a thin place

Yellowcraig, 28 September

Last year Richard suggested watching Scotland’s Sacred Islands with Ben Fogle. We’d missed this series when it was first aired on the BBC in 2021 but Richard stumbled across season one on iPlayer so we settled to watch. (Seasons one and two are available here and I’d really recommend the first one.) I’m not sure why this series spoke to us at the time - perhaps Harris was in recovery post-surgery and we were spending longer at home and seeking the calm of vast skies and coastal scenes, as we also discovered the incredible silent hiking films of Harmen Hoek on YouTube around this time.

In the first series of four episodes, Fogle embarks on an island pilgrimage that takes him from the Inner Hebrides to the southern Outer Hebrides, and onwards to the northern Outer Hebrides and then Shetland; a pilgrimage that was both physical and spiritual as Fogle had set out to discover the connections that might be held within these natural places. It was a fascinating journey, a journey of incredible scenery and shifting light over the seas, with Fogle meeting various people along the way and chatting about island life and also the spiritual connections they had discovered.

In one of the episodes (and I need to rewatch this series to remember the location that was catalyst for this discussion) there’s a reference to ‘thin places’. I hadn't heard of this phrase or concept before, but it struck me. You can Google the term and find definitions, but I came across this 2012 article written by Eric Weiner in The New York Times and found it an interesting read as Weiner points out that thin places can be found anywhere, not only in the quiet and serene land and seascapes of the Western Isles but in those places where you… sense something.

He writes: ‘The ancient pagan Celts, and later, Christians, used the term to describe mesmerizing places like the wind-swept isle of Iona… or the rocky peaks of Croagh Patrick. Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter.’

Weiner goes on to write: ‘So what exactly makes a place thin? It’s easier to say what a thin place is not. A thin place is not necessarily a tranquil place, or a fun one, or even a beautiful one, though it may be all of those things too. Disney World is not a thin place. Nor is Cancún. Thin places relax us, yes, but they also transform us — or, more accurately, unmask us. In thin places, we become our more essential selves.’

I also stumbled across Thin Places Mystical Tours and this post where the writer addresses the question, ‘what are thin places?’ with this: ‘Thin places are places of energy. A place where the veil between this world and the eternal world is thin. A thin place is where one can walk in two worlds – the worlds are fused together, knitted loosely where the differences can be discerned or tightly where the two worlds become one. Thin places aren’t perceived with the five senses. Experiencing them goes beyond those limits.’

If you’re still with me on this, thank you, as you may be thinking: where is this post going? But in watching Fogle’s journey, as he discussed thin places and experienced his own, I didn’t really think about this personally. I was fascinated by this, but didn’t contemplate where mine might be.

Until Harris left us, that is, and I discovered a thin place, my thin place, right here, at Yellowcraig, in the constantly shifting light and the big painterly skies that hang over this stretch of water and the island of Fidra. I’ve known this view for years, and yet… its meaning changed. Something different was revealed. Can I explain this in a way that will make sense to anyone? No, not really. Do I need to? No, because sometimes you feel things that don’t require any explanation. And I’ve felt this time and time again here, walking along the beach at low tide, watching the setting sun casting watercolour hues across the clouds, appearing first as subtle smudges of colour, a hint of the shifting light, before bursting into a warm glow.

Or on cloudy days, below a heavy sky, when the clouds split as if their layers have been parted by a knife, and light spills through the crack onto the water below.

I felt this first when we walked here on the day after Harris died. It was a Saturday, but even as I write those two words ‘a Saturday’ I realise that the ‘a’ is out of place here. Because this wasn’t just any Saturday; this was the day after the saddest, most awful, most heart-wrenching day of my life. Of our lives. We were feeling raw as we walked along the path towards the beach. Spray from the waves was whipping above the line of the dunes ahead of us, something I’ve never seen before in all our years of walking here. Storm Babet had just swept across the UK, and she had churned the sea into a wild, loud, untameable force of water. We stood on the beach, gazing at this scene, a scene that mirrored our hearts, and we weren’t alone as even in the wind and the biting cold, others were standing along the shore, absorbing the power of this tumultuous sea.

We walked on along the beach together, the three of us, Bracken now, heartbreakingly, solo, and as we walked back and reached the corner where the beach sweeps round from the main stretch to the curved section that looks towards Fidra, the setting sun was blazing towards us. We moved from the shadow cast by the dunes into the glowing light. I captured those moments on video: the sun setting behind the treeline, the churning of the waves, Richard ahead, Bracken cantering along, his ears blowing in the wind.

I think, looking back, that this was the first time I felt that something had shifted in my understanding of this place, but subsequent walks here made this clear. If you’d asked me before where my thin place might be, I’d have always said John Muir Country Park (and this previous post explains why).

But no, it’s here. It’s here below this sky, overlooking this stretch of water, at low tide. I feel closer, somehow, to the lads here, especially Harris. When I was thinking about this blog and its name, this idea of thin places was on my mind. If I’d been writing this blog before last October, it would have been slightly different, I realise. It would still have been a space to share our walks and adventures, and it would still have been a place to reflect on those places that make us feel grounded, but in these months when my mental health has been battered and broken, and as I’ve tried to find a path forwards through sadness and loss, these places and connections have taken on a new meaning. And now, as I walk up over the dunes, and have that first glimpse over the Forth, looking towards Fidra, I also feel that I’m returning to my thin place.

And so we come to this walk from last weekend. I know this has been a long introduction to a walk, but I felt it was important to share the context of this place and these scenes. And this was a beautiful walk. The light, the clouds, the shifting hues and the squally showers over the water - it was all stunning. It was a walk where I wished that we’d arrived earlier. We’re at that point of the year when our timing can be a bit off. In our minds, we still have evening walks where we can arrive at 6 o’clock and have a few hours of light ahead, but the reality is that our evening walks are escaping quickly. As I write this, today’s sunset is at 6.47pm. By the end of this month, after the clocks have shifted back an hour, that sunset will be so early.

We leave our walks with Raf as late as possible in the day in the hope of encountering the fewest possible people (for him to react to), but this strategy will need to change as, while we can walk here in darkness, we all need daylight in our lives. Watching the light change so quickly on Saturday, I was kicking myself that we hadn’t left home an hour earlier.

But our late arrival offered us this light. As we walked across the grassland - again, a route chosen to avoid the people on the first section of the beach - we passed a favourite tree of mine, a tree I used to photograph years ago, sometimes with Harris below it, so I captured a few photos here as the light changed from soft and subtle to this warm glow.

From here, we wound up over the dunes and down to the empty beach that stretched below. Raf was delighted, running and running between us, with Richard ahead and me behind, photographing the cloud reflections on the pools of water left by the receding tide. Watching those first smudges of pink appear in the clouds to the west, over the islands of The Lamb and Craigleith, shifting to orange looking east towards Fidra, feeling everything I feel here.

This was a gorgeous sky; a gorgeous sky in this thin place, where it is easier to breathe. To reflect. To feel those deeper connections and the grounding held within.

Yellowcraig, East Lothian, Saturday 28 October 2024.

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