The Passing Place
As part of Tekla’s exploration of cold water swimming in the Hebrides, Màiri NicGillìosa, who was raised in Edinburgh but now lives and feels at home in Uig on the Isle of Lewis, reflects on the transformative power of cold-water immersion.
What began as an effort to teach her children to love the water has grown into a ritual of joy, bravery, and connection to the land. Here, she discusses the landscape of the Hebrides, and the timeless bond between water and Gaelic identity.
I didn’t learn to swim until I was 7 when I was taken to a swimming pool in the city. I was a really tall, skinny seven-year-old, but everybody else in the beginner’s class was about three. I remember standing in the deep end, with the water up to my middle, while all the other children were bobbing along. It was humiliating.
I liked being in the water – you couldn’t keep me out of it when I was out in nature – but I didn’t like swimming lessons or swimming pools. As an adult when I still lived in the city, I didn’t have the same compulsion to swim. The idea of getting in the car and driving to the beach seemed like a hassle.
Then when I moved to Lewis, I started taking my boys to the pool. But when lockdown happened, I was conscious that they weren’t going to lessons. I didn’t want the same thing to happen to them so I started taking them swimming outdoors. I wasn’t trying to teach them strokes. I just wanted them to enjoy being in the water. And that meant I had to go in, too.
I started swimming with another mother in Lewis. Early on, when I was walking into the water and making a lot of noise, she told me “You just have to stop thinking about it.”
Just don’t think about it. I stopped making noise and it stopped feeling bad. It was like this fog lifted and there was just quietness. I’ve channelled that same energy elsewhere. I think it’s an approach you can apply to other areas of life. It’s just about accepting it.
Swimming in cold water can feel like accessing an inner child. It’s a theme I come across a lot when I’m teaching – giving people permission to access the joyful child inside them. Watching my kids taught me this too, they just run into the water for a wee paddle.
I feel that same kind of joy now when I swim in cold water. It’s a playful, “true self” experience where you’re disinhibited, like a child who doesn’t worry about what people think of them or what they look like in a swimsuit. Getting back into that headspace is really healthy and water lets me do that. It’s such a liberator, such a disinhibitor.
There’s something brave about cold water, as well. In order to feel or believe you are brave, you have to give yourself opportunities to be brave. There’s bravery in the challenge of the temperature and even sometimes the environment.
With winter swimming, there's a plurality of experiences. So whether you’re a dunker or a toe dipper or a distance swimmer, there’s no judgment about it. That’s a lovely thing – that what you need shows up in different ways. Sometimes it will be that I swim for a few minutes, and sometimes it will be just a dunk. But both are okay.
I often swim in a lochan – which is smaller than a loch – on top of the hill opposite my house. This lochan and my house are divided by Loch Croistean, where salmon used to run, which I cross by stepping stones. From that point, there’s just one fence between me and the rest of the land. That hill feels like a gateway to the entire landscape.
I walk past the old sheilings – summer-dwelling houses on patches of verdant grass where the last of the summer sunshine falls. From there it’s quite a steep climb, then on the shoulder of this hill is a beautiful lochan.
On one side, a sharp rock comes down into the water, with quartz striations and protrusions running through it. There are steep-sided banks on the other side, where great northern divers nest, which I’ve been told is a sign of how clean the water is.
The lochan is peaty, with bogbean and water lilies growing along the shallower edge. There are always deer around, and golden plovers nest nearby. The lichens and mosses that grow have beautiful and unusual colours. It is very cold, always, and the water can be a little murky. But it has its own beauty.
A unique feature of the coastlines in the Hebrides is the machair. It’s the fertile, sandy grassland that stretches between the shore and the croft land. It’s an incredibly biodiverse space. There are plants, insects and birds that you won’t find anywhere else in the world. In the summer, it’s like a carpet of flowers, buzzing with bees and smelling of honey. The colours change each month, shifting from pinks to whites to blues and violets as the seasons progress.
Water is critical to life here. Just like with the machair, which is made fertile by kelp washed ashore, the sea is part of the ecosystem. Respect for it filters through the community.
I heard of a fisherman who could tell whether the sea was rising or falling just by putting his hand in the water. He could sense it by the temperature and the speed at which it pushed past him. He could tell how long he had before the weather changed. That tacit knowledge, which is part of the Gael identity, is powerful. Yet, there's only a handful of people who understand it these days.
Lately, I’ve been working with a woman who was born in Harris but moved away as a child. She spoke Gaelic but lost touch with it after moving. Now she’s trying to relearn while reconnecting with her roots.
She told me about her family’s ties to an island in the Sound of Harris. Her mother’s people were from there, and she shared stories about losing family members to that fast-running channel. I invited her to go to the Sound and physically put her hand in the water.
When she did, she suddenly remembered Gaelic words from her childhood. It was amazing. This synchronicity, this way of being in the landscape helps people connect to their forebears.
Water connects us. It’s part of us, it passes through us, and it sustains us. Yet, it’s also constantly moving, constantly changing. It’s the same water that has flowed through other people, animals, and plants. It’s the thread that ties everything together. And the only thing separating us is time.
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