The map remembers when the town was louder,
when cranes cut a new skyline and houses multiplied.
Children’s shoes lined paths to schools that stilled later,
and the sea kept the same slow argument with the shore.

They came for the work and stayed for the short bright years,
for trades that taught hands new languages, for shops that learned new names.
Then the plant folded like a map you’d seen too often,
and the menus shortened, the buses thinned, the lights learned to sleep.

Decommissioning is a long word that unthreads a community,
a slow careful taking apart that sounds like goodbye in small towns.
It promises safety, order, tidy receipts of closure,
but in its quiet paperwork the market measures fewer people worth keeping.

Young folk pack their boxes with weather and wit and leave,
because hope needs more than tidy plans and phased reports.
The school bell echoes in empty rooms; the pitch of the football field is a memory under moss.
Posters for houses hang longer, like moth-eaten flags.

We tell ourselves this is temporary; work will come back in skills, in contracts, in the geometry of rebuilding.
But promises become schedules and schedules become lines on a graph; people need parts of life that graphs can’t keep: neighbours who learn your kettle’s boil, a pub that knows your laugh, a Sunday that is not for moving out.

Once the cranes go, the habits go next.
Once the suits leave, the long small kindnesses drift away;
the mechanic who could fix more than engines, the teacher who kept late registers,
the aunt who could coax a stubborn calf into the shed.

There will be surveys and strategy, committees that speak of just transitions,
but the land keeps the weight of the absent; peat bogs remembering footsteps, windows dimming in rows.
Decommissioning may be finished on paper before the town has finished mourning its presence.

So plant hedges that take generations to grow.
Insist on a clinic that stays open and a shop that never learns to close early.
Teach skills that travel but keep a reason to return.
Make festivals that refuse to move online, so the field remembers the feet that once ran there.

Because the sea will still curve the same stubborn way,
and the wind will still find the chimneys that remain.
If we do not stitch new seams into this place, the map will thin until the name on it is lighter than the ink.

Don’t let Caithness become a footnote in a ledger. Let it be a place that counts more than its jobs. Let it keep its people.