Here’s a photograph I took in 2019 on Mount Olympus, at about 1900 metres, at the end of May. (It’s disappointingly fuzzy here, an imperfectly recovered memory.) Snow still lay in a few hollows and gullies, but spring had arrived, and my eyes were all for the flowers, like beautiful Saxifraga scardica.

See how the flowers open pure white and turn pink as they age? See how easy it would have been to ignore seed heads from the year before?

That little patch was unique, as far as I could see, the ghost at a wedding feast. The thistle seeds must have been from the year before: this year’s had scarcely begun to grow, they wouldn’t flower until July or the end of June, and the seeds wouldn’t be blowing around until August. Yet in their present state they would be vulnerable to even a light breeze. They must have been very recently, and in calm weather, released from the snow which had blanketed the mountain through the winter months. The snow had fallen gently, pressed down carefully on the autumn’s dead vegetation and preserved it perfectly beneath accumulating layers of ice which then have been gently stripped off by the spring sunshine, like a bandaged wound slowly, smoothly unwound, to reveal the picture I had luckily found. And very soon it would all be gone. Or is there some other explanation? Why did I not see the same phenomenon elsewhere on the mountainside? And why had the weight of ice not crushed and distorted the seeds and stems? Is it because its rigidity prevents it from pressing down on the delicate structure entombed beneath it? As I walked down to the road the sky grew dark and as I drove back to Litochoro at dusk a huge rain storm fell. In the town streets the water rapidly filled the drains and then burst back up in fountains and ran in torrents. I imagine my little tableau would have been destroyed in minutes.

It reminded me of the ripple stone you sometimes find in Torridon, sandstone which preserves ripples exactly like you might see on sands at low tide. They have been saved by mud, and hardened over millions of years of subsequent deposits of mud, sand, gravel, kept safe by stone which grew eventually kilometres thick, and was then slowly worn away again until the ripples which mark a single day, maybe 900 million years ago, emerged again. I only know of two places where such formations can be seen: on the shore at Inveralligin and Wester Alligin and opposite, on the other side of Loch Torridon, also at sea level, on the peninsula which forms the eastern side of Ob Mheallaidh, ‘ob’ being the Gaelic word for a small bay.

This picture shows a block of Torridonian sandstone at Inveralligin. It was a rectangular block about the size of a large kitchen table and about a metre high. It must have weighed several tons. When I went back to look at it a few years later I couldn’t find it, although it had been in a tiny rocky bay. I went back again subsequently, still couldn’t see it. It couldn’t have been destroyed by rockfall or weather; Loch Torridon is a long, narrow sea loch sheltered from the Atlantic and there are no unstable cliffs above it. Had it been sliced up and sold to a museum? Sent in little pieces to a gift shop? It seems unlikely. I’ll look again one day.

ps  Is that any better?

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