Inchnadamph

What time of year was it?  I remember the water bubbling green in the low grass, the ranger pointing out how the herbage showed the geology below - was it chalk?  No, Limestone.  Of course limestone.  But we looked at the small flowers and stumps of grass; it must have been spring.  Scrambling up the scree to the place above the stream, Allt Nan Uamh.  Uamh, like womb.

But it is not a visual description that I want to give here, more an impression of what a place carries of itself, about time.  A slantwise slice into the geology - the famous bone caves, the ancient name - and the feeling of being there, where these different ages compress into one sensation.  Not layered, but multiple.  A visit is an event, to be unravelled in reflection; perhaps that is why it has taken me so long to write this down - revisiting the memory briefly, over years.  To find it still alive.

Someone had rolled a ball of wool down into the throat of the cave.  And it did, it does feel like a gullet; the stony floor taking a sudden dive past the tonsils, a steep descent, unpeerable into, at the back where the bones were found.

Leopard, rhinoceros?  No, a bear tooth, brown or polar they could not tell.  Arctic lemming, lynx, wolf.  All the velvet antlers of young female deer (that much can be established) gathered, or accumulated (but when?)  Half a bone pin in walrus, ‘of unusual design’, Viking?  Or early medieval.  And a human femur, tucked into a niche in the wall.  Recent scrutiny of the research, tracking down the artefacts logged in 1899 and 1927, those that could be identified, concludes that it is not possible to prove the presence of human habitation here before the Neolithic period.

The deer still gather at Inchnadamph (do they?)  Though not now of course, wrong time of year.  The retired people from Birmingham sell Tibetan yak jumpers in the community hall below.

And underneath, the rocks. The music of them - singing of time and flow and sinking and cataclysm, fire and dust. Slowly giving up their riches to the scourers of the surface, to the plants, the roots, the algae, the lichen and the fungi. Weathering.

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The NBN Gateway Atlas lists 2415 species for the carpark at Inchnadamph.

Animals - 692

Amphibians - 2

Crustaceans - 11

Myriapods - 7

Birds - 106

Worms - 0

Prickly Snail - 2 records

Sedge warbler - 6 records

Sparrowhawk - 31

Yarrow, Sneezewort, Ginger button…

The Moth Atlas of Great Britain is scattered with ‘white holes’, places so inaccessible or remote that no-one has yet sampled to record what does live there.  Although the act of publishing the ‘holes’ in itself has led to a scramble to be the person that fills in one of those last pieces of terra incognita, for moth-kind.  But who does the grasses?  And the bacteria?

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The furry body of the wingless female Northern Winter moth glitters mineral grey in the cold.  Recalls the downy stumps on the young roes’ heads, rubbing off in their (is it their?) second year.  The Antler moth carries the impression of the grown stag’s horn, white on its wing like an embossed monogram - a three pointer.  These together suggest a long mutual association which does not involve humankind.

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Stand on the rocky outcrop by the road just before dusk at Tokavaig, and you can feel, before see, the bats follow the track down to the shore, scooping up the fat bodies of moths as they go. The percussion on the eardrum of swift things flying past, fast and low.  A timeworn track. 

Later (is it a full moon?) toads will come out to plop over the tarmac of this same road, right to left.  A specific combination of conditions: cloud cover, season and humidity tasteable in the air.