Without another word, Flora stood up and turned away. She paced back through the room, towards the burly security guard who stood at the door, taking in some of the other anxiety-ridden faces of the other local residents on her way out. People just like her, being swatted away like annoying flies, and dismissed like the peasants that Big Energy thought they were. 

But maybe we are just peasants? Flora thought. Compared to the wealthy shareholders, what was she really? It was like a second Highland Clearance. 

She stood outside in the car park in her black rainjacket, jeans, and muddy brown hiking boots, her right hand scratching at the back of her neck. She looked up desperately at the overcast sky, then to the other residents as they trickled out of the doors of Siochail village community centre.

There was a journalist milling around, asking people for interviews. A cameraman with him too. Their presence had been increasing recently at all these so-called community consultations, but didn’t seem to be making any difference. Five other Highlander locals sided up to Flora and stood silently next to her as they formed a circle. A silent, standing circle. The irony wasn’t lost on her. Some drew heavily on thin cigarettes, others stared defeatedly down at the asphalt, bags in their eyes and sighing heavily, while Anne Fraser, Flora’s closest neighbour, went over to talk to the man.
He stood scribbling notes in his pad, glancing back at her as her shoulders shook and her hands flung around in the air. “They don’t listen. They don’t care.” she screeched.  “I worked all my life with my husband to buy my house. It was a ruin! We spent ages, twenty years, putting it together, working on it every weekend. I have two rescue horses. I have two autistic sons. I have a well and my own private water supply. And now all that peace has gone!” Flora peered through the circle at Anne’s frantic form. Saw another tear drop from her chin. “The monster pylons are going right by the house. All the construction work will terrify the horses, and how will my sons cope? And now I’m going to see these giant metal towers from my window, where there used to be the hills I love. The water supply will be polluted, concrete and trucks everywhere from here up to the wind farms they will join into. The ecosystems ruined, and I can’t do anything because it’s not on my land. Can’t even sell the house now, nobody will want to buy it. I mean, what have I worked all my life for? What’s the point? 

How can they do this?” she went on, “What is green about any of this? None of them have any idea of life outside a city. Are they really so disconnected from real life and from nature, from the things that keep us alive??” 

​

Later that evening, when Flora was back home, two things kept sparking into her mind. Anne’s face and what she had said, and the corporate man’s sterile eyes and monotone voice as he had boomed that message out to her. Spaghetti junction. Spaghetti junction. It was a phrase that brought up so many images. Of roads and motorways criss-crossing over industrial, apocalyptic cities. When she thought of spaghetti junctions, she thought of big English cities she had once drove through many years ago. Places like Birmingham and London and Manchester. Places where nature had already been destroyed and paved over. Not like the Scottish Highlands. Not like her little village of Siochail, with only two hundred people. It was all just so..senseless.

“Spaghetti junction.” She knew what he meant. Wind turbines, gigantic electric pylons, toxic lithium battery storage sites. All overlapping and running into each other like giant voracious octopuses, the robotic arms reaching out and chewing up more and more land and nature, till there was nothing left. The forest cut down. The access roads put up. Then Steel. Concrete. More chemicals. Industrialisation. 

She looked out from her living room window. The view was stunning, and similar to what Anne saw, a few houses away. The same spectacular hillside, and rising beyond it the peaks of two beautiful mountains that from November till March were sprinkled with snow. There was a little ancient forest rolling down the hillside to the foot of the hill, filled with Scots pines and birches and ferns and mosses, and it never looked the same twice. From purples and pinks to a hundred shades of green to brilliant oranges, golds, rusty colours. Flora felt a heavy sadness overtaking her. She stood at the window and sighed. The landscape had always talked to her, telling her the season and what was going on. After her husband had died suddenly, it was this view and this landscape which had restored her. The doctors had only plied her with medications which just made things worse, and it was nature that had healed her, that had cured her sadness and loneliness. And since those days she had only grown closer to it. Many of the hills around Siochail seemed to bare her hand. For fifteen years she had worked with conservation groups, planting trees and restoring peat, and putting up fences to keep the deer out. She hadn’t had any children, but each tree that she planted felt like her child. Something she could come back to and see how it had grown. Well, she wouldn’t get to see now, she thought. It was all due to be ripped out, just like the eight million other trees torn out in the last few years as the switch to “green” energy was made.

She continued to stare out that window. It was a small cottage. One bedroom, one kitchen, one bathroom, and one living room, and this was the room she spent most of her time. That window was like a TV for her, and much more interesting- watching the trees sway side to side as they moved in the wind, the many birds flying through it all, and the squirrels and pine martens and everything else. She had never been one for watching movies, and certainly not horror, but for some reason one she had watched years ago came back to her now. She thought it was called The Rings, or something like that. And in it, some woman was on the couch, watching a video tape on the TV. The camera angle shot full to a blown-up image of the screen of the TV, and a black demon was getting closer and closer, bigger and bigger. Then the demon broke through the third wall, and came through the TV, entering into the room where the woman was, and killed her. 

And now it was happening, for real. 

What could she do? She looked around the room and saw her favourite old wooden coffee table. Picked up from a charity shop, her husband had given it to her as a surprise present, and she had sanded and varnished it over many hours into the beautiful antique it now was. On one side of it, taking up most of the counter, was her laptop, and to the right of the laptop, was a scattering of red yew tree berries. She walked over to it. She flipped the laptop screen up, but then snapped it back down. It wasn’t any use. How many petitions had she signed? How many feedback forms submitted in the past two years? How many letters, almost begging, pleading letters had she written to so many politicians, the ones who were supposed to help protect local communities and people? And on the few occasions she did hear back, they all came with the same one-track, regurgitated replies, “essential works” “climate change” “net zero” bla bla bla. Instead, she held her right hand out at the table level, and with her left, swept the bright-red, round yew tree berries into her palm. She straightened upright and stared down at them. Stood almost dead centre of the room. The room she had shared with her husband for so long. It ought to be enough for sure, she thought, and her life flashed in front of her as all the golden moments, good and bad, came rushing back all at once. There was a feeling of relief. Some happiness. But overriding all of that, a deep, heavy sadness. What has it all been for? Is this really what it’s come to? She thought. 

Her palm lifted towards her mouth, but then the fist closed, and she forced the berries into her jeans pocket and charged quickly out the room. Grabbing her coat from the hook, and throwing the front door open, she took one last look back at the coffee table, and stepped quickly out onto the grass, in the direction of the hill.

She didn’t bother to close the door. It would stay wide open, ready to face the demon that was coming. A symbol, she thought. She picked up her pace and her brown muddy boots stepped through the field and into the orange bracken and up the hill. She entered into the forest. It was October, a week before Halloween, and a gentle wind was blowing golden leaves from the branches, raining them softly down over her head. As she stepped deeper into the trees the wind softly rustled and hushed the branches, like they were whispering to each other, and perhaps, to her. She felt her breathing calm. Everything slowed down. The leaves underfoot were wet but her boots gripped well as she climbed higher, drinking in the fresh air and the sweet fragrance of the big old pine trees. Somewhere here, she thought, an access road was coming, and these trees would all be stripped and bulldozed, so that the trucks and concrete could replace them. But they would mitigate as much as possible. That word rang round her head once more. Mitigate. Mitigate, and spaghetti junction, but she tried to ignore it and focus back on the present, back on where she was. 

Flora climbed higher and higher, her breath exerted, her body feeling good with the exercise, she went on through the birch trees ablaze in their many colours. Places like this used to be worshipped, she thought, especially at this time of year. She climbed on past the last of the trees as she neared the top of the hill, and she looked back down over the glen and the trees, and she imagined druids and pagans amongst the landscape all those years ago. For so long the land was sacred to them. Those people who had been her ancestors. It was the same for the Celts. Then for the Highlanders. And now, she thought, she was the last in her line.

She looked down at her house, nestled into the middle of the glen, and a hundred yards or so along from it, to Anne’s house. Quiet, small, unimposing houses that looked so tiny from up above. She could just make out Anne’s two horses, munching happily in the field. Then she raised her eyes above the houses, to the hills at the top of the other side of the glen. The western sun was setting there now, casting a bright glow on the spot where she stood, and illuminating the mountains behind her. The contrast was stark, she thought. The glow on her side, to the darkness of the other, where a few distant wind turbines poked their ugly heads above the horizon. And beyond them, over to the west somewhere, was Glencoe. Where the massacre happened three hundred years ago. Where all those MacDonalds, just like her, had been cut down in their homes during the last Highland clearances, so that the government could take more control over them. 

Her hand went into her pocket and pulled out the berries. As the dying sunlight shone around her, they were lit up, redder than ever. She opened her mouth and pushed them all in. She swallowed them down with a hard, forceful, gulp. 
With tears in her eyes, Flora thought of Anne’s words. Of how distant these faceless people were. Making all the decisions from an office somewhere in Edinburgh. Ignoring local councils. Ignoring local communities. Ignoring democracy. People like her didn’t matter, and all this beauty around her, obviously didn’t matter. She stared around at the glory of the golden forests and the rugged, shining mountain tops, the still, peaceful glen, and the magical, spiritual landscapes of what had once been Scotland, and her heart beat louder, and quicker, and she couldn’t breathe. It’s coming, she thought. And she collapsed down into the grass, her knees hitting the ground first, her body falling after. Her heart pounded hard in her chest and she rolled onto her side and looked straight ahead as the sun dipped down just above the mountains. “I will miss you.” She gasped aloud.  “I will miss you.” And her hand went over her chest and she thought of her husband, and the last rays of sunlight seemed to be on her and she felt cold and it was darkness everywhere else. She felt her cheek press into the grass and she looked at the mountain as the sun dropped closer to it. “Slàn leat, Alba.” She whispered. And under her arm, Flora felt a prickly thistle, and the weight of her body squashing it into the earth. She looked one last time to the mountains, and below them to the glen, and the forests and wildness and beauty, and she tried to take it all in but then her eyes closed and everything went black.