This land is ancient, wreathed in folklore as much as it is in mist. As you look out over gorse and heather and the granite outcrops you are confronted with a mysterious raw beauty, then, just as quickly, the picture disappears.
So it was long ago with the horseman’s only daughter. She sculled across the loch in the coble, against her father's wishes, hoping for a haul of wee fish for the supper she wished to cook for him.
“There is a storm coming” he said, “and you’ll lose your way back in the haar.”
But she was a headstrong girl, filled with the invincibility of youth.
“Och, I’ll be fine Da, besides, who’s going to miss one woman in a storm?” and so saying she headed out across the grey waters.
The horseman had lived by that loch all his life and could read its moods better than he could read and write. The haar descended just as he had predicted making loch, glen and munro gradually fade from view. The world morphed from colour to whitewash and shadow quicker than he could shoe a horse.
The horseman stood straining into the bleached air trying to make out the shape of his daughter but the balance of colour was skewed and she had been swallowed into nothing. He stood on the bank of the loch and translated his prayer for her safe return into the ring of bells and in this way his daughter was able to find her way to the shore.
Ever since that day, on a certain loch in the highlands, it has been tradition to ring the bell every time the sea haar swallows the shore to breathe hope into every heart.
