dál riata

on pilgrimage, prayer and spiritual warfare

Early in the morning after the fifth night, I sat in a burial cist in the middle of a Neolithic stone circle and tried to remember why I was walking to Iona. My chain of reasoning, if there had been one, was now remote from me. I was in Kilmartin, having woken freezing in the early hours of the morning. I’d made a fire the way Rhyddian, the woodland ranger of Glenan on the Cowal peninsula, had shown me: collect ‘wispies’, the dead and dry twigs hanging down from trees, and use them to make a ‘heart’, a little bundle, on top of which you can burn dry ferns and bigger bits of wood. It had been enough to warm my hands and pass the hours until the sun rose. At dawn the dewdrops had frozen into little balls of ice on my tent. I packed up my tent, which I’d pitched on the edge of a field next to Glebe cairn, and set off along the ancient monument trail, wearing all my clothes. I hadn’t anticipated how cold the nights would be and hadn’t bought a warm enough sleeping bag, nor had I known about the ticks that were somehow finding their way inside my clothes. Part of me wanted to turn around and go home—but, as I had to keep reminding myself, I’d given up my lease and had nowhere to go home to. There was nothing to do except keep walking and hope that, by the time I got to Iona, I’d have some idea of what to do next.