Reblogged from Pondering the Past… a beautiful visit to the Isle of Mull…

It was a day when the stags roared.

We walked along routes used in ages past. Along tarmacked roads, past machair and grey-blue sea. Then inland. Green grazed fields, golden moor and heather, sheep, geese and buzzard, onto earth and grass track.

We stopped to look at abandoned, ruined blackhouses, sitting squat either side of the track. Overgrown and roofless, the first we passed had been roofed within living (my) memory. It sparked remembrance of my father’s photographs of the last inhabitant of that cottage. An elderly lady, my father had known and visited. He had taken photos of the newspaper lined walls of that house, and a nesting bird sharing the shelter of the cottage. By the time I had known the house, it was empty. Though the last inhabitant was long gone, the dilapidated thatch of the roof remained in my earliest memory.  Now that thatch was gone too and the house stood stark, abandoned and old.

We stood for a while in remembrance of that place, discussing memories that were not our own. This was a place changed in a little more than a lifetime. Altered in a relatively short space of time. Yet few will remember it as an occupied, peopled place. Most who pass by will consider it ancient and people-less. But human hands are visible everywhere still, not just in those abandoned houses, or in re-remembered memories. But in vegetation and moor, in the shape of the landscape, the track that we followed. This place is full of people still.

Continue reading at Pondering the Past