Crofters Annie Worsley and Kirsteen Bell prepare to mark the solstice in Wester Ross and Lochaber.
Dear Kirsteen,
December has been rushing by and the winter solstice is almost upon us! I cannot believe how quickly the year has flown by. The dark seems to have suddenly deepened. For ages we have been blethering about how much daylight we have or do not have. Again, and again! Every time we meet someone on the road! And the dense blankets of cloud of recent weeks have added to sense of growing darkness.
Anyway, I thought I would send you a couple of pictures of midwinters past – as a sort of Winter Solstice greeting. One is a photo of the solstice sunrise from a few years back. The sun is just peeking up over Maol Ruadh which is the long, sloping hill marking the entire southern edge of our valley. It runs from steep cliffs by the sea to the foothills of the Torridon mountains. The other is an image taken from high above Red Point, just a couple of miles south of our croft. On cloudless days we can see almost all of Skye, from the mighty Cuillin to the Quiraing on the northern end of the Trotternish peninsula. There are lots of Solstice-Yuletide-Christmas colours in midwinter sunrises and sunsets!
Every year I hope for clear skies so I can watch another midwinter sun slowly rise or set. Recently, I have been wondering how many more I will see. Bah humbug! I do not mean to be deliberately melancholy but midwinter is special for me. My reaction to the whole thing is swept up in the remembered grief of losing my mum but it means sunrises and sunsets at this time of the year are more intense, more beautiful and somehow much more powerful. Once upon a time I was too upset to take it all in, now I rejoice in the memories and sensations; now life is filled with grandchildren and I want to show them these colours, this light!
How have you been getting on in these darker days? There are only three or four truly ‘workable’ hours outside on the croft, weather-dependent of course. The need for light governs almost everything we do, doesn’t it? Do the mountains contract your days even more? I am trying to visualise sunset and sunrise in your valley, and wonder which mountains are your mid-winter markers. I guess here, with wide open skies to the west and the mountains at arm’s length in the east, we might have a few more minutes of ‘day’ than you?
When it comes, I love the surge of midwinter light. When the colours arrive, they seep into everything – land, sea, me – and although it might sound a wee bit daft, I feel the golds, coppers and bronzes replacing my blood and filling my lungs.
Nowadays I don’t feel the shortening of hours of active light as I once did – as a restriction to mind and body – even when the westerlies blow dark grey over a charcoal sea and the croft seems made of ashes from the fire. If we are lucky enough to have a few moments when the sun breaks through, the day will bloom with chrysanthemums of orange, red, and yellow. And I love that when it happens.
A friend down south asked recently how we cope with such short days. All I could say in reply was that a Scottish midwinter can be a rampaging, alternating, exhausting roller-coaster of light and dark, colour and sound, deep and merciless but utterly wonderful. Or it can be a solemn, quiet sheet of mirrored steel, remorselessly cold but also still beautiful. You must remind me of these words when I next grumble about the weather!
And yet, amidst all the remembering and the search for light, I’ll do exactly what my mother did – go out to collect greenery (holly, pine, leafless bog myrtle, and perhaps the last curling leaves of moor grass) to bring into the house for decorations. Mum was the daughter of a tenant farmer and she used to say their old home was always decorated with gifts from nature at midwinter. So once again, the wilder scents of this place will fill our living room. We will put up some wee fairy lights on the old tree by the gate and many more inside. We’ll decorate the Christmas tree and light the fire and have a dram. (You must tell me what your traditions are!)
Ach Kirsteen! I long for a decent winter solstice. But whether or not it comes, I will go to the coast anyway and watch the shortest day die away, even if the sun sets in a disappointment of greys, even if the winds are howling and pushing mean-spirited showers towards us. I will know then that we have turned the corner (the page?) as a new year begins to unfold, and I will raise my glass to you and yours.
Solstice blessings Kirsteen. I hope you all have a lovely Christmas!
Slàinte mhath xx
*
Dear Annie,
I smiled at you saying you’d been blethering about the weather. In the same way that I wait for the first bluebells to appear, the birch leaves to drop like coins, or the first snow on the hills, I listen out for my husband saying, ‘Aye, the nights are drawing in’, in a caricature of himself every year. By the end of November the mountains behind us hide the midday sun, although I can still get a peek from an upstairs window. By December the only direct light we see lands on the opposite shore, gently thawing the south-facing slopes, while we sit in shadow.
As I write, heavy gobs of rain are being flung at the windows by a north-east wind, sweeping away the recent snows. Instead of a winter wonderland I am looking out a landscape streaked dun and dark. Yes, I can relate to the tendency towards melancholy, particularly when grief is laced through it all. Winter can be a grim time here, so your letter brought a welcome gleam of light.
The croft is quiet at the moment, and I’m secretly grateful for that. We don’t have any pigs this year, and while next-year’s freezer will be emptier for it, I think of the tracks I lay in the snow and ice, carrying feed and water and straw, back and forth, back and forth, tensing every muscle against dead slippery grass, my face screwed up against wind that scours. I remember a morning after one rain-lashed night, going out to find the pig-house filled with water – I have a picture somewhere of me splattered with mud and brandishing a metal rod like a sceptre, triumphant from digging a temporary drain channel, and still in my pyjamas. I am glad to be able to choose whether to face the winter.
You’re right too about the way in which light shapes our days, and I loved to hear about your mother’s traditions and the way you hold them now. Your letter got me thinking about the traditions we observe and those rituals, and the moments we choose to notice in the landscape. The privileges we have now allow us to choose this life, to choose how closely we place our faces to the wind and dark.
Have you read Isobel F. Grant’s Highland Folk Ways? I’ve borrowed this from her chapter on the seasons and occasions observed by our Highland ancestors: ‘The people’s lives were conditioned by the rhythms of their work – the movement of the herds out to pasture in the spring and their return to the stubbles in the autumn, the sowing and reaping of the crops, the movement of the herring shoals… Worked into the occasions were special observations that have changed in accordance with the changing ideas of people, and going back through the long years of history to an even remoter past.’
After I read your letter, I searched Grant’s book for any mention of solstice customs but found nothing. She talks about following the moon, of St. Michael’s Day, of Samhain, then skips over the longest night, going straight to the twelve nights of Christmas and Hogmanay, to St. Brides’ Day, to Beltane. She does, however, speak of a relationship with the deepest days of winter I know we both recognise in our bones: ‘the influence of the land we live in, a stern setting for human endeavour with its long drawn-out winters with the nightly darkness that lasts almost two-thirds of the twenty-four hours, its constant gales and rain or heavy snowfalls, and with seas, hills, rivers and lochs that can so quickly become inimical.’
Christmas is the seasonal beacon in our house, especially with the boys still being so young. In comparison the solstice is quietly acknowledged, maybe muttered in passing to each other, “longest night tonight”, as one of us switches on the lamps early in the day, and the kids might talk about where the sun is, where the Earth is, how we tilt and spin. I bring the rose-tinted glasses to my husband’s more pragmatic bent, so I will usually point out that the days will get longer from here, glossing over the length of time it will realistically take for that light to register in our eyes.
As Grant says, our observations change in the accordance with our changing times and ideas — and don’t we just need a little more brightness in these days. I went back through my own photos around the solstice over the years to see if I could send an echo of light back to you, but all I found were pictures of night. Like me though, my phone camera looks for more light than there really is, so I’m sending you a late December moonset instead.
Wishing you clear skies and light on this solstice night,
Kx