by David Yeadon
“Aye—well, they belonged to his father, Nigel, then. Y’know, the son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. Part of the infamous Bloomsbury group—Virginia Woolf and all that. He wrote that great book on Lord Leverhulme, Lord of the Isles. Anyway, he passed them on to Adam when he was twenty-one. I coulda kept the grazing…my father said I should…but I didn’t…”
“Why?”
Ian’s huge face crumpled a little. He looked embarrassed and replied hesitantly, as if reluctant to explain. “Well…it was like this…I’m not, ah, much of a man f’boats…for the water…I only went to the Shiants once as a youngster. I never wanted to go again. My father looked after that grazing. When he retired, I let it go.”
It seemed oddly touching—this large, powerful man, devoted to his dogs and sheep, willing to climb and search the most arduous of terrain, bog-laden and littered with pernicious, leg-breaking hollows—looking for strays or lost lambs. And yet, bound to the land by a deep-seated fear of the water.
“Must be all those tales of the Blue Men in The Minch!” I said, hoping to lighten our conversation.
Ian laughed. “Aye—must be something like that…”
“Are you superstitious?”
“I didn’t think I was, but I must admit my great-grandmother seemed to have…the powers…”
“Y’mean like ‘second sight’?” I was becoming increasingly fascinated by this subject.
“Aye. I guess you can call it that, although I’m not really a great believer in it m’self. Still, it makes you wonder. I remember there was this one time when my great-grandfather had found a long, curved strip of metal—the kind they line the keel of a boat with. So he decided to keep it. Up on the rafters of the cow byre in case it came in handy. Then one day my great-grandmother came rushing in from the milking in the byre, shouting that the keel strip was jumping about like something alive on the rafters and that she wanted it out—right now! So he took it out and threw it into our drainage ditch. On the edge of the inbye land. And then one day a friend came along and asked if he could have it for his own boat and my great-grandfather said he could. And so he took it and fixed it on his boat and…”
“Yes…,” I said, already suspecting the outcome.
“Well, not long after, he and some others were out in the boat. It was quite calm out there on the loch. No storms or anything. But someone on the shore saw the boat jumping about like it was being tossed by storms and waves. Only there weren’t any waves. And then the boat suddenly capsized and they were all drowned…”
Silence. The usual reaction to such second-sight tales.
“Well—I guess that’s a good enough reason to get boat phobia!”
“Maybe, maybe,” chuckled Ian. “These stories can sneak inside your head…like this other time my great-grandmother rushed back from milking, saying she’d seen two strange men all dressed in black, walking down the track past our house. She couldn’t recognize who they were, so we all ran out but there was nobody around. Then a week later, the man who lived in the only other house down the track got into a bar scuffle in Stornoway, hit his head on a concrete floor, and died. And late that night, two men all dressed in black walked down the same street to tell his wife of his death…and my great-grandmother had seen it all…a week before it happened.”
It was time to change the subject. Second-sight tales here, while intriguing, always make me a little uncomfortable. And the ones gifted with the ability seem the most uncomfortable of all and certainly the most reluctant to discuss the subject. “It’s not a thing to be proud of,” one elderly woman in the Bays once told me. “It’s like a curse…”
“So tell me more about the life of a sheep farmer. What happens when and why and where?”
“It’s all pretty simple…at least, after a lifetime doing it, it seems that way.”
And that’s when we started with the “real good tupping” in November and moved on into the winter.
“That’s the worst time, really,” said Ian. “Our climate seems to be getting wetter and colder every winter. The young hoggs [the current year’s lambs], the ewe hoggs, and the wedders [castrated hoggs] I usually send by cattle float across to the Black Isle for wintering. It’s warmer there and the grass is good in the fields. The older sheep—the ewes and tupps [noncastrated rams] and gimmers [older females], I let out again in the hills and I feed them regularly. Mostly flaked barley. I leave it near the roadside. Drivers get annoyed by all the sheep on the roads but they go there anyway to lick up the gritting salt when it’s snowing. Some farmers say feeding them is bad because it makes the sheep dependent and they lose their foraging ability. But, well—I’m a bit of a softie…and I love my sheep…”
“Do you eat lamb?”
“I never butcher a young lamb for myself personally. It’s not a sentimental thing. Truly. It’s from the meat point of view. My choice is a two-year-old wedder—much, much tastier. It’s not really lamb—it’s mutton. But many call it lamb because there’s no real market for mutton. It conjures up images of wartime rations and tough boiled gamey meat.”
The house was suddenly hit by an abrupt thwack—almost like a landslide. I jumped. Lassie, who had been quiescent for the last half hour or so, leapt up barking. “Jeez! What the heck was that?!”
“Ah, nothin’ much, David…just the wind. We’re a wee bit exposed here.”
“But you’re in the bottom of a beautiful glaciated bowl with hills all around…I thought it would be sheltered here.”
Ian had an attack of the giggles. Once again his large sprawled body rocked in his armchair. “Sheltered? Never! You should be here when the real gales come…in both directions, depending on the mood of the weather. Sometimes screaming like a horde of witches up the loch. Other times roaring down from Clisham and the high glens. Sheltered! The only thing we’re sheltered from is the sun. Most of winter when the sun hardly gets over the horizon we’re in shadow here—and a very cold shadow it can be too.”
“So much for global warming, then.”
“Warming for some maybe. Here it feels like the beginning of a new Ice Age at times!”
“Anyway,” I said, trying to ignore the ominous groaning of the rafters as the winds continued to batter the little house, “we’ve had the tupping and the long winter, so then comes…?”
“Oh, then comes the best time of all—the lambing—in April and May. Smaller farmers bring the sheep down to the croft, but there’s not enough grass yet here, so we let them lamb up on the moor. We lose some that way, but in a good year it’s really an amazing sight. Each ewe—and we have around five hundred or so up there—can average around two lambs, so the hills are full of ’em!”
“Yes—Anne and I saw that in the spring. Beautiful. Hundreds of little bouncy balls of fleece. Tails wagging as they suckled greedily. She wanted to write poetry about it all…but took photographs instead!”
“Aye, it’s my favorite time.”
“And then?”
“Well—then we have the sales. Some of the lambs, but mainly the older males. And then in June and July we have the first gathering for the fank—marking and shearing. Not much of a market for the wool, though, nowadays. They use mainland wool for the Harris Tweed here. Our Blackface wool is too hard. Used to be popular for carpets and the like—but not so much now. And then in August we have the big lamb sales—we had over six hundred from Harris this year…a pretty good year, despite everything.”
“And then we’re back to now.”
“Right. Another gathering at the fank.”
“For which you’d like my help.”
“Aye—that would be very nice indeed.”
“For you…I’m sure.”
Ian gave a great snort. “And for you too! It’s an experience not many outsiders enjoy.”
UNFORTUNATELY, THIS OUTSIDER DIDN’T ENJOY it either.
And it wasn’t through reluctance or laziness. It was simply because I was caught unwittingly in a difficult dilemma that can be traced
back a couple of months or more when I’d been cajoled by the charming—and always helpful—librarian at our little library into buying a handful of lottery tickets for some school improvement project in Tarbert.
“You’ve won second prize!” I remember an excited Dondy telling me. “A day of fly fishing with your own personal ghillie on the Amhuinnsuidhe Castle estate! Isn’t that fantastic?!”
“Well, I suppose it is,” I said, being rather cool about the whole thing because I’d never done a minute’s fly fishing in my life. But also inwardly delighted because this was the first prize of any significance I’d ever won anywhere.
And then I promptly forgot all about it until early October when Dondy asked me how I’d enjoyed the experience. I goofily admitted that my memory, not being what it once was, had failed me. Again.
“Well—you’d better get moving. Fishing season ends on October fifteenth—in less than a week!”
So I got moving, called the castle, and asked when it might be convenient to come and enjoy my prize. I was informed that, because of a series of important fee-booked events (doubtless attended by the cream of British aristocracy or a bevy of megamillionaires), the coming Friday was the only possible day available. Virtually the last day of the season.
And Friday, of course, was Ian’s sheep-gathering day on the high hills of North Harris.
Convincing myself that the gathering might slide over into Saturday—after all, sheep are not known for precise schedule-keeping—I called Ian to explain.
He seemed disappointed but agreed that there might, in fact, be a little final rounding-up to do early Saturday morning.
Thus, I was so to speak, and no pun intended, off the hook and free to go happily hooking other things up among the high lochans of the castle estate.
“So—y’no done s’much in the way o’ fishin,’ then?” asked ghillie David Brown, a lean, wiry man, possibly in his late forties. He was dressed in traditional ghillie garb of moorland-hued tweed suit, green rubber wading boots, thick woolen pullover, and a perky little deerstalker hat set, with Sherlock Holmes panache, firmly upright on his narrow, weather-etched head. He looked distinctly disappointed.
“Well—I thought I should level with you,” I said, wondering if it would have been better if I’d donated my day of fishing to someone who would have better appreciated the honor of being hosted around this revered estate with his own personal ghillie.
“An’ fly fishin’—have y’never tried that either a’ suppose?”
“Uh…no. Never.”
“Ah,” said David, looking even more forlorn.
“Well—they say there’s always that chance of beginner’s luck…”
“Aye, aye, they do say that…indeed they do,” mumbled David, looking extremely unconvinced by such inane platitudes.
“To be honest, the thing that really made me want to have a go when I won the prize was that book by Norman Maclean—y’know the one—A River Runs Through It. I’ve always remembered that wonderful line: ‘The one great thing about fly fishing is that after a while nothing exists of the world but thoughts about fly fishing.’ He makes it all sound so meditational and Zenlike.”
David’s eyes brightened and a smile appeared. “Aye—so y’know that book, d’ye?”
“Indeed I do—y’remember, he says: ‘In our family there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.’”
“Right. And then he says: ‘Fishing is a world created apart from all others, and inside are special worlds of their own…’”
“Yes. Great. Well—at least we both enjoy the same book!”
“’S’one of my favorites. I’m a real one for reading. Gi’me a book and a warm fire and I’m set for the night. Y’can forget yer TV and videos and all that stuff. Books a’ much better, don’t ye think?”
“Absolutely!” I gushed, realizing that all was not yet lost. The day might well turn out to be worthwhile after all, despite my distinctly neophyte status. Certainly in terms of the weather, things already looked promising. After three miserable October days of “mizzle” and murk, the sun had finally broken through that ponderous clutter of gray clouds and I could feel autumnal warmth on my shoulders as the two of us stood together outside the castle looking out across Soay Sound.
Ian Scarr-Hall, the new owner of Amhuinnsuidhe Castle, was now only into his second season of hosting gatherings of avid deer hunters and salmon fishers here, and he had given me a quick tour of his elegant hostelry before my ghillie turned up.
“Madonna almost bought this place, y’know…,” Ian told me, with a sly smile, almost as soon as we met. He was a tall, thin, energetic-looking man, a wealthy owner of a large property management company, and exuding that proud air of someone who, in the riper years of life, was finally living his life’s dream. “But she didn’t like the fact that the main road to Hushinish went right past her front door!” (This sixteen-mile cul-de-sac, barely wider than a cart track, is actually little used, except by seclusion seekers enjoying the sublime charms of Hushinish Bay beach and the more hidden sunbathing enclaves overlooking tiny Scarp Island.)
“No chance of a bypass ’specially for her, then?”
Ian gave a hearty guffaw and just pointed at the rocky terrain that rose up immediately behind the castle and continued on, pretty much semivertically, for another mile or so onto the vast open moors of North Harris.
“So—I was lucky,” he continued in his broad, mid-England accent. “It needed quite a bit of restoration so that put off a lot of other potential buyers. But I just had to have the place. I’ve been coming to Harris for decades—almost since I was a lad. I love the island—everything about it.”
Ian extended his arms in an eloquent theatrical gesture to encompass the sweeping vistas across to Taransay, the elegant arched gateway to the estate, and the soaring mountains behind him. And my favorite feature—the magnificently layered series of waterfalls that tumbled off the moor and cascaded into the small bay and harbor across the far side of the castle’s sheep-cropped lawns.
He noticed me focusing on the frothy spate of peat-colored waters. “Oh, boy, yes—that’s so beautiful in the summer. Boiling with salmon as they come in by the hundreds from the ocean—thousands of miles they’ve traveled—all the way back to the stream of their birth. And then they leap—huge, powerful leaps, almost like flying—up and up the ledges of the falls and then way up the stream. It’s an incredible sight! I never get tired of watching them.”
I could tell this man was entirely in his element despite the deluge of details he’d had to face during a long and arduous restoration of the castle.
“But it’s been worth it, don’t y’think?” he asked rhetorically, after our tour of the grand highlights—the elegantly paneled and painting-adorned dining room and lounges, the enormous baronial fireplaces, a beautifully furbished library, and an eclectic selection of a dozen or so luxurious bedrooms.
“Amazing,” I think I said after this glimpse into his hedonistic haven-supreme.
“What’s amazing is the range of people who’ve owned the castle since it was built for the Earl of Dunmore in 1867.”
“Wasn’t he the man who went bankrupt trying to make the place big enough to satisfy his son’s fiancée?”
“That’s the poor fellow, yes. And so many others bit off a bit more than they expected. It can be a bit of a money pit…but I think we’re getting it right now.”
On our way out to join my ghillie, Ian introduced me to a young man with enthusiasm written all over his cheerful face. “Ah, meet David Taylor—our fine chef. He joined us after Rosemary Shragar left—y’know, she had a TV series here called Castle Cook. I’m never sure, though, if our guests come here for David’s cooking or the hunting!”
David grinned. “Oh—bit o’ both. I mean y’can find just about any kind of fish and game y’want on the estate—venison, grouse, pheasant, wood pigeon, seafood galore, wild salmon—our own smoked salmon—and we’ve even started to bottle our own water n
ow with our own filtration plant. Best water y’ll find anywhere in Scotland!”
David gave me a tour of his well-equipped kitchen and then the “wellie room,” where guests dressed for their hunting and fishing adventures, way back in the wild glens. Replicas of enormous salmon caught on the estate were mounted on the walls, with pride of place being given to the castle’s “record catch.” He pointed to its elegant plaque. “See if you can understand any of that!”:
18¾ lbs, slightly colored but well-shaped cock fish. September 1987. Using a 10' carbon fibre rod and 50 yards of line and backing a 10 lb cast with a muddler on the bob and a size 6 Alexandria on the tail. 1 hour and 2 minutes after catching the fly. Caught by Hugh Carmichael, retired nuclear physicist. 80 years old. Congratulated by everyone on the estate.
“Well—bully for the eighty-year-old Mr. Carmichael,” I said. “But the rest of it’s a bit gobbledegooky!”
David laughed. “Ah, well—maybe a day out fishin’ on the loch will educate you a wee bit more!”
“I certainly hope so…,” I said, quietly wondering how I’d got myself into this mysterious world with no clue at all about its niceties and nuances.
Anyway, I was finally, if hesitantly, ready for my first day of fly fishing. The huge monoliths of North Harris were bathed in early-morning sunshine as ghillie David Brown and I drove for miles in the estate jeep on a rock-pocked track, deeper and deeper up Glen Meavaig until suddenly, on the brow of the hillock, a broad loch appeared.
“That’s the first loch,” said David. “The salmon and sea trout come up here from Sea Loch Meavaig. It’s a good stream. Famous for freshwater mussels…very rare. Protected.”
“Seems like an awful long journey for them.”
“More’n two miles, but that’s nothin’. There’s places where they have to travel twice that distance and more to reach the headwaters where they were first spawned. They keep that memory. It’s like a compass—they know exactly where to return f’ the female to lay her eggs among the stones and the male to ‘milk’ them.”