My Favourite Place In Scotland - Pennie Latin
Post categories: My Favourite Place in Scotland
|12:29 UK time, Tuesday, 28 August 2012
As part of the My Favourite Place in Scotland competition Pennie Latin tells her story...
My Favourite Place
Assynt. It was entirely love at first sight on my part. I remember with amazing clarity the first time we met. My parents introduced us - they were old friends with Assynt having spent many years making the long journey from Cambridge to camp at Inchnadamph with groups of school kids they'd taught over the years. I was heading north with them, hitching an introduction on a school reunion. We stopped just north of Ullapool - my folks being incurable twitchers thought they'd spotted an Eagle - I sat in the car and stared at Cul Mor rising away from me, hardly one of the most dramatic of hills, particularly from the A835 where it sort of shrugs its back at you, but I remember feeling a spark, a flicker.
Across that first wintry week Assynt gave up little. It was a week spent in smirr, mist, dense cloud, rain and occasional snow but the glimpses she did afford were enough.
Returning South to Helensburgh I was changed. Assynt sparked a relationship with Scotland's hills and outdoors like an infection. I found I had to keep heading back, keep returning. It's not too extreme to say that in getting closer to Assynt and the hills I got more and more distant from my marriage.
Eventually a job came up in Inverness. My fate was sealed. North I went, Assynt calling me. Divorce soon followed and a new relationship blossomed, forged, perhaps unsurprisingly on the strength of a climb up Cul Mor together.
Assynt for me means change. It's where I go to think; to grieve; to re-assess as well as to just feel outrageously alive. I've probably shed more tears on Assynt's hills than on any other landscape, not just because its beauty brings me to tears but because an encounter with Assynt is a very frank and raw encounter with oneself. It's a place I feel as exposed and naked as the landscape around me. Sitting on top of Suilven, Quinag or Ben More Assynt can only ever be an honest encounter. Exhausted and exhilarated from the climb you gaze out over a landscape like no other. The peaks rise with such quiet self-assured drama, the lochans below like a fractured mirror to your inner thoughts. Nowhere do I feel more utterly insignificant. Nowhere more conscious of how fleeting we are and nowhere quite so inclined to stand on tip toe, spread my arms and give a full-throated roar into the wind! (If you've never tried perching on a hill and ranting at the world, do it, you look bonkers but it works miracles.)
Assynt. A landscape I love with an irrational, unrequited often unsettling love.
Pennie Latin
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