RUNNING INTO THE WIND: A CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY?

Our first six weeks on Lewis have passed in the typically abstracted, atemporal manner which seems to be native to this outpost of the British Isles, both dragging along and slipping quickly below the horizon like the sun, faster and lower with each day up here.

I am still un(der)employed, and still struggling to get my teeth into any work, no matter how much time I have on my hands, partially because of a chronic lack of surety about the plan for the coming year(s), which is slowly starting to form itself in the back of both mine and Grace's heads. The surf's been too big for the last week for me to get out and enjoy my free time and new board, with 12ft+ swells and 35mph onshore winds, but I've been out walking a few days, and am trying to break in new running shoes.

These small perambulations are serving to break up my days, but have also demonstrated quite an interesting quality of the geography around our house. I was very kindly pointed towards BBC IPlayer last week to watch Jonathan Meades' excellent programme about Lewis and Harris ('the Isle of Rust') in which he asserts that the 'anti-aesthetic' of the architecture and human presence on the island has its roots in the Calvinist influences which quietly radiate out from the stark church buildings with their orderly car parks. One of the precepts of presbyterianism is that aspiring to make things beautiful has many similarities to the sin of vanity, Meades believes that this fear of vanity manifests itself in the unrendered blockwork walls, the endless ranks of rusting cars and unsightly piles of agricultural detritus.

It's beginning to seem that perhaps this trend extends out of the visual, architectural and functional, into the geography of leisure, or lack of it. When I go for a run, not only do I always seem to be running into the wind, but I have to run on one-way, out-and-back routes. On the mainland, we take for granted the circuitous paths and trails which afford us the pleasure of a constantly fresh aspect, joining up functional forestry or farming tracks, formed by the feet of many dog-walkers and 10k trainees. It's hard to know whether many people actually do things for fun here (partly because it's hard to see people, or ask them what they're up to), but the only waymarked trails I've found are linear coastal walks, which require either a double-back or a car shuttle, even for tourists. Other tracks lead to waterworks, sheep, peat banks or dumped cars, all of which are fairly definite termini. Maybe I'm reading into it far too much, but I find it both interesting and a wee bit disconcerting. Maybe there's just too much space to bother trying to divide it with paths: Iain-Murdo the postie said, "What would you want a track for when you've got the whole of the moor to run about in?" although I don't think Iain-Murdo has much time for runners, or artists...

Perhaps I just need to change my mindset - In his foreword to Gus Wylie's photodocumentary book The Hebrideans, Finlay Macleod recalls a conversation with his great-grandfather:

"'Do you know which part of the moor is favoured by our family's sheep?' he asks me as we stand in the fank.

'Of course I do.'

'So you would be able to find them in a snowstorm? You know that the place is called Filiscleitir. You would soon be lost on the moor if we didn't have a name for each hillock and stream', he ponders. I'm sure that I name only a small fraction of the huge matrix of names that he has for the pattern of the moor."

I think that probably sums it up - both Jonathan Meades and I have a lot to learn about Lewis. It's easy to see things superficially, as a runner, an arts graduate or a critic, but it's a hell of a lot harder to see them with the quiet, perhaps contentedly unaesthetic outlook of the locals.