I wake up suddenly and slowly realise that I’ve been rubbing my eye. I blink a few times but nothing seems out of the ordinary. I look at the clock: 04:21.
Confused, I put my head back down on the pillow and close my eyes. Ah, now I can feel it, a nagging annoyance behind the upper eyelid of my right eye where something has worked its way under there during the night. For a good few minutes I try to dislodge whatever it is, but it won’t budge. So I stumble blindly into the darkened bathroom and turn on the light.
Aaargh! My whole being recoils from the sudden brightness, like Gollum emerging from his cave after 500 years. “It burns us, precious!”
I stare bleary eyed into the mirror and shine my phone’s torch into my eye. I can’t see anything in there but every time I close my eyelid I can feel it. For what feels like hours I rinse, blink and rub my eye but the annoyance hasn’t shifted one iota. I temporarily admit defeat and instead decide to let nature take its course. “It’ll come out eventually”, I tell myself, but for the time being it’s too distracting to sleep so perhaps I should just get up. It’s light outside, after all. I look at the clock.
04:52. Ugh.
Tired, red-eyed and irritable, and still with the impression of torchlight echoing on my retinas I stumble downstairs, unsure quite what I’m going to do if I can’t sleep. Fortunately my half-asleep brain knows exactly how to soften the edges of a sharp morning. It makes a big comforting mug of tea, unlocks the front door, ushers both me and the tea outside and then sits us up against the cold stone wall of the house.
Through tired and weary eyes the world looks oddly blurry and there’s very little colour. Just shades of grey, the distant outlines of hills fading into one another like a smudged charcoal drawing. Is that because of my wounded eye? Ah, no, it’s haar hugging the fields.
I inhale deeply. The morning smells amazing. Fresh and damp, but it’s not wet. This is the chilliest hour of the summer night, but it’s not cold. And yet it’s so deafeningly still that the leaves on the trees nonetheless appear frozen into place. Sheep are bleating but I can actually hear grass being ripped from the ground by the horse in the next field.
Sunrise was 40 minutes ago but you’d never know it through the dim light. The birds know, however. A cockerel on the next farm sounds like a parody of itself, and by 05:57 yellowhammers are trilling, swallows are clicking, pigeons are cooing, and a wren is SHOUTING LOUDER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE! How does something so small have such a loud voice?
By 06:08 it’s a bit brighter. A pied wagtail ‘chiswicks’ as it struts around the driveway just metres from me, and a house sparrow preens silently on the hut roof, appearing remarkably relaxed and nonchalant for such an exposed location. Is there really so little to fear at this hour? A hushed whoosh of feathers grabs the sparrow’s attention as a pair of resident starlings return and disappear under the eaves, followed by the frenzied squeaking of hungry mouths. At 06:16 the mouths finally fade out and a skylark fades in, its rising song seemingly beckoning more haary hills into focus.
The guttural double croak of a raven surprises me at 06:19 because it’s been years since I’ve heard one in these parts, but I barely have time to process it before an unearthly trill bubbles up from the horse’s field. The first time I heard this sound was on the Isle of Rum in 2008, where it genuinely unsettled me because I had no idea what it was. It’s a snipe of course, ‘drumming’ by vibrating its tail feathers, but that earthly explanation doesn’t take away any of the wonder.
At 06:29 a bumblebee drones past, announcing to all assembled that the insect world is now open for business. Three minutes later the house martins appear, whistling and clicking as they draw circles in the grey sky. Goldfinches too, flitting between the seed heads that have already gone over.
At 06:30 a low, rumbling roar announces a plane’s departure from the airport. Twenty miles on a morning as still as this may as well be 20 metres, and as the intrusive sound grows fainter it reveals the constant hum of distant wheels on distant roads. The scales are tipping back again as the human world wakes up. Time for coffee and cornflakes I think.
At 06:35am I stand up and take one last ‘listen’. The snipe still drums, and some juvenile starlings playfully tap at the gutters. I close my eyes. Almost two hours have passed since I got up but yep, I can still feel it under my eyelid, so I go back inside the house to start the day. My eye might not have improved, but my mood certainly has.
Ben Dolphin is an outdoors enthusiast and president of Ramblers Scotland