There are areas we visit that leave a lasting impact on us, imprinting part of their being on us be it enduring and ancient or unambiguous and modern. For many creatively inclined people, these imprints can form lasting and inspiring influences on them and their work even in the most minor or subtle of ways through to the outright and definite. For me, one such location is Lochgoilhead, a small secluded village sitting at the top of Loch Goil. Located in Argyllshire on the west coast of Scotland, It was home to my grandparents who lived in the village since the 50s and as such, I spent many summers up there when I was younger during the school summer holidays and at Christmas time we would often go up there. Situated between two large mountain ridges that bracket the village and line the sides and Glen that leads into the villages, dense and vast pine forests. The natural beauty of the area is awe-inspiring, tall bleak mountainscapes and immense, dark forests, and the stillness of the Loch as it waxes and wanes up and down the shore with the tides.
Spending so much time here in my youth and continuing to visit well into adulthood and seeing the same familiar features, they take on a more welcoming even comforting tone, the associations and memories of adventures and hikes through the forests and mountains combined with the smells and sounds of the area, the dampness, the moss, the trees, the rivers, the coal fire smoke, even the rock seems to add to the bouquet of aromas that float on the intensely fresh air that almost feels like soup for the lungs compared to the pollution and haze found back down towards London. The stillness hits you too, no background rush of cars on highways, no roar of planes overhead, no distant building work or music pumping from cars driving by. It’s very tranquil and you feel very removed from the rush and hustle of the wider society and you feel very grounded there, you’re here, now, in this landscape, this wild and natural place, everything else you’ve left at the top of the rest (the narrow single track road leading into the village winds and rolls through a steep ascent up the mountains to reach the main road, it’s so severe that there is a rest area at the top of the road called The Rest and be Thankful, that meaning thankful you’ve made it up this road alive and not crashed or gone off the road), it very much feels like a crossing point where you leave the world and continue your voyage into the dark forest, into the floor of this mountain valley. Revisiting the village is always a welcome break and the level of connection I feel not only to the village but the landscape, the mountains, and the forests is powerful, it’s no doubt at all that the intensity of the landscape and the often bleak Scottish weather has had a profound influence on my creative tastes and expression, especially in my photography, to capture that sense of awe, bleakness, atmosphere, and isolation being found in some form in almost all my work.
(cropped, click for full frame)
The assets I’ve captured here, taken in the winter but not processed until now, feature many of the sights and scenes that are familiar to me and bring back these powerful sensations of adventure, awe, atmosphere, and isolation from the modern world to identify a few. The physical makeup of these images also aims to heighten these feelings and perhaps capture some of the reflection I see within myself on these landscapes, the colder, stony outside, stoic in the face of adverse conditions and overshadowing the warmer, welcoming nature found when you get to know the landscape, live with it and its features, explore them and broaden your understandings of how the landscape sits and expresses itself. The intense shadows in the images perhaps being representative of the low mood, ennui, and melancholia that are ever-present within myself and the difficulty it can cause to maintain the mask of stoicism and keep the more socially adverse aspects of myself locked within the stone, but all of this could seem very dark and troubling were it not for the welcoming familiarity of both the landscape and the downwardly inclined feelings that can accompany my neurodiversity.
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