End of the road

The solstice sun sets behind the Cowal hills as we board the ten o’clock ferry at the end of our long journey from Lewis. Another huge sky, but nothing like the vastness of the endless dome of sky over the island, where we could see an approaching shower long before it arrived and know that it would soon pass in the wind that never stopped blowing.

The journey home, by ferry, and by a road that took us all the way across to Inverness and down half the length of Scotland before turning west again to our own Clyde ferry, seemed an apt symbol for the transition to our normal lives.

But I can still return in my mind to that quiet stone chapel where the sisters at Carmel say their prayers, and hear the wind and the skylark above the machair...