Wild Moment: Eva Spain

"This is an extract from a rain-spattered notebook I carried in the pocket of my waterproof on a five day solo journey through Knoydart in April this year." Dive into Eva Spain's wonderful watery tale.

I had walked these paths before, more than 20 years ago, when I moved rapidly, focused on getting to the next point, completing the journey in two days. A little on-edge perhaps, afraid of being a young woman alone in those expansive, unpopulated spaces. Now it was a different journey. This time, I was letting myself be drawn to what I was drawn towards, and exploring that.

I wasn’t conquering peaks. I was following the water, with its capacity to take multiple forms, to both find routes and make its own routes, always moving, always shape-shifting.

At the top of Glenfinnan, I found places of confluence, where each water course had its own distinct sound. Before I left, my daughter had asked whether I was going to drink water from mountain streams. Like this was a mythical substance she longed, one day, to taste. I had half-forgotten, in the more than 20 years since I was last there, the clarity of the water. Its cool, clean taste. Maybe you form a relationship with a water course when you drink its waters.

I followed the course of a stream to find multiple waterfalls above Gleann Dessary. I stood in the spray, leaning against rocks at the same angle as the falling water, feeling its power. Any sound I could make was held within the sound of the water.

I sat in the rain and watched shallow waves of white water, tinged green in places from the moss underneath, falling expansively down the surface of a vast boulder.

Sometimes the paths themselves were like water courses, water and earth mingled, flowing through each other. At times, it felt like the water was coming from all directions: as rain falling on my face and seeping up from the moss underfoot.

In Gleann Meadail, I set out to follow a stream to its source, though I found it had many sources: run-off from rocks glinting in the sunlight, damp ground below a craggy summit; trickles and underground flows. Or maybe there was was no source, just a continuous movement of water through the landscape in multiple forms: as cloud, rain, bog, run-off and stream. And I realised I didn’t, in any case, need to get to any source. I could just lie there on the moss in the sunshine and listen.

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