This trek across forbidding crags and through crumbling caves demands resilience and determination, but rewards it with a wonderfully rich and atmospheric sense of place
A Highland Song is a magical-realist trek through the Scottish Highlands, and at first I didn’t think I liked it at all. My first attempt at getting teenage runaway Moira through the austere, perilous mountains to her Uncle Hamish’s lighthouse ended with me restarting the game out of frustration, having been stranded, lost and shivering, on the same unforgiving mountain range for so long that my patience was frayed thin. I was battered by relentless wind and rain, kept getting stuck in caves, and dutifully picked up sprigs of lavender and white gorse while never seeming to find anything helpful, like a bothy or a Twix. Moira kept taking tumbles down the scree because I misread the scenery, robbing her of what little energy she had left. It was brutal, and not at all enjoyable.
But the second time, I tried a different path not long after leaving Moira’s home, through a tunnel under a dam, and made it just a couple of days late to the lighthouse. The third time, I was there in time for Beltane (the Gaelic May Day festival), to see the game’s ending. The fourth time, and the fifth, I had days to spare, and spent them exploring the crags, probing caves, meeting strange travellers and climbing peaks I hadn’t yet conquered. I found hand-drawn slivers of map tucked into matchboxes, lunchboxes and mouldy discarded sporrans, and scoured the outline of the hills from each peak to discern their meaning. Sometimes I even found shelter when I needed it, though I also once fell through a bothy floor into yet another cave. Continue reading...
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