Cameron’s Country
BEYOND the fishing port of Kinlochbervie, in the north-west Highlands, on through the straggling croftships of Oldshoremore and Blairmore, you arrive at a gate that heralds the rough track to Sandwood Bay. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say this track isn’t the most exciting stretch of walking in the Highlands.
It could even be described as dull, stretching out ahead over anonymous bog-splattered moorland. However, such a walk-in only adds to the anticipation of the final destination.
Here lies one of Scotland’s finest and most extensive beaches and the sensation of remoteness is powerful. At the southern end of the bay, a 100m (328ft) high sea stack, Am Buachaille (the Herdsman), stands guard on its sandstone plinth. Behind the beach and sequestered from it by a row of marram grass sand dunes lies a freshwater loch, Sandwood Loch, and sitting on the grassy hillside above it are the ruins of Sandwood Cottage, its gable walls forlorn and sad.
On the face of it Sandwood Bay is little different from countless other bays and beaches that fringe the storm-lashed seaboard of Scotland, but there is an element at work here, an atmosphere, that I find almost impossible to describe.
I can effortlessly describe the impressive cliff scenery and the relentless pounding of the Atlantic surf. I can tell you about the bare moorland hinterland and the bird sounds that keep you company. I can rhapsodise about raucous gulls and cheeky seals, and otters that emerge from translucent green waters to play on rocky strands; and I can regale you with tales of mermaids and ghostly sailors and shipwrecks. I can write about all these things but I find it almost impossible to communicate the single and vital element that makes this tiny part of Scotland so undefinable.
Perhaps, just perhaps, words cannot describe the spirit-of-place that lingers here. Perhaps we need to find another way of expressing the soulful, almost spiritual emotions that Sandwood evokes in us. Can such an element of nature, of landscape, can such a spirit-of-place be best defined, explained, in a piece of music?
Musician Duncan Chisholm first visited Sandwood Bay a couple of years ago. He had heard about the beauty, the legends and the inaccessibility of the place and wanted to experience Sandwood for himself. Duncan is one of Scotland’s finest traditional fiddlers and several years ago recorded the Strathglass Trilogy, three albums of traditional music that was his first step into writing and arranging music that was inspired by place.
“I had spent seven years producing the Strathglass Trilogy – Affric, Canaich and Farrar – and what I discovered during that time was that I gained a lot from visual stimulus, particularly from the landscapes,” Duncan told me when I visited him at his home near Inverness.
“The Trilogy production was a big learning curve for me in terms of what actually inspired me and I’m
fascinated by the fact that most of the indigenous music of the world is inspired by landscape.
“If you listen to the indigenous music of Norway or the north of Spain you realise how representative it is of place and how the human mind reacts to place. It’s also about the dark long winter nights of the north of Norway and the music that represents that.
“I was lucky growing up with my teacher Donald Riddle. When he was teaching me he was in his 70s and he had a great amount of historical knowledge about the tunes he was teaching me. So I was getting a history lesson and a new tune at the same time. Both came as a unit so it gave the melody a three dimensional tone. Indeed it gave the tune colour. As he told me the old stories it sparked a visual thought in my head and to a great extent that’s never really left me. Instrumental traditional music gives people the opportunity to visualise, in the same way that classical music does.
“It’s an interesting thought that what you see has an effect on the human mind in a creative sense. We all draw from what we see. If, for example, you observe a beautiful view then you have an experience you’ll remember. Musicians and artists have the ability, through the skills that we practise, to perhaps reflect that in a certain way. I enjoyed the process with the Strathglass Trilogy so much that I looked for a place that would inspire me in a similar way to those glens I know so well.”
That was the background to the writing and recording of Duncan Chisholm’s latest album, Sandwood.
Sandwood Bay is certainly the kind of landscape to offer visual stimulus but it’s more than that. It’s a particularly atmospheric place, with a wealth of legend and folk tales surrounding it. There are those who claim this is the principal hauling-up place for mermaids in Scotland. You may smile, but a local shepherd, Sandy Gunn, was walking his dogs on the dunes a number of years ago when he saw the figure of a woman on a rocky strand which runs into the sea from the middle of the beach. He was convinced he was watching a mermaid.
There are many tales of hauntings here, too, in particular that of a black-bearded sailor who haunts the marram grass sand dunes. Sailors at sea and fishermen claim to have seen him and believe that perhaps he had been shipwrecked here. The Scottish writer Seton Gordon tells of walking to Sandwood Bay early last century and how astonished he was at the number of wrecks that littered the beach. These were, he believed, old vessels, lost on this coast before the building of the Cape Wrath lighthouse 100 years before. He even posed the question that there might be Viking longboats
“Sandwood
Bay is a particularly atmospheric place with a wealth of legend and folk tales”
Cameron’s Country
buried in the sand. It was the Vikings who had named the place after all – sand-vatn, or sand-water. The ruins of Sandwood Cottage are also supposed to be haunted.
I asked Duncan if he had experienced anything of this darker side of Sandwood Bay?
“I’ve never felt frightened or scared in Sandwood Bay,” he replied. “I’ve only ever felt very much at home. I felt I could have stayed there for days and days on end but I have a very good friend, a very wise and levelheaded individual, who got totally spooked at Sandwood Bay. For no apparent reason. As soon as he came into sight of the Bay he became terrified and had to turn round and go home. He’s never been back since, and I’ve read about so many people who have had similar experiences.
“It’s worth remembering that the Celtic pagans used to refer to ‘thin places’ and I’m sure such places are all around us. We’re surrounded these days by all kinds of stimulus but we know that Sandwood has had a dark history, a lot of shipwrecks, the stories of ghost sailors and all of these things but I think there are certain places where there could be a link to the past. I’m personally very scientific of mind but I think there could well be these thin places where we can become aware of an event or events that occurred in the past.”
At the very beginning of his Sandwood album, Duncan records the following words: “Out here there is no time; time is our imagination, past, present and future.” I asked him what he meant by that? “The thing about Sandwood is that when you visit you’re reminded about a sense of time and that’s something I thought a lot about when I was up there. You’ve got the Lewisian gneiss rock, which has been there for billions of years. It’s the place where the Picts first made their home and the Vikings landed there. When you are in Sandwood you’re very aware of that but you also feel as though you’re somehow linked to it. Like time is not important – it’s a timeless place. There’s a definite sense that time is irrelevant.”
I first heard the music of Sandwood earlier this year at Celtic Connections when Duncan performed it live with a group of friends, all first class musicians, both traditional and classical. It was a wonderful evening and I knew that Duncan had tapped into the magical ether of that Sutherland landscape and had produced something quite exceptional, something that went beyond verbal description and story. With that work now firmly launched what is his next project? Was there another landscape in Scotland calling him?
“Well, not at the moment, but you never know. An analogy I always use about being involved in music is that you are on a railway journey, a train journey with no stations. The important thing is that you stay on the train and that you have something to give. For me it’s a life journey. I’d hate to be one of these people who had a huge amount of success in younger years and nothing to excite me anymore. Every time I think about a new project I get excited about it and I will never retire from what I do because I love it so much.” Sandwood is available to download from www.duncanchisholm.com