I WRITE on a midge-infested morning on the west coast of Scotland. It’s the end of just a couple of nights camping to round off the summer holidays and I am in a favoured location, partly because it remains, as yet, relatively untouched by mass tourism, but mainly because it is an incredibly beautiful part of the west coast.

It’s a small family campsite, with the incredible luxury of a small bothy for communal use. The owner puts on the log burning stove at 6.30am every morning so campers can warm their bones after a night under cold canvas. So here I sit, the first up as duty called me from the damp slumber of the tent to come and do my tale.

From where I type in the bothy I can see ancient oaks which line the shoreline of Loch Sunart and hear the sound of crows trying to wake up the other campers. My family are still sleeping and so it is a race against time to ‘put pen to paper’ before midges of a human kind begin to swarm over me, demanding porridge and attention.

And what a melancholy mood in which to write for we must soon de-camp and return home. In the short time here we have had adventure, the memories of which will certainly last with me. A long-standing bucket list wish has finally been achieved, for the key purpose of our trip was to take a small boat trip to the island of Eigg and visit the massacre cave.

We made it, all of us, even the wee ones. The name of the cave comes from events of the 16th century, when MacLeods and MacDonalds were in near-permanent feud. The cave entrance is well-hidden and small, but it opens into a deep, dark and tall chasm. It was in here that over 200 MacDonalds, mostly women and children and old folk, were hiding when a raiding party of MacLeods arrived on the island.

It is a grim tale of human cruelty and how hatred takes on a momentum of its own. The occupants of the cave were deliberately suffocated by smoke. When I entered the cave I noticed that some people had left bunches of wild grown heather at the entrance as a mark of remembrance. Then as I stood in the eerie darkness of the inner chamber I could feel the terrible power of what had happened there.

It wasn’t the end of the story of course, as the MacDonalds sought revenge and set fire to a church full of MacLeod worshippers in retaliation. And so on it went until the end of the 16th century. It’s all history now, of course, but sadly the hatred and cruelty which breeds such atrocity isn’t.

I sat in the bothy with other campers on the evening after our trip sharing stories of our day’s travels and anecdotes about life. We discovered we were from all over as we huddled around the fire, nursing our midge bites and eating camping food. We shared jam, bread, milk, wine and even nappies. But most of all we shared stories of what we do, where we were from and advice on places to go. I put in more than a good word for East Lothian of course.

This sense of community spirit and the ability to have a shared laugh at the drenched and midge-bitten state we were all in was made possible by the cosy communal space of the bothy. And something occurred to me which I had known, but which I had never thought too much about before: summer holidays are often the time you meet people you would never otherwise encounter. It’s obvious of course, but the significance of it really hit me this summer.

And so as the summer begins to wane, and specks of the autumn begin to appear, I feel nourished by the fact that our summer this year in particular has been gifted with many fleeting moments of shared humanity with strangers. They are strangers no longer, of course, even if we may never see each other again. Such shared moments can be the antidote to the cycle of hatred which the massacre cave represented and which still permeates human society.

Perhaps we should find a way to collect all those who have power and place them together in a campsite in a beautiful but rain-drenched and midge-infested west coast campsite with limited supplies of food and then provide them with a communal bothy in which they can share stories and provisions. Perhaps, just perhaps, that would begin to change some perceptions and attitudes.

With these thoughts I must now close, as my children have arrived, with the anticipated demands for porridge and attention. We head off back to our East Lothian home and by the time you read this I will be back home and returned to family routine.

I hope your summer has been likewise enriched by memory and adventure. But thankfully adventure and discovery are not just summer creatures, they can thrive all-year round and be found in any place. At the end of this month they will visit Cockenzie Harbour and Cockenzie House and so next week I will share a story about their arrival there.