Luskentyre by Ian Grosz

My wife cried the first time she saw Luskentyre’s vast, sweeping expanse, framed by the Harris hills one December morning. It was snowing, and the light was playing across the bay between showers: patches of iridescent sand briefly luminous through breaks in the cloud. We bought a print of the beach that still hangs on our dining room wall: a moody shot of light streaming through dark clouds and illuminating the sea between the hills, transporting us back to that morning many years ago.

I have returned to the islands, staying on Lewis for a winter residency, and I take my old campervan on the long road down to Harris to see the beach again. The drive south is spectacular; the road threading its way through the moor and then up through the Harris hills, following a twisting loop around the huge bulk of the Clisham: a foreboding-looking mountain that separates Lewis from Harris. You can feel its dominant presence looming above as you follow the loop of the road, the pressing weight of its time immanent in every rocky peak, ridge and saddle.

Turning a bend, the glint of the ocean filling a tight fjord catches my eye, its waters slab grey and still except for the glint of sunlight. The road drops down the other side of the mountain, bringing me out into a widening valley of shattered rock sloping toward Luskentyre, its tidal sands threaded through with the cobalt of sinuous channels glistening in the sunlight and coiling toward the Atlantic.  I pull over and park in a layby, taking in the full expanse of the drowned inlet and its shale-rich sands, which gleam against the contrasting aquamarine of the clear Atlantic shallows.

Taransay is clearly visible a little over a mile offshore, sheltering the inlet from the harshest storms and allowing a towering dune system to have accumulated that reaches over thirty-five meters in height. The tidal flats are backed by these dunes and, during the short summer months, extensive flowering machair further inland blossoms all the way to the moor. Machair is a Gaelic word meaning ‘fertile, low lying grassy plain’ and is a habitat unique to Scotland and Ireland’s west coasts, formed from lime-rich shell-sand blown far inland and supporting a range of rare insects and birds. The elusive corncrake, with its odd, staccato rasp of a call, once a common sound across Britain and Ireland, is now confined to these far northwest coastal zones.

Traditional crofting practices, with low intensity cattle grazing and crop rotation, have provided the conditions ripe for wild flowers, including red-clover, yarrow, daisies, marigold, field pansy and poppies. This environment, in turn, supports increasingly rare bee species such as the greater yellow bumblebee and carder bee, and other invertebrates that encourage birds like the corncrake; but economic pressures have been forcing a move away from seasonal grazing, crop rotations and natural fertilisers to more intensive farming methods. The Wildlife Trust is working closely with crofters in the most threatened coastal areas to help support more sustainable practices through agri-environmental funding, but without the wider global policies required to help mitigate the effects of climate change, I wonder if I am witness to a landscape on the cusp of irreversible change.

Net sea-level rise in the Western Isles is predicted to exceed half a metre by 2080, threatening to inundate the machair’s fragile habitat with saltwater. The increasing intensity and frequency of storms exacerbate this scenario by creating ‘blow-throughs’ in the dune system: gaps in the dunes created by the high winds and tidal surges, allowing further encroachment of saline water inland. Increasing winter precipitation allows areas of standing water to form, especially in the so called ‘blacklands’: the transitional zone between the machair and the moor where many of the Islands’ crofts are situated. The future for the machair looks bleak.

I drive on, down toward the sands, parking up on Luskentyre’s northern shore; mountains rising up out of the Atlantic all around me. Stepping down from the van, I can hear the distant sound of the ocean, smell the ozone in the air and feel the fine mist of salt-spray against my skin. I pick my way through the rocks down to the beach: the product of thousands of years of wave-smashed shells slowly accreting with each successive tide. The wind is picking up, large breakers visible beyond Taransay, but despite filling my senses, the sea feels strangely remote: the tide out and at least a mile of sand between me and it, the sky enveloping it all with its endless distances.

When it comes to scale, Luskentyre reinforces a sense of perspective: a confluence of tide and time between the hills, its relatively new form the product of rising sea-levels at the end of the last ice age when the Atlantic inundated the inlet. Scotland is still rebounding after the weight of the glaciers were lifted: literally but slowly bouncing back from the underlying magma in a process known as isostatic uplift. Britain is slowly but measurably tilting, with Scotland in the far north rising one or two millimetres a year and the south coast of England sinking by the same rate, slipping quietly into the sea.

Following a line of dark Lewisian Gneiss along the edge of the beach, I look for a shell or a pebble that I might take home as a memento. I collect a few, intact shells and a small, dark pebble: smooth and round and streaked through with the faint pink banding of cooled magma, intruded through the rock a mind-bending one-thousand-seven-hundred-million years ago. The pebble is a record of unimaginably violent forces, now lying cool and still in the palm of my hand, leaving me suspended, for a moment, in the stark terror of it.

I take a photograph of my finds arranged on the sand with some seaweed, and then slip the best of them in my pocket, leaving the rest to the tide. Returning to the van, I continue in an anti-clockwise loop around the island, driving back to Lewis through the otherworldly moonscapes of Harris’s east coast, its naked volcanic rocks bare to the wind. The mountains loom darkly behind, bringing a prickle to the back of my neck, as though the forces held by Luskentyre’s impossible confluence might suddenly swallow the island whole.

***

Ian Grosz is a writer and researcher based in Scotland. Luskentyre is an abridged extract from a work-in-progress which explores how landscapes shape a sense of who we are. His essay Sacred Mountain was published on The Clearing in February 2022. You can read more about Ian’s work on his website.

Photograph by Ian Grosz.