Yesterday we went to Durness – which if you look on the map is as far north-west as you can go without getting your feet wet. First village in from Cape Wrath. There lives the Loch Croispol Bookshop run by book-lover and poet Kevin Crowe – awarded the number 4 slot in the recent line-up of bookshops in Scotland. Don’t miss it if you are ever on the coastal loop around the north coast (there is only one road). Just as you are about to finally turn east (assuming you are going clockwise), just go 300 yards west out of Durness and you are there.
Of course the bookshop has to compete with the sort of blue-sea endless sandy beach that is a speciality of the far north. So we were hoping for rain and a gale – but what we got was the Caribbean so the reading/signing was an intimate affair! No matter – we sold a few books and met some wonderful folk and lunch in Kevin’s restaurant thrown in. Then a 40 mile drive home through Sutherland and Assynt, past Suilven, chatting to Mandy Haggith about her personal techniques for getting down to writing, revising a first draft (“You just know you’re going to have to chop its leg off, or graft it a second head – and you know its going to squeal!”) woodland crofting and how to get Highlands and Islands poetry out to the rest of the world. It’s a grand life – even when the sun shines.
David
