The morning tide had long since retreated, leaving a shoreline strewn with remnants of other places. Other lives. Anyone brave enough to bundle up against the sand-strewn wind and walk the weed-thick tideline would have seen the curious figure of Callum, head down, feet pressing purposefully into the damp, breathing sand. In his black mac and red wellingtons he moved like an oyster catcher: a few hurried steps, then a pause as he bobbed down to examine something on the shore.

 

Callum walked the same stretch of coast every day, seeking treasures amongst the tat. He had learned from his grandfather that the shore was a ledger, each tide a fresh entry, a record of what the sea had taken and what it was willing to return. His eyes moved over the strands of flotsam: a coil of rope furred with green lichen, the smooth curve of a driftwood beam, a rusted iron nail tangled in the knotted fibres of a fishing net. He traced cold fingers over a shard of pottery, the glaze cracked into a network of lines like river tributaries. Some of these things had been lost, some discarded, others carried far from their homes.

 

And then he saw it. Half-buried in a bank of seaweed, a length of hessian, stiff with salt, its edges frayed by wind and water. He knelt, shaking off the ribbons of kelp that clung to his quarry, and spread it open on the sand. The fabric was heavy, marked with faint, darkened lines, like a map. Not of roads and towns, but something older. The lines curved like currents, tracing patterns that did not match the coastline he knew. At their corners were small, deliberate marks—circles, slashes, symbols that made his skin prickle with a feeling just beyond memory.

 

A gust of wind caught at the cloth, pulling it towards the waves. Callum snatched it up and turned inland, heading for the only person he knew who might understand it.

 

Morna lived in a cottage half-buried in the sandy soil, its stone walls softened by creeping ivy. The place smelled of peat smoke and drying herbs, of wool and a coppery tang. Callum’s grandfather used to take him here when he was just a boy, to sip milky tea from a chipped mug as the old man swapped tales with the woman who lived here. She had once been a weaver, the lines of her hands still steeped in dyes made from nettles, coreopsis and seaweed. Now those clever fingers were cramped with age, and she had become a weaver of stories.

 

She took the wet hessian from Callum’s water-wrinkled hands and ran her fingers over its surface, brow furrowing. He watched as she traced the symbols, pursed lips moving without sound. Then she nodded, folding the cloth neatly and pressing it back to him. “This marks a pilgrimage, long forgotten,” she said. “Not to a chapel or a shrine, but something older. From when the land and the sea used to speak to each other, and we knew how to listen.”Callum swallowed. “Where does it lead?”

​

Morna gave him a long look, then said, “That’s for you to find out.”

The first steps were easy enough once Morna had explained the key, and Callum found himself following strange contours along the undercliff. With each step, he realised that the unfamiliar contours were not the coastline as it would be drawn on a map, but the shapes left behind when the tide pulls away. Uneven stones, carved by currents. He moved past the remains of the old pier, its skeleton dark with barnacles, then inland, tracing the places where water had once run—now dried stream beds, hollows softened with grass.

​

As he walked he kept his head down, as he did when he went beachcombing, noting signs he had never seen before: stones flecked with iron, lichen blooming in circular patterns, the faint etchings of old marks carved into the bones of the land. Marks left by nature, and some left by man, as if they had written love notes to one another.

​

Intent in the secret language of stone and moss, Callum did not lift his head to notice the sky darkening as he reached the edge of the Highland faultline. Here the land changed, split by a power long since lost to memory. The wind keened through the gullies, whipping the whitened grass, and ahead, half-buried, he spotted the frayed and flapping edge of another piece of hessian.

​

Callum knelt, suddenly tentative to touch it. After a moment he pulled at the fabric, revealing the edge of something solid—a fragment of iron, blackened with time, etched with the same symbols that marked the map. His pulse quickened as he lifted the treasure from its bed.

​

Then, in the hush that always precedes a storm, he heard footsteps. Not the scattered rhythm of a sheep skittering through the heather, nor the wind rustling through dry bracken, but the deliberate tread of another person.

​

He turned sharply, scanning the gloom. There, at the crest of the hill, silhouetted against the last slant of light before the rain, stood a figure. Callum’s breath caught in his throat. The map had led him here, along a path unused for centuries. But who had he led here in turn?