AUTUMN SEA-SWIMMING ON SKYE

Talisker Bay is somewhere I seem to gravitate to whenever I find myself on the Isle of Skye. Black sand strewn with fronds of bladderwrack, left behind and then reclaimed by the tide, it seems different each time I return, as if transformed by the sharp wind which howls amongst the waves. And yet, something here is always constant; the air seems different, heavy with salt spray and the thousands of miles travelled across the ocean.

The first time I drove the single-track road from Carbost, it seemed endless. Potholes and cracks lined the tarmac, grass creeping in to fill any gap it could find, at times carpeting the middle of the road — nature reclaiming what it rightly owns. Now, it feels familiar. Too narrow to hold two cars, each bend and passing place slip by in a well-rehearsed pattern; drive, stop, reverse, continue, as others pass in the opposite direction. Against a grey September sky, everything here seems oversaturated, as if drawn in childrens’ crayon; a single black line weaving onwards, and onwards, still rising and falling in an ocean of green.

At last, through a rain-lashed windscreen, the horizon opens, grey cloud pouring down to create the sea, indistinguishable from one another but for the faint movements of a breaking wave. Layers, snacks and a flask of coffee are piled into a rucksack, and I set off walking the last kilometre of tarmac, wetsuit already on. September mornings hold a special kind of magic, and at 6 a.m., when everything else is silent, you can almost hear it.

Back to Carbost, for coffee, cake and a shower, despite the fact that days later, I’m still picking fragments of dulse out of my hair. It sticks to you like that, the ocean — it’s where we came from, after all.