An Assynt Dawn
Richards Mountain Pages
I walked for an hour through the maze of hillocks, wondering whether the bothy would appear around the next corner, but inevitably it was just another hollow, with another hillock blocking my view. The path joined a burn, and soon after split in two. The main drag continued along the burn, crossing a bridge and slinking below the ramparts of Suilven and Canisp, on its way to Elphin, but my path headed left. Immediately, the bothy appeared, a low slung stone hut, stretched out below a hillock, with a grandstand view of Suilven.

I opened the first door to find the flysheet of a tent hanging over a line, gathering cobwebs in what was clearly a storage room. Next door I found a large cold room with a dusty floor and a wooden door leading to a smaller cosier room encased entirely in wood, except for a small area around a stone fireplace and chimney stack. There was the usual bothy furniture: a wooden table with a grey plastic stacking chair beside the window. A pair of reading glasses propped neatly by the window, glinted in a short burst of sunlight. Clean, and untouched by spiders webs, they had not been there long. I guessed I would have company.

Despite the evening approaching, it was still warm and bright outside, so with the plastic chair and bothy book in one hand, and a freshly made cup of tea in the other, I sat outside, leaning against the warm stones of the end wall.

I flicked back through several pages, stopping where an entry caught my attention. Beside a cigarette paper held to the page by a dried and yellowed piece of tape, a note proclaimed ‘In case of emergency’. The other entries were of a similar nature, suggesting that the bothy was often used for boozy weekends. I closed the book, and wondered whether it was too early for dinner.

I cooked outside. It was nothing special, just a dried flavoured pasta with a couple of rolls I had grabbed from a supermarket in the few spare minutes before the morning train. I spent the evening gathering tinder for the fire, and searching out a hillock from which to view the eclipse. With a dawn start, I would have little time in the morning.

With the sun slowly swamped by cloud, before it could paint the mountain peaks in reds and gold, a chill wind swept across the plateau, stroking the grass, and rattling the heather. Evening was coming. Retreating to the bothy, I lit a fire, carefully coaxing the flames from dried grass to heather to twigs, and finally the trunks of gorse I had collected earlier. For the hour it burned, the wood spat violently, tossing cinders across the room, jolting as the flames consumed it. Gorse was never the wood of choice for a fire.

I set my watch alarm for four, and retired to bed. I slept little, and by the time the alarm had gone off, I was already dressed, and venturing out into the cold dawn air. My chosen vantage point was engulfed in a stream of mist, running from loch to loch between the mountains, so I sought another hillock, and waited. A glow appeared by the distant slopes of Quinag, and gradually intensified, as it rolled across the horizon; but before the sun could rise, the sky quickly darkened. A minute later, with the darkness gone, a golden crescent rose from the distant hills, gradually widening until the sun was restored. I had missed the full spectacle of an annular eclipse, but I had witnessed a part. I was disappointed, but there was no point dwelling on it; I had breakfast to prepare.

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