Such a boulder sits in Glen Gyle, high up under the Bealach nan Corp and facing the snout of Beinn Duchteach. It has taken me a good few hours to get here: car to Stronachlachar, bike to Glen Gyle, then a steep hike up the gravel and concrete pylon-road to the bealach.
It is a boulder that encourages touch, like a chained elephant, or a shark swimming by a diver’s cage. There is something animalistic and separate and knowing about it, and a feeling of otherness and vastly different world experience: a vertiginous knowing of deep time. The picturesque swirls and colours of the boulder are unique memories of the earth’s earlier days, moments of sediment settling in seas, lakes and rivers, all an accident of a place that no longer exists, a landscape that lived giga-years-ago.
The boulder has survived to this unique integrity, and it has seen days without life swarming around it, without conscious gaze upon it, when water, wind, ice, and changing climates were all that troubled its hunkering meditation. It sits there over millennia as the earth spins round the sun (a time-lapse solar system runs in my head cinematically, the sound of a cinema reel spinning).
This schist boulder has been etched and scalloped by the elements, its mass lifted and turned like a Rubik’s cube by a long-vanished glacier, then discarded on the cusp of a bealach here in Glen Gyle, between these steeply carved and craggy mountain flanks, softened by grasses, heathers, and the endless sound of bubbling waters.
The glacier’s release of icy pressure has calved the boulder in two like a giant egg. A skirt of gravel washes round its feet every time the burn floods, leaving little eskers of quartz and silica around the foot of the boulder, echoing the swirls of the parent stone. Its mass and isolation, like a large tree, makes me vary off the path to lay a hand on its cool and rough skin. The folk beliefs of trolls and monsters frozen into stone, or the boulders as the playthings of the Fianna, hurled here and there by warring factions, makes sense in these moments of encounter. The stone speaks our human stories, despite its urge to be silent and of itself. It does not complain or care or see significance in our tales. Its life has been a long being, asking very little of the world, an ultimate humility. When a human hand touches it, palm against it, it doesn’t react, there is no reason to. But the human registers something resonant within the stone and attempts to give it that conscious agency we give ourselves. It is a romantic feeling, but as close as we get to gleaning how old this place really is, what this stone has witnessed in its stony way, and what it has seen vanish just as quickly.