Seasons on Harris

by David Yeadon

  But as we talked, I remembered something toward the end of his book, when the writing was complete, that seemed to suggest a reconciliation with his apparent modesty. Later that evening I found the passage:

  I know the islands now more than I have ever known them, more in a way than anyone has ever known them, and as I sit here in the house I have a feeling, for a moment, of completeness and gratitude. My love affair with these islands is reaching full term…I went up to the far north cliff of Garbh Eilean and lay down there on the cold turf…I put my head over the edge of the cliff and watch the sea pulling at the black seal reef five hundred feet below me…I start to fall asleep then to the long, asthmatic rhythm of the surf…and the islands embraced and enveloped me.

  Slowly we made our way along the cliff tops for an hour or two and then began to curl down off the high ground and into the long indentation of the “Central Valley.”

  “This is really a strange place,” said Adam as we negotiated our way between nefarious marshy bits by attempting to leap, gazellelike, from tussock to tussock (my ankle required wet elephantine ploddishness instead). “There’s something definitely uneasy about it—it’s not a confident occupation of place.”

  “Well, it certainly looks as though it’s been fully occupied for a long time,” I said. There were grassy humps galore, remnants of black-house walls and sheep enclosures, ancient shell middens, and abundant evidence of archaeological excavations, something that Adam has been encouraging and participating in for years.

  “The problem with archaeology is that you discover the story back to front…upside down. We know there was a huge house here, almost forty feet long and ten feet wide with double-skinned stone walls three feet thick. And there were storage buildings nearby and a stockyard. Much of these seem to be postmedieval structures. But there’s a way to go yet before we trace it all back to prehistory…so in the meantime I decided to add my own little twenty-first-century addition.”

  Adam pointed to a rather dilapidated little rectangle of land nearby surrounded by a sheep-resistant wire fence.

  “My garden,” he said in a wary tone, casting sidelong glances to gauge my and Harry’s reactions.

  “Ah,” I think I said. “And you’re growing what precisely?”

  “Er…precisely nothing at the moment. I tried potatoes, neeps, and cabbages last year but they were…a bit of a flop.”

  “A little small, were they?” asked Harry sympathetically.

  “Small to the point of nonexistence!”

  “Ah,” said Harry.

  “Tough luck,” I said.

  “Bollocks!” said Adam, with a hearty guffaw and one of his disarmingly cheerful toothy grins.

  The sun was beginning its slow, bronzing fade behind Clisham when we finally returned to the tiny cottage. Harry immediately set about preparing dinner. We carried in a couple of buckets of clear, cold water from the spring behind the cottage to help him in his labors. And then, as there seemed little else to do, Adam and I sprawled outside together on the warm turf and sipped the velvety Glenfiddich malt to toast the easing down of the first day.

  Conversation roamed widely as we lay back on the grass and ruminated about the future of Harris, his upcoming book, Seize the Fire, on Lord Nelson to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar, my search for an ideal Greek island of Seasons in… authenticity and charm, the recent death of his father (“I still haven’t gone through all his things yet—it’s harder than I thought it would be”), his occasional frustrations with the rat-infested cottage here and the absence of electricity, a toilet, or running water, and my increasing irritation with an ankle that was complaining loudly about its overuse on the tussocks of the Central Valley.

  “Easy solution for that,” said Adam.

  “Really—what is it?”

  “Fill your glass again!”

  “Best idea of the day,” I said.

  Harry’s dinner was a masterful blending of barbecued leg of lamb, crackle-crisp on the outside and delicately pink at its center, a mix of fire-roasted potatoes and carrots, and a large green salad. It was dark outside by this time. Stars sparkled like diamond dust on black ebony. We dined in a medieval setting of roaring fire and flickering candles and Harry decided that, as no one else had claimed it, he’d gorge himself on the meat shreds hanging off the lamb bone. So, leg bone in hand and chin dripping with juices, he played his Henry V role to the hilt and, as our conversation meandered on into the night, his demeanor became so distinctly regal and animated that I expected him to launch into his St. Crispin’s Day speech at any moment.

  And he may well have done so for all I remember. But, alas, due to a surfeit of fine food, wine, and laughter, I don’t remember much at all really. I don’t even remember the scrabbling of rats among the roof rafters that poor Harry claimed kept him awake for much of the night. His frustration with their antics was not eased by Adam’s insistence that these creatures were a very rare species of “black” rat, considered by many environmentalists to be “more important than the puffin colonies here!”

  The following morning I realized that my walking and climbing capacities had now become severely limited by a distinctly errant ankle. So, as my two friends planned a rigorous clamber over Garbh Eilean island to parade along the bird-encrusted cliff tops and visit the site of an Iron Age house and other prehistoric site discoveries on the central, wind-torn heights of the island, I decided to limit my explorations to the Central Valley.

  Gannet

  “I’ll do dinner,” I said by way of apology. They were both appropriately empathetic and then left.

  Silence descended like a shroud. But more silky gossamer than funereal. It was that scintillating silence of benevolent solitude—what Adam calls “the sheer, solid stillness of the islands.” I finally had the place all to myself. I was free to let Adam’s “ecstasy of being alone” work its magic.

  As indeed it did.

  My long, slow, and meandering stroll up the valley led eventually to the cliffs at the southern tip of the island. They were not as high as the towering ramparts on the eastern flank, and the basalt column structure was far less articulately formed. Maybe the magma had emerged more slowly here from the great subaquatic rift. Apparently the cooling rate of magma greatly affects its molecular and columnar structure. But the soaring vertical shafts were precipitously powerful nevertheless and crammed with birds—mainly gannets as far as I could tell—resting on every minuscule black basalt ledge and turf-topped cranny they could find. How could they possibly breed, sleep, feed, and nurture their chicks on such tiny appendages of rock, I wondered?

  They seemed equally curious at first about my presence too on the grassy edge of the cliffs. Despite my attempts to sit quietly without moving, they would take turns skimming my head and performing aerial acrobatics immediately in front of me, using the rush of air up the cliff face to help them whirl and spin with barely any movement of their wings. Just the slightest adjustment in feather-tip profile was enough to send them forty feet into the air above my head and then down in a return plunge, swoop, and hover in front of me, as if to say, conceitedly and complacently, “Bet you can’t do that.”

  And the odd thing was that, watching them and the apparent simplicity of their aeronautical agility, I began to think “I wish I could…I bet I could…” It was a dangerously seductive sensation.

  But eventually they seemed to accept my intrusive presence and floated off to perform more productive activities, such as dive-bombing the ocean for fish or alighting gently as thistledown on their family ledges to nestle with their mates and then stand rigidly like sentries, proud guardians of their tiny slivers of rock.

  I have no idea how long I sat there. A seductive sense of Shiantism timelessness crept in. A stilling of things. I had nothing in particular to do and nowhere special to go. The day was all mine and I realized that, while being with Adam and Harry was a delight, the island now had me all to itself and was quietly offering glimpse
s of its own special moods and magic. And all it asked in return was that I watch, see, and remember.

  I think, in addition to the pleasures I gained from being with the birds and admiring the strength, wildness, and durability of this small island, it was the sounds that I remember most of all: the thick, lush sounds of ocean breezes captured and channeled upward by the cliffs; the skittering swish of wavelets on the small pebbled beach far below; the deep thump of larger waves on the vertical cliff face that vibrated through the rock; the serpentlike hiss of the explosive surf sprays; the guttural growling of larger rocks and boulders deep under the sea-savaging tidal flows as they moved together, rounding down each other; the silky, wind-skim sounds from birds’ wings as they passed close over my head; the chitter and chuckle of small streams as they trickled, almost invisibly, through the marshy tussocks on the cliff tops; the sudden cessation of those sounds when the streams plunged over the cliff edge and released their waters to the air, spuming, like a confetti of rainbow-sparkling diamonds, down into the ocean hundreds of feet below.

  Much later on in the afternoon, I wandered again, wrapped in a sumptuous silence, among the ancient stumps of dwellings, sheepfolds, and shell middens in the lower part of the valley. And here I sat for a while, ensnared by emotions, and scribbled fragments, observations and “rememberings,” hoping to carry them home, hoping to retain “fragments of Shiants” to refresh, restore, and revitalize my spirit when I returned to familiar surroundings and the daily round of more mundane activities.

  “So—how was your day?” asked Harry cheerfully when I had finally dragged myself away from all these musings and returned to the cottage.

  All I could do, I think, was to give him a goofy grin and mumble something about the validity of Adam’s phrase “the ecstasy of being alone.”

  “So you didn’t miss us at all?!” said Adam.

  More goofy grins on my part.

  “Well,” he continued, with his big smile, “we’re whacked out and starving. Any chance of your dinner being ready in the next day or so d’y’think?!”

  That got me refocused. I forgot I’d offered to cook our evening meal and here I was, still afloat in my “rememberings” with one major “remember” already forgotten.

  “Grub’s up in no time,” I said, wondering what the heck I’d planned to prepare.

  In fact, although I say it myself, the meal did come together remarkably quickly. And, if our collective grunts and sighs were any indication, we all ate long and well in our cozy kitchen with its flickering candles, dancing shadows, flaming coal fire, and the rich aromas of crisped-top roast beef mingled with glasses of fine burgundy.

  Conversations rambled on deep into the night with a generous mix of confessions, life-illuminating perceptions, and ribald humor when we started to take ourselves a little too seriously. We knew we’d be leaving the following afternoon, and although our time together had been brief, we all felt reluctant to face that prospect. The islands had indeed worked their magic on the three of us, despite the fact that I knew I’d barely tickled the surface of their secrets and deep seductiveness.

  SOME OF THE LAST THOUGHTS of our brief odyssey are left to John Murdo Matheson, the burly, red-cheeked sheep farmer whose sheep roam the wild cliff tops and hidden dells of these islands.

  Angus had brought John and a few other friends over with him when he returned to pick us up for the return journey to Tarbert. Among the group were his sister, Katherine, who along with his mother, Katie, is one of Harris’s most noted tweed weavers, and the famous “Charlie Barley” of MacLeod’s butcher shop in Stornoway, whose father created the still-secret recipe for the finest black pudding in the Western Isles.

  It was a lively return trip. Angus took another long detour around the islands and the nesting birds greeted us once again with spectacular aerial displays, curling, wheeling, and diving in their thousands, with puffins performing more of their massed, wave top–skimming antics on cue.

  One young man decided to sing a raunchy limerick of celebration that he claimed to have copied out of the visitors’ book at the cottage:

  There was a young man on the Shiants

  Who leapt in a most furious dance

  When one day at Bog rock [the traditional outdoor toilet here behind the cottage!]

  He got bites on his cock

  When the midges got trapped in his pants!

  Not exactly the most subtle of verses, but it certainly amused most of the passengers. With the possible exception of John, the shepherd, who had spent an hour or so roaming the cliffs to check on his sheep, and was now explaining to me the enticements he often experienced here. His deep awareness of the myriad nooks and crannies, hollows and crags, ancient dwellings and sheep enclosures was a match even for Adam’s encyclopedic knowledge and appreciation. For such a large and obviously strong man, he spoke with remarkable quietude about the carpet-like richness and variety of the flora here, the remarkable deep-diving, fish-catching abilities of the shags that constitute the second-largest “shaggery” in the British Isles, the great stillness that I too had sensed here as the wind dropped and the seas calmed at sunset, and his deep love of being here alone “in a place that wraps itself around you and doesn’t want to let you leave.”

  I’d sensed that too despite the fact I’d only been here a couple of days and much of that time in the company of two extremely sensitive, loquacious, and perceptive men. Our conversations had been loud, long, laughter-rich, and tinged with that beguiling intimacy of a shared, and deeply moving, experience. We had cooked with pleasure and care for one another, supped generously together, meticulously cleaned up the cottage and the adjoining fank, and sloshed through the marshy fringes and among the strange humpy remnants of ancient occupancies of the Central Valley. We’d explored the newly exposed mysteries of the “new” beach ripped open by that furious January storm, and shared comfortable silences outside on the velvety sheep-cropped grass, bathed in the bright, warm afternoon sun or glazed in silver moonlight under star-filled night skies.

  There were so many small delights and experiences during that short period. The absence of normal diversions and distractions seemed to have expanded our time together to something beyond time. A still timelessness unrelated to clocks and calendars; a period of “powerful absences” that enabled the island spirit to ease itself into our own spirits and expand them—pushing out the boundaries of our oft blinkered perceptions and nudging them into new patterns of awareness and appreciation.

  As reflected in the visitors’ book, others had obviously sensed similar emotions here. One wrote: “Time does not exist here on the Shiants.” Another described how “our little-huge world here could not be simpler—eating (anything!), drinking, sleeping, bog-hopping, driftwood-collecting, seabird and seal-watching, fresh unspoilt air, clear spring water to drink and sun, rain, drizzle, and gales all in the same hour.” Someone else had written, “I am afraid as I sit here alone in the warm sun that I will never experience this again” and another, “Magic lurks here on this Prospero’s isle.” I could sense the happiness that these islands and this little cottage have brought to so many. It’s in the air, it’s in the walls.

  Maybe the last lines should be Adam’s, expressing the depth that the Shiants offer in each single moment—in each precious perception:

  A gannet is sailing above the storm, in close beside the beach so that I can watch it above the stained green-and-white surface of the sea. The day is dark and the gannet is lit like a crucifixion against it. I could never tire of this, never think of anything I would rather watch, or of any place I would rather be than here, in front of the endless renewing of the sea bird’s genius, again and again carving its path inside the wind, holding and playing with all the mobility that surrounds it like a magician with his silks, before the moment comes, it pauses and plunges for the kill, the sudden folded, twisted purpose, the immersion, disappearance and the detonation of the surf. The wind bellows in my ears as if in a shell. No one can own
this, no individual, no community. This is beyond all owning…this wonderful sea room, the surge of freedom which a moated island provides.

  That was the one key thought that welled up inside as I remembered Adam’s words—we all “own” nothing except the freedom, intensity, depth, and beauty of each moment and each memory. And, for me, as well as for my new friends, the Shiants provided these in abundance…

  24

  Leaving the Island: A Tweed Revival?

  WELL—YOU’LL BE GLAD TO KNOW—it’s finally happenin,’ David! At long last!”

  “Sorry? Who is this?”

  “Have y’heard already? Ah…maybe y’have…”

  “Heard what…who is this?”

  “The tweed!”

  “What tweed?!”

  “It’s back…”

  “What do you mean…hold on…who is this and what are you talking about?”

  There was a pause at the other end. I could hear heavy breathing.

  “David, this is Roddy. Roddy MacAskill.”

  I was suspicious. It didn’t sound like Roddy. The voice was too high and he was talking too quickly.

  “Where are you calling from, Roddy?” I asked, I guess as a kind of test. We weren’t used to crank calls in the Hebrides. Especially about tweed.

  “From the office…up from the shop…right across from you!”

  “Oh…okay…sorry, it just didn’t sound like you.”

  “Aye, well, maybe I’m just a wee bit excited.”

  “About tweed?”

  “Yes, about tweed. And about Donald John and Maureen…the MacKays…the weavers down at Luskentyre…”

  “Yes, we know them well. Lovely people.”

  “Well…looks like they’ve gone and got things going again.”

  “With the tweed?”