These pieces are, of course, a sign of the market: tradable objects, the new system of things, of money in circulation, of the world outside the islands. An annual July market was held in Stornoway every year, to which the Shiant Islanders might have gone with their own wares to sell: puffin feathers for pillows, perhaps some cheese, wool dyed with the lichen and woven into tweed, or knitted into socks and jerseys. It is likely that some traveller had pieces for sale at the market from the huge factories to the south. It isn’t difficult to imagine how beautiful their colours would have seemed to anyone accustomed to the dun and orange-tinged ordinariness of the craggans.
The Stornoway market is a possibility, but one fragment of Shiant ceramic in particular hints at another source. It is a small piece, an inch and a half long by three-quarters wide, of a large dinner plate made in white salt-glazed stoneware.
In the clear glaze, somebody quite carefully has scratched a picture of a sailing ship. No more than one or two bellied-out sails, a couple of shrouds and some ratlines are visible in the fragment, but in the care of the work, and its double expertise – the man knows both the workings of a ship’s rigging and how to engrave in a difficult, slippery medium – there are signs here that the Shiants in some way or other had contact with a deep-sea sailor. This, in effect, is scrimshaw work, which the whalers usually carved on bone and tusk, rather than plates, catering for a sophisticated urban market which valued the primitive material. But whalebone was a common material here.
We found a spatula or scraper made out of it in the byre midden, and it would be less attractive for a Shiant Islander than the glamorous, new and expensive kind of china just then becoming available. Is it possible that this plate was brought back to the Shiants, perhaps to a mother, by a son who had left to find work at sea, as life at home seemed to become both constrained and difficult? Is this, in other words, by the hand of a Shiant emigrant, one of the first of the forty-odd inhabitants to leave the world of self-sufficiency for the world of money before the general rush began?
That meeting of porcelain and craggan, of the blue fronds and the thumb-whorls, of the sheeny modern glaze and the chthonic realities of the clay, recurs again and again in the objects we found in the house. There were parts, incredible as it might sound, of a wineglass, as well as many green bottle pieces. There were some scissors and a thimble (machine-made, copper alloy), a leather button and a copper one. Mixed up with them were objects from the other side of the divide: several stone tools and a stone garden hoe, made from Shiant dolerite, polished on most sides, carefully chipped at its point, perhaps from a site halfway between the blackhouse and the landing beach, where there is some evidence of stoneworking on the hillside.
Some tools and wineglasses: these are the sharp edges of a world in transition. The kind of war which that disjunction can generate, between ancient and modern, between local and national or supranational, between the antiquated and the technological, suddenly and momentarily erupted into the Shiant Islanders’ lives. Thursday, 29 May 1746 is the only point at which a grander history touched the islands even a passing blow. Bonnie Prince Charlie is on the run and the Minch is thick with naval vessels on the look-out for him. At one point, watchers from the Lewis shore can see fifteen warships spread across the horizon.
One of them is HMS Triton, a new frigate, less than a year old, a fast ship, built for observation and pursuit, under the command of William Brett, recently promoted Commander. His log is in the Public Record Office. It was known that the Young Pretender was looking for a ship back to France and the Triton’s cruise, up from Sheerness in Kent, around the northern capes and down into the Hebrides, consisted of one arrest after another: a hoy from Flamborough bound for St Malo, a Danish ketch en route from Stavanger to London, a Norwegian sloop carrying lobsters to the English markets, several Dutch fishermen, a snow (from the Dutch snaw, meaning a small vessel like a brig) from Aberdeen carrying hay to the army at Cromarty, a ship from Virginia bringing tobacco to Hull, a schooner bound to Madeira from Rotterdam and another snow from Lancaster heading for Riga. You could scarcely ask for a more vivid demonstration of the surge of new business in the eighteenth-century seas.
Early on the morning of 29 May, with a slight wind coming out of the north, the Triton was four miles or so south of the Shiants when she spotted a sail to the north of her in the faintest of dawn light. Brett ordered the Triton to give chase. The other ship turned and beat towards the Shiants. Like all naval action in the days of sail, everything happened in slow motion. Only at seven o’clock was the Triton near enough to fire warning shots, which they did, several of them, ‘but ye chase would not bring to.’
By now the other vessel was in the bay between the three islands and at half past seven that morning Brett from his quarterdeck could see ‘a boat full of men go on Shore from her … The Boat Return’d with two men which was again filled but our shots now Reaching them they got into ye vessel again.’
Although the ship was attempting to make good its escape to the north, Brett now had them pinned against the Garbh Eilean shore. The puffins would have been wheeling above them, startled into flight by the Triton’s warning guns. Clearly, in the islands where the Pretender was undoubtedly still on the run, this was most suspicious behaviour. Had he stumbled on the fugitive himself?
At eight o’clock in the morning the Triton came up with its quarry ‘and she brought too with her head off Shore and hoisted English Colours. Ditto. Saw their men Rang’d at their Quarters She having fourteen Guns.’ It looked for a moment as if a duel was about to take place but the terrifying sight bearing down on them of a fully armed and crewed man-of-war (the Triton carried between twenty and thirty guns and a complement of a hundred and thirty) brought a different outcome and a strange story:
The Mate came on Board and Inform’d us She was a Snow from Dublin bound to Virginia with Bale Goods som Powder and Shot 81 Men & 26 Women Indentured Servants when on ye 13 Instant Being a Hundred Leagues to ye Westward of Ireland ye Servants had rose and Seiz’d the Vessel and order’d her to be Steer’d for ye Ile of Sky in order to make a prize of her & join the Pretender’s Son, that 9 of them with 3 women had gone on Shore in the Boats.
Brett took the rest of the mutineers, and the snow’s crew, on board the Triton. He put his own men on the snow, the Gordon as it was called, and took her in tow. He would eventually deliver them to Carrickfergus Jail in Ireland.
But what of the twelve Jacobites who had landed on the Shiants? The next day Brett sent a boat ashore on Scalpay to ‘Acquaint the Magistrate of those Rebells which had landed with Arms in order for his Apprehending them.’ The naval officer would have been unaware of the irony. Bonnie Prince Charlie had passed this way twice in recent weeks, once only nineteen days earlier, skulking at night in an open boat down the Lewis and Harris shores, running from the hunt that was on for him in the north of the island, and once previously at the very end of April. A shipwrecked Orcadian, giving his name as Sinclair, had landed on Scalpay and had been taken in by the magistrate and tacksman, Donald Campbell. Sinclair rescued a cow from a bog and went fishing in the Minch with Campbell’s son before anyone realised he was the Young Pretender. News got out and the pro-government and fearsomely anti-Catholic minister of Harris, the Rev. Aulay MacAulay (the historian’s great-grandfather) arrived with a posse to arrest the Prince. Campbell would have none of it and shielded the Prince while he escaped. For many years an inscription on Campbell’s house in Scalpay (or at least a later house on the same site) recorded it as the place where Prince Charlie had stayed ‘when he was wandering as an exile in his own legitimate Kingdom.’ You won’t find it there now: the house became a Presbyterian manse and the Jacobite inscription was harled over. One thing is certain: Campbell would not have pursued the Irish Jacobite rebels on the Shiants too hotly. The Shiant population, if they were still Mackenzies, or still attached to the Mackenzies, might well have had Jacobite sympathies themselves. They might have thought, with a Catholic king returne
d to the throne, that the sterilising Presbyterianism of the Church would have been removed from their necks. The holy stone might have been recovered from beneath the floor. They might have entertained the rebels in this very house, perhaps even able to communicate in Irish and Gaelic, to tell the stories and sing the songs which their shared tradition had preserved. There is no saying: after the Triton leaves, the Irish rebels disappear from history and the normality of Shiant life closes back over them like the tide above a rock.
Lying awake one summer night in Compton Mackenzie’s house, with the dogs on the bed beside me, and the sky outside already half light, I abruptly realised with middle-of-the-night clarity something about the other house we were so carefully excavating up the hill. The presence of wineglasses, winebottles, sugar bowls, a teapot, a thimble, scissors, a Bible: these were not the belongings of a peasant’s house. This was the house of a sophisticated family. I had often in previous years gone to look at it, full of nettles and with a hint of rats in the little cupboard at the corner and in the holes in the walls. I had always seen it as a primitive, roofless shed. Now, though, quite suddenly, I saw it for what it was: this was the tacksman’s house. These were his belongings we were finding, broken, brushed to the shadowy corners of the room. This was the house of the last man to live on the Shiants who thought of them as profoundly his, connected to him not by contract but by a deep sense of identity with the land itself. Tacksmen were named after the property they held and this man would have been known as ‘Shiant’. Here in our hands were the last flickers of a form of possession which stretched back to the Vikings and which predated any modern understanding of land as a market commodity. We were touching the outer edges of an ancient past at the very moment it was coming to an end.
12
AS I WALK ACROSS the Shiants today, along the path which the black cattle would have taken from the byres by the shore to the high grazings, with the meadow grass and the tiny bilberry bushes brushing at my boots; past the abandoned lazybeds to the cluster of little houses in the central valley; up past the rush-filled kilnhouse, identified by Pat Foster, where the barley and oats sodden in autumn rains might have been half-dried before storage and threshing; and as I stand in the cleared floor of the house we excavated, so radically roofless now, so exposed to the cold and the wet, I feel a vicarious nostalgia for the wholeness which is now absent here.
The walls of a blackhouse are four feet thick. It was always said that if you wanted to build one (a task for the community together) you had to collect the amount of stone you thought necessary and triple it. If it is true to say that you can’t remember time, only the places in which time occurred, then I think you could say that the bulk of these enormous walls is a kind of time sponge, deeply absorbent of the moment passing, sucking up lives as they happened, holding events as if in a vast memory bank. Standing in the house after the archaeologists had left, and listening to the lark still singing above me, I could feel that these stones, and by extension these islands, continue to hold the memories of the life that was lived in them a quarter of a millennium ago.
Perhaps it is more of a desire than a sensation, a wish to feel that the memories remain. Certainly it is an appetite that needs feeding. What was the colour and smell of the ancient Shiant normality? How did the people who lived here behave towards each other, how rich was their life in more than the material sense? How good was existence here in the mid-eighteenth century? One or two memoirs can do something to people the ruins. The Rev. John Buchanan, the lustful missionary, found the people in Harris, as one might expect, divided between courtesy and suspicion. ‘They address one another by the title of gentleman or lady and embrace one another most cordially, with bonnets off,’ he wrote. ‘And they are never known to enter a door without blessing the house and people so loud as to be heard, and embracing every man and woman belonging to the family. They both give and receive news, and are commonly entertained with the best fare their entertainers are able to afford.’
‘Neighbour’ was the common term of affection and endearment. The essence of life was shared, as much for practical as for moral reasons. The pattern of land-holding, at least below the level of the tacksman, consisted of two concentric circles: the family and its homestead, with its own walled vegetable patch or kailyard, its own animals, its own family tools, a spade, other simple cultivating tools and a distaff for spinning. Outside that, by the eighteenth century anyway, was the joint farm, which would include the neighbouring waters, and for the working of which a jointly owned plough and boat would have been needed. Each of the five Shiant families would have a right to an equal share in the commonly held arable ground and farmed ridges. The operation of both boat and plough would depend on team work. A boat would need five men to launch it, four to row and one to steer and in Gaelic there is a separate system of numbers to describe teams rather than a collection of individuals.
A place like this, where nothing can be given and little risked, where anything eccentric or not done before is likely to be condemned or despised, is the landscape of received wisdom. There is a saying for every occasion, a nodule of deeply conservative and hard-won understanding. And there is a Gaelic proverb for this: ‘No one is strong without a threesome / and, with a foursome, at best they’ll be limping.’
A plough would need at least three men; one to lead the horse, one to hold the plough and one to turn the sod neatly over after they had passed. But four ponies would be required and each man would have had only one or two. Life was unsustainable alone.
It was far from being a communist system. Private property was fiercely protected, but an equal share of rent, an equal number of stock on the common grazings, an equal quantity of arable land and equal commitment to the work were the essential conditions without which these island communities could not have operated. It would have been impossible to pull up or launch the boat, handle the sheep or dig the ground without your neighbours. I have sweated alone on these islands for hours on these tasks, longing for nothing more than a helping hand, surveying the length of the undug lazybed like a pile of last week’s washing up; despairing of the possibility of ever pulling the dinghy above the tide; finally flummoxed by the impossibilities of catching on your own a lamb whose leg had somehow been cut and was bleeding. Work done in common is more than efficient; it is a source of pleasure, stimulation and happiness. When my friends Patrick Holden and Becky Hiscock came around the bay from the house to help me dig the heavy, uncooperative sods of the lazybed which I was attempting to cultivate, it was honestly as if the sun had come out. Alone nothing, together everything: that is one of the governing facts.
For the Reverend Buchanan, with the idea of individual salvation and private guilt in his mind, all of that community talk seemed to be something of a veneer over a harsher reality. Everyone would keep the head of a sheep he had killed for four or five days after he had done so. The head carried the ears and the ears carried the marks which identified the owner. Only with a head could a man prove a carcass was his own. And the old were given scant respect: ‘When a man becomes so frail as not to be in a capacity to look after his flock of sheep in person, he is very rapidly stript of them, and that frequently by his near relations.’
One has to wait for a nineteenth-century account of popular culture in the Isles for life to be seen here in a sympathetic light. Alexander Carmichael, without whose tireless collecting over decades towards the end of the nineteenth century, half the Gaelic cultural landscape would be missing, wrote the following passage in the introduction to his monumental Carmina Gadelica, or ‘Gaelic Songs’, intermittently published between 1899 and the 1970s. It is worth quoting at length because it gives a more affectionate and richer portrait of life in such a house as the Shiant blackhouse than any that has ever been written. The people of the Outer Hebrides, Carmichael wrote,
are good to the poor, kind to the stranger, and courteous to all. During all the years that I lived and travelled among them, night and day, I never met with
incivility, never with rudeness, never with vulgarity, never with aught but courtesy. I never entered a house without the inmates offering me food or apologising for their want of it. I never was asked for charity in the West, a striking contrast to my experience in England, where I was frequently asked for food, for drink, for money, and that by persons whose incomes would have been wealth to the poor men and women of the West.
That is precisely the experience that I continue to have in these islands. Time after time, at the door of Donald and Rachel MacSween in Scalpay, I have turned up filthy and stinking from weeks on the Shiants, and time after time they have housed me, washed me, washed my clothes, fed me, driven me here and there, and looked after me, my boat and my belongings in a way which is scarcely conceivable in any other part of Britain. That much of the old culture remains but Carmichael was travelling early enough to see the blackhouse, and in particular the tigh cèilidh, the party house, still functioning in the way it was intended to:
The house of the story-teller is already full, and it is difficult to get inside and away from the cold wind and soft sleet without. But with that politeness native to the people, the stranger is pressed to come forward and occupy the seat vacated for him beside the houseman. The house is roomy and clean, if homely, with its bright peat fire in the middle of the floor. There are many present – men and women, boys and girls. All the women are seated, and most of the men. Girls are crouched between the knees of fathers or brothers or friends, while boys are perched wherever – boy-like – they can climb. The houseman is twisting twigs of heather into ropes to hold down thatch, a neighbour crofter is twining quicken roots into cords to tie cows, while another is plaiting bent grass into baskets to hold meal.
Sea Room Page 24