(The Udal)
“Ghosts have a half-life, it seems, lingering just a few hundred years, till they too fade away.”
Kathleen Jamie, “Surfacing” [pub. Sort Of Books, 2019]

Stones. Stone-cold. Stones and histories of stone in heaps and levels, stacks, patterns and design –
borrowed by the families who called this sand-mound home. Courses and outliers; lintels, piers and
thresholds; this is what they left, the traces of the changing of a changeless occupation.

Eight millennia. Moss bridging gaps; lichen creeps and blooms. And day on day, these stones are
scoured by wind and rain, by each fleck and grit of sand carried on the winds and in the rains. What the
Atlantic sends by the machair renders silent this place of stones.

Look about you. And when you are done with looking, stand listening for the ghosts.

Listen beyond the nearest thing, that tractor down by, churning furrows; hear behind the gulls and
skylarks marking ownership of air; go on beneath, to where the wind in the marram grass is as
watermarks in paper. Listen. There is nothing.

Dead stone. Stone-dead. Far beyond dead are the old inhabitants: they are guesswork now, elsewhere
exhibited; they are midden sherds, worked bone. Do not think to catch them at the corner of your eye,
the slip of a child within that doorway; the bent shadow of the bodach by the hearth; and lovers’
whispers in the darkness of the piers... they are clean away.
No ghosts. Stones only among primroses in the spring.