Picture This: A Kingdom of Wind

I trudge over expanses of the greenest turf, head down, lost in the periodic battle against loneliness. This northern lip of Mull borders a sea flecked with islands that dazzle in the rare ray of light. There’s a hollowness to the ground, like a blanket draped over the sleeping form of a grandparent. The vassals of the Western Isles are winds speaking in the shape of bellows, saws, and tubas. Their handiwork musses my hair, chaps my face, and brings water to my eyes. The faint track before me leads ever on to rolling hills rife with the ghosts of yesteryear. I turn back and see, for the first time, a palace wedged between gray-blue and green.

In the Blue Glen, the eviction of Muileachs was scored by the keening wind and the shuddering of trees. A Mr. Forsyth, the laird of Dervaig, authored this minor clearance so he might manifest his dream: Glengorm Castle. There is a memory of blue smoke filling the hills, a cloud of small, human aches made corporeal by the burning homes and cast upon the Atlantic’s skirling caprice. Some would argue set free; castles in the air that will never face our constant attempts to imprison the genius. Above it all, the castle, that dream in stone Forsyth never lived to see, glares across the windy sea to Rhùm, Canna, and Uist.