Witness Notes 11

Cercal, Portugal. October, 2020.

(After you have read these introductory paragraphs once, you can skip to the new/old content below. If you are listening, then the time stamp is around the two minute 45 second mark.)

Introduction

The word settled, to me, carries connotations I am keen to avoid. I have never felt settled or, perhaps, I cannot recall a time I felt settled. I do not feel settled now, writing this, and I’ve lived in the same house for three and a half years.

Without even discussing the obvious issues of colonisation, I just don’t feel like I could, or should, settle; better to keep my constituent parts shook up, agitated perhaps, rather than separating and stagnant.

Instead, I feel as though I have been travelling for years, maybe because I have not lived in my ‘home’¹ nation of Scotland for eight and a half years, perhaps because I know I won’t stay here forever, or maybe because I carry that concept of home in a way which differs from many?

More precisely, I still think of myself as a slow traveller, globally feral.

Recently, I have been revisiting places through the photographs and words I recorded when my feet crossed their soil. This is a way of reminding myself of where I have been, not just in space and time, but in mind, too. It is a wonderful thing, to come out of a low and rediscover myself through words I crafted, through the lens of a camera, when memory has wandered in the fog for too long. Thank you, past me.

When I first started sharing letters with the world in this fashion, six or more years ago, I usually began them with a vignette of where I was, a sort-of travel diary, mixed with nature observation, locking in the setting for the reader, before I spoke of other things—and, by so doing, ensuring that place fed into the whole. It was a useful device, for reader and myself both but, as these letters were sent to so few readers, and now languish archived behind a paywall, I thought it a shame not to share these snippets again.

As such, I am going to share a short series of these sketches, accompanied by a photograph from that time, sent to you in date order.

I shall include the above paragraphs in each of the letters in this series, but I shall also include a link at the very start, so you can skip ahead once you are familiar with the above words. If you are listening and similarly want to skip, then the timestamp you want to navigate to will be in the same place.

Taken without these paragraphs, each is a short read, and I hope you enjoy them.

Cercal, Portugal. October, 2020.

When I was little, in England, it was common to see lots of nests, like in this photo from Portugal. Then things got tidied at some point, and the swallows and martins were no longer allowed homes. Later, I remember watching our local vicar knocking down nests, as his wife said they were untidy. That stuck with me.

The world is full of tracks and paths and routes, many invisible to our eyes, currents brushing the face of things, whispers, yesterday’s wind across the earth below. As I write, I am beneath one of these hidden roads, the exodus of birds heading south to Africa for the winter vast and, mostly, unseen. Much as I would like to, I cannot spare the time to sit on the balcony, binoculars in hand, watching for bird after bird, whether solitary, or in huge sweeps like the swallows, or the veritable melee of martins we keep receiving, day after day.

One early morning in late September, I looked outside to see perhaps three hundred swallows frantically feeding, ahead of coming rain, swirling low and hurtling past the window, snatching insect after insect. Our swallows had already departed, bar some of the rebellious young, perhaps twenty or thirty of them, and I knew the migration from the north had begun in earnest. The previous night, the temperatures in Scotland had dropped to their lowest for September in around twenty years—no wonder the birds had gone. On twitter I saw tweet after tweet, each mentioning their swallows, a fixture on the wires for weeks, had departed, vanished in the night. I knew where they were; they were here in Alentejo, feeding up, then resting upon our wires, in the trees and the bamboo, waiting for the rain to pass before they were gone again, next stop, potentially, north Africa.

Our nights are cooler, the land breathing mist as moisture returns after the months of dusty summer. The days are still hot, with temperatures approaching 30°C (86°F). As the moon waxed to full, the owls began holding a parliament, calls from every direction, with several species represented. The sky is bright planets, the moon painting clouds with silver filigree and making ghostly, magical shadow puppetry irresistible. As she wanes, the stars shine ever brighter, distant furnaces funnelled through unimaginable time and distance, to appear as pinpricks to our eyes, decorate our dark skies with heroes, legends, and beasts, cast a skein above, a net to guard us while we sleep, strands and knots connected by imagination and our position in a vast whole.

On the 25th of October 2020, the clocks fall back an hour. Without Covid and Brexit, this would have been the last time this happened in Portugal, as the clocks were scheduled to stay on summer time after changing next March. However, this has been postponed, for now, as the EU deals with these other issues.

Throughout this, unknowing and uncaring, the birds will continue to fly, using the sun, using the earth’s magnetic field, navigating their way via invisible track-ways in the sky, stopping to feed in this insect-rich corner of the continent, where the plains and ocean meet the ancient hills and forests.

It is good to be reminded, good to remember—we are all linked by invisible bonds, secret ways between places, paths between time, more threads tying us together than anything trying to pull us apart.

Finally

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If you enjoyed this letter and wish to share it with others, please do so! I love it when someone shares my work.

I also love it when you comment on a piece—really, really love it. Although I always read and appreciate these comments, during 2025, I was not as good at responding as quickly as I would like but, seeing as my word of the year for 2026 is ‘communication’, I like to think that will soon change.

Finally, many thanks for reading. I truly appreciate each and every one of you who does.

1. And ‘home’ is another of those words. A subject I have been writing around for decades now, one I keep threatening to try and pin down in a long essay, but an essay which has now escaped the confines of a compact base and rambled out into something wilder, more feral. One day I’ll share that with you.