I walk up this hill every day. Some days, twice. It’s not far, twenty minutes from my door to the gate that marks the start of the common grazing. Some days I go beyond. Out across the moorland, until the track fades away, leaving only the rough clumps of heather and peat underfoot. Some days I go beyond and follow the path down to the fank. A squelching bog that, on a bad day, almost overflows into my boots, then down the second hill and a loop around. Or I could double back on myself after the gate. Along the other side of the fence, skirting the edge of the common grazing, holding to an almost indefinable track carved out by sheep. Ovine desire lines. This takes me to a rocky outcrop. High up, I can see south towards Ardnamurchan and, on a clear day, Ben More, Mull’s solitary Munro. My eyes scan the edges of the Sound of Sleat. They pass Mallaig, Scotland’s smallest commercial fishing port, as the ferry appears from the sheltered harbour on its way to Skye. Loch Nevis, Ladhar Bheinn, Loch Hourn, deep into the heart of Knoydart. North, towards the Kylerhea narrows, Sandaig and Glenelg, not quite visible.

I walk up this hill every day. Up the single-track, pot-holed hill. Past the piles of grit, ready for the next icy morning. This is a steep hill, impassable in snow. In January, we couldn’t get the car out for three days and the tractor only just avoided the ditch. Where the road turns to the farm, I keep going straight. Gravel now, less of an incline but still noticeable. The view expands to the left, across the Sound, to the right a sloping expanse to grass. This is home to different animals depending on the season. Now, it’s late April and there are lambs, their mothers protectively guarding them. Eyeing me and the big dog with maternal concern and mild alarm. They quickly scamper up the field as we draw near.

Beyond the last house the gradient is steeper. A sharp right-hand bend in the middle makes it tricky for the tractor laden with bales of hay for the cows. This is where I’ve met the pine marten, face to face with this beautiful, shy, cruel creature. He didn’t linger. The ground is shallow, soil not deep at all and the pitted surface of the track is scattered with stones, solid slabs of rock underneath. In winter it can be a challenge to walk up this short hill, even harder to walk down where it avoids the sun’s gaze and the ice is the last to melt. Still the track rises in a straight line but not a level surface. It’s rough here, ever changing as stones are dislodged and the rain brings new mud and shifting streams. The rock marks out the boundaries of what is possible, despite efforts to level it out with ballast wrapped in tattered plastic sacks. I shudder. It’s not the way we would do it today, but this is old, before people realised. And it serves a purpose, making the track passable with quad bike and tractor. I’m on foot, I see every stone, I know every little ridge and rise. I know when the blaeberries, raspberries and brambles will be ready. I know the limits of the stream where it crosses the track. A barometer of sorts, drawn from a spring at the top of the hill, this is a reliable gauge of rainfall in the hours past. The afternoon walk sees it slow and languid but, by first light, it has become a torrent pushing at the edges and gushing away down the hill. The next day, all is calm.

I walk up this hill every day and it never looks the same. Of course, that depends on how you look at it. It is a picture that hardly changes, yet again the change is constant. The sheep move on, the fields are empty, soon after the cows return. The stream shifts its course a fraction and stones are dislodged. I heard a cuckoo today. The first of the spring. Buzzards have been here all winter and still they float and hover above me. The dog flushes out a woodcock from its usual spot, pounces on an unsuspecting vole or mouse. Now, not far into spring, flowers are appearing along the banks and the old trees, the oak, hazel and rowan are coming back to life. All of this is the day to day churn of the track, changing with use, the weather and the seasons. Widen your horizons and this view becomes more fluid and evolving. This place, this hill, this track. It looks static, like it has been here forever. But look closely and you find a landscape shaped by people, practicalities, politics and power. You see a history unfolding and a place that is still changing.

The path up is straight now. The earlier dog-leg right is new. Relatively new. The Ordnance Survey map from 1881 shows this track carried on to the bottom of the hill and the early part of the path I follow has yet to exist. The old path was steep, too steep for a horse and cart, never mind cars. So, the path was changed. The old lines are visible in the space between the crofts on either side. The stream follows this line, the natural route to the sea but now it is overgrown and impenetrable from either top or bottom. And look around, there are the old stone walls along the path, overgrown, moss covered but undeniably man-made. On the hillside beyond, the scars left by the lazy beds remain. Closer to the path, small rectangles, walls barely at head height. Linked to place by their design, Hebridean corners so obvious when you know them yet invisible to the untrained eye. Rounded corners keep the full force of the savage wind at bay and remind me that progress isn’t always in a forward direction. Here is knowledge, a skill we have lost. There is the ruin of a house at the top of the hill, an outline curated in a pile of carefully placed stones with the timber roof structures long gone. I have a photograph in the 1930s, very much alive and lived in. Self-contained, it was a home until the Second World War but, by 1950 lay abandoned. Crofts were amalgamated, people moved down the hill, more have moved away. Crofting was never meant to be a viable way to live.

I walk up this hill every day, retracing the invisible footprints of those long gone, long forgotten, but whose marks are still clear around me. This path was a part of people’s lives, families, homes long before I knew it.

[2023]