by David Yeadon
Roddy’s pride in particular revealed itself in many ways, but most notably when he spoke the Gaelic version of what he called “our national anthem of sorts.” (“I’ll not be singin’ this—it’s na one o’ my finer talents!”)
The sounds of the words alone were moving in their intensity, and when he offered a rough translation—“Y’canna really translate Gaelic, y’lose too much o’ the spirit”—we understood why:
I see the land where I was born
My land of heroes in my eyes
Tho ’tis hard and stony
I ne’er will turn my back upon it
From the ocean’s waves
The most beautiful sight of all
The land where I was born
When he was finished, Roddy smiled a little sheepishly, cocked his head in a delightfully mischievous manner, looked away, and adjusted his tie (we realized much later during our residence here that Roddy was rarely without his tie, no matter how casual the occasion). At that moment I sensed that beneath his aw-shucks demeanor lay a family history, thick and deep as the Harris peat bogs: layer upon layer of clan loyalties and feuds, famines, crofter clearances, convoluted disputes over land rights and religious principles—the birthright of so many of the people here. He was Roddy, the generous, smiling man we were learning to like—but he was also a MacAskill, one of many generations, and everyone who knew him also sensed this vast genealogical jigsaw puzzle of Highland and island history and heritage.
As we were saying our farewells, Roddy chuckled: “Well—you two’ve certainly chosen a fine place for your book. House and Garden magazine just put the Outer Hebrides near the top of its ‘Best Ten Island Destinations in the World’ list!”
We finally rolled into bed much, much later than we’d intended, and together, propped on pillows, we watched a gloriously silver full moon move slowly over the loch and the high black hills.
“This is just…perfect,” murmured Anne sleepily with maybe just a scintilla of a whisky slur. “We couldn’t have wished for a better island home…and family.”
From what I remember, the following day was a DDD—a Decadently Do-Nothing Day. Too many things had happened too quickly. We were more tired—albeit pleasantly tired—than we realized. So we did what we occasionally do in our odd little lives: we pick a day with nothing much on the endless lists of things to do—and do nothing. Except watch and wonder and mentally record the serendipitous ebbs and flows of tiny events and happenings and…well, anything else we care to notice, such as:
the dawn mists moving wraithlike, snakelike, and low across the surface of the loch outside our living room window;
the soft lemony flecks of new morning light touching the hugeness of the North Harris hills;
that first shaft of real sunrise sun flooding across the lower flanks of Clisham and bathing the rock beaches far below our cottage in a liquid amber;
the incessantly cheerful chuckle of the stream running down at the side of the cottage, bouncing over boulders and swirling off under the spikey tussocks of marsh grass;
the faintest shimmer of wavelets across the loch, suggesting a slow turning of the tide;
a scurry of new spring lambs, hyperactive bundles of white fleece, nudging their reluctant mothers from sleep and demanding their milky nutrition from warm, dewy nipples;
The first guttural shrieks of seagulls way down at the pier waiting for a fishing boat to come in or for the arrival of the salmon farmworkers to take the food sacks out to the fish pens in the middle of the loch;
The scrabbling intensity of Joan’s hungry hens scurrying about their enclosure, seeking early morning tidbits or a cozy place in the grass to lay their eggs of the day;
The steady strengthening of the sunlight as it eases up the spectral range from pearly sheen to bronze to gold to lemon-silver, burning out the shadows and the mists and bathing the loch, the mountains, the bumpy stumps of old black houses, and the marshy-rocky pastures of the Ardhasaig peninsula—everything—in mellow morning warmth;
The clouds!—so many shapes, so many moods, from tiny planktonlike “mackerel” flotillas, slow-moving stratus creatures like manta rays, and huge bubbled thunderheads to cumuli crisp-edged as breakfast bacon and cirrus like sheened flights of goose-quill pens.
You could write a whole book on just one day of such microde-lights. Our long, slow DDD ended in another spectacular moon-glow night, with the faint lights of distant croft cottages on the far side of the loch flickering against a velvety black landscape. Our landscape now.
And while on the subject of books, Roddy was most enthusiastic about the idea of our Seasons on… opus. I was a little surprised by this because he had a library full of books on the Hebrides and I thought he’d possibly dismiss it as just one more diatribe by a neophyte outsider aimed primarily at the island’s slowly increasing tourist trade.
“Y’know…y’may jus’ gi’ us somethin’ a wee bit diff’rent…’specially as y’re livin’ on-island for a while…and not jus’ poppin’ in an’ off like so many o’ the others. Journalistic types y’ken…”
“I hope so,” I said. “That’s certainly what I’ll try to do. Somebody famous—I’ve forgotten who for the moment—once said that ‘journalism is literature in a hurry.’ And we’re in no hurry here…”
“Well tha’s good—and the first thing y’might want t’do is meet with our famous historian, Bill Lawson. He’ll give y’a far better picture of the island than I can. I’ll just gi’ you the best jokes!”
Bill Lawson is intelligent, erudite, occasionally irascible, invariably outspoken, and always a man exhibiting the honesty and integrity of a truly professional researcher, particularly in the convoluted field of local genealogy.
And that was our opinion of him even before we’d met him.
Roddy had loaned us one of his many books, Harris in History and Legend, and we relished Bill’s no-nonsense revelations of island traumas, inequities, and scandals.
According to Bill, the real trouble on Harris began when a Donald Stewart arrived as “factor” (a sort of estate manager) for the MacLeod clan, owners of Harris:
Nothing would do for him…but that he would turn the whole of the machair [western] side of Harris into sheep-farms, and send the people away to Canada…In 1838 he evicted the last of the people from Seilibost. And not content with clearing the living, he had to clear the dead out as well, for he took over the graveyard that the Seilibost people had, and ploughed it up…But not all the crofters gave up without a fight and at one point Stewart even had to send for the army to enforce his edicts declaring: “A conspiracy for resisting the law existed in all this quarter of the West Highlands, which, if not at once checked, would lead to consequences no lover of order would care to think about…”
However, then Bill adds with a not-so-suppressed glee that the Hebridean clearance diaspora and the sheep-farming “revolution” failed, and Stewart eventually lost, “for Seilibost was turned back into crofts again a hundred years later, after the First World War.”
Bill also maintained a healthy skepticism about some of the “utopian benefactors” whose visionary exploits for island enhancement—aesthetic, social, and economic—often floundered on equally unsound and quixotic decision making. Lord Leverhulme, for example, owner of the vast Lever Brothers’“soap empire” (his island nickname was “The Wee Soapman”), purchased Lewis and Harris in the 1920s and tried to develop Lewis first. After failing there (primarily because of the crofters’ love of their small patches of land and their reluctance to become “industrialized”), he came to Harris with his schemes for a vast fishing industry and port at a “new town” to be created around the village of Obbe, at the southern end of the island, which he, of course, renamed Leverburgh, after himself (a popular habit of benefactors in that Victorian era of rampant but often self-serving philanthropy). Unfortunately for the little lord, he apparently failed to notice that the waters off his new town were a labyrinthine chaos of rocks, shoals, and tidal
islets that could quickly decimate the “majestic fleets” he envisaged harboring here.
Ironically, while the scheme floundered following the sudden death of Leverhulme, a far more realistic and modest kind of scheme many decades later for the Leverburgh An Clachan Cooperative survives and flourishes today. And while Bill is a little skeptical—“It was a mistake to expect a committee of amateurs, in the best sense of the word, to be able to run a wide range of businesses”—the place remains a welcome resource for locals and visitors alike, offering a well-stocked store, café, book and souvenir “loft,” and an exhibition area featuring the intriguing Harris Tapestry—a series of large, colorful panels handcrafted by islanders and depicting key aspects of local history and folklore.
Bill’s constant frustration with past and present schemes and dreams of island improvement is echoed by Roger Hutchinson in his recent book The Soap Man, which chronicles Leverhulme’s activities here. He writes:
The Highlands and Islands of Scotland have seen a greater variety of land owning thugs, philanthropists, oafs and autocrats than any comparable region of the western world…Leverhulme’s intention was to revolutionize the lives and environment of Lewis’ 30,000 people, together with those of neighboring Harris…At the stroke of a pen he became one of the largest private landowners in Europe with powers equivalent to the viceroy of a small colony.
Bill writes about similar visionary high-mindedness and is particularly outraged by all the controversy and confusion of the proposed (now rejected) proposal for the Lingarabay Superquarry way down at the southeastern tip of the island near Rodel.
Lingreabhagh [Bill is fastidious in his use of Gaelic names] is best known today for the farce of the local public inquiry into the proposal. It took six years to reach a decision [in favor of the quarry and the local jobs it would create]. The government then decided to ignore the recommendation anyway. Somewhere in the process the local people were forgotten…and all that time the lifeblood of the community—its young people—drained away. The amount of money spent on the inquiry could have been spent on rejuvenating the economy of the south of Harris, but instead we have a worthless report, and nothing else to show for the whole sorry saga…And of course none of the jobs that were promised if the quarry was turned down have ever materialized. One would have thought that if the conservation bodies were so keen on preserving Harris they would have tried to create jobs here, and so they have—six part-time mink trappers!
This ongoing island project of a questionably boondoggle nature reflects an attempt to eliminate a few mink that are said to be scurrying around the island and possibly threatening the eggs of some of the nesting birds. Results to date have been “rather ambiguous verging on total failure,” according to one of our more reliable island sources—“almost as daft as the hedgehog hunt!” This second bizarre initiative is mainly a project on the Uists, farther south down the Outer Hebridean chain, and as such projects invariably do, it has set animal-loving St. Tiggywinkles and other environmentalists, who want to trap and relocate these egg-eating critters, against the more pragmatic “certain-death techniques of the Scottish Natural Heritage who to date claim over one hundred fifty kills.”
One feels tempted to agree with Bill’s outrage at such sorry sagas, particularly when the hedgehog-trapping environmentalists claim that the “ridiculous profligacy” of the Scottish Natural Heritage has so far amounted to an outrageous cull-cost ratio of over five hundred pounds (nine hundred dollars) per hedgehog!
Profligacy was indeed once again the hallmark of one of the earlier benefactors of Harris, the Earl of Dunmore, who decided that his aristocratic status was such that he needed a fine Scottish-style mansion overlooking Soay Sound on North Harris. And in 1867 the impressive Amhuinnsuidhe Castle (of which, more later) was built. In addition to satisfying the earl’s overbearing ego, the structure was also intended to impress his son’s highly placed fiancée. Alas, however, her rather cruel remark shortly after its completion that his extravagant creation, twenty times larger than the average crofter’s black house at the time, was “not even so big as my father’s hen hut,” resulted in such frantic, free-spending efforts to expand the place that the earl virtually bankrupted himself and his family. And of course, as no “lady of position” would ever dream of marrying a penniless suitor, the engagement was dissolved and the castle quickly sold “at a calamitous loss.”
“Roddy’s right—we’ve got to meet this Bill Lawson,” said Anne as she read his hilarious—and sad—tales of island history and life.
So, that’s exactly what we did.
Throughout the warmer months, Bill and his wife, Chris, both enthusiastic naturalists, in addition to all their other interests, offer short walking tours for anyone who cares to join them. The meeting place is either at the William MacGillivray Center, a modest place of homage to one of Scotland’s finest, if rather neglected, naturalists in Northton, or at the nearby notable Lawson creation, a modern white painted barnlike structure opened in July 2000, adjoining their home in the old schoolhouse here, which not only offers an intriguing exhibition of local and natural history but also houses Bill’s Genealogy Research Center, an extensive and meticulously prepared repository of island genealogical data known as Co Leis Thu? (Who Do You Belong To?).
Here in scores of black binders are thousands of family-tree charts mostly prepared by Bill in his tiny neat handwriting (a remarkable feat for a man with such unusually large hands).
“It’s so intriguing,” said Bill. “We have all these people coming here, often from thousands of miles away and looking for links to their ancestors on the island. You feel as though you’ve given them a new perspective on who they really are…an anchor for their lives. Real, almost tangible roots…and then it all happens again when we go off to the USA and Canada—usually a couple of times a year—and visit places where the clearance immigrants built a new life for themselves in the mid-1800s. They’re keener than even the locals here to find their family histories…”
The Lawsons quickly opened our minds and eyes to island history, family heritage, nature, humor, and just about anything else we cared to ask them.
We enjoyed their company too, right from the start—the tall, stooped Bill with his self-effacing chuckle, and the confident eyes and bright smile of Chris. Despite their local status as “incomers” (Bill from the Scottish mainland and Chris from Lewis), they both live, breathe, and adulate their adopted island of Harris, and on our first walk with them out across the vast flower-bedecked machair sheep pastures below the conical summit of Chaipaval, it was obvious that we had met a couple who had truly found their mutual purpose—and passion—in life.
But that didn’t stop them from being direct and blatantly honest in their comments and opinions on the islanders and island life in general.
“Northton’s a pretty odd place today,” Bill chuckled as we set off in discovery of a series of beautiful secluded beaches overlooking the Sound of Harris. “Only forty or so houses, but since we’ve lived here, there’s been a surge of ‘incomers’ to the islands buying up the old crofts at prices that are cheap for them but very inflationary for us. It’s become a real eclectic mishmash here—folks moving in from America, Ireland, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Holland, even Morocco. The original village here of Taobh Tuath was a couple of miles away but, like all the west coast machair, it was cleared in the mid-1800s to make way for sheep. Typical of the lairds in those days. Just listen to their justification: ‘This will benefit all parties, relieving these lands of its redundant populations will improve the conditions of those who remain behind and at the same time relocate the expatriated in a sphere where there is certainty of finding productive outlets for their energies…’ Then, when all that nonsense stopped—when the sheep economy failed—a ‘new village’ was rebuilt here from the earlier 1900s onwards. It was virtually a model crofting community with clearly fenced twelve-acre crofts in a line above the bay and open grazing all across Chaipaval—or to give it its cor
rect Norse name, Ceapabhal—‘the bow-shaped hill.’”
“So—all this was Viking territory?” asked one of the dozen or so walkers who had joined Bill and Chris at the MacGillivray Center.
And that’s all Bill needed to start him off on a fascinating summation of island history. A few in the group, however, were more interested in the wealth of wildflowers already appearing in spring profusion across the honey-scented machair, laced in lark song.
“Oh my God, Henry, just look at these wonderful Dactylorhiza incarnata [apparently a rare species of marsh orchid]!” Others among them seemed ecstatic as they checked off their discoveries: bird’s foot trefoil, ladies’ bedstraw, centaury, meadow rue, harebells, knapweed, poppies, and clovers galore—all gloriously swaying about in the lush grasses.
Two others were avid ornithologists, bowed under the load of binoculars and cameras dangling from their necks and exuding paroxysms of delight at glimpses of arctic terns, gannets (skuas), golden eagles, oyster-catchers, pied wagtails, and a host of other more obscure species that were mere litanies of names to us. Until they spotted seals off one of the rocky coastal shoals: “I’m sure that’s what they are!” gushed one of them. “Or maybe otters.”
“No, no, they must be seals…it’s hard to tell, though…maybe porpoises…”
Without binoculars—which the couple seemed reluctant to share with the rest of the group—we all stared hard at the shoals but saw only the chop and slap of the tide on worn black strata.
Bill was now waxing eloquent about “the real deep history” of this bare, beach-indented sweep of machair that wrapped itself for miles around the base of Chaipaval like a vast emerald-green cape. He didn’t seem to have much patience with the rape, pillage, and plundering ways of the marauding Vikings of the ninth century, and as we stood among humpy lumps of turf and small exposed segments of ancient stone walls, he did a splendid job of re-creating life and lifeways here during the Bronze and Iron Ages.