What he impressed on me again and again over the next forty-eight hours was never to think of fixity in a place like this. Human occupation of the Shiants would always have come and gone like the tides, a filling and ebbing, a restless geography. ‘Life here,’ the professor said to me from the depths of his huddled waterproofs as we stood high on the inland flank of Eilean an Tighe, ‘was never some fixed version of the ancient surviving into the modern age.’ It would have been a consistently responsive pattern, adapting to its own growth and its own travails, extending its fingers into every part of its natural resource, beaten back at times, only to refill the spaces left by those withdrawals. But that very pattern of give and take, mimicking a natural population, is itself a form of permanence, the kind of existence which French historians have called the longue durée – a nearly changeless continuing for century after century.
Of course change did occur. Eight hundred years ago, the pattern might have been very much what you can see in the Celtic landscapes of Cornwall or Wales: family farms, each with its own arable and sweet grazing, with shared rough grazing on the heights. The Shiants would have been a cluster of privacies, with a form of communal grout between them. It is not difficult to imagine them in the five core places: at Annat and the Bagh on Garbh Eilean, by the shore and in the central valley on Eilean an Tighe, on the heights of Eilean Mhuire. Amazingly, you can still see the footings of such a farmstead on the rich ground just beside the natural arch on Garbh Eilean: a house, a barn, a byre and a garden enclosure, just uphill from a fresh-running spring.
It is a lovely place. I have camped there in the past and you see something from these soft green pastures which is hidden from the house on Eilean an Tighe: dawn over the mainland of Scotland, the tangerine sun lifting up over the ragged mountains in Torridon thirty miles to the east with slabs of orange light daubed across the Minch at your feet. Whoever lived here in the distant past, while needing to cower from the terrible exposure here to an easterly gale, must always have loved those wonderful summer mornings flooding in across the sea.
Elsewhere those early medieval farms have been obscured by later building but in the larger landscape one can make out the field walls which must have belonged to those farms, the careful delineation of private holdings. In their lichened and crumbling state, their lines infused with a habit of use, these walls are the most beautiful of ancient marks on the ground. They can only remain enigmatic, as neither archaeology nor landscape history has developed a way of dating them. They are as uninterpretable as the scratches and borings left by generations of schoolboys in a wooden desk; repeated private etchings, their point – beyond the obvious: keep the cattle out of the corn – forgotten.
At some point in the Middle Ages, all of this came to an end. The small farmsteads on Garbh Eilean were abandoned and the system known as run-rig imposed. Each year, narrow strips of arable land were parcelled out among the families of the community, each family receiving different lots every year, as a form of communal fairness. These are the strips you can see all over the Hebrides, often now called ‘lazybeds’, a term invented by late eighteenth-century ‘improvers’, perhaps because by this system only half the ground was cultivated, the other half devoted to wide drainage ditches. Robert Dodgshon told me something I had never even considered before: that this strip system, which is so deeply embedded in the visual image of the Hebrides, may well be an alien import. ‘Don’t the strips remind you of something else?’ he asked me as we walked around, muffled in our waterproofs on a bitter, slashing summer day.
‘The strip systems in open fields?’ I guessed rather wildly, trying to drag an image of huge East Anglian field systems to the islands. That is what he meant. Far from being an indigenous Celtic proto-communism – as everyone likes to imagine – the landscape of cultivated ridges may well be an imposition by feudal landlords in a period of medieval regularisation. The earlier, indigenous, private family farms, were at some point transformed into a shared landscape, a communalisation similar in its way to the collectivisation of farms in Soviet Europe after the war.
There is no saying when it happened here. It may have been after the Black Death in the fourteenth century, which would have devastated the families here, as it did elsewhere in the Hebrides. The older farms may have been abandoned in death and never reoccupied. Or perhaps at an earlier time of sudden and momentous disruption.
This was, after all, the world of the clan. No overarching authority was recognised here for most of the Middle Ages. Each clan, as long as it accepted the fact of vendetta, could attack what it liked and steal what it liked from any other. Violence, and the theft above all of food in the form of cattle, was part of the clan world. The Shiants, at the centre of the Minch, were on the front line of opposing bands based in northern Skye, Lewis, Harris and further south in the Hebrides. The feuds between them continued for century after century and two incidents in particular occurred within sight of these shores.
There was, first of all, the fatal moment, perhaps in the twelfth or thirteenth century, when the glory of the Nicolsons came to a sudden and irrevocable end in the Sound of Shiant. They had owned the whole of Lewis, with a castle probably at Stornoway, and much of Assynt on the mainland opposite. The clan was known for the wealth of its farmlands: ‘Clan MacNicol of the porridge and barley bannocks’. John Morison of Bragar in Lewis, writing in about 1680, described the mournful moment: ‘Torquill, son of Claudius [a seventeenth-century aggrandisement of the name Macleod] did violently espouse Macknaicle’s only daughter, and cutte off Immediatelie the whole race of Macknaicle which is also callede and possessed himself with the whole Lews [all of Lewis].’
The Nicolsons retreated to Trotternish in northern Skye and things have never been quite the same since. Is the abandonment of the Garbh Eilean farms to be dated to the destruction of the Nicolsons as people to be reckoned with?
More enigmatically, the huge dark bay on the eastern side of Eilean Mhuire, filled in summer with more guillemots than any other part of the islands, crowding there on rock after rock around the whole rim of the mile-long bay, is called Bagh Chlann Neill. It might mean the Bay of the MacNeils but nowhere on the Shiants, nor in Pairc opposite, has ever belonged to the MacNeils. Or perhaps it refers to the family of Nial Macleod, the defender of Lewis against the Fife Adventurers at the beginning of the seventeenth century, whom he once attacked with ‘two hundred barbarous bludie wickit Hielandmen’. There is no telling.
There are other bays with the same name in several places in the Hebrides, in Scalpay, Loch Maddy in Uist, between Grimsay and Ronay, and on the north-western side of Berneray in Lewis. There is one in particular in Coll, which is also called Slochd na Dunach or the Pit of Havoc where, it is said, ‘a fearful slaughter of the Maclean’s enemy is still remembered.’ No such story attaches to the Bagh Chlann Neill here, but it is a place where fishing boats do still come in to shelter in a strong southwesterly. It is not inconceivable that some MacNeils were caught there one day, perhaps by the sudden violence of the Macleods, rounding the corner by Seann Chaisteal in their birlinns. The MacNeils would have been trapped in the bay, slashed at by the Macleods, and finally murdered, before the dead were hoisted overboard, leaving only their name on the blood-slicked water. Had the MacNeils been thinking of taking over the riches of Eilean Mhuire? Was it that kind of threat which forced the Shiant Islanders to retreat to Eilean an Tighe?
Those are unanswerable questions and the longue durée continues through and past them. Birds, fish, livestock, vegetables and cereals, clay, peat, driftwood, stone: these were the materials out of which life was made. Metal was nearly absent. Roofs, creels and fish-traps, even the strakes of boats, weren’t pinned or nailed but woven or bound together with ropes made from heather, hair, grass or roots. There was nothing special about this. Life here would not have been essentially different from life on the shores of the sea lochs in Lewis, Skye or the mainland. An island existence was neither more privileged nor more deprived than an
ywhere else. In a world without roads, and only long, wet, sludgy paths across moorland, to be on the Shiants was to have the benefit of the good soils, the riches of the birds and fish. It was not to be deprived of anything the mainland could offer. It was a sea room with sea room, a place enlarged by its circumstances, not confined by them. Isolation and insularity were not the same thing.
This constancy and continuity makes an enormous problem for archaeologists. Not only are the materials of one age, even one millennium, barely distinguishable from those of another, but one age consistently uses the materials of another. A modern sheep pen or fank reuses the stones of a nineteenth-century summer shieling, which reuses the stones of a seventeenth-century house which reuses the stones of an Iron Age roundhouse, which has itself reused the remains of a Bronze Age dwelling. An island can only survive by recycling.
It was not quite a closed system. The outside world had its impacts, but the impact was contingent. Things, people and ideas all arrived at the shore, but they scarcely changed the nature of the system they found. In the summer of 1999, on the beach between Eilean an Tighe and Garbh Eilean, a pebble of pumice was washed up, light enough to float. It had come, almost certainly, from the volcano erupting that year in Montserrat in the Caribbean. Others, identical to it, had been found on beaches in Tiree. A few days later, the large, glossy heart-shaped Molucca bean of a plant called Entada gigas, always known in the Hebrides as Mary’s Nut, washed up, carried here perhaps from the shores of Nicaragua, where it grows above the sandy beaches. Columbus is said to have found these sea-hearts on the coast of the Azores and to have set out westwards in search of the trees that had shed them.
Until about 1600, that near self-sufficiency had defined the Shiants’ relationship to the rest of the world. The pumice is added to the beach, the nutrients from the rotting sea-heart are added to the life-system of the islands, which continue on their way, absorbent and indifferent. But between about 1600 and about 1800 that immensity of the longue durée comes to an end. This is the period of the Shiants’ pivotal crisis. By about 1800, the islands were no longer permanently occupied. No one could be persuaded to stay here and the islands, from having been central to their own existence for millennia, had started to become marginal to a world whose focus was elsewhere. These islands, in other words, had become ‘remote’ for the first time. Insularity became identified with isolation and that was their death knell. Something fatal had happened to the Shiants: the arrival of the modern.
For the modern world, and for modern consciousness, the Shiants did not have what was necessary: closeness to markets, either for sale and for supply, nor access to the materials of civilisation. This moment of crisis, this shift from one type of world, which had existed, more or less, since the end of the Ice Age, to another which is recognisably like the one we now inhabit, would, I realised, be the most revelatory period in the Shiants’ history. It was the period I wanted to investigate in the archaeological excavation we carried out on Eilean an Tighe in the summer of 2000. What happened here? How quick was the change? How sudden the departure? How agonised the experience? Could answers to any of these questions be sifted from the silent evidence which archaeology provides?
When Pat Foster arrived with his team of Czechs in the summer of 2000, we decided what to excavate the first evening. I was already on the islands, having sailed out a few days before, and had swept and tidied the house as if there were no tomorrow. The rat-poisoning campaign in the spring had done its work. There was no sign and no smell of the beasts inside. A couple of poison-desiccated bodies curled up in plastic bags was the only reminder. I burnt them.
The islands were looking their most severe. Cloud was down on the tops and a grin of surf lined the northern shores. The place, when it is like this, can feel like the deck of a trawler. The Czechs looked around them, a little cold and a little disconsolate. Were they really going to be spending two weeks on these grim, sandless, northern rocks? Was this really my apology for a house? Where was the place where we could have a picnic by the shore? But Pat Foster is a richly inspiring person. We walked along the bench of flat land beside the sea looking at bumps and hollows. Anything here that we should excavate? he asked. Anything that I liked the look of? Perhaps not. Too much rubbish in the ruins, too complex a set of overlying structures: modern on eighteenth-century on medieval on prehistoric. Even from the look of the landscape, you could tell that layered complexity was inevitable here. This was the place that had more to offer than any other on the islands. It should not be the site we first addressed.
Petr Limburský, who had been with Pat on Barra, excavating the site of the neolithic house at Allt Chrisal, is a man of precision and gentleness, with a head as massive as Beethoven’s and a slightly distant, romantic air. He had gone for a longer, wider walk from which he came back excited. There was a site that seemed ideal, up in the central valley of Eilean an Tighe. It was the largest house, almost forty feet long internally and ten feet wide, with double-skinned walls that were themselves three feet thick. This building was clearly part of a complex.
Small barns had been built next to it, one to the north and one to the south, and all three structures were enclosed within a kind of courtyard within which haystacks would have stood, protected by the surrounding wall from any wandering beasts. It was, in other words, a farmstead. The walls of the main building were still standing three or four feet high. They had not been robbed or reused. It was a fair guess that this building had last been used when the Shiants were last permanently occupied in the 1700s. The shepherds who had come here in the nineteenth century lived down near the shore, almost certainly on the site of the present house. Pieces of Victorian Dundee marmalade jars and the blue nineteenth-century willow-pattern china can be found quite easily on the beach in front of the house where those Victorian Hebrideans threw or dropped them. Up here, though, on a dry platform of ground where the yellow-flowered silverweed grows in thick profusion, was a place not overlaid by the present or the more recent past. This is where we would dig.
The following morning, the weather had changed to a pale iris-blue sky. Bubbled clouds streamed in from Ireland. The Shiants felt Arctic and looked Provençal. The gulls honked and cacked when we entered their breeding grounds. The wind cut across the high plateau site and above it, hardly glimpsed, but heard unbroken for two weeks, a lark sang, rising and falling in the sunshine, its trembling unbroken glissando the ever-present accompaniment to this delving into the Shiants’ past.
The work was exhausting and heavy at first, cutting the nettles, slicing off the layer of turf in which they grew, stacking the turf for later reuse, moving the boulders which had clearly fallen from the walls and piling them alongside the house. Once cleared, the slow and meticulous excavation could begin, distinguishing colours of earth, feeling as if in deep snow for the contours of the underlying realities.
As the seven archaeologists scraped away, shaving off successive layers, it soon became clear that the time we had would not be enough to discover everything about the building or its site. It was too big, but we drove on day after day, performing our gradual surgery on the body, exfoliating its past lives one by one. By the end of the allotted fortnight we had not reached anything like its origins. The layers were continuing deep below us. Our final day was spent piling the soil back on to the surfaces we had exposed, and returfing them, to protect the archaeology from the sheep which would wander in here during the winter. Only finally, on the last afternoon, with the sky now grey above us, and spits of rain flecking out of the north-west, with our hoods up, did we light a small peat fire on the spot where one of the hearths had been found. Dry bracken was the kindling and gloved fingers the windbreaks until the fire took and we ate chocolate around its blue, intimate flame. The deeper history of this site, as of many on the Shiants, awaits the excavations of later years.
What we found is enough, with some conjecture and with the help of one or two documents, to re-establish a version of what happened here
on that hinge between the ancient and the modern, stretching from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Of course, archaeology discovers its story back to front. It finds conclusion and ending first. Origins and beginnings are the last to emerge. And so the story here is not the story as it came to us on those beautiful summer days, with the lark decanting its heart twice as high again as the house is above the sea. This is the story of events as I think they might have occurred.
BLACK HOUSE ON EILEAN AN TIGHE
Plan
Conjectural reconstruction
Setting
Looking west during excavation, summer 2000
We had no time to look into the south barn or byre at all. It remains covered with its mat of nettles and silverweed, both marks of human and animal occupation and – not to be too delicate about this – defecation. It was always said that women in the Hebrides should relieve themselves with the cattle and the men with the horses. The human manure was added as an equally precious resource to that of their livestock. Much of the disgust of the enlightened eighteenth-century travellers stemmed from this intimacy of everyday life with the substance an urban civilisation thought of as sewage and which was considered here as the source of next year’s bread. That wrinkling of the sophisticated nose encompasses the revolution of this period. What one harboured, the other reviled; what one considered an essential part of the closed loop of their lives, the other wished to see disposed of as invisibly as possible. What the Hebrides saw as cyclical, the visitors saw as linear, a one-way process, a model not of the cycle of fertility but of the line of production.
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