· stillpoint ·

Stumbling on empty in the dark. Audio: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UCINzGkiIqwbDNXxGfrtU3GXNPIqaVy8/view?usp=drivesdk This is coming out a few days early as it is exactly a year ago, as I write this evening, that I was pushed to my physical and emotional limits entirely through my own fault.    I was half way through the Three Peaks challenge, had started up Ben Nevis in the pre dawn and then picked up my good pal Bill Adair in Glasgow who drove me down to Scafell Pike.    I clambered quickly up the peak as everyone else was coming down and summited in thick cloud as evening drew on.   .I took the wrong path down and realised this fairly quickly but assumed it was a path I had seen on the way up which would join the main path.   By the time I realised it was not going to do that I was in an entirely different part of the area.   What followed then was 4 hours traverse over rough bog land and boulder slopes, two hours of which were in pitch darkness as I tried to make my w

Echoes of courage. We’ve just come back from a wonderful couple of weeks in Wester Ross, enjoying the varied weather, spectacular combination of mountains and sea and the time to explore, wander and wonder in God’s good creation.   We were as far removed as you can possibly be in Britain from the political events in London and the uncertain days now ushered in as we head towards Brexit one way or another.    One thing I have discovered is that a wild and grand landscape somehow has even more power and drama in it when there is some evidence of human habitation, past or present.    It is as if a ruined shieling, or light in a cottage, a crumbled field wall or roof peering above a shelter belt of trees somehow frames the waves battering on a cliff, or the clouds pouring over the mountain ridge.   The untrammelled wild of the northwest is gifted a poignancy and history by these edgings of human presence which, in my view, enrich rather than spoils.    Such a life is not for the fa