Small Isles
- pengodber
- Jul 15
- 14 min read
Updated: Jul 16
Rum punches above its weight. 8 by 8 miles of drama. Photo by Rosie.
Rum has charisma. It may be small but at 8 by 8 miles it’s the biggest of the Small Islands. On the map it’s the shape of a neolithic axe head, diamond shaped with an improbable number of flinty high points chipped out in clusters; soft glens radiating back from the deep, wooded indentation of Loch Scresort on the eastern side.
At the head of the loch is Kinloch. This is where the action is, the harbour with its Calmac slip, wheelbarrows lined up for transportation, skips for the island’s recycling, a little bit of commerce and a few houses.
Kinloch Castle, softened by lush greenery. Photo by Pen
Among the trees, incongruously Kinloch Castle, an Edwardian fantasy, monstrosity if you prefer, built by a Lancashire textile merchant. Now it stands empty and decaying, a ghoulish monument to great wealth and vanity. Likewise the vulgar Mausoleum on the opposite side of the island.
Kapok coming out of the upholstery, velvet curtains rotting. Photo by Pen
A good setting for Dicken's Miss Haversham? Photo by Pen
Peering into another world. How many chandeliers did they need?
Rosie and I are sitting on the floor in Rum’s well-appointed new bunk house. A soft rain blankets the world outside. There are around twenty people here. They would be strangers but they folded us into their group with such grace and warmth last night that we feel part of them.
Great glass windows look out over soft grass, speckled with white clover, sloping down to the sea. We can’t see that. Our eyes are closed and anyway both our faces are sheeted with tears.
Everyone in the room is breathing open mouthed in fast gaspy gulpy breaths right down to our bellies. Hold your breath. Let it out. Gasp your lungs full again. Five minutes. Stop. Meditate. Repeat.
I hadn’t wanted to do it. It sounded like a sure way of simulating the panic attacks I have had since being in a knife attack 6 years ago. It used to happen a few times a day. Very seldom now.
But this isn’t a panic attack. I am so not in control that I feel I am suspended, held in a strong calm place. I don’t feel panic. I feel as if some massy plug of grief has come loose within me. Grief for what? I bring into my mind all the dear people that I have lost and allow myself to feel for them. I’m in a longed-for place where that is, at last, a safe thing to do. Perhaps I never did before. I feel great sadness in the room that has nothing to do with me. I think it is flowing out through all of us.
After thirty minutes the room wakes up. Nobody is chatting much but we are purposeful. We’re going swimming. Cold water swimming. I haven’t done this before. Nor have I wanted to but here I am, walking with a couple of women who generously let me slide into their group. We follow the stony track around the bay to a jetty. Up ahead someone is laughing as they get a wheelbarrow taxi ride. Down the stone steps and one by one we’re in. No cold shock. It’s wonderful. I feel just about as energised and positive as an old gal can be.
Back for the best breakfast ever. The main group head off for the hill and Rosie and I are off to resume our sea kayaking journey.
So. You think we’d been taken in by a bunch of hippies?
Well no.
This is how it came about.
Rosie is my younger daughter. We’ve haven’t done a trip together since her childhood. This year we decided to change that. We agreed we would carve out a space in June, as soon as a good weather window came up. June was coming into the last week without any such a window opening. We decided to go for it anyway.
Rosie had her eye on The Smalls. That’s: Muck, Eigg, Rum, Canna and Sanday. We'd visited Sanday when her best friend Vhairi's family had moved there when she was 9. On the map The Smalls look like a handful of boulders chucked southwards from Skye, maybe by the same bunch of Giants that put the Cuillin Ridge together way back then. Maybe they were seeing who could chuck the furthest.
All the best made plans...photo by Pen
Although the wind forecast was unhelpful we could scramble an adventure together by using the ferries for longer crossings if we had to and using the cover of the islands to dodge the wind. Putting our heads together at her home in Balfron we compared planning styles and came up with a plan. We would take the ferry from Mallaig to Muck, the smallest and most southerly island, and use the tide and the south easterly wind to take us up to Eigg and onwards.
On the drive to Mallaig I got a text from Calmac saying the landing at Muck was cancelled because of the conditions. Over coffee and cake at The Bakery we re-vamped the plan to start from Eigg. Over Calmac coffee, looking down at a 2 metre swell with every bit of boat kit flying horizontal we revised the plan again to land at the furthest out island, Canna. The wind, I reckoned, would probably reduce the next day so we could do a shake down paddle, our first together, using the shelter of the island’s northern coast.
A wooden bridge links Sanday to Canna topped with a little shrine . Photo by Rosie
Shake down? Whoever you paddle with you need to work out how you’re going to work together as a team. Being family doesn’t change that, in fact it adds a particular tension: Rosie is my daughter, I love her, I want to protect her regardless of whether she needs protecting. So we need a day on the water when we can put ourselves through various challenges and see how we fit.
Rosie is much stronger than me, she’s the strongest per square centimetre person I know. And she’s far more technically skilled than me but with less real time experience on the sea. I wanted us each to be very clear eyed about our paddle pal’s strength and limitations.
I can't lay my hand on a photo of Rosie when she was tiny. She was 4 in this one and used to like to sit on the sofa with the rabbit when the others had gone to school.
Rosie was a prem baby, 6 weeks, very prem for the time. The hospital told me she would probably never be as strong and active as her sister Amy or brother Jack. For the first year or so her best skill was sleeping and she didn’t seem to be interested in the usual baby progression to sitting up, let alone walking and running. She’d get there in her own time. Or not. We called her “The Grub” and loved her just the way she was.
The Grub awakens. No stopping her now. Photo by Pen
I don’t really know when things started to change. I was a single mum with three children. Life was hectic. If she wanted to take her time that was fine. One day, when she was about three, my Dad slipped his half-moon glasses down and watched her intently. “The little one can put on a fair turn of speed” he said.
He was right. They were playing tag and she was on “it”. She’d already tagged Amy and was storming down on Jack with wild-cat screaming and her favourite pink dress flying in the wind.
Grubby little knees. With Vhairi before they moved to Canna. Vhairi's favourite TV programme was Casualty and I'd love to know if she finally got to work in that world.
She put on muscle at the speed of light. She only had to look at a physical skill to be able to do it. She was a natural born athlete. In Primary School she upset a lot of Mums by taking home all the prizes. Boys especially, they felt, might be damaged for life. As a teen she downhill raced through kayak. In the Welsh Slalom team, doing horrendous whitewater stunts on the sly. She slept next to the whitewater boat she worked babysitting to buy. Nothing else mattered. Then one day she hated boats and wet neoprene and it was climbing, rock and ice. That passion stayed with her.
Pure determination and a little black helmet from the Welsh Squad
She’s worked in the outdoors her whole adult life. She’s a professional and I’m very proud of her. But we’re different. While I love to journey and need to dawdle along the way Rosie goes straight for the jugular: the walk in drives her mad, the climb is the thing.
When we have done stuff together we haven’t always been a good match. “Mum!” she once growled at me, “Absolutely nothing about you is zipped up!” We were on the top of some nasty deserted bit of the Cairngorms and I had absolutely no awareness of our exposure. I’d shamelessly left her to be the reliable one. Or the time we had tried paddling together and it took her to notice, when I was thirty feet out in the waves, that I had left my paddle on the shore. She had every reason to be wary now. There was really no telling how this would work out.
Canna looking small but punchy. Photo by Rosie
The shakeout day, however, worked out fine. We’ve both grown up!
St Columba's Chapel, Canna. We lit candles for Ben and all his family. Photo by Rosie
Canna may be small but the north coast cliffs are hefty and rimmed with Guillemot and Razorbills. The sea is magic with birds streaming out to the fishing fields. The sea is a magic place to be, floating amid rafts of Puffins. We took our time getting to the races at the western end not far off low water slack.
North coast of Sanday. Photo by Pen
At Garrisdale Point reefs extend like rippy toothed jaws, chomping frothy white breakers, ziggy zagging way out to sea. You couldn’t tell that from the map. In fact the OS map finishes at that point. As we wriggle our way through the rock maze we become aware of the powerful swell and winds that we have, till then, been sheltered from. We start making fast judgements on which line to take. Sometimes I’m out front, sometimes Rosie is. Either way I’m as conscious of Rosie’s position as she is of mine, weaving our lines through the mean rocks, making sure the force of this huge swell isn’t going to sweep us anywhere we don’t want to be.
I was expecting this challenge but it’s going on for longer than I expected. Often your fastest, safest way round a point is to keep in close, just playing helter skelter briefly. Not possible here. The swell is dashing over rocks as it makes landfall in a thunder of white explosive energy.
As we come towards Sgorr where we should be able to turn westward I start to count: from the top of one smooth elephant’s back of a water to the next crest passing below me is 16 seconds. This is not wind-blown chop. This water holds the energy of a week of gales from way out in the Atlantic. Thrilling. Ethel the boat and I love it and Rosie is clearly loving it too. Elation: we’re a good team. I love to see Rosie’s neat subtle handling of her boat. And she’s seen enough to know how happy I am in the waves.
By the time we’d reached the southern flank of the island we’re both adrenalin high. We’re soaked in Atlantic energy. We both know that high can let you down hard. We need to find somewhere good for the night. We’d thought of the sheltered silver beach at Sanday, that would have given me a second island, but Tarbert Bay comes sooner. From our boats we survey the beach: a narrow entrance bounded by rock walls, then sand, a storm wall of pebbles and behind it easily enough grass for our tents.
All strung out with buoys. A storm beach in Tarbet Bay. Photo by Rosie
We landed in manageable surf, maybe 30 or 40cms, a bit criss-crossy but ok. A few hours later it was a whole lot bigger and meaner, more than a metre and, pushed and bounced back by the narrow lines of rocks, the waves criss-crossing and dumpy.
Moody and mean and beautiful. Photo by Rosie
The conditions changed so fast. Walking on high ground you could see white horses all the way to Rum. No way I was crossing that. It was the speed of change as much as the sea state that put me off. I went to sleep not sure whether we would even be able to launch in the morning. Oh and I’d lost my tent poles so we had to share Rosie’s tent. They’d got jammed up the back of my boat and innocently slid out the next morning. Poor Rosie, any misgivings she may have had about my being “zipped up” must have come true.
I don't often get to share a tent. It was fun.
Especially after a wee nip of Bunahabin. Photos by Rosie
We woke to diminished wind but surf still mean and tangled. Launching I held Rosie’s boat at the stern to keep her snout at right angles through the dumpy waves and gave her a shove at the right moment. Then it was me alone on the beach. I felt like a small and very silly old lady. It was not the size of the waves, it was that one wave came in from the left and would be just getting manageable as the next would bounce in, crossing over it from the right. I counted that you had 8 seconds of clean wave before you’d be pushed sideways by the next wave. So if you haven’t got yourself floating and in control in 8 seconds you’re going to get knocked back.
Normally I would never put my weight in Ethel before she was floating. This time I would have to, hoping the first wave would float me straight away. Didn’t happen. Ethel wallowed down, bedded herself in the sand. With all my strength I push us upwards and straight to the waves. Next waves coming in. Same thing. Third pair of waves were bigger. Ethel was afloat and we were climbing through breaking water and at last have the depth for my paddles and I’m out with Rosie, my heart pounding.
That morning over breakfast the ever-reliable Alan Kimber had sent us a weather forecast. I only read the baddest bits. In fact I read some bad bits that weren't even there. Wind cyclonic (oh no!) rising to…force 7 (actually not) sea conditions…moderate to rough.
Looking over to Rum the conditions didn’t match that worst-case scenario. It was closer to force 3, if that, and the sea looked condition looked slight. Whatever, conditions had shown themselves to be so changeable last night. I was absolutely not going to do the crossing. I didn’t want to risk meeting big stuff half way across the Sound.
Ferry again. A bit of a letdown. But here's a thing: a pod of dolphins cruising along by the ferry, sometimes coming alongside in a glorious display of smooth synchronised strong backs curving and diving and leaping like tumbling angels and every passenger out along the rails feeling blessed to be there, including me and Rosie. The sea state was indeed as smooth as a dolphin’s back. And gannets flew alongside us watching through cool blue eyes ringed in primrose yellow. Would you not say that gannets are the maddest looking things you ever saw?
Nothing wrong with a wheelbarrow.
Not many people got off at Rum. We’re standing there deflating slightly. The achievement of unloading from the ferry’s hold doesn’t quite match making landfall after a crossing. It’s raining, a smurr of greyness that shows no sign of ever stopping. “If there’s a bunkhouse it’s on me,” I announce. We walk along a narrow track, a couple of houses, a camp site and there it is, the wide glass windows of the bunk house.
A well set young man comes out to meet us, introduces himself as Ish. He’s confident and strong and I would put him down as forces, which he is, or was: Commando, now Police. “Have you got room for two for tonight?” They haven’t. It’s fully booked for a private group. “But, if you’re desperate and don’t mind sleeping on the floor in the sitting room you’re welcome.”
Oh my goodness, that’s amazing. Big smiles, yes we are totally desperate.
“This is a veterans’ group. Are you ok with that?” Ish asks. Of course we are. “Afghanistan, Iraq and Police. Are you ok with that? People working with PTSD.” Of course we are. It’s an honour. It’s really something that these fine people who have served the country are now going to take us in.
A quiet group are settled in the sitting room. People acknowledge us warmly but it’s a calm, quiet space. Helen comes forward to show us round and make us tea. She is warm, gentle and quiet. She makes us feel safe. Rosie and I are both bowled over by the same thing: she looks great. She works out. I’d love to be as beautifully, smoothly muscled as that. I’d be proud. So strong. Just like a dolphin.
Supper will be in two hours. Is that ok? Baked potatoes? Is that ok. Too right it is.
And then the breathing. Half an hour led by Miranda and Sam and then everyone goes to bed and everyone sleeps. And then, wake up at 6, and more breathing and this time it’s quite different. We’re flooding with tears. This is where we come in. Every person in this room has experienced trauma. Great trauma? As one young man says to Rosie, “Everyone’s experience is different but when your cup is full, it’s full.”
Why were we crying? I think that’s an important question that needs to be thought through and probably talked through but Rosie and I, post crying, post swimming, post breakfast and goodbyes are ready to set our little boats back on the water to explore the outer edges of Rum. The main group have already set out walking into the mountains before we leave. I’m pretty sure that’s when their hard work of talking happens.
Plenty of stacks and arches. Photo by Rosie
Did I say already that Rum is Amazing? It’s Mull condensed with a daftness of Tolkienesque pointy mountains and far more green in the sheltered glens. We follow the edge of a long cliff line of basalt columns rising above ridiculously steep grassy slopes; waterfalls falling hundreds of feet like witches’ silver hair.
I love the clattery thunder of a waterfall as you go under it. It's the best since you were three years old and had red wellies and could jump into puddles. Remember that?
How many places can you slip behind a waterfall into a cave and look back towards the Cuillin ridge? At the southern tip a nice bouncy bit through skerries, great mountains rising beside us; and then, along the eastern side a few special dropin points where a tired kayaker might pull their boat up over the storm beach of pebbles and flotsam and sleep with a view of Col and Tiree. Oh yes, and be visited by wild goats and fat wild ponies visited during the night.
Harris, my tent united with its poles, photo by Rosie
Guardil bothy. A wonderful place to stop with a view back to Canna. Photo by Rosie
It was, quite simply, the best paddling I ever did have. The best adventure. After leaving a message to our new friends at Guardil bothy we did do our crossing, back to Canna. It went exactly to plan with no excitement whatsoever. And then the ferry home.
Crossing to Canna, sea state gorgeous, sky state fabulous, photo by Rosie
Rosie and I made a conscious decision. We didn’t finish going round Rum. We didn’t cross to Eig. We didn’t go anywhere near Muck. We left that for next time. We’ll just have to find the right weather window. OK?
Rosie's signature headstand at the lovely Dibadil bothy, all twisting streams and rocky leaps
I am dedicating this post to Helen, Ish and Gary and all the wonderful people we met. My donation will go to their charity, the Curtiss Palmer Program. This organisation, named for the first police officer they supported, helps serving and retired Police Officers with physical illness, injuries, mental health and wellbeing. The expedition we had been invited to briefly join used breathing, nutrition and the hills. The difference this has made with several participants was already clear.
Support comes in all sorts of shapes, responding to the needs of individual veterans: a family night out for a curry was just the ticket for one officer; a police car with a handsome escort to get her to her school prom was what was needed for one young lady who had lost her dear Dad, a serving police officer, to cancer. Officers with injuries and amputations have been assisted to achieve dreams they'd dared to dream.
It’s a charity with heart and imagination. Their stories are inspirational.
My donation, will be just £23, two islands slept on and three paddled round (good as). Just take a look at the website and do please donate. There's a donate button on their site.
If you would like to kknow more about the breath work that we took part in with Miranda and Sam of Breath Connection got to this link
And for Sam's moving story of how his life brought him to the healing effect of wild swimming and breath work follow this link
So happy. Thanks to Rosie for being there, to Alan for bank support and to the wonderful people we met on this Small adventure. Photo by Rosie
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