Picture This: Ben Hope Skybound from Strathmore

Beyond the deep sweep of Loch Eriboll and inland from Sutherland’s wind-scoured coast, Strathmore holds Hope in its mountainous embrace. The enduring eminence of Ben Hope, Scotland’s northernmost sentinel, reaches crag-faced for sky and space. Following Strathmore beneath Ben Hope’s sheer shoulders, modernity grows threadbare and distant. A wondrous broch falls to pieces. Time reveals itself as another of mankind’s constructions, another tawdry exercise in placing ourselves at the center of the universe. Under the overcast sky Loch Hope is a sheet of beaten iron mirroring the weather’s whims, mirroring the mind’s constant convulsion. 

The compass has stopped working. The Arctic lies endless fathoms to the north, but its chill is here among lung and bone. Yet beneath all that black snow embers still hiss and smolder, waiting for a breath, a mouthful of cinders, for like a forest the self requires the occasional wildfire to thrive. The wide world is no garden of answers — those all grow in your own soil — but there are corridors of perception to pierce the inner darkness. Like here in the valley of Strathmore where Ben Hope has withstood tempests, gales, and blizzards for eons unnumbered, and still the earth wishes to touch the sky.