25 Here we are down on the Well Path looking in the direction of Troloss. It looks nothing much today but as we have seen on the previous page, Roman legions passed this way and this was also a main pilgrimage route along which kings of Scotland in all their splendour travelled to Whithorn to pay homage to St Ninian. Can you visualise such things here?
As you will see on page 26 you are also looking here at where the first waters collect to make the River Clyde.
So it's not such an insignificant place after all. But then I find all places I go to in the hills intrinsically significant in and for themselves even without human reference. Then when we do include the human element it makes you pause and think about what life was like in that place for the people who lived and worked there. In the remotest places, shepherds and cotters and their families have put blood and sweat into the land and the dry stane dykers have stitched their signatures from end to end.
Robert Burns' poetry caught the flavour of this raw imprint of man on the land, and land on man and celebrated the real nobility of such men - as in his poem A Man's a Man fur A' That. The cult of celebrity of persons and places in our day tends to blind us to the fact that every man, woman and child is the centre of their own experiential universe and any point on the earth's surface is the centre of it if you happen to be there and are awake enough to realise it. Discovering a wee bit about the centre of yourself while as fully centred as you can be in the landscape you are experiencing is a big (but illusive) part of why most of us go to the hills. That is as near as anyone is ever going to get to real "ownership" of the land. Anonimity of attitude (being quite humbly nobody special at the centre of the experience) offers the magic key. We'll leave celebrity of place and person to the shallow world of the tabloid-type media.
Two qoutes from the excellent recent (March 2011) series of programme on BBC called "Wonders of the Universe" are worth mentioning here in this connection:
"We are the cosmos made conscious"
"Life is the means by which the universe understands itself"