The Tulach

I scribble a bit when I make time and someone has suggested I put some in my blog.  This little poem comes from a childhood memory of rolling our eggs down the Tulach, that  being the Gaelic name for the little hill on the old airdrome in the north, Caithness, where we gathered on Easter morning.
  This site now rings to the blasts of drills and warning sirens as enormous pits are being dug into the slate  rocks below to take the radioactive waste from nearby Dounreay and probably many other places world wide.

The Tulach

The Tulach is a place of death

In Stone Age times bodies at the end of life

Curled back into foetal size and hid

Throughout aeons of time, until one day

An accidental kick uncovered a bone.

Then learned men from the South took

Hold of pick and trowel and dug away

Discovering the pit where the seashells

Of meals long eaten and discarded lay.

Now shells of chocolate and tea stained eggs

Lie scattered at the base of this ancient mound

A childhood place on Easter morn where bairns gathered

To roll their eggs of birth and celebration, fun.

Another time; this time, a place for life, begun.