No pain, no gain.

Without realising, I’ve been dashing around Scotland for the last 20 years with my head wedged firmly between my buttocks (too much detail?). I’ve not intended to be blind to the landscape in front of me but rather than look, see and ‘feel’, I’ve rather tended to simply consume. Recently however, I’ve forced myself to explore the Scottish landscape afresh; to put it in a wider perspective; to understand and appreciate it better, or more fully.

SCOTLAND: The Big Picture has a few lofty aims but one is to showcase Scotland like never before. That’s quite an aspiration, bordering on arrogance perhaps. There have been many great photographers before me who could all lay claim to have ‘reinvented’ the Scottish landscape with their cameras. So what’s different now? Well technology is different for one thing. The means by which the landscape can be recorded and then reproduced is at new heights. More importantly however, The Big Picture has a narrative, which is beginning to guide not only what I photograph but how and why.

Against this backdrop I recently spent time in both Torridon and Sutherland, two areas with half a foot halfway through a half sized door leading to a single-track road to Rewilding – the mass restoration of living systems. Sandwood Bay on the northwestern edge of mainland Scotland is a place on this road. Owned by The John Muir Trust, a Scottish charity which champions wild land, this spectacular beach is remote and, in the true sense of the word, wild. It is my hope it will get even wilder in the years to come.

It was pitch black and with sleet hammering on the windscreen, a five-mile trek across open moorland and wet bog was about as appetising as a jobbie sandwich for breakfast. I looked at my long-suffering photographic buddy, Mark Hamblin, and despite our unspoken reservations, we knew that Sandwood Bay wasn’t going to get any closer just thinking about it. We set off with head torches ablaze and after an hour or so, the rain eased as the darkness slowly lifted. The wind continued to howl however, as we arrived at the head of the beach in less than promising light and already longing for comforts that were still many hours away.

I was really only after one shot – the shot that shouted ‘wildness’ at the top of its voice; the shot that captured the quintessence of this remote edge; the shot that just ‘did it’. That shot needed light and it wasn’t until very late in the day that the conditions shaped up. Between continual squalls eliciting endless expletives as I tried to keep the rain off the lens, there was light: sublime light, the light that only north Scotland in winter can deliver.

We shot until there was nothing left. By early evening the sky was a clear, deep blue bereft of cloud and the tide too full to better what we already had. It had been a long day and now, in the dark, we needed to negotiate a tidal outflow, which had kindly filled my boots once already today, and the return walk in driving sleet. Despite the pain and frustration, I was reasonably content in the knowledge that I’d come somewhere close to capturing the rawness of Sandwood at its best: a truly spectacular part of The Big Picture.

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1 thought on “No pain, no gain.

  1. Pete; Without going too much off topic your mention of the John Muir Trust and their laudable aims brings to mind their justifiable concern regarding the proposed installation of the Stronelairg Mega wind farm in the Scottish Monadhliath mountains, situated on a natural peat bog, which they reasonably argue will release more CO2 than it will save.
    See: http://www.jmt.org/development-peat.asp

    In order to construct this monstrosity, it is calculated that 22m cubic feet of on-site sourced stone will be needed to support the turbines, the equivalent of a Berlin Wall 600 miles long!

    Setting aside the appalling visual and environmental degradation to the Scottish landscape is there not a far more fundamental question of the scientific rationale behind all wind farms?

    The current misplaced obsession with wind power conveniently ignores that they fail almost every test for successful electricity generation which first and foremost requires electricity to be continuously available on demand and in sufficient quantity.
    Wind is unpredictable and can only generate intermittently. It cannot load follow or be stored economically to smooth demand.

    The inescapable truth therefore is that for every wind installation there needs to be an equivalent conventional power back up which can generate electricity instantaneously or is lying idle. Either way this is both costly and inefficient.
    Far from saving the environment most developers are pursuing profit and quoting “potential” power generation is misleading when statistically only a small proportion of the maximum output is available at any given time. The fallacy that wind is preferable to nuclear or conventionally produced power conveniently avoids the truth that it is not an either /or situation.
    Wind farms are hugely expensive, produce very little electricity unpredictably and use public money to do so.

    Apologies for hijacking your blog for a rant but I confidently predict that time will prove that wind power is a swindle that most of the time doesn’t work and far from saving the environment the Highlands are being humiliated as the public are duped by an inconvenient truth that will set back rewilding for many years.

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