Jonathan: Tilly and I head homeward, the path ahead a ragged line of darkness in a landscape powder-coated with fine snow and etched with the light of a full moon. A stillness and quiet has settled on Uist which, after the roar and rampage of yesterday’s storm – the worst since the great hurricane of January 2005, is at once reassuring yet unsettling. After so many hours suspended between dread and distraction, the senses are still on red alert. The cold air brings to the lips a salty, almost metallic tang – the minerals of land, sea and air – untold trillions of ions and molecules torn free from the surfaces to which they are ordinarily bound by electro-magnetic forces. Rock or grass, steel or concrete, alive or inert: when the wind comes a-visiting, there is no bolt so strong, nor weight enough, that the wind cannot take away the very substance of the thing itself. As we turn in at the gate, moonlight glints off the glassy surface of the Lewisian Gneiss from which the Gàrradh – the great wall around our garden – is built.  For all the daily labours and life-long dreams invested in this walled garden over hundreds of years, it will inevitably erode away, ion by ion, stone by stone, hope by hope, until nothing is left but the stories of old men and a line of shadows on a moonlit night.