives me the answer: nothing.

That flick of the switch. The instant change from rejection to acceptance, from grumpiness to cheer, from ‘no’ to ‘yes’. Smiling, laughing almost, I submit to it, and suddenly the rain is my friend. There’s a freedom to it, a release. It’s like that moment at the end of The Shawshank Redemption, but without the preceding crawl through miles of raw sewage.

The water cascades through my hair, penetrates my clothing, saturates me from stem to stern. On another occasion – many other occasions – this soaking would cause misery, a drowning of the spirit. But just this once it feels liberating. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that dryness and warmth are not far away; perhaps the intoxication of the first morning of the trip has immunised me to misery; perhaps it’s the divers.

Yes, that’ll be it. Birds are responsible for everything good. Unless you can come up with a more plausible explanation.

There’s a kerfuffle at the car park – on Skye, there often is. Two cars ahead of us wait for a camper van to emerge from its parking place by the side of the road. The camper van is hampered by a pothole, the proximity of a bank by the side of the road, and its driver’s incompetence. The front car is waiting for the space between the camper van to be big enough for it to slide in, like a ferret sizing up a particularly tight drainpipe.

There is manoeuvring, guiding, fraying of tempers. Each thinks the other wrong, is unwilling to yield, can’t believe other people don’t just do it their way and be done with it.

If you want metaphors for modern life, go to a car park on Skye.

From my vantage point at the end of the queue, I can see it all playing out in ultra slo-mo, each player’s move painfully obvious. Fiat Punto to camper van six, checkmate.

I am, as always, the model of patience, sitting quietly behind the wheel and taking the opportunity to admire the particular shade of golden-brown in the bracken* brushing the side of the car. Meanwhile my brain forms a silent scream.

Just another day on the peaceful roads of Skye. The hills look on from above and shrug their shoulders. They’ve seen it all before.

If Skye’s large open spaces make its population density low compared with, say, London, then the agglomeration of people at the various pinch points causes traumatic feelings of claustrophobia. It’s a strange contradiction, and a relatively recent one in the island’s long history. While the influx of tourists is good for the island’s economy, there’s a perverse conundrum at play here. Yesterday’s unspoiled idyll is tomorrow’s tourist trap, and there must surely come a point when the pain outweighs the pleasure. We’re all suckers, fooled by the guidebooks and TripAdvisor into visiting the ‘top places’. But when you visit a beach once revered for its seclusion and privacy, and find it host to three cafes, two gift shacks and an ice-cream van, you begin to question the wisdom of crowds.

Naturally we regard ourselves, by long convention, not as tourists but as ‘visitors’. It’s a fine distinction, illustrated by the irregular declension: ‘We are visitors; you are tourists; they are thoughtless hooligans desecrating a holy site.’

And so it is when we visit the coral beach, a place of unusual beauty and a nightmare of a car park.

The coral beach is across the loch from where we’re staying, no more than two miles as the red-throated diver flies, but a forty-fiveminute car journey even before you factor in the passing places. The walk from the car park is just long enough to make you feel as if you’ve had a walk, but not so long as to become tiresome to the non-walker. I tarry a while in the car park, thanks to a flurry of house martins overhead. I try to count them, and reach a total of forty-three before having to admit that I’ve counted some of them twice and settling on a provisional total of ‘twenty-five or thirty, give or take’. Regardless of their number, their excitable chattering and nimble dartings are an instant smile generator. They even distract me from the midges, which choose this moment – after a surprisingly reticent couple of days – to descend en masse.

Skye’s midges are famous. Any mention of the place elicits two responses: ‘Ooh lovely’, followed by ‘Watch out for the midges!’ A select minority will then offer their favoured antidote, and it is with the most popular of these that we now slather ourselves.

It works. Until it doesn’t.

I decide that mind over matter is the best tactic.

This works. Until it doesn’t.

And then, no more than a couple of minutes’ walk out of the car park, they disappear. We barely see another one all week, a development welcomed by all.

As we approach the coral beach, we begin to see what the fuss is about. On a grey day, it has a quality of soft brightness that illuminates the area around it even from a distance, offset by water the kind of colour normally associated with the Caribbean. Cobalt, cerulean, topaz, turquoise – call it what you will, it draws you in and soothes the soul, an effect only enhanced by the hypnotic accompanying sloshing and lapping sounds.

As I said, 10 per cent better.

Adding to the beneficial effect is the grass, which butts up against the beach like carpet to a skirting board. It’s soft grass, too, not the sharp kind that lashes your bare legs as you clamber over the dunes, sinking into the loose sand up to your knees. And it is speckled with flowers of yellow and purple and white, the names of which I vow to look up but still haven’t. Stitchwort is one – that much I know – and devil’s bit scabious another, and maybe autumn hawkbit (agh help I’m really not sure), but try as I might, I can’t reconcile the little purple orchidy thing with any of the photos in the book so I’m just going to call it little purple orchidy thing and be done with it.

Never mind. They’re pretty, and give the deep green grass the air of a medieval tapestry. And just thinking of the names of wild flowers gives me a bit of a perk-up – scabious, twayblade, corncockle, saxifrage and many more. Words that feel steeped in history and connection with the land.

We walk down until we feel the scrunch underfoot. It’s not sand, but a fossilised and bleached coralline seaweed known as maërl.* Lime-rich, it was long extracted for use as fertiliser – from an environmental point of view it is a Good Thing, harbouring biodiversity from sea urchins to seals. It is also fascinating to look at. We get down on our knees to examine its varied shapes, sizes and shades: bone, ivory, off-white and all the rest of them, bringing to mind a clothes rail full of linen jackets.

There’s a grassy mound just off the beach, a short effort to climb. We do so for no better reason than that it’s there, but the view from the top is worth the effort. From here you can see the clarity of the water, its quick transition from lightest blue to gunmetal grey as the shore falls away into the loch.

From here, too, we can see across the water to the north, to the island of Isay and beyond to the Outer Hebrides. This beach, the furthest point you can reach on this bit of Skye, feels at the edge of something. Not the world, nothing as dramatic as that, but at least this part of it.

I have a sudden yearning to launch out, somehow, towards the open sea, to leave behind the comfort and ease and warmth and to head for somewhere truly wild. St Kilda, maybe, with its subspecies of wren that sings more loudly than the mainland ones to compete with the wind; or Rockall, perhaps, there to surprise a gannet or two.

It doesn’t last. True wilderness is unbearably harsh and impossible. And the overwhelming majority of us are too softened by what we like to call civilisation. We like the idea of it, which is one of the reasons places like Skye are so popular. And the more we lose contact with nature, the more we’re drawn to spend our time doing things that aim to emulate wildness – glamping, hiking weekends, cycling tours. But make us live in it and the reality would bite, and bite hard.

Back on the beach, a small child squats low, working with utter concentration. She is making patterns in the maërl, a network of spirals and circles and free loops, each line going where her fancy takes it. The lines intertwine and fold back on each other in a most peaceful way, and the result is a mesmerising improvised doodle – a Zen garden, with added freedom.

To judge by the extent of it, she’s been at it for quite some time. Her father looks on with what I like to think is approval but might equally be exasperated boredom. We cannot know the workings of other people’s thoughts.

We walk slowly back. On the shore, a herring gull eviscerates a flatfish. Clouds clear slightly, allowing an end-of-day sun a brief moment of glory. The house martins have gone. So have most of the cars. But the midges are still there. As we reach the car park, a boy – sixteen, seventeen – fiddles with an elaborate arrangement of scarves and sweaters, making absolutely certain that every square inch of his skin is protected.

Some people will do anything to keep nature at bay; others will allow it all the way in.

In the autumn of 1957, a young man visited a terraced house in the furthest reaches of Chelsea. He rang the bell and waited. Receiving no reply, he retreated to the pavement and tried to peer through the front window. He found himself staring at a large stuffed lizard. It was only when the lizard’s tongue flicked out and caught a grasshopper that he realised it was very much alive. The brief appearance, a few seconds later, of a large and brightly coloured bird at the window gave further indication that the house was indeed occupied, and sure enough, after another ring of the bell, the door opened and a lean man appeared. He explained that he had heard the bell, but had spent the intervening minutes observing his visitor through binoculars from the other end of the room.

Had I been the visitor, I suspect I might at this point have backed cautiously away, made my apologies, and left. A monitor lizard is one thing, and to meet one face to face would be an intriguing and potentially attractive prospect; a scarlet tanager, for a young bird-lover, would exert an even stronger hold; but the revelation that my host had spied on me would have been enough to set alarm bells ringing.

The young man was made of sterner stuff. His host invited him in and poured him a half pint of whisky. Then, without saying a word, he took a small, ivory-handled pistol from a drawer, held it to the young man’s head, and pulled the trigger.

And it is here that, after a due pause for hysterical blubbing and incoherent shouting, I would undoubtedly have sprinted for the door, never to return. But the young man, undisturbed by his host’s patently psychopathic behaviour, stayed, becoming the older man’s friend and biographer. His name was Douglas Botting; his host, forty-three at the time but with the wrinkled and lined face of one much older, was Gavin Maxwell.

You might easily conclude from the above story, told by Botting at the beginning of his biography of Maxwell, that the multitalented but chaotic aristocrat was, to put it mildly, ‘a bit of a character’. And you might be right. But naturally there is a great deal more to it than that.

Maxwell was an adventurer. He went on an expedition to the Arctic tundra in search of the elusive Steller’s eider; he was a secret agent in the war; he ran a shark-hunting business (it failed); he dabbled in motor racing. And even when engaged in relatively normal pursuits, drama followed him around like a cat begging for food. He was the kind of person who could go out fishing and come back with a flightless fulmar and a stricken Manx shearwater (they lived, briefly, in his bathroom). The chaos of his personal life encompassed numerous car crashes, two fires, and multiple career changes – often inspired by wildly impractical ideas – but it was as a writer that he became known.

The phenomenal success of his fifth book, Ring of Bright Water, catapulted him into the public’s consciousness. Published in 1960, it’s the story of Maxwell’s relationship with an Iraqi marsh otter called Mijbil, or Mij, given to him by writer and explorer Wilfred Thesiger on a trip to the marshes of the Tigris Basin. He brought Mij back to Britain (a journey not without its dramas – loose otters and passenger aircraft aren’t necessarily a good mix) and they lived together in Maxwell’s remote cottage at Sandaig* in the West Highlands.

Maxwell was, in his own words, ‘otterly enthralled’ by Mij. He had recently lost a much loved dog, Jonnie, but described his relationship with the otter as more one of co-existence than of ownership.

If a love story between a man and an otter seems an unlikely bestseller, Ring of Bright Water also owes its success to Maxwell’s portrayal of the landscape of the West Highlands. It was a wild, remote and romantic world, an escape from the drab reality of post-war austerity. Maxwell’s day-to-day existence in his house at Sandaig – on the mainland but looking across to Isleornsay on Skye – must have felt impossibly dramatic to the average reader. There were no amenities, a visit to his nearest neighbours meant a long slog across peat moors, Kyle of Lochalsh was forty miles away by road, and supplies came by boat and had to be carried to the house by rucksack down a long track.

Ring of Bright Water is not a scientific book – but with its wholehearted adoration of Mijbil (and, after Mij was tragically clubbed to death by a roadmender, his successor Edal), Maxwell did more for the status of the whiskery mustelids than any amount of earnest lecturing could have. At the heart of it is his love for them, and their apparent reciprocation. He tried other pets after Mij died. They didn’t last long. Kiko, a ring-tailed lemur, slashed his legs, leading to enormous loss of blood and an illustration of Maxwell’s cavalier attitude to personal safety – he watched dispassionately as blood spurted from an artery while he tried to remember where the pressure point was.

No such excitements were attached to the nameless bush baby that followed, but therein, perhaps, lay the problem. He found the animal boring, and replaced it with a small flock of tropical birds.

No, it was otters that did it for him. He describes with relish Mij’s morning routine: sleeping in his bed, waking at 8.20 prompt, nuzzling his face to wake him and then stripping the bedclothes to ensure that he got up. Ball games and bathtime were sources of endless entertainment for human and otter alike. And there is a carefree joy about the descriptions of Mij swimming and diving and tumbling in the sea, burn and waterfall around the house, and their daily walks along the beach.

This vivid description of a man’s relationship with an animal will have struck a chord with any pet owner – that it was an otter added a touch of the exotic and eccentric to the story. And if the average person, used to no more pet-related inconvenience than fur-covered cushions or the odd bit of vomit on the floor, might throw their hands up in horror at the thought of a domesticated otter having the run of the house, it’s clear that Maxwell relished it.

The connection between his love of animals and the difficulty of his relationships with humans is easy to make, and even the most amateur of psychologists will leap to link all this to his childhood. His father died when Gavin was just three months old. His mother was a rather austere woman, and his early years were characterised by the appearance of a succession of huntin’ and shootin’ aunts – all tweed, brogues and pipes. Nature seemed preferable.

But equally fascinating is the evolution of his relationship with nature. Like Peter Scott, he went from avid hunter in his university days to equally committed conservationist; and also like Scott, he saw trouble ahead, writing this in the preface to Ring of Bright Water:

I am quite certain in my own mind that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and the other living creatures of the world. The evolution, as it were, of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal, and now, still, he must, for his own security, look long at some part of the earth as it was before he started messing about with it.

Nevertheless, there is also a strange contradiction at play here. On the one hand, his love of wild animals; on the other, his eccentric desire to keep them captive as pets.

His last project was to be a sort of menagerie on Eilean Bàn,* a six-acre island between Skye and Kyle of Lochalsh on the mainland. He had bought the two lighthouse cottages on the island in 1963, after the automation of the lighthouse, and moved there when his home at Sandaig burned down in 1968.

He had grand plans for Eilean Bàn. It would be an otter sanctuary, but there would also be an eider colony around nearby islets, as well as a sort of menagerie, for which he had already bought a gannet, a tawny owl and some goats.

But before he could realise the project, years of ill health caught up with him – eighty cigarettes plus a bottle of whisky a day doesn’t make for the healthiest of lifestyles – and he died in 1969, less than a year after he moved there.

It doesn’t take a leap of imagination to guess what Maxwell would have thought of the road bridge now linking Skye to the mainland, but he might also quietly have appreciated the irony that Eilean Bàn is now the home to one of the pillars supporting the bridge – opened in 1995, twenty-six years after his death at the age of fifty-five. And as a keen and somewhat reckless racing driver he would no doubt enjoy the manoeuvre required to park outside Eilean Bàn when approaching it from Skye-side – a hurried U-turn to take advantage of a brief lull in the steady traffic.

We park in the small layby, go through the gate and down the path, and I try to imagine the house before the bridge, without the looming presence of the monumental pillars, without the rumble of cars, without the intrusion of modernity. It’s an enticing picture, full of peace. David, our guide, gives us a brief biography of Maxwell, brings him to life with a couple of well-chosen anecdotes. Then he shows us Maxwell’s long living room, furnished with taste, style and not a little expense. A large gilt mirror, Moroccan daggers, a stuffed jay. The telescope through which he watched boats and dolphins and gulls and ravens and sometimes a killer whale, but also the comings and goings of people on Kyleakin High Street.

We go up the lighthouse, with its views across Inner Sound to the islands of Longay and Pabay, and, more prosaically, the fish farm on the Skye coast. We spend time in the wildlife hide, from which we do not see black guillemot, shag or white-tailed eagles, but we do see a great black-backed gull, pecking furiously at a dead something on the shore.

And as we thank David and walk slowly back to the car, my eye is caught by a small and exquisitely beautiful thing. It’s nothing, really. Just another rock, a smooth one with a little craggy bit at the top that would make it just too uncomfortable to sit on. But its flat surface is coated with lichen in a pattern of such delicacy as to demand closer examination. It looks like a network of misshapen fields photographed from way up high – irregular patterns in infinite variations of beige, marbled through with the thinnest lines of dark green. I take a moment to consider the strange fascination of these organisms – composites of fungi and algae or cyanobacteria, living symbiotically, manifesting in thousands of different forms. It’s easy to dismiss them, but as they are estimated to cover 6 per cent of the world’s surface, perhaps we should give them more attention. Sometimes it’s the smallest things, the insignificant or easily overlooked, that catch your eye.

And sometimes, by contrast, they’re so big you can’t ignore them.

There’s a sort of grim inevitability about it. The morning dawned dry and sunny, with just a few light-and-fluffies shrouding the hilltops; the drive across the island was notable for the quality of light, the bright sunshine bringing out the best of the various shades of green and purple in the grass-and-heather duvet draped over the hills; the forecast is set fair. So, sure enough, the moment we set foot on the boat it starts chucking it down. You might take me for some sort of rain god.

This manifestation of the island’s multiple microclimates is received with resigned good humour by all the boat’s passengers. There are twelve of us, plus two guides. They will steer us out of Portree harbour, out into the Sound of Raasay, hugging the coastline until the purpose of the trip is fulfilled. There’s a barely suppressed excitement aboard – we’re off to see the eagles.

The allure of the white-tailed eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla) isn’t hard to fathom. They’re massive – nearly a metre tall and with a wingspan of up to 240 centimetres – and if there’s anything we like more than things that are small and cute, it’s things that are large and terrifying. The white-tailed eagle falls firmly into the latter category, sharing equal top spot for Britain’s largest bird of prey with its cousin the golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos). A sighting of either bird is a memorable occasion, and the white-tailed’s rarity* only adds to the romance.

Sightings, I have read, are possible anywhere on the island, but we’re keen to make sure, so the boat trip, with its bet-hedging assurance that 99 per cent of excursions yield a sighting, seems a worthwhile investment.

Nigel, our guide and pilot, treads the fine line between jovial banter and irritating chumminess with the assurance of one experienced in his field. He dispatches the safety announcement with good humour, points us towards laminated information sheets and tells us what we can expect to see. We duly scan the water for the hint of a porpoise, with predictable results.

Our travelling companions on this two-hour excursion are, for the most part, quietly genial, keeping to themselves and speaking when spoken to.

For the most part.

There is one exception. She is talkative, she is friendly, she is completely lacking in self-awareness.

It’s clear from the moment we board that we’re in for a running commentary. As she steps from harbour to boat, she nearly comes a cropper.

‘What am I like? I nearly fell in there!’

Unable to think of anything to say, I say nothing, hoping that a non-committal quarter-smile will speak volumes.

No such luck. We are now, it seems, friends for life.

The squally shower threatens to accompany us across the water, but Nigel is more than equal to the task, accelerating smoothly through it and out the other side, and soon we’re coasting in bright sunshine, hugging the coastline. The water here is the kind of deep blue you can get lost in. I want to say it’s glassy smooth, but it never is. Not really. Even the millpondest surface is interrupted by little ripples and eddies disturbing the surface like fork marks in Christmas-cake icing.

Adjusting my binoculars, and trying to steady myself against the gentle rocking of the boat, I scan the cliffs. I’m familiar with this feeling. It’s so easy to think the wildlife will present itself as if on a plate, ready to do our bidding, but its existence doesn’t revolve around our entertainment, and against a large and varied backdrop such as this cliff face, even a bird as massive as an eagle can blend into the background. Gulls and gannets, pristine white against the bright blue sky, are easily visible, and shags, their goose-like forms skimming low over the water, catch the eye.

But no eagles.

Sheer cliffs, lone trees clinging to rocky outcrops, all offset by the lush green of the surrounding hills and the chiaroscuro of the cliffs. This is the kind of scenery that holds you entranced, eagle or no eag— FUCKING HELL A BIT OF THE CLIFF JUST TOOK OFF AND IS FLYING TOWARDS US.

A flurry of excitement ripples through the paying punters. But no sooner has it taken off than it’s landed again, and a few of the party, looking elsewhere, need a bit of help finding it.

Jamie – young, eager to help – is on it.

‘You see the three caves. Find the right-hand one, go right a bit more, then straight up. About a third of the way up there’s a lighter patch of rock, then to the right of that there’s a tree, and just next to tha—’

‘OOH! I’VE GOT IT! THERE IT IS! PERCHED ON THAT ROCK! YOOHOO!’

She’s waving, as if to an old friend departing on a long sea voyage, her frantic gestures accompanied by the jangle of jewellery.

I like enthusiasm. My experiences with seasoned birders have sometimes led me to yearn for more overt displays of it. But right now I would kill for the dour and dogged silence of a bird hide.

‘Clap your hands! Maybe it’ll come down! Hello, eagle! Over here!’

Even at a distance it’s easy to see the disdain in the eagle’s eye.

A splash off to our left. Another tour boat is throwing fish into the water to lure the eagle towards them. They’re thwarted by a pair of herring gulls, opportunists par excellence. The eagle remains steadfastly glued to its outcrop.

Any disappointment at the immovability of the bird is soon overcome by the appearance of a second one, apparently from nowhere. And now there are two more of them, soaring close to the cliffs, languid flaps interspersed with glides, white wedge of tail splayed so wide I can count the feathers, illuminated like a nativity scene by the angled sun. Eleven of them, arranged in geometrical perfection.

The bulk of these birds. Thick, barrel chest, planks for wings. Hooked yellow bill, enough to deter any encroachment. Their slow, measured wingbeats disguise a deceptive ability for speed, which we see clearly as one of them circles the boat at a respectful distance. There is a rough wildness to them, in keeping with the craggy rocks that are the backdrop for their display. They are fearsome, majestic, awe-inspiring beasts.

They even manage to silence Ms YooHoo.

They give us fifteen minutes of their time, then they glide back up to the cliff and perch in a way that says the show is over. Nigel steers the boat across the water towards the neighbouring island of Raasay, where we delight in the more sedentary joys of a group of twenty or so seals (‘Hello, seals! Cooee!’). They adorn the rocks with a strange kind of lumpen elegance, occupied with nothing more than the onerous duty of being seals. One of them rolls off the rock into the water (‘Ooh! ’E plopped right in! Did you see?’), another lifts a flipper in what we take to be a greeting of sorts. Nigel turns the boat round, and we putter back to Portree.

We say our thank yous and disembark. Nigel has been an excellent, informative and generous host. Ms YooHoo remains bubbly to the last, and in the end the purity of her excitement wears me down. The slightly fixed expressions of our fellow passengers when she’s in full spate tell me I’m not the only one who thinks she’s a bit much. But I also realise that my curmudgeonliness is less than generous, an example of the very dourness of spirit I deplore in others.

She could have spent the day on the sofa watching telly, or in the hotel bar drinking piña colada, or any one of a hundred other things. But she was there. And she loved it. And if you can’t show your enthusiasm for something like an eagle, then we might as well give up right now.

If it seems strange to want to escape the hubbub of a relatively deserted place like Skye, then I can only blame it on the camper vans. They are, as previously advertised, relentless in their fecundity. Wherever we go, there’s another one, trundling towards us, or lurking behind a boulder like the sinister truck in Duel.

So, in the eternal quest for absolute and uninterrupted tranquillity, we take the twenty-five-minute crossing from Sconser to Raasay, experiencing that hint of adventure, the leaving behind of cares that always comes when you set foot on a ferry. This was what visiting Skye itself used to be like, before the building of the bridge, back when we had time – slow, patient travel.

We explore the island by car and bike. It is, to all intents and purposes, a four-road island. There’s the one that goes south, the one that goes east, the one that goes in a circle, and the one that goes north. The first two are very short, and the third as long as you care to make it – we take the fourth one, heading northwards. There are views across to Skye to the left, blue sky punctuated by pockets of unthreatening cloud, the sunlight on the water giving it a soft glimmer, and beyond it the contours of Skye’s hills, gentle shades of green morphing to grey and black.

We see five humans, a smattering of birds and a flock of sheep. And the deliberately measured pace of our day acts as a relaxant, slowing everything down to a speed quite unfamiliar to a modern city dweller, but no less welcome for all that.

At Brochel, there is a sign: CALUM’S ROAD.

Calum McLeod, a crofter, lighthouse keeper and part-time postman, thought the footpath from Brochel northwards was insufficient for the needs of the inhabitants of that end of the island. Despite years of campaigning and several grant applications, the council disagreed. So he built it himself.

He had a shovel, a pick, and a wheelbarrow. He also had a book called Road Making and Maintenance: A Practical Treatise for Engineers, Surveyors and Others. It took him ten years, and remains a testament to the virtues of dedication, single-mindedness and sheer bloody obstinacy.

I try to imagine the strength required to do this. Physical strength, of course, but also strength of will. Unimaginable, to me at least.

We get to the end of the road and walk further, to an abandoned village where twite chatter and a very tattered meadow brown butterfly sits on bracken, and the air is soft and warm and nothing happens and it does it in the most pleasing way imaginable. And then we come back and sit near the ruins of Brochel Castle, looking out across the still water, the light and the soft breeze and the obscene picturesqueness of the landscape combining to do something to us that should be prescribed on the NHS. Not just the landscape, but the slow passage of time, the sloughing away of cares, the lack of urgency you really get only in a place conducive to such things.

Out on the loch there are two birds, tiny specks to the naked eye, floating on the water. They might or might not be black guillemots. I give them a few minutes’ scrutiny through the binoculars. Inconclusive.

Across to the left, a rocky outcrop, sand in colour, with seaweed drapery. A rock moves. Not a rock; a seal. And another, and two more, and now I see there are a dozen of them, rock impersonators one and all.

And so the long day wears on.

Sometimes it’s enough just to sit in silence in a quiet place with people of like mind, looking out over water, absorbing the contours and shapes and colours and swells and crooks and hollows, saying nothing, but just allowing the world to drape itself over you, bringing you together in a conspiracy of beauty. Cheese sandwich optional.

* Much bigger, I soon realise, than I’d imagined it – it’s sixty miles from tip to tip, and its individual shape means it has four hundred miles of coastline.

* Not small.

* Not to brag or anything, but I’ve been in temperatures of –20°C or so during a frigid Toronto winter. The Isle of Sheppey, on that windy December afternoon, probably registered only about –1°C on the thermometer, but once you throw in the Brit-chill factor of –1 gazillion, had Toronto beaten hands down.

* They have short legs, positioned very far back on their body, and are comically ungainly on dry land.

^† Or grawk – the jury’s still out.

* A non-native invasive species, it is, understandably, much frowned on by the locals because of its tendency to take over, but there’s much to admire in its drooping fronds for the fractal fan.

* Pronounced ‘marl’.

* In an effort disguise its true location, he renamed it ‘Camusfeàrna’ (Bay of Alders) for Ring of Bright Water.

* ‘White Island’ in Scottish Gaelic.

* Not that the golden eagle is common – far from it – but its range is somewhat larger, extending across a lot of northern Scotland, while the white-tailed is restricted to a few islands in the west.