Is Scotland particularly colourful, or colourless?



My good collection of topographic books tell me colourful.

However, though Scotland's purples are remarkable, changes in the sky astonishing and the spectrum of brown so wide, I'm still preoccupied with the question. I can't help thinking that my fixation on colour in the landscape is a result of Scotland's colourlessness. It's as though I need all that I can get.

The snow is a source of frustration as when I take a photograph (I'm on automatic settings; not a photographer) it 'normalises' the white into grey. A way around this is to focus on a bright colour - a red-marked signpost - and the landscape is 'allowed' to be white again. By contrast with each other, colour allows white and white allows colour.

At what point do implanted coloured objects in the natural landscape, like this red sign, become attractive? Around Ullapool, they stand out like monuments: the picture-postcard painted boats; bright pink buoys in the water; coloured road signs (why are heritage signs always brown; to blend in?!); the bright yellow Shell garage roof and the neon of hidden away Somerfield. Representing a relationship between Man and the environment, they are a marking of place. The buoys, for example, declare someone's stake in that space, making place even out of the shifting territory of water.

I am reminded in this experience of viewing colour of looking out of a landing aeroplane at night-time, watching the tiny headlights of a car progress beneath me, thinking of the person in the car with whom I share the experience of being alive. It is like a flashing lighthouse, or the glittering display of camera flashes I saw on Chesil beach during the 1999 eclipse. It says We Are Here, In this Place, Now.