The track, which in winter had become a quagmire where inches of mud threatened to suck wellies from feet and ever-spreading pools of standing water threatened to spill over their tops, has been totally transformed by months of fine weather. Now it stretches ahead, two lines of dry silvery sand separated by a ribbon of green, leading across a machair landscape shimmering in the heat. To one side, open fields of rapidly growing corn rise gently towards the dune line, their cool greens liberally interspersed with the bright yellow of charlock. To the other, a succession of white butterflies dance above lush meadows filled with a riot of buttercups and daisies, and studded with the deep pinks and magentas of orchids.
Beyond the meadows, the loch, with its surface unruffled by even the lightest of breezes, lies placid under the morning sunshine, the small grey boats used by fishermen still drawn up on its banks. Swallows, in flight both swift and silent, are gathering food for their young, skimming low over the fields to take advantage of the profusion of insects also on the wing. This morning all sound seems soft: there is the constant humming of bees as they search through the flowers, the sound of wings through air as a lapwing passes overhead, and the quiet tseep of a meadow pipit. Even a usually harsh sound – the repeated call of a far-off corncrake, a tardy cockerel's clarion cry – is gentled by distance to a harmonious part of the tranquil summer morning.
And then, quite unexpectedly, a lark begins to sing and, with the bright outpouring of its song, transforms the near dreaming quiet of the morning into a peace of an entirely different kind. It sings without ceasing, wings a blur of motion, as it rises ever higher into a sky where faint white wisps of mares' tails hang unmoving against a backdrop of otherwise unbroken blue.