by David Yeadon
“Aye—it’s a magic place you’re going to,” said Hector Macleod at the Ceilidh Place pub in Ullapool, a small port town of tiny whitewashed cottages overlooking Loch Broom on Scotland’s west coast. “Some of the kindest people you’ll ever meet—not pushy mind…” Hector paused and then winked. “Well—they’ve a bit of the magic too.” The barman laughed. “They’re Gaelic and Celtic—what can y’expect?—they’ve all got the touch of Irish in ’em!”
For years I’ve been promising myself a journey to these mysterious islands where the Scottish crofting families still weave the famous Harris tweed in their own homes. “There’s over two hundred different islands out there,” Hector continued, “and there was a time—not so very long ago—when every one had its crofters and its own kirks. But then came the terrible famines—the potato famines—and all these great ‘clearances’ in the middle of the last century when the big lairds got together, kicked many of the people off the land—sent them to Canada and suchlike places—and moved the sheep in. Now I think there’s only thirteen islands with any people at all. Maybe less. Crofting’s a hard life.”
A frisky three-hour ferry journey from Ullapool brought me, a little shaken, to Stornoway, capital of the 130-mile-long Outer Hebrides chain. This small town of 6,000 people is the hub of life on the main island of Lewis and Harris, and the epitome of all the best and worst of island life. Fine churches, big Victorian houses, lively industries, new hotels, even a mock castle and a colorful fishing fleet mingle with bars, pool halls, fish and chip shops, and, according to one local church newspaper, “palaces of illicit pleasures whose value to the community is highly questionable,” referring to the town’s two rather modest discos.
Stornoway’s stern Calvinistic appearance was no great inducement to dallying so I was soon off across the bleak moors and peat bogs looking for the tweed makers in the heart of Harris. And that’s how I got stuck in the storm.
But as the weather cleared, I came down slowly from the wind-blasted tops and could see, far below, the thin crofting strips on the fertile machair land fringing the coastal cliffs and dunes.
They say the milk of cows grazed on the machair in the spring and summer is scented by the abundance of its wild-flowers—primroses, sea spurrey, campion, milkwort, sea-pink, sorrel, and centaury. Each strip, usually no more than six acres in all, had its own steep-gabled crofter’s cottage set close to the narrow road, which wound around boulders and burns. Behind each of the cottages lurked the sturdy remnants of older homes, the notorious “black houses” or tigh dubh. Some were mere walls of crudely shaped bedrock, six feet thick in places; others were still intact, as if the family had only recently moved out. They were roofed in thick thatch made from barley stalks, held in place by a grid of ropes, weighted down with large rocks. Windows were tiny, set deep in the walls, and door openings were supported by lintel stones often over a foot thick. Nearby were dark brown piles of peats, the cruachs, enough to heat a house for a whole year.
Looking at these black houses, which until recently formed the communal living space for families and their livestock, you feel pulled back in time to the prehistoric origins of island life, long before the invasions of the Icelandic tribes and the Norsemen from Scandinavia, long before the emergence of the Celtic clans of the MacLeods, the MacAulays and the MacRaes.
All around the islands are remnants of ancient cultures in the form of brochs (lookout towers), Bronze Age burial mounds, stone circles, and the famous standing stones of Callanish on Lewis, thought to have been a key ceremonial center for island tribes since 2000 B.C. The ponderous tigh dubh houses seem very much of this heritage, and I experienced a strange sense of “coming home” again to something half remembered, deep, deep down, far below the fripperies and façades of everyday modern life. Something that sent shivers to my toes.
Lord Seaforth, one of the islands’ numerous wealthy “utopian benefactors” during the last century, was anxious to improve “the miserable conditions under which these poor scraps of humanity live” and ordered that “at the very least a chimney should be present and a partition erected between man and beast in these dark hovels.” But apparently the crofters were quite content to share their living space with their own livestock. They also considered the quality of peat soot vastly superior as fertilizer for their tiny “lazybed” potato plots. The smoke was allowed to find its own way through the thatch from the open hearthstone fire in the center of the earthen floor.
And in spite of such conditions, the crofters were known for their longevity and prolific families. Dr. Samuel Johnson, accompanied on an island tour by the ever-faithful Boswell in 1773, put it down to island breakfasts! “If an epicure could remove himself by a wish,” Dr. Johnson remarked, “he would surely breakfast in Scotland.” I concur wholeheartedly. My first real Scottish breakfast came at the Scarista House hotel overlooking the Sound of Taransay on Harris and included such traditional delights as fresh oatmeal porridge, smoked herring kippers, peat-smoked bacon, black pudding, white pudding, just-picked mushrooms and tomatoes, free-range eggs, oatcakes, bannock cakes, scones, honey, crowdie cream, home-churned butter—everything in fact except the once customary tumbler of island whiskey, “to kindle the fire for the day.”
“Och, the breakfasts are still very fine,” agreed Mary MacDonald, postmistress of Scarista village. I had made the long descent from Bleaval and sat by her blazing peat fire drinking tea and nibbling her homemade buttery shortbread. “The world’s getting smaller everywhere,” she told me. “Things are changing here too—we talk in Gaelic about an saoghal a dh’fhalbh—‘the world we have lost’—but you can always find a good breakfast!”
I wondered about the changes.
“Well we’re losing a lot of the young ones, that’s always a big problem. But those that stay still work at the crofting and keep up the Gaelic.” She paused. “I miss the old ceilidhing most I think. We used to gather at the ceilidh house to talk about local things and listen to the old tales by the seannaicheadh—an elder village storyteller. Now they’re a bit more organized, more of a show at the pubs with poems and songs and such. Not quite the same.”
I asked about the famous Harris tweed makers of the islands. “Och, you’ll find plenty of them—more than six hundred still I think—making it the old way in their own homes on the Hattersley looms. You can usually hear the shuttles clacking way back up the road.”
Mary was right. I went looking for Marion Campbell, one of Harris’s most renowned weavers, who lived in the tiny village of Plocrapool on the wild eastern side of the island, where the moors end dramatically in torn cliffs and little ragged coves. And I heard the urgent clatter of the loom echoing against the bare rocks long before I found her house, nestled in a hollow overlooking an islet-dotted bay.
Through a dusty window of the weaving shed I saw an elderly woman with white hair working at an enormous wooden contraption.
“Aye, come in now and mind the bucket.”
The bucket was on the earth floor crammed in between a full-size fishing dinghy, lobster pots, a black iron cauldron, cans of paint, and a pile of old clothes over the prow of the boat, just by a crackling peat fire, which gave off a wonderful “peat-reek” aroma.
“You can always tell a real Harris tweed,” Marion told me. “There’s always a bit of the peat-reek about it.”
She worked her loom at an alarming pace and the shed shook as she whipped the shuttle backward and forward between the warp yarns with bobbins of blue weft. I watched the blue tweed cloth, precisely thirty-one inches wide with “good straight edges and a tight weave” grow visibly in length as her feet danced across the pedals of the loom and her left hand “beat up” the weft yarns, compacting them with her thick wooden “weavers beam.” Then her sharp eyes, always watching, spotted a broken warp yarn. “Och! I’ve been doing this for fifty-nine years and I still get broken ones!” She laughed and bounced off her bench, which was nothing more than a plank of wood wrapped in a bit of tartan cloth. “And
mind that bucket.”
I looked down and saw it brimming with bits of vegetation, the color of dead skin and about as attractive. “That’s crotal. Lichen—from the rocks. For my dyes.” In the days before chemical dyes most spinners and weavers made their own from moorland plants and flowers—heather, bracken, irises, ragwort, marigolds—whatever was available.
“I’m the last one doing it now,” Marion told me. “By law all Harris tweed has to be handwoven in the weaver’s own home on the islands here from Scottish virgin wool, but I’m the last person doing it the really old way—dyeing my own fleeces, carding, making my own yarn, weaving—I even do my own ‘waulking’ to clean the tweed and shrink it a bit. That takes a lot of stamping about in Wellington boots!”
I pointed to a pile of tan-colored fleece and asked if it had been dyed with the lichen. Marion giggled. “Ooh—no, no that’s the peat—the peat soot. Makes a lovely shade.” I suppose I looked sceptical. “Wet your finger,” she told me, so I did and she plunged it into a pot of soot by the boat. “Now rub it off.” I obeyed again and—surprise—a yellow finger! Her laughing made the shed shake. “Aye, you’ll be stuck with that now for a while.” Three days actually.
Later I sat by her house overlooking the Sound of Shiant as Marion spun new yarn for her bobbins. On an average day she weaves a good ten yards of tweed. “I do all the main patterns—herringbone, bird’s-eye, houndstooth, two-by-two. I like the herringbone. It always looks very smart.” On the hillside above the house I could see a crofter walking among his new lambs in the heather; out on the sound another crofter was lifting his lobster pots.
“You’re a bit of everything as a crofter,” Marion told me as her spinning wheel hummed. “You’re a shepherd, a fisherman, a gardener, you collect your seaweed for fertilizer, you weave, build your walls, cut and dry your peats, shear your sheep at the fank, cut hay, dig ditches—a bit of everything. In the past you’d leave the croft and go to your shieling in the summer to graze the cows, and each night the girls would carry the milk back to make butter. I remember that so well.”
And I remember my walks on Harris, particularly around the peaks of Clisham and West Loch Tarbert.
I picked a clear day for one of my rambles here and lay back on a soft hillside basking in a warm sun. A curlew flung out its dismal warning somewhere behind me and meadow pipits and greenshanks chirped. Among the rocks, dappled with lichen and puffy with tufts of heather, were scatterings of starry saxifrages, butterwort, and roseroot. Breezes off the ocean shook their leaves and bowed the brittle nardus grass. I thought of nothing really important. At one point I may even have been thinking of nothing at all, which is a rather difficult thing to do for any measurable length of time, for me at least.
Some obscure guru with a name longer than his beard once offered the thought to an impatient world that “in nothing is everything.” The world as usual ignored him, and the guru eventually disappeared into his own nothingness, claiming as he departed that he was now everything. I didn’t quite understand at the time and I’m not sure I do now. It sounded like one of those Zen wordplays, infinitely complex and infinitely obvious, and a little too obscure for most Western minds to grasp.
And yet there are moments—tiny capsules of nontime—when the incessant chatterings of the mind cease. One is touched and exposed, and a link is made with something beyond the body. Most people are fortunate if they experience this kind of sensation a dozen times in a life. But each occasion can never be forgotten. Names have been given to the experience—spiritual awakening, a sense of the infinite, universal harmony. I had that sensation, a little shiver of awareness, on that hillside, and it more than made up for the ankle-busting climbs up Clisham.
And I too remember my other moments on these islands—some sad, all revealing. I remember the shepherd, Allistair Gillis, recently returned after years of adventure in the merchant navy, only to lose a third of his ewes in a long cold winter and spring. “You can’t win in a place like this,” he told me with Gaelic melancholy. “All you can do is pass your time here. Just pass your time as best you can.”
And then I remember Andrew and Alison Johnson’s honest island cuisine at their Scarista House hotel, where you dine on Harris crayfish, lobster, venison, salmon, or grouse (whatever is fresh that day) as the sun goes down in a blaze of scarlet and gold over the white sands of Taransay Sound. And then the two Johnnys—the brothers MacLeod—on “the first good day at the peats in nine months,” slicing the soft chocolaty peat with their irons into even-sized squares for drying. I talked with them at dusk as they moved rhythmically together along their family peat bank (their piece of “skinned earth”). “Another eight days like this should see enough for the year,” the elder Johnny remarked, still slicing. The younger Johnny nodded and eyed the whisky bottle half hidden in a nearby sack. “Not jus’ yet,” said the first Johnny. The second Johnny grunted and lifted his fifteen hundredth peat of the day.
Not far away, Dougie MacDonald was working his own peat patch, alone. His grandfather and his father had both been crofters but Dougie found little appealing in the life. “I tried it but the land was sour—there wasn’t enough anyway. Two ridiculous acres! When I was a lad it didn’t seem so bad. Don’t suppose it ever does. We always had a fine fire of thick peats. My dad would cut ’em with the others over in the bog—he was a dab hand with a tuskar, once cut a thousand peats in four hours and kept on going all day. I used to help him a bit. We’d come on back around five o’clock and tackle my mother’s ‘pieces’ (flour scones with butter) before supper. Not much meat, maybe once a week on Sunday. Breakfast was brose—a scooping of oatmeal with salt and milk. Salt herrings were good, though. It was mainly our own stuff—tatties, turnips, oatmeal—same as now.”
He nodded toward a pan boiling on the stove. It was full of potatoes. In the sink were more unpeeled potatoes and on the table, salt, pepper, and margarine. I saw no meat or eggs, and no refrigerator. On the wall above the table was a faded color print in a frame of a stern-faced man.
“William Edward Gladstone,” Dougie told me. “My dad called him ‘the crofter’s hero.’ Didn’t make much difference, though, in the end. Most of them had to do what I did—work for somebody else. You couldn’t do much else.”
His surly attitude reminded me of an incident that had occurred a few days previously. I’d been wandering through the Lochinver Peninsula, a wild area of Scotland forty or so miles to the east across The Minch, which separates the mainland from Lewis and Harris. I had paused for a dram of Skye malt whisky at Lochinver’s Culag bar, and someone was talking about recent discoveries in the Allt nan Vamh caves where eight-thousand-year-old human bones had been discovered. Apparently the remains of lemmings were also found, which led to the remark by a thickly bearded student, accompanied by his dog, that lemmings and crofters “had much in common.”
It had been a boisterous evening with Gaelic songs by the locals and free-flowing beer. The spirit of the Highlands was an almost tangible presence. But abruptly the mood was broken and an ominous silence spread over the room. The barman paused in the middle of pulling a pint. Someone coughed nervously. The barmaid went pale.
“I wonder,” began one of the singers, a burly man in a navy blue fisherman’s sweater, “I wonder if you’d care to repeat what you just said now.”
No one moved. The student took the bait, apparently oblivious of the mood, and began to explain his thesis that Highland crofters brought about their own destruction by refusing to cooperate with the landowners in modernizing the marginal economy of the region.
“They were stubborn—bloody minded,” he said. “They wanted their own patch of land and that was all. They didn’t consider changing, most of them. They wouldn’t listen, even when it was proved they’d never last another generation—they’d all starve. They just went ahead and destroyed themselves.”
A moment’s silence was followed by a thunderous uproar as a dozen men bellowed out rebuttals, and the student began to realize
what was happening. The barmaid had vanished. Even the dog began to look uncertainly at his master. People began moving for the door, and an old man passed me chuckling. He paused and whispered, “I’d be getting back a bit, laddie, if I were you. You’re a wee touch too close sitting there.”
He was right, and much as I would have liked to record the ensuing discussion, I decided I had a lot more traveling to do, and discretion, in this instance, was certainly the better part of valor.
“He’s opened up a real wound wi’ that one,” the old man remarked as we strolled alongside the fishing pier. He was still chuckling. “M’be there’s something in what he says. We’re sticklers for tradition in these parts, and I’m not sure that it’s got us very far really. There’s a few that carries on, but the old places are pretty much dead nowadays—it’s all holiday cottages and outsiders trying to preserve everything like it was theirs. S’not bad here yet, but south of Torridon it’s hard to find anyone who’s lived there for more’n a few years. Some only come for a few weeks a year. Rest of the time their houses are empty. Applecross is the same. They opened a road but it was too late. Most of them had gone. Now the houses are falling in or they’ve been snapped up by outsiders. Captain Wills (of the Wills tobacco family) is tryin’ some new ideas, so I’ve heard, but he’ll have a job on. Even ’round here”—he gestured at the village of Lochinver straggled along the bay in the moonlight and the fishing boats nestling against the harbor wall—“the trawlermen aren’t local, most of them come by bus from the east coast every week. They say property’s too expensive. City folk have been buying it all.”