St Tredwell's Chapel

I walked down past the Links and across the waterlogged fields to the ruined chapel which is perched on a little promontory-peninsula across from the manse, it was a beautiful, mild, sunny morning, quite different from anything we had been led to expect. You can see the signs of a broch clearly enough, clear enough anyway to my wholly untrained eye, and then above it the ruins of a tiny chapel. The loch was clear and quiet, sea birds calling from time to time and skimming low over the water. Still the utter poignancy of something that simply looks abandoned, once a place of pilgrimage to a slightly lunatic Celtic saint who offered her eyes on a stick to a king who had admired them. Perhaps she was the Christianised version of some more ancient spirit or goddess.

Christmas here was a wonderful experience of harmony. Some times one is just happy and immediately I at least feel uneasy to be in such a state with a tense sense that it can't, won't, last, and that harsher realities will soon make their presence felt. But perhaps I am just beginning to learn to be happy while I am happy and accept it without clinging to it and when it goes to accept that too: he who binds to himself a joy, etc.