The truth is, I lost the way. And to make it worse, this path was one I’d walked a hundred times or more - so often that it felt more normal than not to wander its May-bright hedges and moss-rich stones.

 

After a few failed attempts at finding the trailhead - a left turn at the crooked stile, then a right, then walking past the stile altogether - I began to give up hope. I walked less. Stayed closer to home. Avoided going out entirely. The notion of sodden boots and wet, clinging clothes no longer appealed.

 

It was the scent that drew me back at first. That creamy stench of lanolin, making me think of manure and Sunday roast at once. Gentle enough to be soothing, but animal enough to be alarming.It leapt out and latched on as I rounded a corner. Pungent, insistent, needling at long-unused thoughts. Then a shape: at first nothing more than mottled shade, then suddenly, wonderfully real. A sheep, thick with clumps of winter fleece, all tangled and flecked with burrs. It blinked slowly, and I laughed - I don’t know who was more surprised by the sound, me or the sheep.

 

The creature waddled with its rolling gait, half-obscured by gorse and heather. Without stopping to reason, I followed it. I reached out a hand to brush the long grass as I passed, fingertips tingling with tickling fronds. The toes of my boots scuffed against stone, sharp and solid amongst the sylphy grass, and I picked my feet up higher.

 

It wasn’t long before my chest ached with exertion. It had been a long time since I’d pushed this hard. But somehow the feeling was healing. Lungs expanding after long months, the thousand fractal flat-packed channels filling up with air.

 

As the hillside levelled, the mist began to thin. The landscape opened up before me to show a drystone wall, low and lichen-covered, sagging to the ground. My hand brushed it instinctively, hungry for the cool of the stones, the interplay of rough and weather-smoothed. The flaking of lichen like cracking paint, and the sheep-soft moss upon it. It was familiar, in a way I couldn’t place.

 

I followed the line of the wall, my fingers walking small canyons of crumbling stone as I went. Heather brushed against my calves, dry and rattling at the tips, but springy beneath where it drew from the myriad burns. The wind tugged at my old knitted scarf, and I relished the scratch of wool against my throat.

 

I crouched and dipped my hands into a burn. Cold surged through my palms, grounding, sharp. I brought a handful to my lips, and screwed my face up at the metallic tang. Like blood and peat, making me sharply aware of my mouth, my body, the solid ground beneath it.

​

Where the wall turned to fence, a scrap of wool hung, clean and curled by weather and time, a faint orange streak from the rust of the barb. I pulled it free, and touched its softness to my cheek. A smile bloomed across my face, warm and unexpected as the coconut-scent of gorse. I tucked the wool into my pocket and carried on.

​

The path began to take shape beneath my feet. A line of deer-trampled heather, a gap in the stones, a rhythm in the earth. My steps grew to match it as I followed unmade ways without pause.

And then I crested the rise.

​

The loch was a silver crescent below, pale beneath thinning clouds. Fingers of translucent light reached through the haze to stroke it. I released a mighty breath, and it felt like I left my body with it, looping down on low thermals and relaxing into that waxing curve of water.

​

I stood for a long time. The wind moved softly through the heather. Sheep shifted in the middle distance. My fingers found the wool in my pocket and wrapped themselves around it, thumb stroking the fibres slowly, earthing myself in them.

​

Somehow, despite the long winter, I had found my own way back. Or rather, I’d never lost it, just forgotten how to look.