As summer’s longest days stretch ahead, the mountains of Skye will as always attract the energetic and intrepid. These two powerful poems - the first by Rayne Mackinnon (Netherbow Arts Centre, 1986), the second by Andrew Young (Collected Poems, Carcanet, 1998) - catch the drama of the island’s high places.

            THE CUIILLIN

When bitter passion stirred the earth

The Cuillin first knew pangs of birth,

Tugging each way inside earth’s womb,

Cracked the soil, gasped for room,

Shook off the heather and the grass

Then froze in an ungainly mass;

The lava took thought, bided its time

And then once more begin to climb

Till earth had no more soot to spew;

Then in the vacuum, winds rushed back,

Sucked by the mountains’ magnet, blew

And, hard as iron, filed away

The gabbro, that each storm sung black,

Until the peaks, in man’s own day,

Gaptoothed, lie growling at the sky.

Thickening the darkness, I’ve seen them lean

Over the glen, and stamp the scene

With anger, while the hissing wind

Blows night around, and chases it

From peak to peak, until the light,

With grey fingers, gropes to find

Stray corners of the sullen range

Whose iron passions never change.

   THE CUILLIN HILLS

Each step a cataract of stones

So that I rise and sink at once,

Slowly up the ridge I creep;

And as through drifting smoke

Of mist grey-black as a hoodie-crow

The ghostly boulders come and go

And two hoarse ravens croak

That hopped with flapping wings by a dead sheep,

All is so hideous that I know

It would not kill me though I fell

A thousand feet below;

On you, Black Cuillin, I am now in hell.