We then started the return journey back towards Ullapool and again the weather closed in but was so blustery there was a chance that we could get the odd break in the clouds before the next downpour.

It didn’t look promising as we headed back under Stac Pollaidh again, but we were in no hurry so stopped of to make a cup of tea and listen to the rain battering the van. There’s something very reassuring hearing rain pounding a few inches from you when you’re safe and all tucked up. It’s a sense I’ve had many times in a tent and it’s no different in the van – just a little easier to brew up!

We nearly missed it. All steamed up, warm and enjoying a hot drink you can lapse into that dangerous malaise when you take your eye off the ball. I partly blame the fact that the rainbow straddled the van, right over us. It had been a good hour since we brewed up and we’d lost all hope of that elusive break. The glint of sunlight reflecting off the wing mirror just about seen through steamed up windows gave it away and primed us into action. Straight out of the van and the rainbow was arking across the road in front of us. With a blackening sky the near ground lit up and the clouds swirling around the hostile crags of Stac Pollaidh, we had another unforgettable 15 minutes. Short though the moments were, they were still coming at us and I was beginning to warm to the hours of prolonged rain for the glimpse of the special.

The Journey back to the God’s site was dreadful but late evening opened up and we ended what had been a quite extraordinary day with one of the finest sunsets I’ve  seen for many a while. It had started 16 hours ago and if you remember Ardmair 1, posted a few days ago, I quoted from my diary – I’ll leave this day by re-visiting that same entry,

…so all in all saw a great sunrise, a magnificent sunset and 16 hours in between which gave very occasional glimpses of the sublime.

Seven very smart Brent Geese spent some time around the coast at Aberthaw.

After lunching at Reiff we headed south to Achitibuie to look back towards Ardmair and past by the best school bus stop I’ve ever seen. Just imagine standing there waiting for the day to begin!

The weather was at last kind for a few hours, and we enjoyed spectacular views over the Summer Isles. We really wanted to be on them, but that was never going happen with the winds and we were due to leave for the high north the following day. Seeing the Assynt range out of cloud was something we’d come for and we had it if only briefly.

The ‘mad little road’ was empty and very wet but as we moved out towards Achiltibuie things began to clear and the wind began to get up.

At last we were able to look back over the extraordinary range that is Assynt. The height of these mountains is not great, none of them claiming the Munro status, but they rise up from a flat plain and so give a feeling of grandeur and are some of the most impressive in Scotland.

We had hoped to climb Stac Pollaidh but the weather conspired against us. My brother Mike had said it has to be about the finest view in Scotland for the least effort, for now I’ll just have to take his word for it. We viewed it from below, as we’d been forced to do with all the peaks we had hoped to get on to.

Ardmair was to be our base for the next couple of nights. The last paragraph of my diary entry for our first day sums up what was to be another long but ultimately rewarding day,

…so all in all saw a great sunrise, a magnificent sunset and 16 hours in between which gave very occasional glimpses of the sublime.

The day extends as you go further north and this far up you really begin to notice it. A couple of brief, very brief, sightings of an otter in the early morning with a ‘Bonxy’ passing close by and Dunlin coming well into summer plumage and a piping Common Sandpiper made for a good and promising start. It was still, clear, quiet and I felt I had Scotland to myself.

By ten thirty all had changed. A wind had whipped up from seemingly nowhere and the sea took on a very different demeanor within no time at all. It saw us scuttle to Ullapool for provisions in hammering rain, before optimistically heading out on ‘the mad little road’ a term coined by Wainwright many years ago. I’m sure it was rougher then than now but it still aptly describes this famous route out towards the wilds of Assynt and the Summer Isles’ We had hoped for a trip out to these Isles that seemed, in their name, to be now mocking us. All boats out had been cancelled for at least 48 hours and the forecast was for even higher winds coming from the west in the next week. It wasn’t looking good for any of our planned Island trips! I’d been on the Isles before having been enthralled by the accounts of Fraser Darling in his ‘Island Years’ but again it was to be a first for us both together. It was becoming clear that we were going to have to come up to these parts again and before too long.

During my recent illness and recovery I’ve been lucky enough to have some good friends who have helped me through some difficult times. Some of them have taken me out and about knowing that I’m never better than with a camera in hand and enjoying the act of making images.

I’m grateful to them all. I’m back out of hospital now after my second op and knowing you have such support is a real help. Anyway on some of these trips we’ve had some good encounters with some fine birds and the next couple of posts will highlight some of these. It’s been a good winter for the Short-eared Owls Cardiff had its fair share.

Much of my work over the years has been coastal, it’s somewhere were so much is going on; so many processes and changes, it’s continual and in constant flux and has the capacity to take you into a different space and time.

The two areas I’ve spent most time photographing on the coast are in Pembrokeshire, Druidston and Broadhaven and on the Heritage Coast of South Wales between Ogmore and Cardiff. We are fortunate to have such dramatic coast so near and the variety of geological features is remarkable.

I spent an afternoon, with the tide well out, on the beach at Cwm Nash recently and re-kindled my deep love of the processes that reveal themselves here. Again as at Caerfai I become intrigued by the dance of light and the edge of pools. I’ll continue to explore and see where it takes me.

The hour and a half Brendan and I spent on the beach with the tide pushing us back towards the cliffs took me back to my work at Druidston in Pembrokeshire (more posts to follow).

The colours in some of the rocks in this part of the world are nothing short of breathtaking and I’ve begun to be interested in the transition between water and rock and how light dances in small collected pools. It was raining hard and the rocks were at their best. The beach was empty, something that I love about adverse conditions and the wind was playing on the cusp of the breaking waves on a sea that felt as if it should be rougher.

I’m back in hospital this week and will be out of action again for a few months. The site will continue to tick along though as I’ve prepared posts that will automatically come on line every five days, so do keep looking. If I don’t reply for a while then apologies, I’ll catch up with that when I’m up and about.

One of the first priorities when I return in the summer is to kick start the Bala project. Hopefully I’ll finish all the scanning during my recuperation and be ready to look for ways to finance the project. The plan is to take all the work back to the area and to archive it properly. I intend it to be a community project with screenings of the work and prints that the locals can annotate with as much information as possible. I’d also hope to be in a position to update the archive by recording the estate today. I photographed it in 1980 and in 1995 so it would be good to keep it going.

My daughter Nia, whose studying Photography Press and Editorial at Falmouth, is also hoping to help me with the project and carry out some of the new photography. It’s something to look forward to anyway! Nia’s also started her own blog where she’s combining writing about photography with some of her images. You can check it out here.

I’ve always been an avid collector of books and despite now owning a Kindle (they do have some advantages), I’ll keep collecting. You commune with books, they become part of you and immersion within them is an experience that is at times intensely personal.

They can resonate place, not only related to content but the moment you came across the actual physicality of the object itself. I have books that tell a story outside of the story they tell. It works like that, it’s how it is and the digital form is a cold substitute.

There’s anticipation too, looking forward to a publication that is forthcoming, one you’ve heard a lot about and are excited to begin a relationship with. That relationship began with me yesterday on a stormy day overlooking the bay in Pembrokeshire where much of Glimpse was born. But it was more than that, much more.

I edged my finger nail down the cellophane wrap and carefully removed the packaging to reveal an outer box of cobalt blue beautifully crafted and embossed with ripples that instantly spoke about the processes that were, at that very instant, happening all around me. The van was rocking in the increasing wind, surely now reaching towards a gale. The incoming tide was fighting against the off shore wind. Eddies, flows, back rushes and a constantly shifting surface light echoed the box in front of me. I saw, just in the box that contained the book, sand, water, rocks, time and the processes that I knew would reveal themselves further in the book itself.

I had picked Brendan up earlier in the morning to take a couple of his paintings to be framed in Haverfordwest along with a hundred boxed books to be dropped off in Brawdy. The paintings fitted inch, literally inch, perfect in the back of the VW and the twenty boxes each containing five books were loaded around them. We’d decided I should wait until we were in Pembrokeshire before opening mine. The title Glimpse, now seemed appropriate on another level. Brendan had taken two books out of one of the boxes and I saw the outer cover. It was only a glimpse and I was wanting to get on with the journey west.

We travelled to Gounod’s Faust, taking us both back to earlier times when we were bold enough to inflict such ‘radical’ music to coach loads of Foundation students as we headed for our annual winter field trip to Broadhaven and Druidston, where much of Brendan’s work has its roots. The paintings were delivered leaving just the books and soon after we dropped them off at a small industrial estate by Brawdy air field. Brendan was giving a present of one of them to a friend, Ceri, who had been instrumental in getting the project off the ground. It was a strange moment for me as she opened her copy on the other side of the small industrial unit. It wasn’t my moment and I wanted to wait.

So on to Caerfai and with worsening weather. We moved to the back of the van and Brendan handed me my copy. The next hour was one I’ll never forget as the book revealed itself and invited me in. To open any exquisitely produced book is a delight, to open one sitting next to the artist in the location where much of the work was created, was a privilege. The cover, with over 180 words, hints at all those things Brendan’s paintings are: sensual, perhaps almost gently sexual at times, words that come from a deep understanding of the processes that shape the landscape and our relationship to it.

Brendan’s palette is there too and as you enter the book the quality of the design and production shout at you. Rubbings come first, printed on rich textured paper, vellum like. Grid references locate the work.

Essays by Tony Curtis, Mel Gooding, Anne Price-Owen and Sally Moss interspersed with Brendan’s diary extracts from his residency at Oriel y Parc in St. Davids, take us on a journey of the artist’s creative output, frustrations and moments of revelation. I have never seen printing to this quality before and hearing Brendan’s account of the time he and Andy Dark spent in Venice overseeing the plates as they came off the press, was testament to the attention to detail involved in this extraordinary volume. Andy Dark has shown wonderful sympathy in the use of space, colour and typography throughout the book.

It was hard to put it down and when I did it was with the utmost care; it is a piece of art in itself and deserves to be treated as such.

One hundred and seventy five pages of luxuriant extravagance. The paintings themselves have always moved me. I know the processes that they reveal, the cusp that is always present between abstraction and realism and here in the book, they become almost as tangible as the original pieces, every possible detail revealed and with a balance of colour and tonality that simply astonishes.

We finished the day by putting on the waterproofs and spending an hour and a half together, yet always in our own space, working Caerfai Bay with its extraordinary colouration of rocks; rocks that echoed the book that was safely tucked up in the van above the bay. My relationship with this book had begun and in a very special way. It will continue to develop as I absorb the words and the journey that Brendan took during this most productive time. Privileged is often an overstated and over used word but on this day with the place, the book and the artist, it has never been felt or used more appropriately.

GLIMPSE – Brendan Stuart Burns  ISBN 978-0-9571647-0-3

http://www.brendanstuartburns.co.uk/current/29-current/37-new-book-release-glimpse