So I’ve just spent almost a week on Coll. A three-hour ferry sail due West of Oban it’s a wind-scoured little Hebridean isle; on a map it looks like a fish with a big bite ripped out of its tail
The ferry docks at the island’s only village, Arinagour; though in winter sometimes it doesn’t, especially if the tide is too dangerous, the winds too high or the weather too mental, which believe me it can be any time of year, but especially in winter.
Once you make it onto land, though, you know why it is worth the effort. The air is so bracing fresh you can almost drink it, the beaches are staggering, there’s even a pub to stagger into after those windy coastal walks.
But I’m getting slightly ahead of myself here; because like I said, the ferry doesn’t always arrive, and has been known, especially in winter, to arrive at Coll (or the neighbouring isle of Tiree) but then, unable to dock due to the weather, ferries its passengers and cargo straight back to Oban.
I originally wanted to visit Coll in December last year – but the ferry was cancelled at the last minute. This time I did make it – and by the time we docked my stomach was beginning to churn from the roll of the waves.
I went to Coll alone. I wanted to spend my time there writing, and thinking about writing, and walking and thinking about walking, and especially about darkness. I think about darkness a lot. I love it, long for it and still fear it. We experience so little natural darkness, most of us: we live under perpetual artificial light that is quite rightly referred to as pollution. Even when our own house lights are extinguished at night, so much other artificial light probes us: streetlights, car lights, lights from businesses or neighbours, lights from other people we live with, lights at sea, and the increasing intensity of light beamed towards us from space.
The junk floating up there in space reflects sunlight as it circles our planet. Space scientists (who do so love a label stating the obvious) call this stuff low earth orbit satellites and space debris. The abuse of space as a celestial fly-tipping site includes, of course, remanents from the Space X Star Link network, that scientists now label as one of the Megaconstellations.
It is hard to think of anything less megaconstellational than the isle of Coll; thought there is a curious link between the two. Coll is an official dark sky community, only the second in Scotland (the first being the Cairngorms). With 160 full time residents, it has very little light pollution, and the nearest neighbours are an hour away by ferry.
My first night in Coll there were three other visitors at the (comfy and wheelchair accessible) hostel. One of them, a self-identified aurora hunter, prowls outside at nighttime seeking the northern lights. And she found them, shimmering above the hostel, about 10 o’clock that first night. We raced outside to witness the show – I was already in my dressing-gown (that’s the thing when you take your car, you bring all the unnecessary stuff you suddenly really need) and stood in the car park in the freezing dark cooing as reds and greens shimmered, shifted, wafted as the aurora sparkled.
When the aurora gradually faded, what a dark sky it was. Black, thick and rich as pudding. I had the sense not so much of standing in it as being completely wrapped inside the night. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt the night like that, as a live presence that didn’t cloak or cover the sky but was the sky, expanding all over and inside me like cold breath.
The visitors left the next morning: the ferry came early because the winds rose. For the next four days I had the hostel to myself. I walked across muddy fields, and swam in the pale green sea, which was ferocious and delicious especially because I swam naked, which I do whenever I can (just be wary of rip tides, they can be deadly whether you’re naked or not), I met a hedgehog on the beach – he was very dainty – and disturbed flocks of plump honking barnacle geese. I even saw hares.
And every evening the sun set early – and that thick rich pudding of night sank into the island. It was noisy: the wind bellowed over Arinagour, blasted across the long machair sea meadows. I loved it and feared it, that darkness. So utterly different from what I’m used to, even in Oban, so cold, intense, impenetrable.
I feared it because it was all these things, and I guess it reminded me of being a little girl with little-girl fears of looming monsters. But I tell you what, I slept so well beneath it, in the deserted hostel with the front door unlocked. I loved Coll darkness because I think we each need darkness, its restfulness, its ferocity and the imagination it provokes. The sense of being, I don’t know how else to say it, in season.
I’m sure one of the reasons nature writing is so popular right now, is that we are desperately trying to rekindle our sense, individual and collective, of what most of us feel we’ve have lost because we are so estranged from the physical natural world around us. We pine our lost sense of wonder.
I honestly don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we mourn this lack, even though most of us – and I so include myself here – don’t even have the words for exactly what this is we’re mourning. The joy of bright red, white and shooting stars, the curiosity of moonlight, the dazzling comedy of the Milky Way and the scale of what is out there, up there, sparkling, beaming and also lighting our world. We need darkness just as much as light. Our own stories reflect this.
Greek Mythology identifies Nyx, Goddess of night, as one of the first deities – feared even by Zeus: Nut, ancient Egyptian Goddess of sky, stars & the cosmos was a protective deity – her body cloaked in stars; Arianrhod is a Welsh Goddess of the moon & stars & the corona borealis constellation, or northern crown. Stories of cosmic Gods & Goddesses used to make me roll my eyes, but our ripped-apart world could do with a bit of cosmic Goddess intervention right now. A bit of dark magic.
In that warm hostel I wrote reams in my notebook, mainly in my dressing gown. And very night I stepped outside into the freezing car park, and thanked the darkness for being there, reminding me of what night can be.
That’s what happens when you spend some winter nights alone on Coll.
Footnote: you can reach Coll by ferry – see Calmac for details. Don’t forget to pack your sense of wonder
photo: all mine – from the ferry coming back from Coll (too early in the morning)
