In excavating a few folders on my computer for early writing about place, I came across this piece that I wrote in 2008. At that time, I was living on my croft on the shores of Loch Broom, in the northwest Highlands of Scotland. Two years later, we’d have left and moved to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. This was a place I built myself, long before I met David. It’s a place I thought I’d stay in forever. Reading it now makes me sad; although I owned that house and that croft for nine years, in the end I had to go. The anxiety I spoke of in the penultimate paragraph came to pass. Too many people, and the old ways dying fast. But it feels good to celebrate that beautiful place now. I hope this article gives you a sense of it.

You wake to the sound of silence, or a cock crowing. You don’t hold your breath any more against the daily violations of noise and fumes; you haven’t done that for years. No more crashing of trucks along the A-something or M-whatever; no frantic scrabbles at radio buttons for early morning traffic news. Now he brings mugs of tea to bed and you listen to the world awaken. A song thrush in the plum tree competes with a grumpy wren; a curlew calls, bubbles to a trilling crescendo as it skips along the surface of the loch; a sudden sharp cacophony as a goose wakes from a slow dream of warm summer grass.

The sun tugs you out of bed, wellies on and down to the gleaming loch. The breeze carries nothing but the scent of fresh air. The dog, a flash of gold at your side, runs to select from his hillock of sticks, his sea-booty, spoiled for choice. Ben Mór Coigach shines red to the west like a seafaring Ayers Rock. On your way down the field you open shed doors to let out the poultry: hens, ducks and geese, peashot into the cool clarity of spring morning. You freshen their food and water; ruffle up hay in nesting boxes. You peek at the two geese who are sitting on eggs in carefully-constructed nests of straw and of down plucked from their breasts. They are tucked into sheltered nooks by the sides of the byre, bodies sagging and heads slumped to the ground. Out of thirty-two sitting days there are twenty still to go. There’s a broody hen sitting on duck eggs in a broody coop; if she hatches them she’ll get a surprise. The black horned ewes are grazing in the field below; they lift their heads for a moment and watch you as you pass. They’re slower now, quieter; soon there will be lambs. In winter they’d be running at you, the boldest nudging for a handful of beet pulp as you took the bucket to the trough. Now all they want is grass. Yes, this is a working croft: five acres of cultivation sliced out of the wilderness, carved from the transitional lands that occupy this thin sliver of space between rock-bound hill and sea.

You step through the farm gate at the bottom of the field, the boundary to a different world. A pebble-covered, seaweed-strewn watery world, where sea mingles with river, where sky dissolves into loch. For yours has been a North Atlantic drift, a slow surge north and west, a lifelong flow to edges. A chromatic progression of migrations that landed you here, in this sanctuary. So much more than just a safe place, here is a fastness, both an inner and an outer sanctum. No longer landlocked, your only security is here: on the shifting thresholds of a shoreline that comes and goes, that gives and takes. There are some who will argue this isn’t your place: after all, you don’t come from here. If you don’t come from here, can you ever properly belong? But it isn’t about belonging: it’s a question simply of being.

You feel no dominance over this landscape; you merge with it, that’s all. No more or less a part of it than the heron on the shore ahead, perfectly balanced on one leg, a vision of intense contemplation. No more or less than this breeding pair of oystercatchers, whose constant sharp to-wheep punctuates your night’s dreams. They’re still for a moment now, perched on the tip of a flat gunmetal rock that juts out into the loch. You whisper to them as you pass. There’ll be eggs soon, and babies. You’ll be safe here, you tell them; it’s going to be a fine spring. You’ll tell them again tomorrow, and you’ll tell them the day after that. You are part of their morning landscape; they are quiet now as you pass. But when nests are made and their young are born you’ll retreat if they chase you away. This is a place that you share with these others; you’ve come to understand their needs. You adapt yourself even to the neighbourhood pine martens, and lock up your poultry at night. For you are no tourist in this landscape, no weekend escapee. You don’t take it like aspirin for a big-city tension headache, fine use of the wilderness though that might be. You live in this place, in all the ways it is possible to live. Oh, you don’t imagine for a moment that you are wild too – not in the ways that these creatures are wild. Our lives are far too complex for that. We’ve grown beyond that possibility into other possibilities of our own, and that isn’t all bad. But you change with this wildness; you adapt to it. In some deep sense you are a part of it; in the most essential of ways it becomes you.

High on the scent of seaweed, you watch as four eider ducks sail down the loch in a neatly spaced line, crooning like a family of Clangers with indigestion. Each year a colony springs up in a sheltered bay further down the lochside. You watch as the black of the male’s piebald plumage fades into brown with the year. The dog lifts his head and sniffs the air; a few minutes later, a moment’s sadness as you pass the decaying carcass of a small deer calf that drifted down the burn, through the crumbling makeshift water-gate and onto the shore in the heavy rains a month ago. It is too high to be carried off by the tide. You’d see the calf each morning, running along the fence between the upper and lower fields on the neighbouring croft. Always the same story: trapped in the bottom field, unable to find its way back out and too small to leap the fence uphill. Its mother, safe on the other side, would stay by it as long as she dared. Most mornings it managed to escape, running alongside her up the field, past the house and across the road, disappearing finally over the hills to the south-west. The cause of its death? Unknown. The crows or the buzzards have pecked out its eyes; its neck is twisted where it broke against a boulder. You whisper to the dead calf, too.

There is no sense of the ridiculous in talking to the landscape: you live with it; what else would you do? On your way back to the gate you gather flat stones to edge your garden flowerbeds and paths. Lilac stones, grey stones, stones shot through with streaks of glittering gold. You are walking some fifty metres from the estimated edge of the Moine thrust: this land does not lack stones. You select the stones carefully for shape and colour. You admire the stones; you tell them how fine they are. You whisper to them as you pick them and put them in your pocket. It’s okay, you tell them. You’ll like it up there. You’ll see all kinds of new things. There’ll be soft moist soil, and flowers and bees – and all kinds of different birds. Bet you’ve never seen a siskin down here. And you reassure yourself with the thought that if one day, a thousand years from now in the long slow life of a rock, it should find itself once more longing for the shore, then the shore by then will surely have risen to meet it. Shifting, like all wild places, like all wild things.

You linger a while, hoping to see the seal. The same solitary grey seal, you imagine, that has haunted this shore through the six years that you’ve lived here – though of course you’ve no way of telling. How long does a seal live? But there it is this morning, head rising from the water, watching you intently. The dog wags his tail, sits down on rust-coloured seaweed, ears pricked, head tilted to one side. He’s learned not to run after it into the water any more, but he so badly wants to understand it. You hum a tune to the seal; it raises its nose to the sky but after a few moments it slips back down into the water. Ah well, you think: maybe it doesn’t like Leonard Cohen. But a moment later it emerges again, closer to the shore. It looks at you. You look at it. There’s a sense of belonging so strong that it will not be emptied by expression, not for all your fine words, not for all your fine tales of selkies and seal-woman and shedding skins. For this is a place where myths inhabit the landscape, a place where stories come as easy as breathing.

The sun slips over the hill on the other side of the loch, enfolding you in its warmth. You close your eyes and lift your face to it; when you open them again the water dazzles, as a million diamonds glitter on the incandescent surface of the loch. You make your way back to the gate, paying silent tribute to the solitary rowan tree that grows out of nothing, clinging tenaciously to a crack in the rock. Lopsided, battered by south-easterly winds, it leans towards the water as if yearning for another element. You stand close to it, brushing its bark with your fingers. Soon there’ll be leaves, you whisper. Soon there’ll be berries, and birds.            

You walk back up the field to the house, hugging the banks of the burn that divides your croft from the croft next door: in this place fences follow the natural features of the land. The water hurls itself down the hill, skipping across rocks and boulders, building up momentum as it flows. Your husband found an eel in a side-pool one afternoon, long sleek head poking out from under a flat rock. There’s an eel in the burn, he said, so you crept down the field with a torch at midnight to see if there were elvers too. There were no elvers in the burn, just the shadow of an eel haunting the night, and you swam back to bed with a memory of seaweed and blue Sargasso seas. The eel was never seen again, but you think of him there, creeping from pool to pool in search of a place to grow. Sometimes he enters your dreams, your beautiful immigrant borne here on the Gulf Stream’s briny surge, dreaming in turn of the day he’ll be strong enough to swim the long silver road back home. Perhaps, one rain-sodden night, you’ll meet him crawling across the field, forging a path to who knows where, and you will sit a while together, you and the eel, and you will listen to his tales of the graveyards of ships and the salt-soaked Sargasso sea. There’s an eel living in your burn, growing fat on secrets. There’s a secret in your burn, and sometimes you go to the water at midnight but you do not take a torch. There’s a trace of Sargasso in your burn, and at night if you turn your face to the breeze you can almost smell its spices.

The blue-painted gate to the garden emerges in a clatter of sunshine. Your eyes drift to the bank above the house, to the place he’s prepared for your bees. A strip of flat land nestled in the gentle slope of the brae. A runway, he calls it: an instinctive reflection of his own past life. And you remember that in Ancient Greece the Pythagoreans worshipped bees as Aphrodite's sacred creature; that honey was a symbol of love. You dream for a moment of how it will be when the garden is filled with bees. Soon the bees will arrive, in a box despatched from Devon. Soon the bees will come, and you are Sylvia Plath, eagerly awaiting The Arrival of the Bee Box: ‘Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.’ You will dance with them in your white bee-suit; you will sit with them by the hives. Not close enough to bother them, but close enough to tell them your stories.

You empty your pockets of stones and pull off your wellies, sweating. The morning is growing warmer: a day to stay outside. You don’t take it for granted; there’s a month or more to go before the boar-toothed blue Cailleach of winter will give up her grip on the land, before Brigid the spring maiden wins her battle against the dying of the light. You look ahead to that time, to the growing and the blossoming, to the new life in the fields. To the days when he’ll wake and say ‘Bugger this, I’m off fishing.’ And sometimes you’ll go too, dog a golden blur leaping ahead up the brae, for ‘going fishing’ means no more than strapping a rucksack to your back, fishing rod in your hand and a steep walk across the hills at the back of the house. Above the road behind the house the old ways linger still. The hills are mapped with Gaelic names, though few now understand them. Creag Mór, the big rock, looms down at us from the skyline directly above the house. A pair of ravens lives there. Further east is Kestrel Rock, where someone sometime spotted a kestrel. These hills are mapped with memory. Our own memories are mapped there too, as Kestrel Rock becomes Old Lady Rock for the beautiful feisty old hen that we sky-buried there. And this is the way we live here: we superimpose our maps on their maps, but always with respect. People change, but the rock remains the rock, no matter what name we give it.

The same divide exists above the house as exists below, on the shore. You inhabit a sandwich made of two types of wilderness, your croft the rich green filling in the middle. Filled with essential nutrients, this tiny sliver of cultivation is necessary for people to live here, to fully occupy this land. It has always been necessary, in any place where people inhabit a wilderness. By crofting it, you don’t destroy this land: you work it, and you care for it. You treat it with respect, and in return it gives you life. If this sliver of land were left to its own devices, in a single slow beat of the earth’s heart it would be colonised by bracken and rushes. And so proudly you take on this small strip of land in the wilderness and you treasure it and you cultivate it; you allow the sheep and the geese to graze it, and you grow your vegetables on it. You plant your swathes of native trees and you fence them against the deer; the birds come and live in them. Song thrush, mistle thrush, siskins, greenfinch, wagtails, robin, wren, blackbirds, great tits and coal tits, chaffinch and redwing … they come for the trees, and the fruit, and the flowers. Last year a colony of peacock butterflies established itself in your garden; they rarely come this far north. The expanding population of trees brought a single red squirrel to scope out potential new territory. This place that you’ve made has niches all of its own.

The dog barks, high-pitched, excited. You turn your eyes to the road above the house: your neighbour, born in this crofting township seventy-five years ago, walking with his black and white collie. The two dogs have grown up together, and yours takes off up the brae to touch noses through the fence. ‘Fine day,’ he calls down to you through a gap in the larches. ‘Fine day,’ you reply. His are some of the memories you walk through in this place; his are the stories that populate the hills. And others like him: the oldest man, who still sings the songs that his father and others here made in Gaelic. He recorded them so they won’t be forgotten when he dies. His thin fluttering voice competed with the hiss of the ageing tape recorder as he played them for you at Hogmanay. The songs spring from memories, and stories spring from the songs, and the life and heart of a fading community is handed on to those who succeed them. The seeds are planted; new songs and stories grow.

Yes, people live here, too. Never too many of them: outside of the villages, life can be tough. There aren’t many who are built for it; not many who want the long dark nights of winter, or the midge-laden days of high summer. But people inhabit this wilderness too. It is possible, after all, to live here lightly: to live lightly, but to live well. The harshness of the land and the rigours of life are natural limits to growth. This is no sanitised protected area, devoid of human footsteps. People have lived in this place for longer than memory survives: the iron-age broch on the hill just above you is testimony to that. The history of human occupation is traced along the veins of your wilderness just as it bears the tracks of its animal inhabitants. Your wilderness is not defined by a lack of human habitation – your wilderness houses a community. As all the world’s wild places have harboured communities, from the deep forests of the Amazon to the bleakest Alaskan snowfields. Communities with shared values, communities that know the value of solitude, that know how not to intrude. But communities that know how to work together. In your wilderness, if one man has a tractor and cutter he’ll crop the rushes in your field, and in return you’ll give him a hand during lambing. In your wilderness the community is rich and strong, diverse as the land you nurture. Elderly crofters who know no other life co-exist with incoming refugees from elsewhere; scattered along this five-mile single-track dead-end road are natives of countries from all the continents of the earth. Others who have shed their skins, cast off past lives, and remade themselves in the shadow of the Tor or Creag Mór.

There are anxieties, of course, in this wilder life that you live. When another plot of land is sold, and another new house is built. When there’s talk of giant electricity pylons cutting a new road through these valleys. You worry that there’ll be an end to it, that all this might be lost. But whatever comes to pass on this sliver of occupied ground, there will always be the shore below and the wild uninhabitable hills above, where ravens, buzzards and eagles fly and golden plover and meadow pipits nest in the long grass. There’ll still be stags in October to roar under your plum trees at night and you’ll awaken from dreams of Africa. There’ll still be a place for the sparrowhawk, for the pine marten, for the fox. There’ll be ceilidhs in the houses at Hogmanay and barbecues on the lochside in summer and maybe, one day, someone will breed alpacas.

There are internal changes, too: an increasing alienation from the more common human landscapes, a horror of crowded places, of masses – you’re no longer fit for polite society. And even here, in this green and watery paradise, life can’t always be sweet: there are hard days to navigate too. When a gosling dies or a sheep miscarries or a lamb is sent to the slaughter. Days when the world intrudes too deep, and the balance you’ve fought for is lost. But at the end even of those days you turn your head to the pillow and take a deep breath and, for all your diplomas and degrees, for all your Chartered this and Solution-Focused that, you know that this is where sanity lies. That this, after all, is the only sanity there is.