FROM MOOR TO MACHAIR.

Across the road the old peat track winds its way out onto the moor and as I trudge this now familiar route I try unsuccessfully not to allow my mind to imagine the devastating changes that are coming. The two and a half meter track will expand to double that to allow heavy machinery to pass. The hillside on my right will disappear totally to become the first borrow pit and the second will gouge away the granite outcrops nearer the summit. Looking west and south from here the fourteen 140 meter high wind turbines will miniaturise our existing village turbine. The Hebrides are renowned for their high winds and when the interconnector cable joins us to the mainland Lewis will be seen as an energy production plant. After a village meeting this week I was left with the feeling that Tolsta is in no way prepared for what is about to befall it. For some it was the first they had heard of the wind farm and I wondered just what plant they had been living on. Although the meeting was for Tolsta well attended and made the front page of the Stornoway Gazette most people did not attend, either having not been informed or possibly feeling powerless to change what is now the inevitable with planning having been granted on smaller turbines three years ago.

I follow a smaller indistinct track off to the left heading east passed old peat cutting bank to a lochan were my eye catches the turquoise flash of dragon flies at the water’s edge. Further on along the ridge I rest at my favourite spot to look down on New Tolsta and out beyond to the pinnacles and the cliffs of Tolsta Head. From here my world looks perfect a domain of dunlins, lapwing, plovers, grouse, merlin, buzzards and eagles most of which will simply move aside and have little problem in adapting to the coming changes.

Descending through the heather and the still parched bog I follow Allt na Muilne the burn that meanders down past the remains of two Nordic mills to Traigh Mhor beach. I make my way passed the primrose carpeted inner dunes crossing the fence to the steep gradient of bunny-ville where rabbits stretch out relaxed lounging outside their warrens. As I climb the slope rabbits of every size scatter in all directions the picture of a healthy community. Further across the machair where Cleite Beag, the stream from New Tolsta reaches the sea I note that above perched on the normally dripping clay cliffs the buzzard has abandoned its nest.

 Below where the stream makes its way through a host of golden iris I spot in the water what looks like some strange form of after birth. Strange plastic all the way from Barcelona. With my hand now full of recovered plastic for my recycling bin I make my way home passed the soft purple of orchids on the neighbours’ croft to the riot of yellow buttercups that form a cushion below my studio and the young pine trees that shelter beneath them a Twite’s well-concealed grassy cup of a nest, invisibly to all but me.