Thirty years earlier the 1896 Gazetteer of Scotland said that Iochdar, ‘measuring about 14 square miles . . . forms practically a separate island . . .’
Little had changed. In the 1920s Iochdar in general and Balgarva in particular were as far from the ferry port, shops, and savings bank of Lochboisdale as it was possible to go and still be in South Uist. Very occasionally, Balgarva itself actually did become an island. The highest of spring tides – the same tides which washed the earth floors of some Balgarva houses – crept in through salt marshes through the lowest croftland, until the whole small township was surrounded for a few hours by a semi-circle of brackish sea.
Cut off by the tide or not, Balgarva was much closer to the island of Benbecula than to most of the rest of South Uist. The MacPhee family croft looked at Benbecula over two miles of white dunes, beaches and rolling sea. Within 40 years bridges and causeways would connect South Uist to Benbecula and Benbecula to North Uist. But in the 1920s the three islands were still separated by broad and perilous tidal strands. A child could look from Balgarva at the shimmering sands of Benbecula, but never be allowed to walk there, not even when the emergence of a certain reef from the sea in front of his house indicated that the tide had fallen far enough to make the strand fordable on foot.
‘It was a very sad, black place when they arrived in the early 1920s,’ a relative would say. The Great War had taken a heavy toll from the Uists. Before the war some 9,000 people lived in the chain of smaller and larger islands that ran from Berneray through North Uist to Grimsay, Benbecula, Fladda, South Uist and Eriskay. Between 1914 and 1918 they lost 372 men on the battlefields of Loos and Ypres and in the ships of the merchant marine. It was a disproportionate sacrifice. On average, 2.2 per cent of the population of the whole of the United Kingdom was killed in the First World War. But 4.1 per cent of the people of Uist died. That figure represented over 8 per cent of the male population of the islands, and by further extrapolation meant that perhaps one-sixth of the young and early middle-aged men of Uist were lost.
Eleven of the Uist dead had been serving with the Lovat Scouts. It was of equal relevance to the MacPhee family that, as well as Angus and Archibald Bowie, no fewer than 30 of the fallen were from the district of Iochdar. Almost all of the Iochdar boys had, like Angus and Archibald, died as infantrymen on the Western Front. Most of them, unlike Angus and Archibald, lost their lives at the Battle of Loos in the autumn of 1915. ‘Their colonel in the Cameron Highlanders,’ said Father Michael MacDonald of Bornish in South Uist, ‘was the mainland landowner Cameron of Locheil, whom they blamed for the slaughter. After the end of the war, in the 1920s, the same Cameron of Locheil (Domnhall Dubh) was invited to unveil the war memorials at North Uist and Benbecula, but the people of South Uist refused to have him perform the unveiling ceremony at their own memorial on Carishival above Bornish. Instead, they asked a local woman, Bean Thormaid Bhain from Kilaulay in Iochdar, to carry out the task as she had lost two sons in the war.’
There was a further cost, which many at that time and later preferred to ignore. More than one in every hundred members of the British Armed Forces in the First World War, 75,000 men, ‘were pensioned for mental and nervous diseases’. As late as 1922, 10,000 of those servicemen were still in asylums or hospitals. The effect was discernible even in the remotest parts of the kingdom, like a slight surge of the tide from a distant tsunami. During the war years of 1914 to 1918 the number of people admitted to the single lunatic asylum in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland jumped by 6 per cent, before falling again in the 1920s.
Not a crofthouse was untouched by injury or death. The loss of so many young men had a debilitating effect beyond their individual tragedies. It meant that almost 400 Uist women were either widowed or were robbed of a prospective husband. It was neither unusual nor coincidental that in the first half of the twentieth century two of Angus MacPhee’s three sisters left the islands to marry and settle far away in England. The Great War stole hundreds of families from the islands. Their population, which was already in long-term decline, fell by 1,000 people in the ten years between 1911 and 1921. The number of children under the age of 14 in North Uist, Benbecula and South Uist dropped by a precipitous 17 per cent, from 1,750 to 1,452, between 1921 and 1931. The men who did not return in 1919 would be forever revered in Uist memory as the islands’ greatest generation: the best, the bravest, the biggest, the strongest, the wittiest, the wisest – and the heroic embodiments of a lost future.
For all its bereavements, its epidemics and its emigrations, South Uist always had grace and joy. The MacPhee family returned to an island easily recognisable to an exile from 30, 50 or even 100 years before. The Gaelic language had retreated hardly at all since the nineteenth century. Its associated oral culture – the songs and fabled stories of the Hebrides – was still heard in every village. Its subsistence crofting and fishing lifestyle dominated the self-sufficient local economy. Government grants enabled many people to move out of the old blackhouses, which they had shared with livestock, into better dwellings. But the technological developments of the twentieth century evaded most people in the Uists. On the west coast machair and beside the rocky east-coast inlets they had no electricity, no telephones (there were not even, until 1939, public telephone kiosks anywhere in the islands), often no running water and certainly no motor cars. They had their land, their language and each other.
A young woman from Pennsylvania in the United States stayed in South Uist for six years between 1929 and 1935. Margaret Fay Shaw lived in a remote southern corner of the island, over 20 miles from Iochdar. She found there the kind of life which Angus MacPhee was living in Balgarva. It was a seasonal round of outdoor duties which had been honed over centuries. The ground was furrowed by hand-ploughs or by horses; potatoes were planted and raised and stored; grains sown and harvested; cattle and sheep walked to market; the cottage thatch mended or replaced. Much of the work was done communally. The annual fuel supply, in the form of peat, was cut from the ground at the same time every year. It took, estimated Margaret Fay Shaw, six men two days to cut a year’s peat for one home. People worked together at ‘the lamb marking, the sheep clipping, when the men used to shear and the women fold the fleeces, and the dipping to control sheep scab, which was required in Uist by law four times a year’.
Margaret Fay Shaw was entranced by the humour and hospitality of the people of South Uist, and captivated by their traditions. She diligently collected their songs and customs, sayings and stories. One day her friends Peigi MacRae and Angus MacCuish gave her a remarkable verse which had been written by a man called Allan MacPhee from Carnan, the township close to Balgarva in the district of Iochdar at the other end of the island. ‘O mo dhuthaich,’ they sang . . .
. . . ’s tu th’air m’aire,
Uibhist chumhraidh ur nan gallan . . .
Tir a’ mhurain, tir an eorna,
Tir ’s am pailt a h-uile seorsa . . .
‘O my country,’ Fay Shaw translated,
I think of thee,
Fragrant, fresh Uist of the handsome youths . . .
Land of marram grass, land of barley,
Land where everything is plentiful . . .
The Pennsylvanian was also an expert photographer. She took a portrait of an old man, a celebrated stonemason called Iain ‘Clachair’ Campbell. Campbell was sitting outside his crofthouse that day in the early 1930s, smoking a pipe. To his left a tangle of rough picked heather lay against a wall. To his right were coils of thick, strong rope. In the middle, in his big bare hands a sheaf of the heather was being expertly woven and extraordinarily converted into neat lengths of the rope.
Iain ‘Clachair’ Campbell was plaiting heather into rope because he lived on the east coast of Uist, where there was a lot of heather but hardly any marram grass. Out on the west coast machair, in places like Balgarva, everything was truly plentiful. In that part of Uist marram grass was abundant. In Balgarva the MacPhees had no need to make rope or thatch solely f
rom heather. In its season they also used marram grass.
Marram grass, bent grass or beach grass elsewhere in the English-speaking world, muirineach in Scottish Gaelic, ammophila (sand-lover) in Greek, is native to sand dunes all around the sub-Arctic coasts of the North Atlantic Ocean. Its relationship to dunes is symbiotic: it helps to create them by binding blown sand, and then marram grass flourishes in the stabilised dune.
It grows in thick clumps, and in Europe its broad, fibrous, resilient strands can reach a foot in length. Marram grass has always been exploited by the people who lived near its dunes. In Denmark, where it proliferates on the Baltic coast, it was used for fuel and cattle feed as well as thatch. In Ynys Môn, the Isle of Anglesey off north-western Wales, a Celtic domain 300 miles south of Uist, marram grass was turned into brushes and mats as well as thatch. Up and down the east-coast links of Scotland ‘the bents’ became a generic term for the sea-shore. All over the country marram grass was once so commonly harvested for thatch that in places the coast disintegrated, villages and farmland were buried under sand, and in 1695 ‘His Majesty does strictly prohibit and discharge the pulling of bent, broom or juniper off the sand hills for hereafter.’
In the Uists and other Hebridean islands where the King’s writ failed to run, marram grass was used for thatch until the second half of the twentieth century – until, in fact, thatched roofs themselves were replaced by corrugated iron or slate. It was used for practical, playful and confessional purposes. It was woven into dolls, and even into Roman Catholic icons – perhaps half in appeasement. In Scottish Celtic legend, when the fairies stole away a Christian child they left in his place a facsimile made from marram grass. An echo of the Gaulish wicker man, this chimera had human faculties, but had no human soul.
The folklore collector Alexander Carmichael described a typical Hebridean household in the late nineteenth century as being one in which ‘The houseman is twisting twigs of heather into ropes to hold down thatch, a neighbour crofter is twining quicken roots into cords to tie cows, while another is plaiting bent grass into baskets to hold meal.’ He noted a local saying:
Ith aran, sniamh muran,
Us bi thu am bliadhn mar bha thu’n uraidh.
(Eat bread and twist marram grass,
And thou this year shall be as thou wert last.)
Carmichael discovered a festive cereal cake called ‘struan Micheil’ to which batter was ceremonially applied as it baked by the fire, and ‘in Uist this is generally done with “badan murain”, a small bunch of bent-grass’. Ears of corn were baked by hanging them over a slow, smokeless peat fire in nets made of marram grass.
‘The people of neighbouring islands,’ said Carmichael, ‘call Uist “Tir a’ mhurain”, the land of the bent-grass, and the people “Muranaich”, bent-grass people. Even the people on the east side, where there is no bent, apply the name to those on the west, where this grass grows.’
Apart from making baskets and thatching outbuildings and the family home, as a young Muranach back in Uist Angus MacPhee would have used marram grass and heather to make rope. It was a skilled process, but straightforward once mastered. Three strands of grass were plaited into a short string. Three of the strings were then plaited into a thin rope. Three of the thin ropes were plaited to make a thicker rope. Perhaps halfway along the length of the uncompleted plait, three new strands were introduced and bound in to increase its length. The process was continued until a rope as thick and as long as its weaver wished had been created. A crofting household could never have enough rope, but hemp or sisal rope bought from a shop cost money. Well-made grass or heather cords were equally strong. They had a short useful lifespan but they were easily renewed, and were free. Crofting women knitted and sewed; the men kept their hands busy at night by mending nets and creels, and plaiting rope. In a later age plaiting rope would not be cost-effective. An hour’s paid work would deliver more than enough cash to buy yards of sisal rope. But well into the twentieth century most Hebridean crofters had more hours in the day than cash. They had too little spare time and too little disposable money, but in the balance they had more of the former than the latter. However long it took them, making such essentials rather than buying them made economic sense.
And as these things do, plaiting grass metamorphosed from a financial necessity into part of a culture. Perhaps because it was an individual rather than a communal exercise, grass-weaving would never assemble the rich store of cheerful shanties and stories that became associated with waulking tweed or rowing boats. It was a private, quiet activity. But it was as common, as skilled and as useful a pursuit as any, and it inevitably became linked with another powerful Uist custom that would also die later in the twentieth century: the horse aesthetic of the machair plain.
Like rope and baskets, horses had been a necessity in the islands for centuries. Unlike rope and baskets, horses were also a substantial asset and a source of pride, status and recreation. Horses must have been introduced to the Uists when there were ships big enough to carry them there, which is to say some 2,000 years before Angus MacPhee went to live in Iochdar.
Once stabled offshore they were not easily replaced or put out to mainland stud. So unique breeds evolved in the Scottish islands, most famously the Shetland pony, way out off the north-east coast of Scotland, and the Eriskay pony, a stone’s throw from the south coast of Uist. Both breeds are historical mongrels. They were probably introduced in the Bronze Age, and over the centuries certainly interbred with Celtic and Pictish steeds from Ireland and the Scottish mainland, Viking ponies from Scandinavia, and much later Clydesdales and Arabs.
But they remained sufficiently isolated to retain distinct characteristics of temperament and appearance. They were small and muscular with large heads. They were intelligent, patient, hard-working and remarkably friendly to the humans with whom they had washed up on those distant outcrops of gneiss. They were easy animals to love.
Hebridean ponies were useful everywhere in the hilly, roadless islands. But on the wide west-coast beaches and flat machair of the Uists they became more than pack- or draught-horses. The machair, which ran for 40 miles from Sollas in the north of North Uist to Polachar at the southern tip of South Uist, and for two or three miles from west to east inland, was horse country as good as any in Burgundy or Northamptonshire. There, they could be raced.
The earliest travellers to the Hebrides recorded horse races. ‘The natives are much addicted to riding,’ noted Martin Martin in North Uist in the 1690s, ‘the plainness of the country disposing both men and horses to it.’
They observe an anniversary cavalcade on Michaelmas Day, and then all ranks of both sexes appear on horseback.
The place for this rendezvous is a large piece of firm sandy ground on the sea-shore, and there they have horse-racing for small prizes, for which they contend eagerly. There is an ancient custom, by which it is lawful for any of the inhabitants to steal his neighbour’s horse the night before the race, and ride him all next day, provided he deliver him safe and sound to the owner after the race.
The manner of running is by a few young men, who use neither saddles nor bridles, except two small ropes made of bent [marram grass] instead of a bridle, nor any sort of spurs, but their bare heels: and when they begin the race, they throw these ropes on their horses’ necks, and drive them on vigorously with a piece of long seaware in each hand instead of a whip; and this is dried in the sun several months before for that purpose.
This is a happy opportunity for the vulgar, who have few occasions for meeting, except on Sundays: the men have their sweethearts behind them on horseback, and give and receive mutual presents; the men present the women with knives and purses, the women present the men with a pair of fine garters of divers colours, they give them likewise a quantity of wild carrots.
That image preserved by the Skye man Martin Martin, of young men riding bareback, using loose reins of woven marram grass and whips of seaweed, could have been caught anywhere in the Uists over a period of ce
nturies. Horse culture was there as prevalent as on the Great American Plains. The tone of Martin’s last words on leaving South Uist by boat for Eriskay would be echoed by many a European catching first sight of the Cheyenne or the Sioux somewhere west of St Louis:
As I came from South-Uist, I perceived about sixty horsemen riding along the sands, directing their course for the east sea; and being between me and the sun, they made a great figure on the plain sands. We discovered them to be natives of South-Uist, for they alighted from their horses and went to gather cockles in the sands, which are exceeding plentiful there.
Hebridean horsemanship was justifiably famous. It was not restricted to men and boys. Early in the 1890s a newly arrived schoolteacher was talking to a South Uist parish priest on the pathway to his church door, when
Along the road came at full gallop a large white horse with a young woman seated sideways on its back. Just as we reached the gate it stopped and she slid easily to the ground almost before it came to a standstill. I noted she had ridden without saddle or bridle.
After a rapid conversation in Gaelic, she put her foot on the bar of the gate, sprang lightly to the back of the horse which immediately started off at full gallop on receiving a slap from its rider. It transpired that she had come with some important message from the priest of Bornish, the next parish eight miles away. On my speaking of her remarkable riding my companion exclaimed: ‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ as if it were not worthy of comment.
In 1901 Alexander Carmichael reported that the yearly Uist odaidh, or horse races, were dead. ‘By a curious coincidence,’ wrote Carmichael, ‘the horse-races of Norway and the principal horse-race of the Western Isles, that of South Uist, ceased in the same year, 1820, and in two succeeding months . . .’
The last great ‘oda’ occurred in Barra in 1828, in South Uist in 1820, in Benbecula in 1830, in North Uist in 1866, and in Harris in 1818. In the Small Isles the ‘oda’ continued later, while occasional ‘oda’ have been held in all these places since the years mentioned.
The Silent Weaver Page 5