Coffin Road by Peter May Read Free Book Online

gnarled, stunted shrubs clinging stubbornly to sandy soil. More skeleton trees punctuate the bleak September landscape, late-season heather bringing the only colour to otherwise stone-grey hills. I am aware of Sally glancing at me.
    ‘I guess you didn’t wake up suddenly remembering everything?’
    My laugh is without humour. ‘I wish.’ And it occurs to me that I am being shaped now only by the memories I am making, and have made since yesterday. Who I am, or rather who I was, is lost. A new me is being forged out of the moment, and I wonder how different that new me is from the old one.
    We drive in silence on a road that twists and turns and undulates around and over the contours of the land, glimpses of the beach opening up at almost every turn, vast and dominating. Even on this greyest of mornings the water is the most extraordinary blue, somehow generating its own light. Then, as we follow the line of the shore, the hills rise up around us, the summer green of the grass already fading towards winter brown.
    It is a long way to the head of the bay, and I am glad not to have been walking it on my own in this rain. We encounter no other vehicles, and at the road end we hit the main A859, which turns north towards Tarbert and south to Leverburgh. On our left, a rain-streaked perspex bus-shelter harbours a single miserable soul waiting for a bus into town, a phone box next to it placed there, perhaps, so that passengers might call someone to pick them up when the bus drops them off. On the hill to the north, we see lines of lorries and road-rollers laying a ribbon of thick black tar on a new, wider stretch of road. We turn south, and the road here is still single-track, with passing places. Half a mile on, we pass, coming in the opposite direction, the bus that will lift the spirits of the solitary passenger waiting at the Luskentyre turn-off. Then the long, straight stretch of causeway that arrows through choppy sea until it curves to the right, and on our left a huge expanse of salt marsh stretches away to the north, a startling green, shot through with snaking ribbons of still water reflecting grey sky.
    At the end of the causeway, at the Seilebost sign, we turn left on to a metalled track, past a tiny pitched roof over a circle of stones, an ersatz well with a crudely carved wooden plaque depicting a hiker and the legend Frith Rathad , the Harris Walkway. Opposite is a sign for a rural sewer project funded by the European Union, and I wonder how people would survive in a place like this without the European money that would never have come from Westminster.
    The track curls up past a clutch of cottages, lifting gradually into the foothills, the salt marsh stretching away in the plain below, the sheer scale of Tràigh Losgaintir behind us becoming apparent as we rise above it. We abandon the car where the tarmac gives way to stone and grass and rivers of water running in the tracks left by farm vehicles. And we walk, then, up to a wooden gate where we have the choice to continue north, or turn east. We take the latter, following Bran, who makes the turn without thought. A familiar route. He bounds over a stile, and we follow him along the track, heading off into a sodden wilderness of grass and heather that cuts between barren, rocky hills pushing up all around.
    There has been no let-up in the rain. We are more exposed here in the hills, wind rushing between the peaks, hurrying east, the same wind that must have blown rain into the faces of all those carriers of coffins across the centuries.
    I notice for the first time that, although Sally’s parka is keeping her core dry, she is not wearing leggings and her jeans are already soaked through. A fair-weather hiker. I had dressed instinctively, donning those waterproofs I found in the boot room. Experienced in protecting myself from the elements. And Bran’s confidence in where we are going tells me we have been this way many times before.
    It is disheartening to look