The sun is rising through the Black Cuillin Mountains. Everything smells of the pristine snow that still caps their peaks, and the sun’s rays cut and filter through a thin morning mist. The air glows and the frosty ground crunches beneath my feet. Beside me crystal clear water gurgles through stones and down small waterfalls, forming the Fairy Pools. A bed of stones rounds the endless, glittering current.
I can’t see or hear anything or anyone but the ancient land and the water’s song. As I stand here, bathed in the early morning glow, I can’t stop the tears that rush to join my smile.
The sun is high in the sky and I am sitting on a mossy stone deep in Glen Coe, hidden in the Highlands. I look around and around over and over, and no matter how many times I take in these surroundings, the endless sweeping green hills and dark mountains between which I’m nestled, I’m incredulous. How can this really exist?
Clouds chase one another across the bright blue sky and I feel like I’m starting over. I feel like I’m healing. I feel like this place can right everything that has gone wrong in the world.
No church, no chapel, no cathedral I’ve explored has ever felt sacred the way that this does. There is something here that is more than words. There is something here that only I am witness to, something that reminds me of how small I am in a world that has so much to teach me – a world that is vast and mysterious and beautiful and at times, terrible.
I knew then, just as I know now, that there would be no way to fully describe the Highlands.
I came to Scotland in search of magic, and I found it.