Time Travel

A day of rocks and fire. A rock in our path in the pre-dawn light - big enough to need rolling, rather than lifting, aside. It would be possible to see this as a hostile act by the hill, but it did not feel that way - more like a playful gesture to gain a little attention: I may be quiet, but I am still here

By dawn we were in central Mull - the part where two volcanoes once existed and, for 3 million years, spewed out layer upon layer of vast basalt lava flows, which now form the wedding cake landscape of North Mull. This is extremely inconvenient of you are trying to simply walk down a hill and are repeatedly confronted by giant steps, or mini cliffs, too high to scramble down, potentially arduous to walk around. Just the hill's little joke.

The sunrise lit the hilltops like a volcano re-enactment - 60 million years rolled back in a trice - fire in the sky and cascading into the loch. A performance in our honour, an apology for the jokes

Further south, we stopped using the word 'hills' and switched to 'mountains'. These titans do not engage lightly with humankind. They observe, they tolerate, or they do not. We were permitted passage, silent and awestruck

Beyond the mountains, a softer landscape and, beneath it, rock so ancient it thinks that life on land is a modern fad that cannot last. Perhaps it is right. We reach the southern coast, where the rock is exposed in its ancient strangeness; twisted, glinting, like an eye that has seen through most things. The rock and the sea have conspired to create a cave with a cathedral entrance, a mythic organ-blast in solid rock; Wagnerian stone

Within the cave, humans have left their marks. Bronze age (or earlier) 'cup-and-ring' designs (though here only ringless cups); crosses and labyrinths from early Christian centuries, and this. Perhaps some Christian significance, perhaps a modified cross. Or perhaps it is what it appears to be: Poseidon's trident, a tribute to the sea that is so close, to the sea that made this cave, to the sea that first made these rocks, an aeon ago in another hemisphere, and that girds and guards this island. I hope that's the case, and I hold out my hand to the one that drew it