Sea Room

by Adam Nicolson

  This was also the period, though, when magic was coming under attack from the rationalist ideas of the new Enlightenment. There was an incident off the Shiants at just this time which encapsulates that transition.

  According to the late seventeenth-century manuscript chronicle of James Fraser, Minister of Wardlaw, now Kirkhill near Inverness, the accident happened early in 1671, somewhere between Lewis and the northern tip of Skye, perhaps in the tide-rip just south of the southern point of Eilean an Tighe:

  This April, the Earle of Seaforth duelling [?dwelling] in the Lewes, a dreedful accident happened. His lady being brought to bed there, the Earle sent for John Garve M’kleud of rarsay, to witness the christning; and after the treat and solemnity of the feast, rarsay takes leave to go home, and, after a rant of drinking upon the shoare, went aboard off his birling and sailed away with a strong north gale off wind; and whether by giving too much saile and no ballast, or the unskillfulness of the seamen, or that they could not manage the strong Dut[ch] canvas saile, the boat whelmd, and all the men dround in view of the cost. The Laird and 16 of his kinsmen, the prime, perished; non of them ever found; a greyhound or two cast ashoare dead; and pieces of the birling. One Alexander Mackleoid of Lewes the night before had voice warning him thrice not to goe at [all] with rarsay, for all would drown in there return; yet he went with him, being infatuat, and dround [with] the rest. This account I had from Alexander his brother the summer after, Drunkness did the mischeife.

  That is the rational, reasonable and modern explanation. A dissolute laird, drinking on shore, loved by his people, displaying to them, his hounds aboard, the birlinn with its new fast rig, no reef in the heavy canvas sail, so much less pliable and manageable than the traditional woollen sails, a racing journey home with the wind on the port quarter, ignorance perhaps of the Stream of the Blue Men and the holes that can suddenly appear in the sea there in front of you: these are the accidents with which a bravado culture always flirts.

  But alongside this is another explanation. A raven, the bird of death, is said to have settled on the gunwale. Iain Garbh Macleod of Raasay reached for it, to strangle it, missed and drove in the upper strakes of the birlinn and the sea poured in. Why had the raven settled there? A rival of Iain Garbh’s for the lairdship of Raasay had paid a witch called, perhaps inevitably, Morag, to sit and watch for his return on the heights of Trotternish in northern Skye. For days she looked out northwards to the Shiants and the sea around them, waiting for Raasay’s sail. She had her daughters with her and asked them to fill a tub with well water and on its surface float an empty eggshell. When Raasay’s birlinn came into view, Morag continued to watch but told her daughters to go to the tub and to swirl the water with their hands as fast as it would go. They did what she asked and, in the whirlpool they made, the eggshell filled and sank; just at that moment a squall enveloped Raasay’s birlinn and the seventeen men were drowned. It was always said that on the anniversary of Iain Garbh’s death, the tide boils and stirs at just the place where he and his men went down.

  The two versions of the story mark the beginning of the end of magic in the Hebrides. The burying of the cross stone beneath the blackhouse floor may well be another symptom of the same change. The floor under which it was found, made after about twenty years of abandonment which themselves followed the famine of the 1680s, can perhaps be dated somewhere soon after 1720. A document survives in the National Archives in Edinburgh which suggests a reason for the stone’s presence there. In the 1720s a definite and deliberate effort was made by the reformed church, here as elsewhere in the Hebrides, to bring the souls of the islanders more firmly under ecclesiastical control. The Reformation may be dated in Scotland to 1560 but out here, well beyond the reach of central control, what the reformers considered reprehensibly papist practices lurked on. The Edinburgh document is called ‘A PREPARED STATE, the Presbytery of SKYE, against the Heritor of the Lews’, dated 11 December 1722. The Heritor of the Lews, and the owner of the Shiants, was the Catholic Kenneth Mackenzie, Earl of Seaforth, who as a Jacobite had rebelled against the crown in 1715 and again in 1719, and after the failure of the rebellions had his estates confiscated by the Hanoverian crown. The presbyters from Skye were petitioning the commissioners in charge of the estate to divert some of its revenues to enhance the missionary efforts of the church in the untamed and backward-sliding Hebrides. Lewis, they said was spiritually in a parlous condition: ‘This wide and spacious Country, since the Abolition of Popery, was always served by Two Ministers, one at Starnway, the other at Barvas.’ That was nothing like good enough and the island should be subdivided, one of the new parishes to be Lochs:

  the Church, Manse and Glebe to be at Keose, and the Minister to go to the South Skirts of the same, as he sees Occasion, there being but few families there who cannot attend the Ordinances at the ordinary place of worship. From the South-East corner of that Parish lies the Islands of Shant, Six miles from Shore, One of them only inhabited, and in it Five Families, making Twenty Examinable Persons; the Minister should repair thither twice in the Year, to preach and catechise.

  The cross stone would have been seen by the new visiting ministers as a primitive totem of Christianity from before ‘the abolition of Popery’. In the reformed church’s emphasis on the intellectual clarity of the word, the cloud of magical associations clustering around the cross stone would have been anathema. Two sermons a year were preached in the little church by the shore here for the rest of the century. The minister would have been adamant. The stone was to be got rid of. But the Shiant Islanders did not destroy or break it. They buried it. Their precious totem was hidden but still kept, nurtured closely within a yard or two of where they all sat in the evening around the hearth, a secret presence in the substratum – you could say the subconscious – of the house.

  This, too, is another version of the hinge of Shiant history. The turning of the stone face-down, the burying of its meanings in the dark, the denigration of an ancient way of thinking and its substitution with a clarified, authoritative Calvinism: all of this has seemed to Gaelic intellectuals, particularly in this century, like the turning-point in the culture of the Hebrides. Among the finds made in the blackhouse was a small folded copper alloy strip, about four inches long and half an inch wide. It may be part of a binding strip used in the eighteenth century to finish the outer edges of a Bible’s cover boards. Book replaces stone, word image and intellect the symbolic heart.

  The Stornoway-born poet and Celtic scholar, Professor Derick Thomson, has written a poem ‘Am Boxachrocais’: ‘The Scarecrow’, stimulated, he told me, by no particular event but by ‘religious antagonism in the Lewis of my youth to secular music, dancing, even secular story-telling’, which envisages precisely the kind of moment in which the minister of Lochs walks into this blackhouse. As the biggest building at this end of the Shiants, it might well have been the cèilidh-house, the house in which people met, talked and told stories on the benches around the central hearth, and from which, when the evening came to an end, each would walk back to his own bed, his path lit by a glowing peat taken from this fire:

  That night

  the scarecrow came into the cèilidh-house:

  a tall, thin black-haired man

  wearing black clothes.

  He sat on the bench

  and the cards fell from our hands.

  One man

  was telling a folk-tale about Conall Gulban

  and the words froze on his lips.

  A woman was sitting on a stool,

  singing songs, and he took the goodness out of her music.

  But he did not leave us empty handed:

  he gave us a new song,

  and tales from the Middle East,

  the fragments of the philosophy of Geneva,

  and he swept the fire from the centre of the floor

  and set a searing bonfire in our breasts.

  Perhaps that is why the stone has such a strange air to it now. When Linda first found it buri
ed in the floor, and when she first rolled it back to expose its carved face, I was there with her, to hear the shriek and see her look of horror at what she had revealed. All the holiness of the seventh-century hermit who made it is overlaid with the chill behind its burying. That act of joyless denial feels quite unholy and this first phase of the ending of the Shiants’ full life left me feeling troubled. I went for a walk that evening high on the east side of Eilean an Tighe, with the peregrines squawking like farmyard birds in the air beside me, and it came to me then, I think for the first time with the force of reality, that this was not a holiday place; that grim and persistent struggle had been the nature of life here; and that the replacement with a printed Gaelic Bible of a nurtured ancient stone was a symptom not of godliness but of empire, imposition, control and a sort of shrinking of life. The sea room of the Shiants had begun to die by the 1720s.

  11

  EVERY DAY, WE WOKE AT EIGHT, brushed our teeth in the little stream that runs down from the spring to the sea, rubbing the toothbrushes with a sprig of the watermint that grows there in summer, cooked our breakfast and ate it on the rocks outside the house, before dragging ourselves back up the hill to the site of the house and starting to excavate again. The story I can tell you here was not at all clear at the time. The evidence sifted and sorted by archaeologists is fragmentary at best. It is the science of the abandoned, the forgotten and the hidden. All you find is an impression of the life that gave rise to it, like the spoor of a hare in the grass, or the marks left by the wings of a grouse as it takes off from the snow on a bank. It is, in other words, a negative, a mould, from which the thing itself, the shape of life, has to be inferred. Only later when all the evidence is there in front of you and you can arrange it into a form that seems to make sense, can you understand what it was you were finding.

  ‘Record and collect, record and collect’: that was Pat Foster’s repeated mantra as we squatted with our little scraping trowels on the floor of the abandoned house and in the barn that was built in the 1720s on its northern side. Fragments of anything that might be significant, any flake of stone, bone or china, any shift in the colour of the soil, was picked up, photographed and drawn, with no idea whether it mattered or not. Everything mattered.

  Nuance had to be read as carefully as a portraitist would investigate the face of his sitter. But nuance is not enough. Detail has to be set within a larger, overarching picture. I tried to apply what I had gathered of the documentary history to what was emerging from the excavation. It certainly became clear from the carefully preserved papers in the National Archives in Edinburgh that life wasn’t easy for the church on the islands and that the ministers had trouble supervising the Shiant flock. ‘The Lewis island is the most spacious and most remote of all the western islands’, the Skye Presbyters had moaned to the officials of the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge in Scotland in 1722. Two decades later, in October 1744, Collin Mackenzie, Minister of Lochs, wrote a sad complaint bewailing his circumstances to ‘the Very Reverend the Moderator of the Committee for Reformation of the Highlands and Islands’. He wanted extra staff and a raise. Among the most burdensome of his expenses and difficulties were

  the Islands of Shaint (a place well known to seafaring men) at the Distance of Sixteen miles of Sea and Land from the minister’s manse lying towards the south. In these islands are thirty examinable persons and the minister can go there in the summer and that at a vast expense being obliged to hire a boat and Crew. Moreover this parish is very discontiguous being divided by three long arms of the sea which renders it difficult for the minister to visit the people and for the people to visit him.

  This is, of course, special pleading, but here too is another modern note: the first mention of any idea that the Shiants are difficult to get to. Within a few decades the idea of ‘remoteness’ would have brought the old life here to an end.

  The population had increased between 1722 and 1744 from twenty to thirty ‘examinable persons’. These were people who were able to learn and repeat a catechism. Although the second figure only comes from Collin Mackenzie, the Minister of Lochs, and it was in his interest to exaggerate the numbers to justify his demand for more money, it might imply a total population of about forty, including both the younger children and perhaps the simple or the dumb. By the 1760s, the early economist John Walker, in his survey of the Hebrides, recorded twenty-two people on the Shiants, but his figures are often suspect and usually out of date. Almost certainly, that is an underestimate. Then there is a gap until 1796, when the Reverend Alexander Simson, by then minister in Lochs, wrote of the islands in the Statistical Account of the parish: ‘There is one family residing on the largest of the islands, for the purpose of attending the cattle.’

  The picture is clear: a rising population until the middle years of the century and then a quite sudden collapse. It is here that the Shiant crisis reaches its sharpest point. This is not some slow and gradual sliding into the dark. The number of people increases, the level of work, business and energy has to grow to satisfy their demands, the resources of the islands are stretched and squeezed, the system is pushed to its limits, and then quite suddenly it breaks. After about 1770 – and there is no florid moment in the documents to which one can point as the end itself – life here for a self-sufficient community, for a complex of reasons, becomes unviable. The bulk of people leave and a single family remains, tending the animals, almost certainly not as sub-tenants of the man who rented the islands from the Seaforth estate, but as his employees. The relationship of people to the Shiants had for the first time in some five millennia become commercial, and the islands had entered the modern world.

  Could our excavation of the eighteenth-century house, combined with an examination of the surrounding landscape, illuminate this fulcrum of Shiant history? We looked for the signs. When the house was improved in the 1720s, with its new south drain and external paving, the barn was built on its northern side. It was a sign of things going well. The old door that led out that way was blocked and cattle were kept in there. We dug into their manure, transformed over the centuries into a sticky green clay, near the base of the barn walls. Animals were all-important to the way anyone could live on the islands. The small black cows they had were a way of storing nutrients. They reduced people’s dependence on the seasons. They flattened out the difference between summer abundance and winter dearth. What the cattle ate on the high summer pastures of Garbh Eilean and Eilean an Tighe could be consumed by people in the form of beef, milk and all the dairy products, almost at will. The little cupboard built into the south-west corner of the house, the dampest and the coldest corner, raised a few inches above the floor, would probably have been the place in which the milk and cheese and butter would have been kept in earthernware pots, sometimes wrapped in moss to keep them cold. It was a tiny, cool room, a larder chilled by the wind. In bad years, when food was short, blood would be drained from a living cow and used to make a blood pudding. Sometimes, at the end of a winter inside, these valuable creatures were so weak that they had to be carried out to the spring pastures by their owners. And they were valuable. Twenty cows would make a very good dowry, but as Samuel Johnson said, ‘two cows are a decent fortune for one who pretends to no distinction.’ The rates of exchange were clearly established: one cow equalled three ewes equalled a spinning wheel equalled two blankets equalled a small chest or kist.

  A cow was portable, or at least drivable, wealth. She also, with her winter manure which built up in the barns and byres, provided fertility for the vegetable gardens and plots of oats and barley. The lower end of the house, as well as the barn, was intended for animals. We found thick deposits of degraded manure there. The east wall of the house was taken down every spring, so that the manure could be shovelled out more easily, and then built back up. That too was obvious in the structure. The neat coursing of most of the house walls was almost completely absent at the east end, the stones haphazardly tumbled back together the last time the wall was
reconstructed.

  Before things got bad, the people here would also have used ponies to carry their heavy goods up from the beach, the manure to the fields, and maybe to plough the fields. As Robert Dodgshon has shown all over the Highlands and Islands, when a community has plenty of relatively fertile land for its population, and not too many mouths to feed, it makes sense to use a horse where you can. The ground needed to grow hay for its winter sustenance can be spared from growing arable crops. It is reckoned that in the Hebrides, with he traditional varieties of black oats and bere barley – low yielding but necessarily tough in the face of hostile weather – about five acres of cultivated ground were needed to feed a family of five. In the 1720s there were five Shiant families with twenty ‘examinable persons’ and perhaps another five children. They would have needed twenty-five acres of arable to keep themselves alive.

  From walking the islands again and again and by looking carefully at large-scale air photographs, I have measured the amount of ground on the Shiants that was cultivated at some time in the past, or at least for which evidence survives in the form of cultivation ridges. The map shows how it divides.

  Apart from the obvious conclusion that the sweetness of Mary was the foundation of all life here, and that Garbh Eilean was mainly for grazing (only 1.7% of the island under cultivation at any time, compared with 21.6% of Eilean Mhuire and 7.0% of Eilean an Tighe), the acreages themselves are significant. Thirty-odd acres of good ground (and one should perhaps reduce that figure because these measurements count all ground ever cultivated, some of it necessarily bad and sour) would be enough for about twenty-five people. As soon as the population started to climb towards forty, then serious difficulties – the prospect of malnutrition, illnesses that could not be shaken off, a loss of morale and eventual abandonment – became likely.