St Finnan's Island to the Iron Church across Hills of Lead

I have recently walked a six mile path in the West Highlands that links the village of Polloch to Strontian, rising over the shoulder of Ben Resipol (pictured) at over 1000 feet, and linking fresh water Loch Shiel with salty Loch Sunart. Each loch cuts a dramatic 25 mile gash inland and each has a feature that once drew columns of human traffic to it.


Eilean Fhianain, the island of St Finnan, sits in a twist in such a narrow point of Loch Shiel that you almost feel you can touch the island from its banks. This island was a traditional burial ground and drew coffin paths to it from all over the once heavily populated areas of Sunart, Moidart and Ardnamurchan. The ragged high land must have taxed the coffin-bearers and resting points are still marked with huge cairns.


On an OS map of 1925, on the high pass between Polloch and Strontian, where, a few metres apart, a cairn overlooks each valley, a well is attributed to St Finnan. The well suggests this path must once have been the final journey for the people of Strontian. After the mid 18th century as they dropped steeply towards Loch Shiel, the procession would have passed the Corantee lead mines. The mines are best known for the discovery of the mineral Stronianite in 1791 which was named after the village. The chemists Crawford and Cruickshank concluded that it contained a new “earth”, subsequently Dr Thomas Hope's research set the scene for the discovery of the element strontium by Humphry Davy in 1808. The hillside is still scarred and cleaved there. Building rubble, broken cogs and implements lie on the ground in rusty testimony.

So what about traffic heading the other way? Perhaps its most remarkable use was as a religious pathway at the time of the 'Disruption' of the Scottish Church in the 1840s. At this time, the Church of Scotland was ruled over by Parliament, making the reigning monarch head of the church and the local Laird ‘Patron'. This meant that he would choose his own minister rather then the congregation doing so. In 1843 unrest about this unwelcome link between politics and spirituality came to a head and most ordinary people chose to rebel by joining a break-away movement, the ‘free church’.

Such was the spiritual hunger of the people that accompanied the physical hunger of potato famine in the area, that when the Laird, Sir James Milles Riddell refused to sell them land on which to build their own ‘free’ church, they met in huge open-air services. People would walk anything up to 20 miles to the small bay at Ardnastang just a mile west of Strontian, sometimes barefoot, in order to gather in all weathers and seasons between the low and high tide marks in services that went on for several hours. The 'Corantee' path would have been the most direct route for worshippers from Polloch.

This poverty-stricken community, having recognised that the sea could not be ‘owned’, took it a step further. They resolved their situation by raising an extraordinary amount of money to commission from a shipbuilder on the Clyde an amphibious 'Iron Church' able to accommodate up to 750 people. In July 1846 it was towed by two tugs around the Mull of Kintyre and through the Sound of Mull into Loch Sunart (pictured). People lined the shores to celebrate its arrival and flocked to it by foot and boat from Morven, Ardnamurchan and Moidart. For ten years it remained anchored just off Ardnastang and during this time the popularity of its visiting ministers was gauged from the ‘plimsoll line’ of church attendance - an inch for each hundred congregation.


There are still many parts of the story to assimilate and imagine. This is a place of careering crags, jagged skylines, and tiny communities that teeter on the edge of the Atlantic. We might think of the land as 'wild' and uninhabited. But there is a sense that human footfall, industry and belief has stamped stories on these hills. This path is an important one to keep in use. I loved walking it with this great sense of history, passion, religious observance and human ingenuity beating a rhythm under my feet.

A common word between us and you

I first went to Spain in 1989. With O-level Spanish locked in my muscle-memory, I spent six weeks on a teaching practice in a secondary school in Madrid and then went to Cordoba in Andalucia to visit a friend who was living there. Wandering the narrow streets and whitewashed patios of the ‘Ornament Of The World’ in the early heat of Easter, I was struck by a strange sense of familiarity. I was not long returned from teaching for a year in Zanzibar, where Arab and Portuguese influences still breathe from the style of buildings, from the faces of people, from the Swahili language.

In Zanzibar the style of mosques was simple, but they were ubiquitous. Although I never actually went inside one, the call to prayer at dusk, the snatched sight through lit doorways of rows of praying men’s heads, the rituals of Ramadan were part of my normal life. People shared wealth and hospitality in ways that we would call ‘Christian’ at home. I had to question some of my prejudices.

In Cordoba the sharp sweet tang of orange blossom pursued me, palm trees shaded walled courtyards, buildings stood tall with interiors open to the skies to create a draft. Even the open-throated singing that coiled through the labrynths of streets from balconies, punctuating day and night during the fever of Semana Santa, echoed with reminders of a style of Zanzibar music, Taarab, and with the mosque calls. I knew little of Spanish history. I was disoriented by finding this nostalgic familiarity in Europe, even though when I visited the mosque, its grandeur bore little resemblance to the simple single-story buildings I had seen on corners in Africa. Two worlds seemed to touch each other here.

In the years that followed I returned to walk in the hills of Andalucia, was excited by the aquecias- the irrigation channels high in the dry hills introduced by the ‘Moors’ and still in use today. Later when I went to walk in La Marina – a range of mountains inland from the Costa Blanca –it was the Mozarabic trails that astounded me. These are extraordinary feats of engineering - narrow paths stepped into rock so that steep ascents and descents through severe mountain and ravine-cut land could, and in some places still can, be easily traversed.

The ‘mozarabs’ (would-be Arabs) were Christians who adopted Moorish customs and habits and learnt their skills. Although the majority of the population converted to Islam, Christians were treated with tolerance, had normal freedoms, and contributed considerably to the Hispano-Arab civilisation that flourished for several centuries.

It was the physical superiority of these ancient paths that grabbed me, and have insisted that I follow their zig-zags and archways again. At the time I had no idea that they were also emblematic of a period of religious tolerance when culture in the arts, science, engineering was so sophisticated we might even call it a ‘golden age’. But this idea now excites me – that our very feet might teach us something by taking pilgrimages on enlightened routes.

This October, when prominent Muslim scholars wrote a letter to the Pope, they warned:
"If Muslims and Christians are not at peace, the world cannot be at peace. With the terrible weaponry of the modern world; with Muslims and Christians intertwined everywhere as never before, no side can unilaterally win a conflict between more than half of the world's inhabitants. Our common future is at stake. The very survival of the world itself is perhaps at stake."

They called the letter ‘A common word between us and you’, drawing attention to shared theological values and their expression in words from the holy books. I was interested in the language aspect of this, 'the word'. Already in my scant reading around the subject of the era of religious tolerance in medieval Spain, I’ve come across problems with the way words come at us. ‘Medieval’ itself is often used to indicate a backward and enlightened culture, when in this case we mean quite the opposite. ‘Moor’ was a disparaging word for Muslims used by Christians. And even ‘Mozarab’ is said by some to have been used by Christian resistors against those who collaborated with Muslims to become Arabised and impure. The word is loaded, needs to be regarded cautiously.

I had no idea my feet would lead me into such territory, but I’m going back to La Marina to see what walking can tell me about the word between us. I have no doubt of the importance of this issue, and the importance of looking at history.

As part of the 2007 London Design Festival, '26 Posters' set a challenge to twenty-six pairs of writers and designers. To create a six-word ‘advertising’ poster that somehow comments on or reflects its immediate location. I’m intrigued by this one and its intertwining of two words, two worlds. It also reminded me of this image on a Zanzibar postage stamp in 1963.

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