A dark day, with torrential rain; the atmosphere itself inexplicably but vividly reminding me of the countless times before that I had wandered those paths, rain dripping from the trees, or sun beating down, or snow coating all. The weather was a fitting tribute to the mournful feeling of roaming a place that became home, that became more than a home, and yet somewhere I am slowly becoming a stranger to. Sitting in the courtyard outside "my" old cottage - now renovated, lacking its interior rustic charm. I'll cling onto my experience of it instead, the bumbling insects, noisy mice, peeling paint. I was a stranger there in what was my garden; it's a picnic spot, and anyone looking in would have seen two people taking a seat, not knowing the parties we'd had there years previously, and what it meant to be sat there once more for old times sake
This place, this small slice of history and manufactured countryside, brought me up north. It, and the woman I met there, kept me in the area; even when eventually living on the other side of Scotland, it still had a hold on my life. It is tightly bound with the friendships, the love and the loss, the beginning of a chain reaction that has always felt slightly surreal. Improbably, she was there today too; a second of eye contact, before it was broken by awkwardness, pain and pride, both pretending we hadn't noticed each other. Fifteen minutes later, stood in the spot where I first said those three special words - the start and the end, both at this place. It could be no other way; we met there, we lived and loved there, and now, our last sighting of each other is there.
The trees, too, constant reminders. Adam and Eve, still majestic; I touched Eve's healing wound, the dried resin smooth over the rough of her trunk. I squeezed the fibres of the redwoods, thinking of the treecreepers hiding in old branch wounds. That small, but for some reason memorable, pruning wound on a turkey oak - I remember quite clearly doing that. I guess I've had my own little lasting impact on the place after all. The gnarled sycamores, beeches and turkey oaks that we scrambled around in on a fine winter afternoon, and many other times between. The copper beech that saw some of my earliest attempts at tree climbing with ropes. The turkey oak by the path, with its lowest branches perfectly placed for sitting on - and rubbed smooth by the countless visitors taking this opportunity. The time tree, now inexplicably without its eye-catching platform around it - just a large beech in the woods now, nothing to mark it out as different, nothing to catch the attention and fire the curiosity of visitors. I instantly think of a photo of myself, standing on the now-absent platform with beer in hand, now impossible to re-create. It was here where a passion for woodlands and trees developed and made me re-think what I wanted from life; in a way, the woods and trees here are responsible for me leaving to pursue that passion.
The love-heart shaped outcrop of rocks into the ocean - though today looking more like a meaningless triangle, neither the tide nor my emotions being at the right ebb to convert it into a romantic sign. In a strange twist of fate, I stopped at the spot where we had first kissed, and on the shore below two sets of footprints could be seen coming together from separate sources, walking side-by-side before diverging off again in the distance. It's as if the beach knew, remembered, and communicated. Despite the rain I stopped at my favourite point, above Port Carrick, where we had whistled to seals and where, as the rocks, sea and sand all merged into black one summer twilight I finally saw that elusive otter, just discernible from the dark closing in as it clambered over rocks, slid into the sea and swam away across the bay. The same spot where that beautiful black/white photograph was taking, now hidden away from view but still taken out and studied at times, having become a melancholic reminder of person, time and space.
This place, that for some will be just a boring place of work, or where they walk their dogs of an evening; this place, so mundane to some, will always be with me. It will always mean something I can't explain; more than just a country park, a visitor attraction, it is to me an embodiment of an adventure, a once-in-a-lifetime experience that then kept going, dipping in and out of my life over three and a half years. For all it is passive, a collection of habitats and organisms and people, it has played a large part in shaping and moulding me; and leaving this afternoon, possibly for the last time, the feeling was one of finality, of a chapter ending, of the adventure being over.
