These islands are better adapted for sheep and a few goats than for cows, which cannot be kept from falling over the rocks, – an accident that happened while I was there. I should think the fine woolled Cheviot breed would thrive well on them. I mentioned this to the tacksman: but he said that sheep were to apt to get fat there; and then they became lazy, and fell over the rocks, like cows. But this objection is easily obviated by stocking more fully, which would prevent them from getting more fat than necessary. Cows cannot get at half the grass. I am also apt to think that these Isles might form a commodious fishing station. The seas around swarm with fishes of various sorts, and there is a commodious landing place for boats between Garve and Y-Kill.
The fishing station was not a good idea – no anchorage and no market – but since Headrick’s report, the Shiants have been a sheep place. Sheep get fatter there quicker than on the mainland of Lewis (Hughie MacSween said that in some years he had fat lambs from Eilean Mhuire by June, whereas in Scaladale or on Seaforth Island, where he also had his stock, they would never be fat before the end of August) and they also have more lambs. Because the Shiant sheep tend to have – and are able to rear – more twins than elsewhere, the average lamb survival rate is about one lamb per ewe, or a ratio of a hundred per cent, whereas on Lewis, even in a good year, they are pleased to get seventy per cent. It is said by Tommy Macrae and other Lewismen that Shiant lamb has yellow fat, which only a few weeks’ grazing on Lewis can turn white, and it is the ‘sea birds manuring the grass’ that is to blame. And at Dingwall Market outside Inverness, the wild and springy stock from these islands had a reputation before the war as the ‘Shiant Isle Jumpers’.
It is the relative riches of the Shiants which has kept the shepherding tradition alive here, despite the costs and difficulty. The islands are a step up, not down, for Lewis or Harris sheep men, which is what makes coming out with them here such unalloyed pleasure.
The grazing tenancy has been handed down in this century in an unbroken chain. Calum MacSween, the Tarbert baker, was Lord Leverhulme’s tenant, then Compton Mackenzie’s and my father’s. He left it to his son Johnnie, and it then went to his cousin Donald ‘DB’ Macleod of Scalpay, a butcher, poet and romanticist. When he died, it went to Hughie MacSween, Calum’s nephew, and from him to another cousin, Donald MacSween, the Scalpay fisherman. When Donald had some trouble with his heart, he was forced to give up the Shiants, but there was a man waiting in the wings. John Murdo Matheson of Gravir in Lewis, who is now twenty-nine, had left school at sixteen (‘I didn’t have the academic brain to go on’) and had started work part-time at Stornoway Mart and part-time on a farm north of the town. He wanted more than that and the man who owned both mart and farm encouraged him to have a go at taking on the Shiants. He knew Hughie MacSween from his visits to the market and when, in 1989, John Murdo heard that Hughie was thinking of giving up the Shiants through illness, he ‘clicked into gear’.
John Murdo’s father had a nickname for him: ‘Friends of the Earth’, because of his unrequitable hunger for land. The family already had two crofts, one at Gravir above the lochside and another a few miles away at Calbost, and now he wanted to add the Shiants to the collection. He has a way with animals and a natural authority. Mackenzie, Nicolson and Matheson blood all flow in his veins. I once remarked on this to him. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘I think we’ve got it all covered.’ But he was only seventeen and that was too young. Besides, he couldn’t raise the money to buy the stock from Hughie. The islands went to Donald MacSween and only in 1996 did he transfer them to John Murdo. By then, he was working both at the mart and as a slaughterman at Heather Isle Meats in Stornoway. Few of these arrangements have anything to do with the nominal proprietor; he is the lucky recipient of the grace, courtesy, charm, energy, loyalty and generosity that pours out from one Hebridean tenant after another. No rent is paid nowadays, but we share the costs of maintaining the house.
The pattern of the shepherding year is immutable. The tups are put on in November, about eight or nine of them for the three hundred-odd ewes, and are taken off in February, ‘knackered’ as John Murdo says. If the weather prevents them being collected and given cake and nurture at home in Calbost, as happened in the dreadful storms of early 2000, with winds in Stornoway recorded at a hundred and six miles an hour, the exhausted and expensive animals can die on the islands. Lambs are born in late April or early May, deliberately unsupervised. If anyone lands on the islands and disturbs the ewes at this time, the likely outcome is that the sheep will desert their lambs. At the end of May the lambs are marked – male a red spot, female blue – and the ram lambs castrated. The flock is shorn in July, an exhausting, hot few days, as the wool is clipped entirely by hand. In early September, the sheep are gathered again, the best ewes and ewe lambs kept back for stock on the islands and the cull ewes and marketable lambs taken to Stornoway. In November, finally, the tups are put out there again for the winter.
Each trip also has its pattern. You arrive usually on a Saturday and as Hughie MacSween says, ‘there may be a dram or two in the provisions. And the first night we arrive, whether it was a Friday or a Saturday – now DB didn’t approve of this – we’d have a dram. And that first night the whole lot would be perished. The whole lot.’
The perishing of the dram is a wonderful chute to oblivion, an increasingly sentimental slither into the night. John Murdo has brought his uncle Kennie Mackenzie, a joiner from Leurbost in Lochs, and ‘two boys from the mart’ with him. Kenneth Angus Maclver – Toby – is a shepherd and stockman. Nona, whose real and unused name is Donald Smith, is a shepherd and ex-butcher. The tilly lamp hisses over us. John Murdo has cooked us a leg of lamb from his own sheep at Calbost, which he slaughtered and butchered himself, and some of the potatoes I have grown in the lazybed at the far end of the bay.
Toby: There is nothing like a good potato. And that is a good potato.
John: You don’t want too much seaweed on it. Seaweed makes the potato wet.
Kennie: I hope you didn’t plant those on a Sunday, Adam.
Adam: No, I’m sure it was a weekday, Kennie.
Kennie: Because nothing planted on a Sunday ever grows.
Adam: No, and fish mustn’t be landed on a Sunday.
Kennie: It’s better that they rot on the shore.
Adam: Even if they’re caught on the Saturday and you are late coming in?
Kennie: You would benefit more by throwing the lot than eating even a morsel of one of them.
The coal fire glows so hot that we are all in shirt sleeves and sweat pours down John Murdo’s face.
Toby: You think it’s hot in here, Adam? You should see us at the clipping. Fifteen ewes and it’s in the sea to cool off. Especially on Mary Island, where the sun shines off the rocks by the fank there. Lambs jumping all over you. It’s hot work then. It’s fast work. You might think it’s hot now. I can tell you it’s hot then.
The rats scuffle behind the boarding around the room.
Nona: Ah, there we are. That’s a sound I like the sound of. It’s always nice to know you’ve got some neighbours handy.
John Murdo is king here. Only a slight gesture is needed from him, nothing more than moving to untie a knot or shift a coal on the fire, for the others to jump to, looking to him.
The dogs, which have been tied up outside, are brought in: John Murdo’s Sheba, a delicate little thing, Toby’s Queenie, hyperactive, with darting eyes and quivering ears, Kennie’s Roy, one eye brown, the other eye blue, and Nona’s Spot, a sweet-natured, big clown of a creature, named after a spot on his ear, and who refuses ever to go to his left. They curl up at their respective masters’ feet and their ears are stroked.
John: When Sheba gets home she’ll be on the tips of her toes for a few days. It’s hard-going for the dogs here. Her feet get so sore and her pads are soft. She needs a bit of looking after.
Nona: Not like this one. The first year we were here, wasn’t it, over by the salt pool above the cliffs next to the natur
al arch, that was Spot’s day wasn’t it?
Kennie: Wasn’t it?
Adam: What happened?
Nona: We were gathering them down there and I sent Spot off on a run over to his left to get behind the sheep, out, you know, in a curve like that. As soon as I’d given the whistle I knew I had made a mistake. It wasn’t even worth looking. Phut. He’s gone straight over. I told John it wasn’t worth looking over. He’s dead. So we went to the cliff edge and there he was, wet through, on a rock down at the edge of the sea barking up at us. It must be sixty, seventy feet down there.
Adam: What had happened?
Nona: It was his speed that saved him. He must have leaped out right out wide like that above and over the rocks and into the sea eighty or ninety feet below him and then somehow climbed to the rocks at the shore.
John: It was a terrible swell that day. We got round there in the boat but if he hadn’t jumped for the boat, we’d never have got him. But he jumped for the boat.
Nona: And I had to keep him going not to let him stiffen up. He would have stiffened up if he’d laid down. And when we got home he was sore for days afterwards. He must have smacked into the sea, his belly. But it didn’t change him. He’s a good dog.
John: I had a dog die here. Meg. She’d been poorly at the beginning of the year, a liver complaint, and then we were out here in March and she wasn’t right. She wouldn’t come out of the house. And then that night she was lying there next to me at night on the other bed and in the morning she was as flat as a pancake.
Nona: A good dog she was, always on the go, a good soul, wasn’t she?
We all stare at the fire for a while as the dram continues its perishing around us.
Toby: What about the boy who got a Russian one out of those catalogues?
Nona: A dog?
Toby: No, it was a wife, Nona. There are a few tasty bits in there.
Nona: What was his like?
Toby: A hefty number.
Nona: I don’t think she’s arrived yet.
Toby: She’s a lawyer, isn’t she?
Nona: Well, she’ll have him if she is.
Kennie: But that’s no way to get married.
Toby: He only knew her a week or two.
John: He had one before. She didn’t last long.
Toby: Women are best left out of it. I’ve got more daughters than I can count and none of them can boil an egg. They should be let out once a year to cook the Christmas dinner.
The five of us disintegrate into whisky-sodden hysterics and John puts another coal or two on the fire.
John: How many people would give their eye teeth to be here now?
Kennie: Aye, away from the cares of the world.
Adam: Hughie told me once that his uncle Calum, sitting on the beach here waiting for the boat, always used to say, without anyone ever prompting him, ‘There is no place outside Heaven’s Gates where I would prefer to be sitting than the place I am sitting in now.’
Nona: On a day like this you would never want to leave, would you?
The next day, being Sunday, nothing is done here. We go for a walk, we sit in the sunshine, we read the newspapers that we brought with us yesterday. We listen to the radio. It is a holiday away from the world. But come Monday, after a sober tea and coffee evening the night before, the work begins. In the drenching rain, we gather the sheep island by island. First on Eilean Mhuire, easily gathering them in a smooth and continuous sweep around the island and down on to the shore. There with the washed-up kelp on the floor of the fank, and wool and dung mingled on the cobbles, the bodies of the wet sheep pressing against the hurdles and the seals wailing on the offshore skerries, it is easily and quickly done. All the sheep are dosed with the worming drench, the fifteen best ewe lambs are marked for collection on Wednesday and then released back up to the pasture again.
Toby, in his yellow jacket and orange trousers, keeps muttering at Queenie, ‘Come into heel, will you,’ and Nona stands there with Spot beside him. ‘That’s the lambs, or some of them. They’ll look better when they’re dry.’ I asked him why he had given up butchery. ‘I couldn’t stand it on a good day, stepping out the back door and looking at the sky.’
In the dripping, drenching rain, Garbh Eilean is a different proposition altogether. The shags have gone now. There’s just nest after nest of fulmars crowded with grown chicks. The cloud is down low on the islands like a lid. It clings like smoke around the cliffs. The colour of the screes has been dulled in this early autumn rain and the corpses of sea birds, a kittiwake, a puffin, have already dissolved away – or perhaps the rats have had them – leaving just the feathers on the rain-glazed grass.
Garbh Eilean is a big, stocky brute of an island to shepherd. It is high and steep. Different parts of the flock are hefted to different areas and resist being herded. In particular, those which spend their lives down on the sweet rich grass at the Bagh don’t like coming up on to the sour acid moor of the high ground. One of them in particular, an old ewe that John Murdo calls ‘the old ski champion’, goads the rest. For year after year she has niftily dodged the gathering, allowing herself to be led almost to the top and then, when they think they have done it, suddenly turning round and skiing past men and dogs back down to the bottom, taking her sisters and granddaughters and enormous extended family down with her. There are ewes down there, with three unshorn fleeces one on top of another, which look like abandoned sofas.
In a mile-wide line, the five of us, each with a crook, and the four dogs, set about clearing Garbh Eilean. ‘Get on, come on, get up, goo on, goo on, shsssh, sssh, whistle, heaaunk, heank,’ – a grunted pushing with the back of the voice – and then to the dogs, ‘That’ll do. That’ll do. THAT’LL DO!’
John Murdo strides easily around the island, jumping down into a cleft to collect a ewe and a lamb that have squeezed themselves in there, Sheba endlessly tearing here and there to his whistles. ‘Just get up over, come up over. Sheba!’
He had asked me to drive the sheep the length of the southwest shore, down towards Annat and then on to Stocanish, and not to let any of them past me. It was a struggle in the broken ground, steep slippery places, some gooed over with shag muck, and with the sleeting rain slicking the surfaces of the rocks, as I sweated in my waterproofs, much too aware of the need to keep up with the others spread out across the hill above me. It is not exactly the dynamism of these men that is so impressive, more the habit of exertion, the muscle and resilience learned in a lifetime of work. I felt like a stick of asparagus next to them.
I emerged on to the high ground, thinking and hoping that I had kept all the sheep in front of me. I could see John Murdo in his green waterproofs, half a mile away, gesticulating to me and shouting.
‘What?’
His words were torn and broken by the wind.
Again and again, he was waving his stick in the direction I had come. I couldn’t hear but I guessed what he meant. Some sheep had doubled past me. I should go back to gather them, and so I did, half a mile back and half a mile back again, driving a couple of ewes and their lambs firmly in front of me. It worked this time, and I finally joined up with John Murdo and the others. ‘There were some ewes and lambs behind you,’ he said quietly, smiling.
‘I know,’ I said.
Now the difficult part: driving this gathered flock of some hundred and thirty ewes and the same number of lambs, along with the four tups which had survived the spring, down the steep south side, the Sron Lionta, of Garbh Eilean. ‘Don’t get below a sheep on that hillside,’ John Murdo said, ‘or if it falls or tumbles down on to you, that’s you.’
Slowly we edge them towards the lip. They seep across the hillside. This is not a way they usually come and there is a hesitation in the movement, a stickiness which means that as they come to the edge of the steep slope, which is at a gradient of perhaps two in one (‘There’s no point in describing it,’ Kennie says. ‘Just call it the Eiger.’), they stop. The sheep tremble on the brink. It is something like those
films of wildebeest crossing the river in the Serengeti, with the steam coming off the exhausted and bleating animals, many of them crammed on to little rock ledges, uncertain where to turn. A lamb suddenly slips and we watch it falling and rolling like a doll towards the sea, over and over, jerking and jumping over each new rock, all the way down to the little cove at the bottom, breaking its neck as it goes, dead before it is halfway there. It is left for the gulls and the rats because its flesh is bruised and no good for anything. ‘You can’t eat them,’ John Murdo says to me straightforwardly. ‘They are just wrecked. It would be all right if it fell into the sea. It would be all right if you could slit its throat and bleed it then, but with the bruising, the bloods’s clotting and it’s no good.’
Something in the quivering, bunched queue of sheep finally gives and they begin to trail carefully down the rocky path to the shore, the exhausted shepherds gently pushing them down in front of them. They trail across the isthmus and into the fank on the other side. Everything is in, including the champion skier. ‘There she is,’ Toby says, ‘the bastard from the Bagh, the bastard from hell, the bitch.’ The best twenty-five ewe lambs are marked to go back to Garbh Eilean and the rest are kept in, ‘to go home’.
The next day on Eilean an Tighe is easy by comparison. A steady sweep down to Mianish and back up again, with the big stocky body of a peregrine flying over the driven animals, draws the Eilean an Tighe flock into the fank by the house.
Only afterwards did I realise something which may or may not be significant. Every one of the islands had been gathered in a clockwise direction.
This might seem coincidental were it not for the fact that well into the historical period, recorded from Martin Martin in the 1690s to Margaret Fay Shaw in the 1930s in South Uist, the habit of doing things clockwise, which is also the direction the sun travels, from east to west, was in the past regarded as a form of blessing. Boats on leaving the shore, supplicants at holy wells, hosts greeting strangers, those resanctifying women after childbearing, anyone visiting an ancient and holy cairn: all these would involve a clockwise or sunwise turn, deiseil in Gaelic, as a form of charm. And here, even the way in which the sheep were turned from one holding pen to another within the fank was sunwise.
Sea Room Page 27