It was a coincidence that they both came from Iochdar, but it was not a coincidence that they both came from South Uist. They were among the last practitioners of a demotic Celtic art which, if it was to be found anywhere in the twentieth century, would be found on that island.
Celtic fantasy, and the art that it produced, were rooted in the patterns and cycles of the natural world. The Celtic imagination wrestled with the infinite implausibilities of life. The Celtic ascendency of Roman and pre-Roman Britain, whose metalwork, illustrations and sculptures have become regarded as their islands’ most sublime contribution to the art of the world, dealt chiefly in abstractions. They were more than capable of representative art, but representative art did not adequately illuminate their vision. They were too mysterious for the modern world, and sometimes too mysterious for their own good.
‘You must not laugh at us Celts,’ wrote the Breton philosopher Ernest Renan in 1883.
We shall never build a Parthenon, for we have not the marble; but we are skilled in reading the heart and soul; we have a secret of our own for inserting the probe; we bury our hands in the entrails of a man, and, like the witches in Macbeth, withdraw them full of the secrets of infinity. The great secret of our art is that we can make our very failing appear attractive. The Breton race has in its heart an everlasting source of folly . . .
It is impossible to give an idea of how much goodness and even politeness and gentle manners there is in these ancient Celts . . . The unselfishness and the practical incapacity of these good people were beyond conception. One proof of their nobility was that whenever they attempted to engage in any commercial business they were defrauded. Never in the world’s history did people ruin themselves with a lighter or more careless heart, keeping up a running fire of paradox and quips. Never in the world were the laws of common sense and sound economy more joyously trodden under foot.
The Celtic race, said Renan, ‘has worn itself out in mistaking dreams for realities.’
‘Balance, measure, and patience,’ the sensible English writer Matthew Arnold had proposed to Renan,
these are the eternal conditions, even supposing the happiest temperament to start with, of high success; and balance, measure, and patience are just what the Celt has never had.
Even in the world of spiritual creation, he has never, in spite of his admirable gifts of quick perception and warm emotion, succeeded perfectly, because he never has had steadiness, patience, sanity enough to comply with the conditions under which alone can expression be perfectly given to the finest perceptions and emotions.
The Greek has the same perceptive, emotional temperament as the Celt; but he adds to this temperament the sense of measure; hence his admirable success in the plastic arts, in which the Celtic genius, with its chafing against the despotism of fact, its perpetual straining after mere emotion, has accomplished nothing.
In the comparatively petty art of ornamentation, in rings, brooches, crosiers, relic-cases, and so on, he has done just enough to show his delicacy of taste, his happy temperament; but the grand difficulties of painting and sculpture, the prolonged dealings of spirit with matter, he has never had patience for.
Responding in 1897 to both Renan and Arnold, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote:
Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine, and could take a human or grotesque shape and dance among the shadows; and that deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon, were not less divine and changeable.
They saw in the rainbow the still bent bow of a god thrown down in his negligence; they heard in the thunder the sound of his beaten water-jar, or the tumult of his chariot wheels; and when a sudden flight of wild duck, or of crows, passed over their heads, they thought they were gazing at the dead hastening to their rest; while they dreamed of so great a mystery in little things that they believed the waving of a hand, or of a sacred bough, enough to trouble far-off hearts, or hood the moon with darkness.
Quoting the medieval Welsh legends of the Mabinogion, Yeats drew closer to the world and work of Angus MacPhee: ‘“They took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw; and they baptized her, and called her Flower Aspect”; and one finds it in the not less beautiful passage about the burning Tree, that has half its beauty from calling up a fancy of leaves so living and beautiful, they can be of no less living and beautiful a thing than flame.’
The people who came to share the British Isles with the Celts, who pushed those wanderers to the western seaboard and islands of the archipelago, who produced artists such as William Shakespeare and John Keats – those people also regarded the natural world, said W.B. Yeats. But ‘they looked at nature without ecstasy, but with the affection a man feels for the garden where he has walked daily and thought pleasant thoughts.
‘They looked at nature in the modern way, the way of people who are poetical, but are more interested in one another than in a nature which has faded to be but friendly and pleasant, the way of people who have forgotten the ancient religion.’
Renan, Arnold and Yeats were agreed upon at least one indisputable fact. Celts were not classical Greeks or Romans. Whatever their respective merits, Celtic art was not part of the representative Graeco-Roman tradition which for two millennia monopolised European culture even within the old Celtic territories. Regardless of the mental condition of its creators, Celtic art was antithetical to the classical ethos from which Jean Dubuffet and scores of his illustrious contemporaries struggled to extract themselves. Celtic art had its disciplines, its measure and its balance, but they were not strictures. They did not dictate the form; they were subordinate to the form. Celtic art derived from a less sensible and unregimented human reverie. It honoured the colours and shapes of dreams.
However Angus MacPhee viewed the wind and rain, the sun and racing clouds, the tumultuous ocean, the bent grass, the leaves and the small, brave flowers of his surroundings, it was not with ‘the affection a man feels for the garden where he has . . . thought pleasant thoughts’. His instincts, and those of his perennially independent people, were impulsive, witty, inventive and frequently fantastic.
He was out of his time in the second half of the twentieth century, but he won back the past. He translated vegetation that had flourished in the Highlands of Scotland before any human civilisation into cultural artefacts which by his lifetime were manufactured mainly from rubber, leather, plastic, metal and artificial fibres. His motives for making his burning tree were unfathomable, but make it and burn it he did.
It cannot be known if he was the first Celt in Europe to construct a pair of laced boots from woven grass and a pair of sandals from leaves. It can fairly be assumed that he was the last.
NOTES
CHAPTER ONE THE HORSE SOLDIERS
p. 1 ‘Two people from that house . . . They all loved going.’ Peigi Cross, née MacPhee, in the documentary film Hidden Gifts, directed by Nick Higgins, 2004
p. 2 ‘It was the best way for getting a fortnight’s holiday . . . and had a good time.’ Polly, Roger Hutchinson, Edinburgh, 1990
p. 3 ‘The horses in Iochdar were famous . . . depended on them.’ Fr Michael J. MacDonald, email to author, 2010
p. 5 ‘It was demanding work . . . Gaelic song and the “mouth music” with many good tales thrown in.’ The Story of the Lovat Scouts, 1900–1980, Michael Leslie Melville, Moray, 2004
p. 6 ‘But I was daft about horses . . . horse races and the like.’ Interview with author, 2010
p. 6 ‘We used marram grass . . . and sell them in the district.’ Interview with author, 2010
pp. 6–7 ‘In the ’30s and the ’20s . . . that’s what my father would thatch with.’ Peigi Cross, née MacPhee, in the documentary film Hidden Gifts, directed by Nick Higgins, 2004
p. 7 ‘That Friday night . . . went back and
got the horse.’ Interview with author, 2010
p. 8 ‘spent what seemed like hours . . . splashing through the water.’ The Story of the Lovat Scouts, 1900–1980, Michael Leslie Melville, Moray, 2004
p. 11 ‘Chaos ruled mainly . . . killing them with our bayonets.’ Unpublished memoirs of Donald John MacKenzie, edited by George Hendry, available online at http://www.scotsatwar.org.uk/veteransreminiscences/dmackenzie.htm
p. 11 ‘Training was carried out . . . night training, anti-gas precautions . . .’ The Story of the Lovat Scouts, 1900–1980, Michael Leslie Melville, Moray, 2004
pp. 11–12 ‘Our main task for the first period . . . but soon we were very competent riders.’ Unpublished memoirs of Donald John MacKenzie, edited by George Hendry, available online at http://www.scotsatwar.org.uk/veteransreminiscences/dmackenzie.htm
pp. 13–14 ‘the flat country . . . the Lovat Scouts’ The Story of the Lovat Scouts, 1900–1980, Michael Leslie Melville, Moray, 2004
p. 14 ‘We had a feather bed . . . his dart board at the twenty and the bull.’ Unpublished memoirs of Donald John MacKenzie, edited by George Hendry, available online at http://www.scotsatwar.org.uk/veteransreminiscences/dmackenzie.htm
p. 15 ‘We were mechanized . . . too small for me . . . We suffered . . .’ Unpublished memoirs of Donald John MacKenzie, edited by George Hendry, available online at http://www.scotsatwar.org.uk/veteransreminiscences/dmackenzie.htm
pp. 17–18 ‘Round about the town . . . those hopeless-looking hills.’ The Atlantic Islands. A Study of the Faeroe Life and Scene, Kenneth Williamson, London 1948
p. 18 ‘crowds of people . . . remained there all day.’ The Story of the Lovat Scouts, 1900–1980, Michael Leslie Melville, Moray, 2004
pp. 19–20 ‘Oh, we had a great reception . . . they were friendly, oh, very very friendly.’ Interview with author, 2010
p. 20 ‘The Faroese are hospitable . . . someone is almost sure to ask them in for cakes and coffee.’ The Northern Garrisons, Eric Linklater, London 1941
pp. 20–21 ‘We took over from . . . was a very sea-worthy craft.’ Unpublished memoirs of Donald John MacKenzie, edited by George Hendry, available online at http://www.scotsatwar.org.uk/veteransreminiscences/dmackenzie.htm
p. 21 ‘When held firm . . . with a single magazine.’ Quartered Safe Out Here, George MacDonald Fraser, London 1992
p. 22 ‘Here’s to . . . to do it again.’ The Story of the Lovat Scouts, 1900– 1980, Michael Leslie Melville, Moray, 2004
pp. 22–23 ‘was Major Richard Fleming . . . seven miles back to the billets.’ Unpublished memoirs of Donald John MacKenzie, edited by George Hendry, available online at http://www.scotsatwar.org.uk/veteransreminiscences/dmackenzie.htm
p. 23 ‘It was a great pleasure . . . game with Tommy-guns.’ The Northern Garrisons, Eric Linklater, London 1941
CHAPTER TWO TIR A’ MHURAIN
p. 27 ‘The best arable . . . been sent to inferior lands . . .’ Evidence taken by Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the conditions of the crofters and cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, Volume I, London, 1884
pp. 27–28 ‘We are yearly getting poorer . . . unproductive ground . . .’ Evidence taken by Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the conditions of the crofters and cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, Volume I, London, 1884
pp. 28–29 ‘A skilled, unmarried farmworker’s . . . three and sixpence [£10.50p] a bottle . . .’ The Furrow Behind Me, Angus MacLellan, introduced and translated from Gaelic by John Lorne Campbell, Edinburgh 1997
pp. 30–32 ‘There was a lad from Uist out there . . . Indeed I won’t.’ The Furrow Behind Me, Angus MacLellan, introduced and translated from Gaelic by John Lorne Campbell, Edinburgh 1997
p. 37 ‘When they arrived . . . nothing but Gaelic.’ Interview with author, 2011
pp. 37–38 ‘Religion featured prominently . . . and left them bereft.’ Interview with author, 2011
pp. 38–39 ‘The early historians of Scotland . . . and well-stocked land on the north-west.’ History of the Outer Hebrides, W.C. MacKenzie, London 1903
p. 41 ‘It was a very sad, black place . . . in the early 1920s,’ Author’s interview with Eilidh Shaw, 2011
p. 42 ‘Their colonel in the Cameron Highlanders . . . as she had lost two sons in the war.’ Fr Michael J MacDonald, email to author, 2011
p. 44 ‘the lamb marking . . . by law four times a year.’ Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist, Margaret Fay Shaw, Oxford 1955
p. 44 ‘O mo dhuthaich . . . Land where everything is plentiful . . .’ Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist, Margaret Fay Shaw, Oxford 1955
pp. 46–47 ‘The houseman is twisting twigs . . . where this grass grows.’ Carmina Gadelica, Ortha nan Gaidheal, Volume One, Alexander Carmichael, Edinburgh 1900
pp. 49–50 ‘The natives are much addicted to riding . . . a quantity of wild carrots.’ A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, Martin Martin, London 1703
p. 50 ‘As I came from South-Uist . . . which are exceeding plentiful there.’ A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, Martin Martin, London 1703
pp. 50–51 ‘Along the road . . . as if it were not worthy of comment.’ A School in South Uist, Frederick Rea, London 1964
p. 51 ‘By a curious coincidence . . . and other sports.’ Carmina Gadelica, Ortha nan Gaidheal, Volume Two, Alexander Carmichael, Edinburgh 1900
p. 52 ‘At a distance of two . . . which answered equally the purpose.’ Unpublished history of South Uist, by Fr Alexander Campbell
p. 54 ‘pretty primitive . . . good laughs, yes.’ Peigi Cross, née MacPhee, in the documentary film Hidden Gifts, directed by Nick Higgins, 2004
pp. 54–55 ‘I was at school with them . . . a very nice, quietly spoken boy.’ Interview with author, 2010
p. 55 ‘Angus was such a lover of horses . . . “How did these horses get so mild ..?’” Interview with author, 2011
p. 55 ‘the bobs my father . . . lost their mothers.’ Peigi Cross, née MacPhee, in the documentary film Hidden Gifts, directed by Nick Higgins, 2004
CHAPTER THREE THE ROCKY HILL OF THE BIRD
p. 59 ‘His father wanted him back . . . he would take over the croft.’ Interview with author, 2011
p. 60 ‘He couldn’t cope with it . . . He seemed unable to cope. Couldn’t cope.’ Peigi Cross, née MacPhee, in the documentary film Hidden Gifts, directed by Nick Higgins, 2004
pp. 60–61 ‘Nobody seems to know . . . while he was pushing it . . .’ Interview with author, 2010
p. 61 ‘They all thought . . . I didn’t see him for years.’ Peigi Cross, née MacPhee, in the documentary film Hidden Gifts, directed by Nick Higgins, 2004
pp. 61–62 ‘His attack of illness . . . at the top of his voice the word “pipe”. ’ Craig Dunain Hospital, Inverness, One Hundred Years, 1864–1964, Martin M. Whittet, Inverness 1964
p. 63 ‘He had been insane . . . twice in the course of the year.’ Report of the Royal Commission to inquire into the condition of Lunatic Asylums in Scotland, and the existing state of the law in that country in reference to Lunatics and Lunatic Asylums, London 1857
p. 65 ‘has drained the Highlands and Islands . . . or among the hills.’ Craig Dunain Hospital, Inverness, One Hundred Years, 1864– 1964, Martin M. Whittet, Inverness 1964
p. 67 ‘The dread of the Asylum . . . attached to such a move.’ Craig Dunain Hospital, Inverness, One Hundred Years, 1864–1964, Martin M. Whittet, Inverness 1964
pp. 71–72 ‘Almost all schizophrenics paint . . . And they’d be away . . .’ Interview with the author, 2011
p. 72 ‘the genetic inheritance . . . original and creative minds.’ Henry’s Demons, Patrick and Henry Cockburn, London 2011
p. 73 ‘able, original, likeable . . . what he wanted to do himself.’ Henry’s Demons, Patrick and Henry Cockburn, London 2011
p. 73 ‘In this hospital . . . a shell of what they used to be.’ Hidden Gifts, directed by Nick Higgins, 2004
; p. 76 ‘It is conceived . . . graver error could be made.’ Craig Dunain Hospital, Inverness, One Hundred Years, 1864–1964, Martin M. Whittet, Inverness 1964
p. 82 ‘Many patients unable to tolerate . . . and anti-depressant drugs.’ An introduction to physical methods of treatment in psychiatry, William Sargant and Eliot Slater, assisted by Desmond Kelly, Edinburgh 1972
p. 83 ‘characterized by dramatic . . . combinations of the two.’ Encyclopaedia Britannica, London 2011
CHAPTER FOUR SELF-MEDICATING
pp. 84–85 ‘The Highland temperament . . . the gay as well as the grave occasion.’ Craig Dunain Hospital, Inverness, One Hundred Years, 1864–1964, Martin M. Whittet, Inverness 1964
p. 85 ‘the somatic and medicinal . . . tranquillisers and antidepressants.’ Craig Dunain Hospital, Inverness, One Hundred Years, 1864– 1964, Martin M. Whittet, Inverness 1964
p. 86 ‘great stress . . . poultry, potatoes and vegetables’ Craig Dunain Hospital, Inverness, One Hundred Years, 1864–1964, Martin M Whittet, Inverness 1964
pp. 86–87 ‘He was very, very good . . . he would do it. You know, that was his style.’ Hidden Gifts, directed by Nick Higgins, 2004
p. 88 ‘What is found quite frequently . . . identity - re-find it, really.’ Hidden Gifts, directed by Nick Higgins, 2004
pp. 88–89 ‘He wouldn’t talk to anyone . . . he would weave them. He did it, and that was that.’ Hidden Gifts, directed by Nick Higgins, 2004
p. 89 ‘dark and chaotic . . . giving his drawings away.’ Henry’s Demons, Patrick and Henry Cockburn, London 2011
pp. 89–90 ‘He made a cap. . . . and he made gloves.’ Hidden Gifts, directed by Nick Higgins, 2004
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