I do not know anything about transcendental meditation but I do know the absolute peace of mind you get from being alone on the edge of a great sea-cliff looking out on a headland with nothing but sea between it and the North Pole.

In my last short piece I wrote about being there at the time when a red sun was dropping into the Atlantic and the Easter moon rising and silvering in the sky.

Sandwood Bay was touched by the last embers of the declining sun on a curve of softly lit sand two miles across, laced with the white edges of breaking waves, and behind it the succession of cliffy headlands extending in rock ribs to Cape Wrath.

Just to be there at such a time was as near bliss as anything I am likely to find on this earth. I can't say I slept soundly, which was just as well, for I saw the sun illumine my world first as a yellow point of light like a lantern, becoming an edge, hoisted into a large ball whose warmth was a great comfort for it was very cold. Then I lit the stove, fried a couple of bits of bacon, put them in a sandwich and brewed some tea.

Unlike my awakening at home, there was no dawn chorus of birds. In fact, the all-night-long drumming of snipe and the birling of golden plover stopped at dawn. The only sounds were of the waves breaking far below me.

By craning my neck I could see the pinnacle of Am Buachaille which has a special significance for me. My friend Tom Patey had climbed it three years before his death when he fell from a formidable sea stack east of Cape Wrath at Whiten Head, Loch Eriboll.

Tom had done his last big rock climb with me just before he was killed. That was on the Cioch of Applecross when he tried to persuade me to come with him to Loch Eriboll and attempt another virgin rock stack. It was then he had told me of the tremendous adventure of climbing Am Buachaille. This has been called one of the finest discoveries of an outstanding climber. In my mind's eye I could see Tom and his two companions manhandling an odd piece of equipment four miles over the hills, two long alloy ladders, not to reach up to the pinnacle, but to lay across a dangerous channel between seashore and pinnacle, for Tom had more fear of the sea than the rocks.

A meticulous planner, Tom had timed things for low tide which would give the party four hours to cross the sea channel, climb the pinnacle, and get down before the ladders were awash.

It must have been a tremendous adventure, and I can almost see the grin on Tom's face crossing the ladders and thrusting himself into the attack for he loved a good grapple on crags and overhangs.

The proof of success was before me. I could see bits of mouldering rope anchored as belay points, loops of yellow nylon tape indicating the extraordinary route from overhanging base to the slender point of the sandstone rock needle.

Following the pink sandstone cliff edge, I had the company of gliding fulmar petrels all the way, these masters of air currents who can maintain a parallel and eye-level course without as much as a flap of a straight wing.

I knew I was getting close to Sandwood Bay by the roaring of the breaking seas on the vast curve of its sands. It was the perfect way to arrive, from a vantage point high enough to command its vast sweep, so charmingly gentle after the cliffy wilds, perhaps the kind of place where it would not be so surprising to meet a mermaid, as a local shepherd is reported to have done in the very corner I was approaching.