Beneath my feet, the hillside is riddled with an interconnected series of tunnels and chambers, some so tight as to be impassable, others large enough for a person to climb through, their way lit by thin shafts of light falling from cracks in the rocks above. None of the openings I have found so far are big enough to clamber into so, instead, I call out into a small fracture in the rock face ahead of me, and hear myself distantly and half-heartedly reply. I scramble over the rocks, climbing further up the slope. And then I see it. A gaping maw ripped out of the hillside, completely invisible until I'm right on top of it. At least ten metres tall, and a little more than a metre apart, the walls of the chasm, green and slick with algae and lichen, taper inward as the ground falls away toward a great obsidian slash through the rock, which leads beneath the earth, and into the eerie, silent darkness. Argyll's supporters were right; you could hide a world of secrets down here. And so they did. Down here in the darkness, the little wooden chest holding those precious papers was kept safe. Away from the harsh elements. Away from prying eyes. Away from the clutches of the loyalist militiae. A Campbell family secret. Right here, in this cave. A secret which would outlive Argyll himself. I climb out of the crevasse, onto a narrow ridge carpeted with moss and clover, which ends abruptly in an overhang, to reveal the loch spread out beneath me. I search the surface until I find the lone kayak once more, then in my mind I turn the page a final time, to the failed rebellion. [Secret Diary]
www.secretdiaryargyll.com/post/0048-rock-paper-secrets. 24 Sept. 2020. NB this is now (May 23) a dead link.