Sea Room. Adam Nicolson

yourself to weather which at home you might have hidden from. I decided to climb the cliff again. I went up to the foot of a familiar route, the Grassy Chimney, an adder’s tongue fern in the cleft above me, a cushion of thyme on either side. I reached up for the first hold, pulled my body up six inches, perhaps a foot, and as I did so, as I applied my weight, I felt the block, a cubic yard of dolerite, ease out a little from its bed. I let go of it as if it were a burning coal and dropped those few inches back to the turf. Never again.

       6

      I HAVE SAT FOR HOURS on the bench in front of the house – it’s a plank of driftwood on a pair of stones – watching Donald MacSween trawling for scallops (or clams as they are called in the Hebrides) in the waters a mile or two away just south of the Galtas. He has a new boat now, the Jura, but in the 1980s, it was the Favour, a steel thing, not, it has to be said, the greatest beauty that Scalpay has ever known, painted red and white, with its name in huge letters on the wheelhouse.

      Sometimes, he and Kenny Cunningham, his crewman also from Scalpay, went on deep into the night and on a quiet evening all you could hear for hour after hour was the groaning monotone of the diesel, a slow surging in its note, as the Favour