The one difference which the twentieth century made to the Shiants was the idea that they should be ‘conserved’. The shoulders of what Hughie MacSween once described to me as ‘our beloved Islands’ now sag beneath a heavy load of modern conservation labels. They have been designated under a succession of governments as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, a Special Protection Area, a Nature Conservation Review Site (Grade 2) and a Geological Conservation Review Site. Most recently, under the European Community’s Birds Directive, they have become part of the Natura 2000 Network. It all reminds me of some ancient military personage: Admiral of the Fleet Lord Shiant of the Minches SSSI AONB SPA NCRSii GCRS ECN2000. He staggers under the honours he wears. Every February, I am obliged by law to tell the Land Management Administrator of Scottish Natural Heritage, the government’s conservation agency, at their North-West Regional Headquarters Annex in Inverness, exactly what I have been doing with the place.
1. Information and expenditure [actual and planned]
2. Details of maintenance [completed and outstanding]
3. Information on any positive works undertaken to safeguard the interest of the site
and finally, the one that is more pleasure to answer than any other:
4. Details of access arrangements including for pedestrian access only.
There was one occasion when SNH wrote to me asking what kind of vehicular access there was to the site. As it is, the answer to all the questions is always the same: ‘No change.’
At one moment in the early 1970s the conservation movement reached out its long acquisitive hand towards the islands. I have the letters on file and I read them now with an amazement at the arrogance they display. They begin with a letter from George Waterston, the Scottish Director of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the RSPB, one of the most powerful and rich of all British conservation organisations. It is addressed not to my father but Colonel Sir Tufton Beamish, President of the RSPB.
23rd March 1970
Dear Tufton,
The Shiant Islands
This very interesting group of small islands lie some 12 miles north of Skye and about 5 or 6 miles east of Lewis.
The islands comprise a most important seabird breeding station; and when I landed there many years ago with James Fisher (from a National Trust for Scotland Cruise) we found vast numbers of Razorbills and Puffins nesting.
There is an attractive small bothy near the landing place at Mol Mor between Garbh Eilean and Eilean an Tigh. It seems to me that the group of islands would make a most attractive Bird reserve, and I wondered whether you could approach the proprietor, Mr Nigel Nicholson, MP?
My hackles rise even thirty years later. Why did George Waterston think that he could do things here any better than we could? Beamish, an old friend of my father’s, sent the letter on with a fair wind.
27th March 1970
You could be confident that we would take sensible and active advantage of an opportunity to make a bird reserve on the Shiant Islands.
My father replied, asking what the RSPB would like to do with the Shiants. He had no answer for two and a half years. He then received a long letter from George Waterston’s successor as the head of the RSPB in Scotland, Frank Hamilton, explaining what they had in mind. Nigel would have to agree not to alter or develop the Shiants without consulting the RSPB. He would also ‘agree subject to consultation’ to various improvements such as ‘tree planting, provision of water flashes, erection of hides for public viewing etc. etc. These are not necessarily suggested for the Shiants, they are merely an illustration of the sort of things sometimes included in an agreement.’ Mr Hamilton also suggested that the RSPB should be responsible for visitor control. That is what had happened on the island of Handa off the Scottish mainland, where a management agreement had been put in place and where the news of the RSPB’s involvement had resulted in an increase in the number of visitors:
Numbers have gone up to such an extent that a summer warden has become necessary to control and to mitigate damage both to the wildlife and the habitat. And the way we have done this in that particular case is to lay out a definite path to which we ask people to keep, thus ensuring that ‘delicate’ areas are protected. It is not uncommon for us to develop such a path as a nature trail giving visitors information about particular points of interest.
Finally, with some delicacy, Frank Hamilton brought up the slightly longer-term question:
Legal ownership would in no way be affected, although you might, if you felt it worthwhile entering into such a management arrangement, consider the possibility of writing in a provision for the Society to be given the first option to purchase in the event of your deciding to sell.
Something in Mr Hamilton’s description of the RSPB’s vision for the Shiants produced a response from my father for which I shall be forever grateful. He told Mr Hamilton that he was a little puzzled by the RSPB’s motives. What was the point of making somewhere a nature reserve which, thanks to ‘its very isolation, inaccessibility and lack of human habitation’, was already as protected from interference as any place could be? In fact, if the RSPB got involved with the Shiants, that might well be the most intrusive development the islands would ever have known: ‘A sudden influx of visitors might lead to disturbance, the appointment of a Warden, rules and regulations, “nature trails” – in fact all the business of regulated access which presupposes and even encourages such access.’ Nigel would have to consult the RSPB on all manner of details, such as the areas which could be grazed by my tenant’s sheep, the erection of hides for public viewing, visitor control, permission for my friends to land and camp there, and so on and so on. And for what purpose?
Mr Hamilton replied with a new reason for the RSPB to get involved: the Shiants were threatened by oil rigs in the Minch. Only with the RSPB at the Shiants’ side could they be protected from this new threat:
If an agreement, or better still a lease, were entered into by the two parties this would ensure that, should a developer come along at some later date, we could show them that there was a legal document to indicate that the R.S.P.B. thought highly of this place, enough to make it a reserve.
My father saw this for what it was – an empire-building bogey – and rejected the argument. If there was oil discovered in the Minch, the Shiants would be spoiled anyway. The RSPB could do nothing about it. With an agreement, however, he would be landed with an obligation to refer to the RSPB in everything he did. The answer was ‘no’. Mr Hamilton replied, hoping that my father would ‘appreciate that our desire is to see the Shiants unspoiled for many generations to come.’ There hasn’t been a squeak out of them since. I told John Murdo Matheson this story once. He said, ‘Promise me one thing, Adam. You will never, ever let one of those organisations get their hands on this place. It would be the end of it, the real death of it. It needs to belong to a person who loves it.’
‘It does,’ I said, ‘and it will.’
Tangled in with these two modern Shiant strands, as a place for holidays and a place for nature conservation, is a third: the working environment for the shepherds. The categories are not quite watertight: the shepherding trips to the islands are a kind of hard-working holiday. But I have always felt that the shepherds’ relationship to the islands, because of their repeated, deep familiarity with the contours of the place, decade after decade, and because of the sweat expended and the dangers undergone here, is much deeper and less trivial than all the passing summer visits of the proprietors, whether Leverhulme, Compton Mackenzie, my father or me. I believed the man who told Hughie MacSween in the Tarbert pub that he was the true owner of the place. However much we attend to the Shiants, however much Mackenzie’s novel or this book are a tribute to them, there is no matching the intimacy that Malcolm MacSween, DB Macleod or Hughie achieved with them.
One can only sit back and listen to the stories: the day when Hughie lost his dinghy from the beach and thought he should try a
nd float out to it on the lilo he had been using as a mattress in the house; or the day when trying to rescue some sheep stuck far down the cliff on Eilean Mhuire, dangling off a rope held by two of the boys up on the top, he slipped on the rain-slicked grass and hung there for a while, dependent on the strength of the men who were holding him. ‘That was the only time I really frightened myself there,’ he says, grinning and pulling on the lobe of his ear.
‘Now I start to hear about it,’ Joyce says as Hughie confesses to me the excitements of his life thirty years ago.
Hughie won’t be stopped now. His stories rumble on, ever quieter. What about the day when his uncle Calum, it was during the war, decided he had to take the cattle off? They were on Eilean an Tighe. The first beast they took out in the dinghy but they were worried one of them would put its hoof through the planks. So the rest of them were swum out on a rope and then attached to the steam derrick on the deck of the Cunninghams’ puffer. The men waited below in the dinghy as the poor beast was lifted by its horns high into the air, bellowing at the indignity and with fear. Just as the animal was high above the gunwale, the men in the dinghy guiding it in by the tail, the bullock emptied the entire contents of its four stomachs over the men below. That was the last time any cattle were seen on the Shiants.
At one time when they were there, a cow had somehow got itself into the house and had shut the door behind it. Who knows how long it had been there. It was lying down and we managed to get it on its feet and took it outside. It had not eaten or drunk for days, weeks maybe, who knows? So we brought it out and gave it water and it drank so much of the water, it was the water that killed it.
A deep drag on the cigarette: ‘Yes, yes. Aye, it was the water that killed it.’
Throughout his youth, Hughie had gone out to the Shiants with Donald Macleod, the butcher on Scalpay, known as ‘D B’ for ‘Donald Butcher’. He was a marvellously friendly, charming, avuncular man, his grey hair standing in stiff toothbrush bristles on his scalp, always in a big tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbow, and a habit of calling me ‘my dear’, holding me without affectation or ceremony by the elbow or shoulder. He was still the tenant of the islands when my father first gave them to me and would sometimes come out for the day on the fishing boat when I was there, to see the islands, just to have another look. What I never knew was that he was a poet and songwriter, famous in Scalpay and beyond for his songs, some of them a little risqué. There is a well-known one about a magnificent cockerel for whom the hens become increasingly desperate – ‘we couldn’t hear ourselves for the laughter,’ one Scalpay woman said to me when telling me about D B’s songs. Others were more romantic, often about his love for Mary, his wife. His most famous song was about the Scalpay Isle, a Scalpay woman fishing boat belonging to Norman Morrison. You can still hear it on the Gaelic radio from time to time. Iain MacSween, Hughie’s son, sometimes requested it to be played on a Sunday night when his father was out with the sheep on the Shiants, listening to the radio in the house there, and it is still sung at the Mod, the annual national Gaelic singing competition, where a prize called the Shiant Shield, endowed by Compton Mackenzie, is presented every year for the best example of traditional singing.
Something persists here in the world of the Shiants, a wholeness in the culture, despite the batterings it has received, which has disappeared from the rest of Britain. The idea of a butcher in southern England writing a song that brings together the wild romantic sea and landscape, his own love and fearfulness, his sense of the future and the persistence of his song after death – stock themes as these might be – is quite inconceivable. This is the enriched world to which the Shiants belong, to which D B belonged, to which Hughie and Donald MacSween belong and from which I am quite removed.
Another man with Scalpay connections, the great modern lyric poet Norman MacCaig who died in 1996 and whose mother was from Scalpay, asked, in the voice of ‘A Man in Assynt’, as the poem is called, the devastating question: ‘Who possesses this landscape? / The man who bought it or / I who am possessed by it?’
It is a reframing of all Donald MacCallum’s radical and passionate questions in the 1890s. Can one really buy a place like this with all its attendant associations? Do the conventional rights of property apply here as they might to a car or a flat in London or Glasgow? Can I say as the ‘owner’ of the Shiants that I ‘own’ them any more than any of those people who are heir to the sort of inheritance which so effortlessly shaped Donald Macleod’s poem? His own words answered those questions by not even addressing them, by his assuming an unadulterated intimacy with this world. How can an outsider ever compete with that?
Of course they can’t. In the late 1990s, with the coming of a Scottish parliament, these questions received a new burst of life. At its quietest, the land reform movement was insistent on at least a right of universal access to wild land. At its most radical, a view that did not in the end find much favour with the Scottish Executive, the idea of a private individual owning land was itself called into doubt. On a Scottish internet discussion group, [email protected], the owner and convener of the group, Robert Stewart, a member of the SNP National Council, suggested early in 2001, just as I was finishing this book, that ‘all Scottish mountains, and certain other uncultivated moorland [should] be brought into perpetual national common ownership.’ I asked why and what benefits might accrue either to the place or to the local community from public ownership?
Stewart replied, in brief, that the land had traditionally belonged to the people and that it had been stolen from them by the Crown and its vassals: ‘I, personally, believe that land “ownership” is arrogant and pretentious. I cannot see how humans can claim to “own” and buy and sell land any more than we can claim to own and buy and sell the air that we breathe or the rain that falls from the sky.’
The same was true of all claims to ownership of fish or game, but all Scots, he felt, should have a right to rent ‘a portion of arable land sufficient for their needs.’
In Adam’s case, my objection would be to the concept of any person ‘owning’ three islands in the Minch. In my view, those islands should be taken into national common ownership to be managed and tenanted, but not sold, by the local community.
He asks what benefits would accrue either to the place or to the local community from public ownership. My answer would be that the main benefit is that control of the land remains with the local community, thus seeking to reverse the past experience of communities throughout Scotland, many of which have suffered at the hands of unscrupulous landowners, both foreign and home-grown.
I am in a strange position here. If I didn’t own the Shiants, I might easily say the sort of things that Robert Stewart says. Without some kind of institutional framework, there is no guarantee that a private owner, however beneficial, might not turn nasty and exclusive. Or at least that his heirs or successors might. But I am not in that position. I do own the Shiants. I love them and I have a duty to my son. I want Tom to be able to love them, and to love them without feeling an overpowering sense of illegitimacy in doing so. As the history in this book has shown, the idea that some moment existed in the past when the islands were held in communal bliss, which was then disrupted by greedy and rapacious landlords, does not match the facts. There were originally five family farms here, which at some time in the middle ages were agglomerated and held in common under a quasi-feudal system, owing rent in kind to the clan chief. That lasted until the deep disruptions of the eighteenth century, brought about by the coming of the market. There is nothing in this that can suggest the people of Lochs have any more right to the Shiants than I do.
Importantly, though, their right to them is no less than mine. It has been my purpose in this book to show how much the Shiants are part of the lives of everyone who lives on the opposite shore. They are not some naked place on which castaway fantasies can be played out, as if no one had ever lived there, but a richly human landscape. It is important to me that my ownership of
the Shiants should reflect that and give the local community all the benefits which that community would receive if it owned them itself.
I would go further: private ownership of a place like this, if community-minded, can actually be more open and more flexible (responsive, for example, both to Scalpay and to Lochs, different communities with in some ways equal claims) than exclusive community ownership might be. Private ownership does not need to be hung about with the sort of regulations and notices by which public ownership is usually accompanied. No one who comes to the Shiants need ever know that they are welcome there. They can simply find it wild and beautiful. And anyone who wants to stay in the house, ratty or not, can get in touch with me on [email protected] or, after 5 March 2005, with Tom on [email protected] and they can have the key.
In the course of the debate in the discussion group, I quoted the words of Donald MacCallum and said that in many ways I agreed with them. It is historically true that all property is theft, reinforced with violence. Robert Stewart ended with this:
In admitting that “What the Rev. MacCallum said is true’, Adam Nicolson himself declares that no one has the sole right to ‘own’ the Shiant Isles and no one has the right to buy or sell them. He faces a dilemma. Should he maintain his claim of ownership of the Shiant Isles, which he admits is ‘dependent on a succession of acts of violence, quite literally of murder, rape and expulsion’, or should he make history as the landlord who reversed history and returned the islands to common ownership?
There is a flat-faced appeal to vanity in that but, in response, I can only say that I couldn’t think of giving the islands away, that it would not be fair to my own son and that the expression of the dilemma is in the solution I propose: community-minded private ownership, with a resolution to share this place as much and as widely as we can.
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