I've made it onto the far Northern reaches of Lewis once again via a slightly loopy bouncing ride in the Calmac ferry from home on Skye. It's good to see the community is still here amongst a wild remnant of the storms that played havoc in the islands the other week. Instead of being able to work, local crofters even had to resort too leaning on one another in the bar until help arrived [!] Despite roofs being torn from their mountings, chimneys falling through houses & sheds deciding to migrate to Barvas; the most frighteningly worrying event in the middle of the chaos, & by far the most serious, seems to have been old Donald losing his hat...I can't stress enough though: it's merely a rumour at this stage. Nobody should panic unnecessarily.

I'll take the dog along the vast expanse of sand that is Europaidh beach later today & throw driftwood into the surf. There is a scent of snow in the air, rain squalls moving through with haste, over miles of flattened shivering moorland & there are white tops out in the ocean. Everything is pierced by the cold sun giving a living 360 degree oil painting feel to the day.
Still sporting an unpleasant lower back injury, I know I'll clamber through the freestanding seaward boulders & check on them. Make sure they havn't changed angle or indeed, been swallowed up forever by the recent tidal ferocity & hurricanes, although it's highly unlikely.

Some of the cataclismic black shards of rock that have been crushed & fused together too form freehanging roofs by tide & time, are not of an equal power to the forces that originally placed them there. When the wild ocean & these imposing cathedrals of stone are locked in such ferocious battles, the fragile human spirit has no earthly business being inbetween the argument...These formidable clashes of geology & erosion, which form as the Butt of Lewis comes under the direct wrath of a deepening winter Icelandic sea, are the instruments of the planets epic symphony...a hyperballad, beyond all our recorded existance.