by David Yeadon
My pessimist-self, however, was not quite so complacent: “When things start to go well—watch out!” it muttered. My optimist-self responded on autopilot: “Any further problems are merely opportunities in disguise!” And there were indeed problems. Two of them. First, my plateau of safety was actually lower than the main dunes, so I couldn’t see out for orientation. And second, the sun, which had been my comforting companion throughout the hike, had suddenly vanished in an ominous pall of clouds that were now rapidly descending as a thick and chilly mist, sullen, silent, and ominously still. A sudden sheen of silence.
Oh, great! I thought. I could be wandering around this wilderness for ages trying to find my way out. And of course that’s what happened. For the next hour I flailed through this omnipresent fog, maybe walking in circles along the highest ridges, hoping for something to confirm my somewhat confused sense of direction. A friend of mine once advised me that “the key to a good walk is knowing when to sit.” Obviously I forgot his advice that day.
Eventually I realized that I was actually going consistently downhill, either back to the beach or, hopefully, toward the cemetery. But this strange little corner of my island still had a few tricks up its topographical sleeve: nasty overhangs of soft sand that wanted to send me tumbling back into one of those treacherous bowls; little scooped-out “sand holes,” many partially hidden in the marram tufts and carved out by vicious little mini-tornadoes or “sand devils”; and ankle-snapping rabbit burrows that pockmarked the surface of the sand like Gruyère cheese holes.
Finally I heard a car or a truck or something with linkages to a more familiar world. It came from quite a distance but at least it was straight ahead. And then—a path! Only a rough indentation in the sand, but at least something to suggest that other of my species had wandered, and presumably survived, here.
The velvety, sheep-cropped grass of the cemetery suddenly appeared out of the mist as I made a long descent down the last of the dunes. I sighed with relief and wandered past the scores of headstones for MacLeods, MacLeans, MacKayes, MacDonalds, Morrisons, and MacAskills. All lovely familiar names in this safe, quiet haven. Which it indeed once was, and still is. A haven, particularly for those who died on the eastern bay side of Harris, where the ground is so rock-bound that no space could be found for communal burial sites. So, along an ancient peaty track (now part of the Harris Walkway, which links over twenty miles of traditional hill tracks from the Lewis border to the Seilibost Sands), the coffins had to be carried the ten or so miles from Grosebay to the soft machair earth of Luskentyre for sanctified interment. It doesn’t sound particularly far, but as later hikes across the “lunarland” of central Harris showed us, it can be an extremely arduous experience.
Then came the track. A narrow, sinuous creature that I knew would take me safely back home. Maybe I’d even get a lift. Otherwise I knew I’d be in for a long walk.
It was not only a long walk. It was also cold, wet, and utterly spirit-crushing. Not a single vehicle passed me along those three miles back to the main road. And the cloud-fog, which I hoped would eventually lift as quickly as it had come, decided instead that it was time to release its pent-up burden of Atlantic rain, with drops big as pinto beans, and dump a good part of it right on top of me as I sloshed along, soaked and shivering in this ridiculously unseasonable autumnal storm.
I tried to restore my subdued spirits by remembering one of my favorite mantralike travel aphorisms—another beauty attributed to Sir Richard Burton: “Of the gladdests moments methinks in human life is the departing upon a distant journey into lands unknown.”
But the only really good thing about the remainder of that eminently forgettable day was the fact that when I finally gained the sanctuary of our little cottage, Anne cosseted me like a newborn baby, supplied me with mug after mug of strong hot tea, and, God bless her, had even prepared a delicious and truly Yorkshire dinner of steak and kidney pie with minted peas and roasted potatoes.
“I almost cooked some lamb,” she told me. I was glad she hadn’t. The memory of that poor creature—and doubtless many others—trapped and terminated in the sand bowl had spoiled that particular aspect of my appetite for quite a while.
But as the days passed and the weather became pleasant and predictable (a rather rare occurrence on this climatically fickle island), we continued to explore the sands together and our discoveries of new mini-earthscapes, strange aquatic creatures in the rock pools, and other multifaceted peculiarities of local flora and fauna, were endless and always enticing.
NOW, MUCH AS I HATE TO spoil this picture of our deliciously carefree ramblings, I feel I should mention one particular drawback at this and other seasons: the pernicious midge.
The Pernicious Midge
You’ll never forget that first bite of the meanbh chuileag—the little fly—a ridiculously polite euphemism for one of the most detested plagues of the warm months here. And one reason you won’t forget the bite of this virtually invisible attacker, with a wingspan of barely a millimeter, is because it rarely attacks on its own. Ratherlike Canada geese, midges are social creatures, enjoying the perpetual company and attack formations of cloud like collections of clones that breed in their billions among the bogs, lochans, and wet rasslands of the islands. Piranhas, of course, act within similar cohesion and, having once experienced nips from these devil-teethed barbarians of the Orinoco River in deepest Venezuela, I will congratulate the tiny midge on coming in a close second on the pain scale.
“Ach, it’s only the pregnant female that bites. The males are harmless,” I’d been told at the beginning of the midge season in late May by a strappingly bold ex-crofter in the Tarbert Stores, that lopsided wonderworld of do-it-yourself miscellanea next door to the Clisham Keel.
“Well,” I said a little grumpily, having just beaten off an attacking army with huge clouds of my cigar smoke (and a quick dash for the store too), “when there’s a million buzzing around your head, I don’t think it makes any damn difference if only half of them are biting!”
“Well, what y’might wanna do,” replied my stoic informant, “is use a little squirt of oil of citronella or pennyroyal, or a sprig of bog myrtle pinned to your clothes…or…”
“Aw, no, no,” chipped in one of the young men behind the counter, “my granny always says one part of lavender oil to twenty parts of elder-flower water.”
“Nah—that’ll not do it. Just try lemon juice…”
And even a fourth joined in: “Listen—the best cure of all is a mix of lanolin, camphor, and cassia…I forget how many parts…”
The owner of the store was dismissive of such folk remedies: “Na’ listen—all those things are useless—just tasty salad dressings for those hungry creatures—but we’ve got this new machine comin’ in next week…The Midge Master. Y’put it outside where y’sit, turn on the special fuel, and the midges think it’s you an’ they get sucked in by the thousands. Works wonders!”
Roddy laughed when I told him of all these remedies. “Well, now, there’s always someone comin’ up wi’ a new remedy, but the only real way to beat ’em is t’keep the breeze about ye, particularly in the evening, or puff like crazy on a big cigar, or…well, y’could do what I do and jus’ stay inside and enjoy a nice glass o’ malt.”
That and a noxious cigar sounded by far the best solution. But that first sudden ambush had left me fired up both physically (I had dozens of little red welts all over my face and arms) and mentally. The He brideans are a little canny about their summer plague (“Don’ wanna put the poor tourists off, now, d’we?”), so I decided to undertake a little research into the matter.
I began with George Hendry’s Midges in Scotland, in which he explains in cool, nonemotive, scientific prose (obviously he’d never experienced a full-blown armada attack) that:
The critical step for the female of the culicoides impunctatus species is to secure a supply of fresh blood…without it egg development is arrested and, given the short life span of twenty, perhaps thi
rty, days for the adult, this is the point on which all future generations depend absolutely…but blood meals are none too common in the Highlands.
Which of course would explain their vampirish voraciousness when they finally do find a gullible victim. Like me.
However, being usually of a generous and benevolent nature, I would hate to see any species threatened through lack of basic nutrition, despite the fact that it seems the midge’s only purpose, other than self-perpetuation, is to satisfy the gustatory requirements of reed warblers. So feed away, little fly, on whatever sheep, cows, horses, rats you find (although it does distress me to see sheep particularly driven to suicidal distraction by these avaricious hordes)—but leave us Homo erectus alone!
But of course they never do. Even cigar puffing, lanolin and lemon juice–drenched, pennyroyal-protected members of our species seem to suffer as much as everything else. Some claim that concentrated elixirs of Deet can do the trick, but my feeling is why kill yourself just to avoid a few nibbles. After all, others have suffered and survived, including this anonymous island visitor in 1850 who later wrote (thus confirming his survival):
Talk of solitude on the Moors! Why, every square yard contains a population of millions of these little black harpies, that pump blood out of you with amazing savageness and insatiability. While you are in motion, not one is visible, but when you stop a mist seems to curl around your feet and legs, rising, and at the same time expanding, until you become painfully sensible that the appearance is due to a cloud of midges…which in one instance sent me reeling down the craggy steep, half mad…
Even the most distinguished of travelers here have had to suffer the same torture. For example, according to John O’Sullivan, a fugitive from Culloden along with Bonnie Prince Charlie:
The Prince was in a terrible condition, his legs and thy’s cut all over from the bryers; the mitches or flys wch are terrible in yt contry, devored him, and made him scratch those scars, wch made him appear as if he was cover’d with ulsers…so we wrapt his head and feet in his plaid and cover’d him in long heather. After leaving him in that posture, he uttered several heavy sighs and groans…
Even Queen Victoria noted in her Leaves from Our Life in the Highlands that on an 1872 visit “we stopped to take our tea and coffee but were half devoured by midges.” Apparently, she even borrowed a cigarette from one of her courtiers to keep them at bay notwithstanding the fact that she avidly discouraged smoking. Ironically, the two greatest moaners and groaners about Highland conditions, Boswell and Johnson, never mentioned midges. Neither did many of the celebrated artists and writers who ventured into these wildernesses, including the renowned William Wordsworth, who apparently wrote his mellifluous, rosy-hued lines here in perfect peace.
But when I read of today’s scourge in the guest book of our little cottage—“You swat and flail, clawing at your scalp, cursing. But a cloud of them hangs about your head, your nostrils, your hairline, your brows—it is hell on earth!”—I decided that Roddy’s advice is perhaps the best. Light up the most noxious cigar you can find (or a pipe of strong Navy Cut tobacco—I’m told that’s pretty effective too) and valiantly sally forth into the summer skirmishes. Or, better still, close all doors and windows, open up a bottle of fine malt, and watch these clouds of egg-anxious females have their wayward way outside. With someone else—preferably one of those stoic, dismissive Hearaich characters who claims that we “outsiders” just don’t have what it takes to resist these summer onslaughts. And may he be wearing a very loose kilt when they swoop in for the kill.
14
The Sheep Farmer, The Fank—and The Finnock
WELL, AS WITH MOST ENJOYABLE things in life, the sheep’s year begins with a real good tuppin’!” said Ian MacSween, one of the island’s leading sheep farmers, with a broad grin.
“Tupping?” I asked.
“You know—mating.”
“Ah—right.”
“That’s usually next month—in November. After the October dipping in the fank…”
“The fank being all those pens outside your croft?”
“Tha’s right.”
“And that’s what I’m coming to see next week—the dipping?”
“Well, you’ll be doing more than seeing. You’ll be part of the gathering…won’t you?”
“Bringing the sheep down from the hills?”
“Tha’s right. Tha’s where all the fun is. Bring your wife too, if you like.”
“Well—I’ll certainly ask her.”
“Aye—you do that!” He laughed and his massive frame, sprawled Nero-like across the large armchair by the fire, rocked violently. He knew as well as I did that such gatherings held no great appeal to the females of most families. From what Ian had told me so far, it was a tough biannual exercise trying to entice hundreds of sheep—in Ian’s case around six hundred—down from the high boggy hills of North Harris to the rich grassy inbye land beside the cottage and the dipping fank.
I liked this gentle giant as soon as I met him. The first greeting, however, came from a great brown slavering dog of obscure origin that rushed me as soon as I opened my car door.
“Down, Lassie, down!” boomed a voice in the doorway of a modest-sized croft cottage set on a steep slope overlooking the broad, twilight-glimmering expanse of Loch Seaforth, just over the mountains of North Harris at Scaladale. Lassie paid no attention whatsoever and seemed determined to plant a sticky wet kiss, first on my face and then, as I resisted, on my crotch.
“Lassie! Down!” the voice called again to no effect.
Ian MacSween—Sheep Farmer
So this large figure, silhouetted against the house lights, rolled toward me, arms outstretched, seized the recalcitrant dog by the scruff of its neck, and shouted into its face: “Inside! Now!”
Finally the dog obeyed and my hand was grasped by a man whose billowing white hair, huge walrus mustache, and twinkling eyes, full of humor, immediately conjured up images of Albert Einstein. A somewhat larger and more rotund version of the original, it’s true, but a definite clonish resemblance. And I told him so.
“Now that’s most ironic y’think that.” Ian laughed as he led me inside to a cozy sitting room with a glowing peat fire (and Lassie, still awaiting her kiss), “because as well as being a sheep crofter, I run the maths department at the Nicolson in Stornoway.”
“How d’you find time to do both?” I asked, surprised because Roddy MacAskill had told me Ian was one of the last few major sheep farmers on the island. “An’ that takes an awful lot of time and hard work!”
“Well, things have really changed, y’know, for this generation. There are so few people involved now compared to what it used to be in my late father, Hughie’s, time, and my grandfather’s. Can’t really see it going on too much longer. We’re all getting older. The young ones won’t stay and the landlords don’t like us grazing sheep on their deer-hunting estates. So—there’s only a handful of bigger crofts left now. There used to be gatherings galore when we brought the flocks to the fanks all down the valley here. Our sheep aren’t ‘hefted,’ y’see—that’s when they instinctively stay on the part of the hills they were born in. Ours roam all over the place on the ‘common grazing,’ so it’s quite a job finding ’em all and gettin’ ’em down here. But we all used to work together—helping each other. Only now there are so few of us. You really need at least ten people and the same number of dogs for a good gathering. These sheep can be spread out over miles up there—and it’s hard going. Even the small crofts are dwindling—just a few trying to stay on, but they won’t last for long.”
“I keep hearing that same story about so many things that used to make the islands special…unique.”
Ian nodded. “Aye. And I’ve only got two dogs now. I love ’em both, but they’re not as good as the ones I used to have. With those, I could go up there gathering a few strays all by m’self—didn’t need anyone else to help out—but now, with these two, I’d likely come back empty-handed. Good train
ed dogs nowadays cost upwards of a thousand pounds—far too much for most of us around here…”
“So why continue?”
“Because that’s what we’ve always done. And I love working with sheep. Have done ever since I was a child. It’s a family thing. You get to know them almost as individuals—the strong ones, the weak ones, the stubborn ones. You can tell, almost as soon as a lamb pops out, what kind of sheep it’ll be. It’s an instinct that builds up over the generations. My great-grandfather came here to Scaladale in 1885. He came from Scalpay, that wee island just off Tarbert. Used to be a real big fishing island. Almost every family around here came from Scalpay. They were given crofts—it wasn’t what you’d call a real ‘clearance’—more ‘an incentive-motivated inevitability’! They built black houses down by the shore—y’can still see the ruins. My dad—Hughie—was one of thirteen children. This house we’re in now they built in 1912 and another one close by. But there were just too many people—up to fifteen in a house sometimes. My mother was English—from Birmingham. She married my father after the war in 1946 and moved here. She often said if she’d known where and how she was going to live, she’d never have come. I mean, there was no electricity, no inside water—not much of anything really. True culture shock it was for her. But she stuck it out…adapted quite well in the end, bless her.”
“How did you manage to build up such a large sheep farm?”
“Well—it used to be even bigger. We ran sheep over all the hills around here and we even once held the grazing rights to the Shiants.”
“Adam Nicolson’s islands?” Anne and I had become ardent admirers of Adam’s recent book, Sea Room—an exquisitely crafted, multilayered portrait of the tiny Shiant Isles, way out in The Minch, east of Harris.