KILLILAN TIME
SHIFTING DOWN and sinking back in time. That’s the feeling when you turn off the A87 a few miles short of Kyle of Lochalsh and take the winding road inland by Loch Long. Or maybe it was just me. The last time I’d been along here was aged eight on a family holiday. We’d stayed in a cottage by the loch shore. Memories are fitful and fragmentary now – a rocky wooded tidal island, local exhortations not to walk out alone on the mudflats at low tide, and Charles and Diana getting married on a tiny black and white television. The past is a foreign country, no less.
But, suddenly, I was right back there. I’d forgotten about the heronry. I nearly drove into in a ditch as I craned my head to see the circling, pterodactyl-like shapes above the old, twisted trees between the loch and the road, still bare of leaves in early April. Not all memories surface in the mind; some come at you in the heart or gut, and this was one of them. The herons were still here, the sun was out, and the mountains were waiting.
Loch Long may translate to loch of the ships in English, and it would make sense. It’s a
