It is a habit that persists with us. Modern visitors to the islands always over-cater in one particular commodity: loo paper. About forty rolls of it clutter the back of the cupboard in the modern house, testament to a modern anxiety. I have taken to using seaweed myself and although I would advise against both laminaria (leathery) and serrated wrack (prickly) or any of the red seaweeds (tendency to disintegrate) I can recommend bladder wrack, a saline swab of the most comfortable and effective kind.
In 2000, we concentrated on two areas: the inside of the house and the north barn.
The earliest layers are the most obscure and in the house itself, they were no more than glimpsed in a single trench – or sondage, a sounding, as the archaeologists call it – cut by Linda Čihaková. There are a pair of stone-lined and stone-capped drains in here. Linda removed the dark mud with which they were filled and found a baked clay floor in the bottom of each of them. This level is almost a foot and a half below the eighteenth-century floor and is perhaps the floor of a medieval house. At the same level in the barn, just above some building foundations, a small copper brooch was found, perhaps from the mid- to late-sixteenth century.
It is only an inch and a half across and it is not a rich thing, not in the same class as the torc, a domestic object which would have pinned up a woman’s shawl. Others identical to it have been found in Lewis. The ring is incised with what looks, at first glance, like letters but are in fact the worn-away remains of a repeated moulding. Four small crosses are cut crudely into the metal at the cardinal points.
Can a picture be drawn from these enigmatic hints of Shiant life at this earliest of our excavated levels? These are the floors of the Shiants in the very late Middle Ages. There are people living on this island and perhaps on Eilean Mhuire. It is also the moment the islands are first mentioned in a document. In 1549, a man of whom almost nothing is known beyond his name and title, Donald Monro, Archdeacon of the Isles, perhaps Rector of St Columba’s Church in Eye, near Stornoway, made the first tour of the Hebrides, perhaps a pastoral inspection. He was coming north from Skye:
Northwart fra this Ile lyis the Ile callit Ellan Senta, callit in Inglish the saynt Ile, mair nor twa mile lang, verie profitable for corn, store and fisching, perteining to Mccloyd of the Leozus.
Be eist this lyis an Ile callit Senchastell [still the name of the rock off the eastern point of Eilean Mhuire] callit in Inglish the auld castell, ane strength full of corn and girsing, and wild fowl nests in it, and als fishing, perteining to Mccloyd of the Leozus.
Monro’s description of Garbh Eilean and Eilean an Tighe together, and of Eilean Mhuire as a separate possession of the Macleod chieftain of Lewis, hints at a possible history. By the time of Monro’s visit, the farmsteads on Garbh Eilean had already been left and that island was now farmed as one unit with Eilean an Tighe. The fertility of Eilean Mhuire, despite its terrible exposure to winter gales, had kept some people living there, with their own farming system of arable fields, hay meadows and grazing.
They are not a poor place, ‘verie profitable for corn, store and fisching’. The ‘wild fowl nests’ here are famous and if a fowl is a bird whose destiny is the pot, these people are eating them. There were some signs of green sticky clay next to the brooch, probably manure, so animals are kept inside over the winter where their manure builds up to be spread on the spring-time fields. It is perhaps a good time, a florescence for the islands.
Those early levels are immediately below the first true floor of what is now called a ‘blackhouse’, a nineteenth-century term, for what previously would have been called, quite simply, a house. It, too, is of clay, baked hard, reddened by the heat and perhaps by the mixture of peat ash, which is a wonderful soft ochre. The central drain was laid in this floor.
It is of course nearly impossible to assign dates to memories and ghosts of structures such as these. It is like trying to name ripples in the tide. But again one can make a guess. The first blackhouse is an improvement made, perhaps, in the last years of the sixteenth century. Its new floor and its new well-drained accommodation reflect the relative well-being of the period.
Immediately after it, though, comes the first sign of crisis. Quite briefly, perhaps for no more than a decade or so, the house is for some reason unroofed and unoccupied. A thin, dark layer of silt soil, no more than a couple of inches thick, is spread across the well-laid clay that preceded it. Sheep would have trampled in here, the nettles would have grown, died and rotted, people would have been absent. Why? Here, above all, on one of the most favoured places in the islands? The documents provide a possible answer.
Between about 1590 and 1615, anarchy overtook Lewis and its dependent islands. The disaster for the Macleods began with an accident, in all likelihood the worst ever to have occurred within sight of the Shiants. The heir to the Macleod possessions, Torquil Oighre, his second name meaning heir, the son of Rorie, Chief of the Lewis Macleods, when ‘sailing from the Lewes to troternes in the Ile of Skye with a hundred men perished with all his companie by ane extraordinarie storme and tempest.’ The bodies would have washed up on these beaches and been buried in the cemetery by the shore, without doubt the greatest number of dead ever seen on the Shiants.
The inheritance of the island possessions was now uncertain and a long, complicated and bloody feud followed in which Torquil’s younger brothers, three legitimate, by his father’s three wives, and three others illegitimate, by other women, plotted against and murdered each other, pulling in allies from the mainland, and slaughtering their followers in the episode known as ‘The Evil Trouble of the Lews’. The Macleods were violent heirs to their Viking inheritance. It was said that the Clan MacLeod, ‘were like pikes in the water, the oldest of them, if the biggest, eats the youngest of them.’ It was a turmoil of mutual destruction.
Is it possible that our thin layer of silt, a mark of abandonment and discontinuity, just above the level of sixteenth-century coherence, is the Shiants’ reflection of the Trouble of the Lews? Perhaps. And could it be this period of disruption and change also brought about the withdrawal from Eilean Mhuire, the concentration of people in what may have felt like the collective safety of Eilean an Tighe? That too is a possibility. Certainly by the end of the century, and from then on, the three islands are treated as a single group and the entire population was living on Eilean an Tighe.
The eventual beneficiaries of the chaos were the Mackenzies from Kintail on the mainland. They had tied themselves by marriage to the Macleods, and played a brilliant, many-stranded and double-crossing role in depriving both the Macleods and a band of would-be gentlemen colonists, the so-called Fife Adventurers, of Lewis. They paid over some money (a signal of change: the first time the Shiants were ever bought) and emerged the legalised victors in 1611. The Genealogie of the Surname of McKenzie since ther coming into Scotland, complied by John MacKenzie of Applecross in 1667, described how ‘The Lord Kintail having now bought ye right of ye Lewes he landed in ye Lewes wt 700 chosen men qr aft. [whereafter] ye taking away of some herschips [plunder] and some little skirmishes manie of ye inhabitants submitted themselves to him and took yr poones [possessions] of him.’
One of those transfers of land, and perhaps some of the herschips and maybe some little skirmishes, occurred on the Shiants. Certainly, the islands went from the Macleods to the Mackenzies, who became Earls of Seaforth, in honour of the grandest loch in the grandest landscape of their new island possession. A 1637 charter from the crown, confirming the grant of Lewis and its islands to Seaforth, names these little specks of their new acquisition quite explicitly: ‘Iland-Schant’. The Shiants were now Mackenzie country. When, a century later, in 1718, the first surviving rental of the Seaforth’s estate comes to ‘Shant’, the name of the tenant is ‘Kennith Mackenzie’. He is the first named occupant of the island, one of twenty-two Mackenzies, tenants-in-chief or tacksmen to the Seaforths, who were occupying the best farms and key properties in Lewis. This Kenneth Mackenzie had been on the islands at least since
1706 (he was one of the few tacksmen unable to attend the hearings in Stornoway in person, presumably because of the weather) and was perhaps the grandson of the Mackenzie who had landed one day in the early seventeenth century on the beach between Eilean an Tighe and Garbh Eilean, his keel sliding onshore, his boots slipping on the slithering cobbles, the large number of Mackenzies he had with him jumping from their boats, coming around the corner, past the wells, past the little church and cemetery and then doing, or perhaps only threatening, the immediate and familiar violence. There is no record here of the casual gore, but that is the story I read in the inch or two of darker soil in Linda Čihaková’s meticulous section: blood in the silt.
The abandonment of the house was brief and, over the silt soil created in the troubled interval, another floor was soon laid. It was made precisely like its predecessor: thick clay packed hard. Almost certainly, the clay came from the narrow band of Jurassic mud stones and shales just to the west of the natural arch on Garbh Eilean. That is the only outcrop of clay discovered on the Shiants and the little valley of the stream that runs down there looks as though it might have been artificially dug away. It would be a long, heavy job carrying it in creels down to the little beach there, rowing to the main landing beach and then carrying the loads up the trackway to the site of the house, but not impossible. They would probably have had ponies (there were horse bones in the eighteenth-century archaeological layers) and, besides, unremitting labour is the price of existence in a marginal world.
Contemporary with this floor is the strangest story – it hinges on dearth and the pressures which dearth places on revered customs – ever associated with the Shiants. It carries no date, but probably describes an event in the middle of the seventeenth century. Iain Dubh Chraidig came from Uig on the Atlantic shore of Lewis. Every year, many Uig men used to come over to Pairc, on the east side of Lewis, opposite the Shiants.
John Du used to go in summer to fish for saithe in the Sound of Shiant. On one of these occasions he took his mother with him, as there was no food to be got at home in Uig. Poor John was only there for a few days when his mother died, which left him at a loss what to do. He wanted to bury his mother at home in Uig – but he was at the same time loath to leave the fishing. So this is what he did. He removed the entrails from the corpse and placed the body in a cave, where it became mummified. And when he was done fishing, he took his mother’s body home to Uig, where he buried her alongside her husband.
Evisceration of a loved one was not unheard of in the Hebrides, particularly if the party was away from home and the corpse might rot before you got it back to hallowed ground. Some men from Ness gutted one of their company when they were away on the Summer Isles, buried the guts there and took the rest of him home to Lewis. Perhaps only the best of fishing, or the deepest of hunger, could justify it, but Ian Dubh was not being irreverent. The opposite in fact. He air-cured his mother because he loved and honoured her, not through indifference. There is still a cave on the coast of Pairc opposite the Shiants, just outside the mouth of Loch Bhrollúm, called Uamha Mhic Iain Duibh, ‘the Cave of the Son of Black John’, a name I cannot explain. But is it also ‘the Cave of the Eviscerated Mother’?
Just outside the house on the islands, at a level a decade or two later than this story, the excavators discovered a significant deposit. Underneath the foundations of the barn – in other words before the barn existed and, of course, after the medieval building on this site had disappeared – was a band of limpet shells and a few animal bones fifteen inches thick. Limpets are not very pleasant eating. I have tried them fried, boiled, with butter, garlic, parsley. Nothing can really disguise the basic sensation: you are eating someone else’s nose. Limpets are, in other words, famine food, a desperate recourse, the sort of protein to which you turn if all other options have gone.
This band of limpets, beneath the barn foundations and in use at the same time as the seventeenth-century floor in the house, consisted of about a hundred thousand shells. It is possible to do a little mathematics. Families in houses like this usually had about five members. It is possible to make a reasonably palatable and nutritious limpet broth, in which you can dip your bannocks, if you have them, with about twenty limpets per person. A limpet meal for the whole family in other words needs about a hundred limpets. In the time of birds, between April and August, and in the fair weather of summer when fish could be had, no one would turn to limpets for their protein. They are the famine food of winter and early spring, which in times of crisis might have been relied on for, say, half the meals for six months of the year. That would mean ninety days in which limpets had to feed the family. A famine year, then, might require something like nine thousand limpets. Although limpets were also used as bait, this pile, accumulated at some time in the late seventeenth century, may well represent something like ten years of famine.
That, in the 1680s, is almost exactly what there were. Martin Martin, travelling here in the following decade, refers briefly but conclusively to it. ‘They are great lovers of Musick,’ he says of the Lewismen, ‘and when I was there they gave an Account of eighteen men who could play on the Violin pretty well, without being taught: They are still very hospitable, but the late Years of Scarcity brought them very low, and many of the poor People have died by Famine.’
One can only imagine, from the accounts of other famines in other years, the reality of the horrors which that pile of limpets represents – the drawn faces, the broken tempers, the shortness with each other, the sense of the world being against you, the death of children, the endless, wearing diseases of the old, the temptations to selfishness, the squeezing of tolerances, the exhaustion and the despair. In that vestigial, mirror-image way of archaeology, the evidence of the horror of these years on the Shiants is quite apparent in the section cut through the house floors. After the famine food comes another abandonment. It all became too much. The people who lived in this house either died or left. Once again the roof disintegrated, or more likely in the Hebridean timber shortage, was removed and reused, and a seven-inch thick layer of grey silty soil accumulated over the floor on which the famine had been endured.
The occupied floor is quite different from the layer of abandonment above it. In the floor, astonishingly, you can see some of the smallest details of everyday life. The floor of the entire house is trug-shaped, rising towards the walls on either side and sinking towards the centre of the house, or like an old, thin mattress in a boarding house, slumped towards the middle, steep at the sides.
These are worn, swept places, with the dust broomed away from the hearth, out into the corners and edges. Within the section itself, you can make out the millimetre-thick bandings where a layer of black charcoal or of rusty peat ash has been swept out across the surface. It is a microscopic human landscape of powerful intimacy and unrelieved poignancy. These sweepings, keeping tidy in the face of catastrophe: what deeper sign of dignity is there than that? Above it, the silt layers are inert, a dead and formless accumulation of matter, indicating only absence, silence and the rain falling on forgotten lives.
This is the sequence of the Shiants – as of elsewhere in this marginal world – this coming and going, this suffering and resurgence, this courage in the face of a trying world. How long does that grey silt layer last? Thirty years perhaps? There is no way of telling. But eventually the people return, just as the puffin burrows on the north face of Garbh Eilean, abandoned in years when the population is falling, are eventually reoccupied and rehabilitated. Here, once again, perhaps around 1720, a new floor was made, again on the same principle, and burying the accumulated silt beneath it. It was a new beginning and easily the most sophisticated so far.
There are signs of change. A new stone-capped drain is installed along the south wall of the house. A stone-rimmed hearth is built roughly in the middle of the house and a line of stones makes a ‘step’ between the east and west end, that is between animals in the byre end and people around the hearth. A large area outside to t
he south and east is roughly paved and an extension, a barn or byre, is built to the north, on the site of the limpet pile. To a traveller from England or Lowland Scotland, this house might still have looked like a primitive habitation, the sort of thing that men occupied in a cultural backwater, ‘a Borneo or a Sumatra’, as Dr Johnson described the Hebrides in the 1770s. But compared with what had been here before, this was an improved and rationalised building. The fingertips of the Enlightenment had touched the Shiants.
It was under this floor that we found the inscribed cross stone from the hermit in the seventh century, face down, under the clay of the floor and deeply buried in the grey silt beneath it. The stone’s used and pock-marked surface looks like something which far from being tucked away or buried has been in constant, bruising use, dropped and picked up, battered in passing. The stones which most resemble it on Inishmurray in County Sligo (and others which have now been lost on Iona itself) were used even in the nineteenth century in rituals that crossed the borders of Christian and pre-Christian belief. Jerry O’Sullivan, the Irish archaeologist who is currently making a long and careful investigation of the early Christian remains on Inishmurray, guesses that the cross-inscribed stones there may have been used in penance, carried from from one site to another on the island as a form of ritual pilgrimage. The heavier the crime, the heavier the stone. In the nineteenth century, there are also records of them being used as instruments either to bless or to damn. Turned clockwise, or sunwise, they brought goodness; anti-clockwise a curse.
The late seventeenth and early eighteenth century was a time of potent magic in the Hebrides. Stones of almost any kind were used as charms. We found several smooth and beautiful pebbles both in the barn and the byre end of the house, as well as one elongated egg of the same Torridonian sandstone as the cross, all of which might have been used for a kind of magic on animals.
Sea Room Page 21