“Keep civil, lads. There’s ladies present.”
“And visiting dignitaries to boot,” said Angus, winking toward me.
The standard cliché is that the Scots are an unfriendly, dour, and taciturn lot, but you could not prove that by me. From Edinburgh to Kintore, from Kintore to Inverness, all across the Highlands, and now out to the last bastion of taciturnity, the Hebrides, everyone I had met was not only friendly but generous and talkative. One man in the Highlands, in a small car, seeing me pushing my loaded bicycle up one of the mountains, offered me a lift, not considering the fact that there was no room for me and my bicycle as well. He apologized for not being able to assist me and drove on.
There was a big debate raging on the islands about whether to “cull” the seal population at this time. There wasn’t much argument here, however. These people in the hotel were all conservationists and against the cull, and to some degree, I noticed, against the fishermen who wanted the seals culled.
I had also asked them about Selkies. But they were a sophisticated lot and informed me that no one on these islands believed in the Selkies anymore.
The American travel writer Lawrence Millman, who passed through these parts a few years after I was there, collecting stories for a book, did report finding older people who believed in Selkies, however.
The Selkie legend takes many forms, but the basic story holds that the Selkies are seal people who occasionally take up residence on land. They are, in their human form, exceptionally beautiful, especially the females, who sometimes marry with local men and have children. In one tale from this region a man unknowingly marries a Selkie who gives him three beautiful children. The Selkie mother has a strange habit of disappearing from time to time, however. One day her husband follows her. She walks down to the coast to a hidden cove, takes out a full sealskin she has hidden, strips her human clothes, dons the sealskin, and swims off into the sea. In some versions the jealous husband hides the skin or destroys it, and the beautiful seal woman dies. In one sad ballad version, she disappears forever into the sea after she is discovered, taking all her children with her.
Although it seems unlikely (except perhaps for their purported sun worship), Selkies are by tradition celestial beings, driven out of Heaven for some minor sins that were not bad enough to land them in Hell.
While he was in North Uist, Millman encountered a man in a pub who pointed out a darker man, drinking with some others. “Do you see that fellow,” Millman’s informant said. “He’s a MacCodrum; all his people are seals.” Apparently the entire MacCodrum line is descended from Selkies. The old man told Millman that whenever a MacCodrum is buried, the wild seals follow the funeral procession, swimming just offshore, barking and moaning for their lost relative.
“That family will never eat seal, like other people in these parts,” the old man told Millman.
Try as I might, I could not collect any Selkie stories while I was there, nor yet confirm my oddball theory that seals, along with lemurs, turtles, snakes, bears, cats, and other beings that bask, worship the sun.
In the morning, even before I woke up, I could hear the wind again, rolling in like a battering ram from the northeast. This confirmed my plans to go downwind to Benbecula and on to South Uist to visit the wildlife sanctuary and the aerie of the golden eagles. That way I would also be on the Catholic island if I happened to find myself on the road on Sunday.
I left early and headed southwest across the brown moors and lochs and the long, rolling barrens. All along the road I began passing little bands of men and women cutting peat for the next winter’s fuel. They all looked healthy and happy and were dressed against the wind, the men in flat peaked caps and worn-out Harris tweeds, the women in flowered shirtwaist dresses and thick cardigan sweaters with kerchiefs tied tightly around their heads, and all of them, men and women alike, shod in high rubber Wellingtons. They looked up from their work as I swept past with the wind, and waved and shouted to see so marvelous a thing as a bicycle flying with the wind.
Lawrence Millman met an old man near here who had moved to Harris as a young man from the island of Scarp, where trees are unheard of. Millman had asked him if he was afraid when he first saw a tree on Harris. “Na,” he said, “I was na afraid a trees. I was terrified when I first saw a bicycle, though.”
Apparently the idea of a wheeled man scared him.
The cutters were stacking the peat in neat piles and I stopped at one point to chat them up about their work. Now, in June, they told me, was about the end of the cutting season. The crofters all have cutting banks on the common grazing lands of the townships, and they try to do all the work between May and June, which is the sunniest time of year in the Hebrides. Peat needs a spate of clear weather to dry out once it is cut from the bogs, and they stack it in little piles, like roundhouses, the peat slabs set vertically in a circle, damp side outward, and topped with a slab to hold the peats in place.
“Peat needs sun if it’s to burn,” one of the crofters said.
The place where the crofters were working was probably a lake seven thousand years ago, about the time that the glacier began retreating from this area. Slowly over the following eons, sphagnum moss, the dominant inhabitant of these acid bogs, began to creep over the waters from the soggy shores where it first took hold. Sphagnum moss is a self-perpetuating, self-promoting sort of plant that seems to have an almost everlasting life. The fresh green stems grow profusely on top of the old brown stems of the former growth and in this way the moss tends to pile up on top of itself. Year after year, generation after generation, it thickens and deepens and spreads and eventually covers whatever body of water it started to grow upon, absorbing the waters and compressing the dead stems into the soggy, brown, spongelike material called peat.
Like all green plants, the chlorophyll of the leaves absorbs the energy of the sun and stores it in the stems and cells of the plant as potential energy. The sphagnum on this bog on the lonely moors of Benbecula may have been laid down long before the pagan worshippers and sun cults of Callanish set up their stones. It may have been growing in that remote period when aurochs, the wild ox ancestor of today’s cattle, and the great-horned Scottish elk roamed these parts. But nonetheless, after it is cut and stacked and dried, once ignited, that potential energy is released and the heat of the sun, absorbed so many thousands of years ago, will warm again. Peat gives off a poor, smoky, weak heat, but in this treeless expanse, where the winter wind cuts like a chisel, it’s all the crofters have.
Sphagnum moss is an ambitious plant. Given moisture enough it will climb trees. It will cover wet rocks. It grows out over still waters and forms soggy, bouncy islands, and if anything falls onto it, or into it, the peat will cover it and preserve it in its acid, brown depths. It buried the famous sun chariot of Trundholm bog nearly three thousand years ago. It buried and preserved the bodies of Celtic princes and Celtic criminals and sacrificed human beings who were strangled and tossed to the bogs. It even attempted to bury the standing stones of Callanish. When the circle of stones was first identified on Lewis in 1857, they had to be excavated from peat to reveal their full height.
“Wherr’ye be gayne ain tha’ becycle a’ yurrn, lad?” one of the older peat cutters called out as I made to leave.
I could barely understand him. Although everyone speaks English in the Hebrides, the native tongue is Scots Gaelic and the accent of the Western Isles is thick. But I caught his drift.
“To the wildlife sanctuary,” I said.
“Ha’ care th’aigles don’ carry y’off,” he said. “They’re fond’ a’ young lambs.”
I’m not sure what the old man meant.
It was a great pleasure riding with the wind for once. On straight flat roads I had gotten in the habit of pedaling along no handed, and was even able to execute easy curves by leaning from side to side, riding with my hands on my hips. Here the narrow, winding road was perfect, and I sailed along with the sun ahead of me and the wind at my back, stretching my ar
ms and flying over the moors, sometimes curving to and fro and weaving across the road like a gull. But at the end of Benbecula, the joy ride came to an end. The wind shifted to the west and I had to turn into the teeth of it, bending low, keeping my head down and shifting gears ever downward. Within a half hour I was worn out and had to stop for a little picnic lunch overlooking a small loch. After lunch I crossed over the tidal flats on the causeway that connects Benbecula with South Uist and then turned to the southwest, with the wind again, riding along stretches of machair, the grassy plains on the west coasts of the Hebrides. In some places here, electric wires ran beside the road and they whined and moaned ominously in the wind, sometimes rising to a high eerie wail.
Eventually I came to a turnoff for a gravel road that led out to the reserve, but it gave out after a few hundred yards and became a rutted track, too rough for a bicycle, so I left it and hiked on across the rolling moors, under the screaming wind. There had not been a single car on the hard-topped road that morning, not so much as a sign of tire tracks on the gravel road, and no footprints other than those of sheep and red deer on the track. It was a lonely barren ground, stretching off to the gray water, with hollows and sucking fens, and the empty groan of the wind. Just where the track narrowed to a path, I saw the body of a large ram that had got himself caught in a barbed-wire fence and died there in the wind, one leg up on the wire, his eyes emptied by ravens and his great curling godlike horns making a mockery of his former power.
For an hour I walked southeast toward the aerie, across the low hills, and farther and farther into this strathy, rolling land. There were bogs and ponds becoming bogs, and bogs becoming drylands, and lochs piercing the shores, and shorelines trying to reclaim the sea, and all of which I had to circumvent, backtracking and forging onward to the south. The wind was howling ominously; overhead in the sky, great charging horseherds of clouds began to obscure the sun, making the wind all the colder, and sometimes I had to duck down in the shelter of the hollows to rest from the incessant battering on the open ground. In time I came upon a little horseshoe-shaped cairn, a low wall of rocks that could have been the remains of a sheep pound, or, for all I knew, the barrow of some long dead Celtic prince. The high end of the wall blocked the wind, and the open end faced south, out over the loch, so I went in and lay back against the stones to watch the sky.
The gray herd of the cloud cover was moving fast, and there was a warm island of blue sky forming in the breaks and moving eastward. I watched, anticipating that moment when the patch of blue would meet the sun. Slowly, it sailed on, then it sank, and then it rose again and then, like a fire blast it opened and the full force of the late spring sun struck my face. At that very moment, there was a great outcry and gabbling from the gulls and the graylag geese that had gathered in the loch. Into the rift of blue flew a huge flat-winged bird. It was a golden eagle, the lord of the skies, the ancient emblem of the Greek sky god Zeus.
I left South Uist the next day and rode back up to Lochmaddy, where I spent the night in the hotel. The following day I caught the ferry that skirts the east coast of South Harris and puts in at Tarbert and from here began a slog into the wind, across the moorlands of Lewis toward my final destination, the small town of Callanish. Here, just outside the village, I located an isolated croft that provided bed and breakfast and settled in to wait for the solstice. It was a cozy little house, sheltered from the incessant wind, with two small upstairs rooms and thick whitewashed walls. The croft appeared to be under the leadership of an energetic matriarch who wore her Wellingtons inside the house and fed her family and guests on shortbread and tea, fish stews, and lobster, with no variation.
The standing stones of Callanish are located in and around the tiny village on the west coast, and are now under the charge of the state. The place has become the most famous prehistoric site in Scotland, and like Castlerigg, in the Lake District, it is set in a dramatic location. The circle stands on a rise beyond the town and is visible over a wide area from both land and sea. Even after the advent of Christianity in these islands, local people used to gather at the stones around May Day for reasons lost even to those who attended the ceremonies. The Free Kirk, the strict Presbyterian Church of the northern islands of the Hebrides, long opposed the tradition. In the early years of Christian settlement, the stones were more or less stubs in the landscape. Their full size, the drama of the site, and the overall layout were not brought to light until 1857, when outsiders took an interest and excavated the stones from the peat.
The actual stones consist of local Lewisian gneiss and are set in a ring that encloses a huge monolith at the center. In the middle of the ring are the remains of a chambered cairn, whose existence became apparent when the peat was cleared and may be a later addition to the circle of stones. Running north from the stone circle are two parallel lines of nineteen stones forming an avenue, and lines of four stones head off to the other three quarters. If you observe the layout of the site from the air, or map the stones on paper, it becomes apparent that the whole arrangement takes the exact shape of a Celtic cross, which is an interesting anomaly—Callanish, which is generally presumed to be a solar temple, predates Christianity by at least a thousand years. So which came first, the solar cross or the Christian cross, or was the cross a solar symbol all along?
Much research has been done over the last eighty years on the astronomical orientations of Callanish. Early scholars believed that the northern avenue was positioned to indicate the rising of the star Capella, about 1800 B.C., when the temple was first constructed. The shorter rows of stone match the setting and rising sun, as it would have appeared at about the same period. There is also a possibility that two stones outside the circle, lying to the northeast and southwest, mark the northernmost and southernmost points of the moon in its annual coursing. More recently, researchers have come to believe that this is a far more complex celestial observatory, and that the southern line of stones together with the large monolith in the center of the circle is a north-south meridian line, designed to mark the pole around which the stars revolve and to indicate the highest position of the sun on any given date.
Local legends of the origins and purposes of the stones abound. There is one story of a being called the “Shining One” who emerges from the loch at midsummer dawn and walks up the avenue of standing stones to the cairn. When Millman was at Callanish interviewing oldsters of the Western Isles, one man told him in all sincerity that the stones were living beings, and like any living thing, were fond of drinking (as was, perhaps, Millman’s informant). Periodically at night, he said, they would go down to the loch to refresh themselves.
“One night I was out there,” the old man told Millman, “and the stones were na’ there. Down by the water’s edge, they were, taking a drink.”
I spent the next day resting from the wind, having tea and shortbread and taking little bicycle excursions north and south among the many lochs to look for birds. I thought about riding up to the main town of Stornaway to see if I could find a restaurant that would not serve fish stew, but the wind was in the wrong quarter and still blowing hard, and I had no stomach for any more of the hard work of the road. The weather held clear, although cool, and the forecast for the midsummer dawn was good.
On the evening of the solstice, after dinner, around eleven o’clock, I wandered out to the site again. Now I was not alone. Several people, some of them obviously local, some obviously strangers to this place, had come out and were sitting on the ground, facing west, watching the skies. There was a black cloud lying along the western horizon, like a dark, sleeping dragon, its slightly upturned pointed nose resting on the northern horizon line and its riffled, jagged back already glowing in gold. The sun was still above the cloud, and still to the south of the standing stones, and there was heated discussion as to whether it would be obscured in its descent by this dragon-cloud. From my point of view, it looked as if the sun would drop into the sea well to the south of the short avenue of stones, but I was ass
ured that, as it sank, it would be sweeping northward along the sea rim and drop down near the avenue line.
One fellow in a tan windbreaker and a deerstalker cap was especially keen on celestial observations at this site and was setting up a quadrant. He was intensely mathematical in his observations and had charts and graphs and record books of the rising dates of various stars from ancient times onward, and was calculating the solar angle and the like, checking his chronometer every minute or two and marking the time and the angles.
Others were not concerned with the science, but with the holiness of the place. One man wore a silver Celtic cross on a chain around his neck, and there was a small group in Druid hoods and robes, and two long-haired couples in beads and loose, Indian clothing were sitting some distance off from the site, honoring the temple by smoking a sacred herb that they ritually passed among themselves with ceremonial formality.
As the sun drew nearer its descent, the collected few grew quieter, and then quieter still, and by the time the sun reached the horizon, they spoke only in whispers, if at all. I drew apart and moved back to the east slightly to get a good view of the whole scene—the temple, the people, the loch beyond, the small island lying just beyond the loch to the southwest, and the great blue arc of the sky, the black dragon-cloud, and this honored god, the sun, who was now moving almost imperceptibly along the line of the sea, as if unwilling to let go his handhold of day.
The great fiery horses of the solar orb, those who fed on the fields of ambrosia by night, could not be seen, nor could we see the golden, resplendent chariot of Helios. The sunhorse of Trundholm bog was not visible, nor the barge of Ra, nor the Vedic charioteers, nor Sula, nor Sol, nor Surya. But they must have all been there that evening, hard at work, slowly reining in the horses, steering the chariot of the sun ever downward at a decreasing angle into the western sea. Their work for the day was almost over.
Following the Sun: A Bicycle Pilgrimage from Andalusia to the Outer Hebrides Page 31