Free Seasons on Harris by David Yeadon Page A

road, but these are merely human-scaled frills on the fringe of this dark, threatening infinitude of…nothingness.
    Even on warm, sunny days, this is an eerie emptiness, pockmarked here and there with remnants of ancient peat-cutting beds and collapsed frames of summer “shieling” shacks suggestive of traditional lifeways long abandoned to the silence and slow imploding suction of the bogs.
    I’m heading for Stornoway, but a sign appears at the roadside pointing westward across the bogs to the remnants of settlements and forts and standing stones, many of which are thought to predate the great Egyptian pyramids—most notably the 4,500-year-old stone circle of Callanish.
    I’d intended to revisit these places with Anne to see if they’d impress us the same as they had more than twenty years ago. But the hell with it, I thought, this day is all mine and I can go wherever I want—so why don’t I just nip over and take a peep, then return some other time with Anne to investigate their mysteries more fully.
    Great idea, responded my little serendipitous self. Go! So I went, easing my car off the main road and heading due west across the wild fringe of Barvas moor.
    Bleak barely describes the next twelve miles. I was now alone on one of the loneliest roads in Britain. Naturalists and ornithologists of course love this place for its untrammeled wealth of flora and fauna—harder to spot here than in verdantly lush machair locations, but that’s what makes the moor so captivating to the knowledgeable viewer able to identify all the sproutings of ling and bell heather, bog asphodel, sundew, cotton grass, bog myrtle, blue moor grass, deer’s hair grass, and those spongy green masses of sphagnum moss.
    I obviously respect their enthusiasm and certainly empathize with their virulent opposition to one of the most ambitious mega projectconcepts to ever hit the Hebrides—that proposed creation of one of Europe’s largest wind farms across these moors. The actual scale of the concept varies depending on the perspective and political savvy of the presenters, but according to the latest headlines in the Stornoway Gazette , there’s talk of as many as six hundred four-hundred-foot-high turbines that could generate “enough sustainable energy for half the Highlands of Scotland” and ensure “considerable economic benefits” for the rather sparse coffers of Lewis.
    The objectors of course decry the destruction of “a unique and beautiful wilderness,” the decimation of “countless thousands of birds every year” in the huge whirling blades of the turbines, and a wide array of other traumatic factors, including “the pathetically meager royalties that the private investors proposing the scheme would donate to the island as token compensation for their capitalistic greed and topographical and aesthetic ruination.”
    This, I thought, as I scurried across the dark moors and bogs, is yet one more of those dramatic confrontations between traditionalists, environmentalists, and futurists. It’s early days yet but already, in the strident pro and con letters to the Gazette and furious village meetings, I could sense the battle lines forming and the fear of yet one more unwanted invasion—invasions that for thousands of years engendered so many of the ancient remains of forts and huddled settlements in defensive locations scattered up and down the west coast of Lewis.
    These remnants of threats and bombastic responses were all still intact as I meandered my way along the coastal road—the modest stone circle and standing stones of Garynahine, the Breaseclete burial chamber, the restored Norse mill at Shawbost, the enormous towering bulk of the Iron Age Carloway broch or dun (much archaeological argument here about whether brochs are fortified homesteads and duns are actual forts or…), and the excellent renovation and museum at the Old