There’s something about an island….

August 26, 2022, 7:56 am , by Richard Lutz

Richard Lutz finds less is more on Lismore

E ven walking on an island gives you a sense of Nowhereness. North of Otherness. South of Elsewhere. Across the Waterness. East of ….Overthere. Even time seems slower, even a bit irrelevant, though a late ferry from Lismore is pending.

Maybe it’s the act of arrival and departure that makes an island a bit special. To get to Lismore, near the Scottish port of Oban and floating between the twin straits of the Lynn of Movern and the Lynn of Lorn, we first waited on the mainland quay. Rain threatened. Would it continue, brighten, worsen? Was there island shelter if it didn’t improve? What was there? Not there? What’s that bump off to the right? Is that a church or a barn halfway down? Anticipation was a major ingredient. Then the ferry scooped us up, looped first north to dance with the heavy tidal current then southwest to head for the tiny Lismore slipway.

We were met by a baleful ram, a tin hut for bicycles, a bigger hut that was a waiting room, drying room, refuge from the weather. The rain thankfully broke clear. The ram sauntered off. We headed out, south from the bustle of North Ferry. The sky brightened.

We took the main road down the spine of Lismore’s 12 mile length. A handful of wavy lanes branched off, aiming for a farm, an old castle, a speck of beach. More indistinct paths led directly over a hill with no indication where or why it goes where it goes. At a solitary farm, a vigilant sheepdog eyed us warily, followed us down the road, and then stopped, sat on the tarmac and watched us disappear down our road.

Traffic rumbled up and past, shakey cars, tractors, camper vans, quad bikes. But it was infrequent. Mostly, the island road was empty, stripped of human sound, stripped of time:

Of course, islands mean so many different things: an island of political perfection (Utopia), of fear (The Island of Dr Moreau), of sensuality (Bali Hai from South Pacific), of solitude (Robinson Crusoe’s home), of pleasure (tv’s Love Island), of transformation (in Shakespeare’s Tempest), of mystery (Ed McBain’s Isola), of pure film fantasy (Sinbad’s island with that unforgettable cyclops).

This green island, Lismore, is simply a place of quiet and flowers. Meadowsweet mixes with rambling roses, scabious, yarrow, agrimony, and, along the roads, a border of wild fuschia:

And, of course what island would be an island without a fading banger of a car, tattooed with lichen, eternally parked up in a patch of flowering thistle?

Further down, on a slow bend, there’s St Moluag’s church. It’s built on a pagan site that was followed by a 13th cathedral, then by this ’new’ 18thc replacement:

Inside, salty light flows through its windows:

Outside, little lanes head to tiny shoreline hamlets, once pocket fishing ports, now home to summer visitors:

And all around, across from the two fast running lynns are a ring of rugged hills that make up the Argyll mainland:

We head for the ferry to take us back to the mainland sophistication of Port Appin which has not one but two hotels. And a post office. And an art gallery. We look back as the little motor launch pulls away. Lismore is a sliver in a fast flowing sea loch. Green and verdant. No wonder its name means, in Gaelic, ’the great garden’, even as it becomes blanketed behind a sudden belt of lowering cloud. And then disappears.