Cairns for Joan

Taken by Marcheline at Loch Cluanie, Scotland 1999

My friend Joan of Walk This Way fame has recently posted some lovely pictures of a traveler's cairn on her website, and this is my response post, as it were. I encountered the cairn above in the mountains on the way to Glen Coe. The weather was windy and cold, and there wasn't another living soul to be seen in any direction. If one wants to be alone with one's self, there is no better destination than Scotland. But of course if you ask me, no matter what - there is no better destination than Scotland.

The beauty of cairns is not as much in their haphazard architecture as it is in the physical proof that others have gone before you... in the most magical, hard-to-reach corners of the world, adventurers reach out to each other by the simple act of placing a stone on the cairn. Each stone touched by the flesh of another kindred spirit, each stone a validation of the pull of places more beautiful than words can describe.

When I took my mother to Ireland a few years ago, as a special gift to her (visiting Ireland was one of her lifelong dreams), Bear asked me to place a cairn for him somewhere in the wilds. And so I did, on the great Blasket island, off the coast of County Kerry.



My camera was, unbeknownced to me, suffering from an illness in one of its most-used outdoor shutter settings, so many of my pictures were utterly ruined by big black blurry bits eating up half of the image. You can see here that this picture was in danger of being obliterated by the shutter blight, but happily Mom had positioned the camera so that I and Bear's Cairn were to the extreme right of the shot. My mother, queen of the backdrop effect, had wanted to catch the Irish sea behind the remains of the old stone house, bless her soul! The resulting effect is somewhat creepy and very appropriate - for the sad, ghostly history of the Blaskets fits perfectly with the feel of this picture.

Since I just spent the last twenty minutes going through my plastic bag of assorted photographs from Ireland (some supplied by Mom, to make up for my lost ones), I now have the urge to drag out my travel diary and put them all in a photo album!