The other night

The other night we visited the end of the world.

When we look to our left toward the strip of the setting sun over the Atlantic, astronomical twilight, midnight merging colour reflects where loch meets sea.

The short drive to the end of the road is a real roller coaster. Condensed hills a child would draw, road rutty and narrow, one side falling sharply to the water. In the dark we drove crawling speed not a single soul around. Suspended quiet.

Cove, in the Second World War was where the Russian Artic convoy assembled, sailing from Loch Ewe, allowed by a tactical agreement between Churchill and Roosevelt to help Russia with supplies. The remains of gun emplacements, geometric structures black against the sky, litter the very top to the right. Below, to the left is the cove, seaweed covering the hummocks and burns of the now low promontory.

Behind us it’s pitch, we start to walk. 

Imagine a scene from the late sixties series ‘The Avengers’ where cyborgs emerge from byways or ‘The Prisoner’, ball bouncing orange. There’s a sound, intermittent, strangely unidentifiable. It wasn’t sheep baaing or the weird sound of a night jar, no other sounds come close to describe. It seems to follow us from side to side yet we cannot see a thing. I imagine perhaps there’s something moving. Is it in the air? A bird, a drone? In the heather, not at all distant, close enough to see but we cannot. Are we being watched? 

We get back in the car.

A few hundred metres or so we drive back past a deserted huge hangar barn with lights completely blazing, inside strange shapes hang. I’m now somewhere between Twin Peaks and The League of Gentleman.

The next night our guests also went to see the midnight sun setting on the sea, having the same impressions, the same experience, S sent the sound recorded to a friend sound recordist. Drone was suggested but no certainty at all.

Another visit is pending.