A Weathered Fishing Village on the Scottish Coast

Journal Entry 03.26.2025

Photo by Olivier Collet on Unsplash

Greetings all,

I don’t have any regular articles this week so here is a writing experiment that I wrote yesterday on my son’s birthday. I took the following collage poem that I previously posted and then used each line as a place to expand into a fictional story.

Few are Left Who Believe

I was living around the corner [from]
a mythic world that existed at the beginning of time,
a single vast mirror gazing.
A time when many
had been working on the problem
of voice and gestures
aiming at the startling and revelatory.

The known voices died away [in]
[the] sounds of shadows that possess no future;
a quiet residential neighborhood
not far from the sea
full of sky.

The oldest come first to the ruins
to die in an old chateau
who had lived on from another time
and who had seen so many things.

When you look back there is always the past;
the dark passage they had no name for
included the work of contemporary poets
my brethren in the dream
Just sitting on the steps
And nobody knows them.
Few are left who believe.

From various sources starting from the blog: Poems and Poetics

A Weathered Fishing Village on the Scottish Coast

In a weathered fishing village on the Scottish coast, long forgotten by the world and barely held together by salt and time, a small community of artists and poets has quietly taken root. They came not for fame or fortune - those things have no currency here - but for something older, deeper. Some say they were drawn by the silence between tides, by the way the wind carries voices that aren’t quite there.

Why these creatives came here no one could say. Perhaps such artistic communities inhabit remote places all over the earth; in the mountains and valleys, along the rugged shores, in small towns and villages on back roads rarely traveled, in isolated cabins in the high desert of straggled pinon and juniper or the woods and forests and even in run down neighborhoods in urban centers everywhere. Many artists and poets are like mystics who follow their own inner path to wherever it may lead.

The village itself is a patchwork of stone cottages and buildings huddled close together in a labyrinth of streets and vennels for protection against the winds and gales, haunted by gulls and the ghosts of fishermen long gone. Moss grows thick between cobblestones. Rust stains the harborside where old fishing boats moor. But behind the shuttered windows, inside rooms lit by oil lamps or low electric hum, there is life. The artists have filled the empty spaces with canvases that never leave, with songs performed around a fire, with poems read aloud only to each other and to the sea.

They do not speak often of what they do. There's a shared understanding that meaning, like fish, can’t be forced from the deep - it must be waited for and it is often a personal and private catch for the day. These are not the kind of poets who chase applause or trends or live on the time marked by clocks. They are the kind who watch the fire burn low, who listen for the turn of the tide in a stranger’s breath. Their art is not so much for galleries or publication. It is for the soul that remembers - faintly, painfully - that once it was believed that something sacred moved through brush and pen.

Few are left who believe in such things. Fewer still are willing to live for them. These are the fishermen of the shoreless sea who cast their nets into its depths. Here, in the battered shell of this coastal village, belief lingers like mist. Fragile. Persistent. A line of verse pinned above a hearth, a painting standing against a wall, a song hummed while gutting freshly caught mackerel.

They are the watchers and weavers of the thread - those slender filaments that tie sorrow to beauty, dusk to dawn, forgetting to remembering. The world, in all its hubbub doesn’t notice them. It moves on along its busy well-trodden roads, as it always has. But when things break like wave on the shore - as they always do - something from this place will rise as a song or a story or a vision. Quietly. Without needing credit. A breath, a line, a light against the dark.

I was living around the corner from a number of these poets and artists in an old shingle and brick bungalow with a wide covered veranda. It is a quiet residential neighborhood not far from the sea and full of sky. Here the known voices of the world die away in the sounds of shadows that possess the present without concern for the future.

The area had been built well over a century ago. It was originally a centuries old fishing village that was envisioned at a certain point as a romantic seaside resort town which accounts for many of the fine old homes but at a certain point the area had fallen on hard times and in its earlier history this house where I now find myself had been badly neglected. A leaking roof is the main culprit in the ruin of a house allowing leaks in the roof to cause damage to the interior ceilings and walls.

The first order of business during its redemption was to ensure that the place had no leaks and to keep the weather out of the interior and to repair the chimney for the old stone hearth. Then the project has been to slowly bring the beast into a tamed state of livability.

The interior is in a continuous state of refurbishment with an eye to maintaining its dilapidated plaster walls through careful repair but leaving as much as possible in its original state. This included walls that had been covered over with many layers of peeling paint and ancient wall papers which were pulled down in some places revealing earlier layers and otherwise repasting those places where such a thing could be done if the design was interesting or romantic.

Anything torn out that could be used in the studio for making art was kept. I have always had a soft spot in my heart for neglected things and cherish the resulting character-building that an old house like this can possess. One often discovers secrets in the evidence of its many years of inhabitation that creates a certain unique atmosphere in such places. These discoveries can be grist for the imagination.

Here, in this little village, I found myself in a mythic world that existed at the beginning of time, the writers, poets and artists here are like a single vast mirror gazing and reflecting in a time when some were working on the problem of voice and gestures aiming at the startling and revelatory.

When we weren’t in our studios or tending to the little things of everyday life, we often sit out on the verandas or stoops watching the world go by, the weather come in or talking about who knows what or go out for long walks in the rugged landscape or, when day is done, often find each other at the pub having a beer and a bite to eat. All of which constitutes the fabric of our days and nights.

In a small remote village everyone becomes a quirky, idiosyncratic family of sorts who are by nature a community of isolationists where most are comfortable in their own solitude. Those who are not, do not stay long.

The oldest among us came first to the ruins.
The locals say he simply arrived one misty day walking down from a mountain path that no longer leads anywhere, with nothing but a canvas satchel and a penetrating gaze that held the weight of forgotten centuries. He’d lived on from another time, that much was clear. Not in the theatrical sense of an immortal, but in the quiet way a tree might outlive empires—by standing rooted, and knowing how to remain regardless of the conditions.

He said little, only that he'd once known this place. The chateau, long since broken by weather and wars no one remembered, had once been his - or perhaps he had served in some capacity within it, or loved someone who had. His words were never direct. They circled like birds over wreckage, giving shape to stories through absence and deep quiet reflection in the silences between his sentences. We learned to listen carefully and had to infer much.

The rest of us came later—painters, writers, those driven by a longing we could never quite name. The chateau on the hill, a sentinel standing guard over the sea attracted us because it was a monument to endurance as we all wished to become. Endurance is a retrospective quality, one that can only be looked back upon. Stone broken down to bone. Windows gaping like empty eyes. The staircase, still spiraling upward toward a roof that no longer existed. You could see the stars from the ballroom floor.

But he had come before all of us. He had created something of a hermitage in the lower kitchen chamber of the abandoned chateau where he could build a small fire to cook and stay warm. He swept the leaves out with a tenderness that felt sacred. He found an old wooden table where he could eat and write. He planted nothing, repaired nothing, asked for nothing. Instead, he remembered. He was our resident memory of things unknown to us. Not always spoken aloud, but in the way he moved and gestured. In the way he stood in the light and closed his eyes when the wind passed through. As though greeting old friends.

He often spoke of fairy lore, myths and legends plucked from the mists of time often as if from personal experience. He frequently walked the ancient mountain trails and along the shores of the sea at a slow dignified pace. He once mentioned a woman who sang to the rohan trees and a boy who painted storms. He didn’t say who they were or from when, whether they had died or simply drifted away back into legend. When we asked why he came, he only shrugged: “Where else would one go, when the world becomes too busy for listening?”

Those who knew him - most of the artists and poets and stray souls in the village - saw the signs. He’d been quieter and more reclusive than usual, more watchful of the wind, like he was listening for something no one else could hear. He hadn’t written in weeks. Just sat by the fire in the old pub at the inn, eyes tracing the mountains through the window and the flames in the hearth while deep in thought as he stirred the embers.

No one tried to stop him when he walked out into the snow. How do you stop a man who knows his own ending? We assumed he had headed back to his haunt in the old chateau.

They say the old poet left just before the snow came down heaviest, the kind that buries fences and time. He wrapped himself in his wool coat and hat, took his walking stick carved with ogham, and walked east into the hills without a word.

We found the traces of his footprints, such as they were, a day later – a deliberate, slow, heavy walk heading up the slope past the old sheep gate. But it was what followed alongside that gave us pause: another set of tracks, larger, heavier. A woman’s feet, bare and long, pressed into the snow beside his own. And between each of her steps, the mark of a staff, round holes in the snow as from ancient wood.

The shepherd's boy saw it first and went pale. “She’s with him,” he whispered. “The Cailleach took him.”

Some said, ‘Nonsense!’. Some crossed themselves. But the oldest among them just nodded. The poet had been marked long ago—when he first arrived, half-starved and full of local stories no one remembered telling as if he had returned from an ancient time. He’d written poems that felt like weather, verses that tasted of moss and fire. The Cailleach, they said, had spoken through him more than once and that he had second sight. But most creatives develop the chambers of the heart and are sensitive and intuitive seers of things beyond the boundaries of the everyday.

Three more days passed. The storm continued. No one dared venture out after him.

On the fourth morning, the snow cleared, and a few of us trecked up into the mountains. The trail was mostly gone, lost to the wind. We assumed we might find him frozen, propped up against a boulder. There was no body. Only snow and rock. And the faintest impression of two figures walking on, side by side, into the white.

Then, high above the tree line, where the world flattens into sky and cloud, we found his satchel. Inside: a single sprig of rohan tree berries, a folded piece of paper, perfectly dry, sealed with a stone. No signature, just a line of verse written in pencil:

“To her, who remembers the silence before the first song, I return.”

Some say he went with her to the mountain’s crown, and she opened her cloak and wrapped him in it - ice, wind, and eternity. Others say he became part of her, his poems folded into the turning of seasons, scattered in frost and thaw. Or did he just walk away and arrive somewhere else as he had arrived here? Some how he had passed through that dark passage they have no name for.

After that we often toast him and recall stories he had told and how he had told them. Most of his stories led to questions that were left unasked and unanswered . He became his own story and legend among us.

But all who speak the old tongue agree: he was not taken. He was received.

And when the snow falls just right—when it glitters like language—you might see it: the delicate line of footprints, and the heavy mark of the staff, winding upward into the cloud covered crags, where poets and goddesses walk without fear and some never return.