It was August of 2020, and I’d spent months cooped up in my garden-less flat. I was aching to be outside. I’d even started sunbathing through the open window of my tenement flat, four floors up. I missed nature a lot during the first lockdown and, mostly, I was longing for the sea.
I’ve always been happiest in the water. I’m a pool swimmer – I go at 8pm when my local pool is empty. The tall rafters make it feel like a church, the moon rising above me through the glass ceiling. I’m a summertime swimmer – on warm holidays I’ll swim for hours through water still as glass. Once, I glimpsed a sandy-coloured octopus on the ocean floor. But it was Scotland that taught me to love true wild swimming.
That August, my partner Fergus and I finally left our little flat for Oban. And from Oban, we walked two miles out of town to take a small boat across to the isle of Kerrera. The water was a glorious icy white and the boat trailed iridescent waves in its path. Oban had felt tame, but as soon as we stepped off the boat, Kerrera felt wild.
The fields were overgrown and sparkling with dew. There were long swathes of deep, lush ferns. We hiked along to the South of the island, curving away from the coastline. Passing the remnants of a sheep skeleton – bleached by the sun and worn down into fragments. Kerrera is surprisingly hilly and perched perilously on the hillside we spotted a herd of wild goats and watched them grazing from afar. Their thick horns could rival a deer’s.
It had been over half a year since I’d last swam. And while there hadn’t been any good swimming spots in Oban, I was determined to find one on Kerrera.
We reached Kerrera’s southern shore, where black rocks peppered in barnacles jut out into the moody sea. The bay is overlooked by the ruins of Gylen Castle. It was humid. The water was dark and grey clouds had gathered steadily above us.
In the water, I could see knots of seaweed and shoals of small fish drifting like clouds. I dipped my hands in, and even though it was August it was bitingly cold.
Fergus was in first. Easing himself in with grit that comes from swimming in Scottish seas as a child. I watched from the shore as he bobbed away like a seal.
It took me longer. In my swimming suit, I hopped ungraciously across the slimy, slippery rocks until I was ankle-deep in icy water. And quickly jumped back out again. For the last several months, my cold-water experiences had been limited to paddling in shallow rivers.
On my next attempt, I made it in up to my thighs. The cold shooting up my legs. Shadows darting beside me. I dunked my shoulders under, and the breath was knocked out of me. My numb limbs moved in slow jerky motions.
But I was swimming, swimming.
And it wasn’t long before a great depth opened up and there was nothing beneath me but water and the ghostly outline of my legs, disappearing. I put my head back and the water filled my ears, silencing the world.
For a moment I was floating in the cold, immense sea. I felt limitless.
But there was something about the darkness of the water, the depth. And just like that, I was kicking my way back, a panicky swim toward the shore. Not letting my feet touch the seaweed or any spikey creatures I imagined lurking below. I swam until it was so shallow the rocks were scraping my belly.
While I’ll always love swimming, I feel a genuine sense of awe for the sea. As a child, I almost drowned in the Atlantic Ocean and I think that I’ll always be a little bit afraid of it.
I flopped wetly onto the rocks. Their gritty surface dug into my skin. But I was elated. The water had left me alert, fulfilled, and awakened.
*
In the late afternoon light, even on an overcast day like that one, Kerrara was shimmeringly beautiful.
Damp and tired, we left the shore and walked up to the ruin. All that’s left of the castle is a single tower overlooking the patch of sea where we swam. On a plaque outside we learnt that it had had a short life before being besieged and burnt down in 1647. It was so hard to imagine that that secluded, grassy space was once as a site of great violence. We stood looking out over the bay, a mist of rain beginning to fall.
The year was a space of upheaval and loss. For me, the first lockdown came not long after I’d graduated from university – an already turbulent period. It had halted the adventures of my early twenties and exacerbated the fears of building my life up from scratch, of finding community again after all my friends had moved away.
The horizon stretched out into a white blur of sea and sky. We could see the isle of Mull, its slumped shape fringed in light. I felt like a quiet, welcome cold had reached every cell inside me.
I found my own pockets of joy and adventure that summer. I stood there for a while, searching the waves for whales.