Above the house is a strange unwooded landscape. The ground is all softness, inches of vegetation that seems to have grown layer upon layer upon itself, saturated by tea-coloured water. As you climb up, zig-zagging up the steep slope each footfall squelches into a puddle, which is somehow hanging there and defying the laws of water and gravity.

Beneath this living sponge there must be stone, because in places chunks of granite and shining white quartz crystal penetrate the damp carpet. These old crones have their own decorations, a lacework layer of lichen and perhaps some intrepid mosses thinking to cover them over in the coming decades or centuries.

This landscape is water-sliced. Shaped by torrents, and dressed up with heather, moss, and ferns. There is a bone structure to these hills, else the water that defines this place would long ago have washed it all down into the cold inlets below, to feed the mussels.

In late October, the hills burn with auburn beauty. The heather has finished her purple phase and is browning, ready for winter. The mosses are still in denial, glowing green in the glut of moisture. Bracken, in death, is painting rust over the landscape, to argue softly with the myriad of greens and yellows.

Above it all, the weather above sings a haunting song of lights and darks, as long days of rain are punctuated by short burst of sunlight that paint a hill or two golden for a few instants between grey curtains of rain.