by Dan Boothby
One wet afternoon when no one wanted a tour of the island, I climbed the steps to the bothy with the intention of giving it a good clear-out. The building had once been the lighthouse keepers’ wash-house and its windows looked straight down Loch Alsh, but today the view was obliterated by rain streaming down windowpanes. The pine-panelled walls were covered in posters identifying wild flowers and fungi, trees, birds and ‘Animals of the Hebrides’. Three large desks had been rammed in there – two under the windows on either side of the door and another against the back wall. A map of the island was pinned to the wall and a pinboard was covered with thank-you cards and yellow Post-it notes scrawled with action plans and jobs to be done and photographs of previous wardens with visitors. Dust and cobwebs and dead flies covered the desks and windowsills.
I worked my way through the bothy – dusting, tidying, reading. The wind droned in the chimneys. What to do with a rusting bike with a buckled back wheel, a moth-eaten stuffed polecat, an ancient road atlas, jars of used turpentine, a car hubcab, an oil drum? Do I keep the worn-out gloves and the balding paintbrushes hanging from a string above the storage heater, the torn heavy-duty work jackets sagging off pegs? Where else can I put the paint pots, the cardboard boxes of household cleaning gear, the empty jam jars and tins of industrial grease, the assortment of tools, flowerpots, seashells, dried flowers?
I pulled out a drawer filled to the brim with plastic-bagged owl pellets, pine marten scat, otter spraint and the bones of small mammals.
In the hanging files in the old grey cabinet I found copies of long-dead correspondence. I sat at one of the desks and read, the flagstone floor drawing the cold to my feet through the soles of Gregory’s old sea boots.
There were letters from Gregory to nature conservation agencies requesting advice on the most ecologically sound way to ‘manage’ the flora on the island, and copies of the often terse replies his letters had engendered. ‘Don’t touch ANYTHING,’ the agencies ordered. Gregory wheedled, ‘What about the little area over by the . . . ? It can’t hurt. It’ll improve access . . . allow other plants to flourish.’ ‘Let the island go back to nature,’ was the obdurate order from on high.
But the island wasn’t a nature reserve. Susan Browning liked to call it a ‘nature haven’, which seemed a particularly vague and woolly term to me. People stayed in the house on the island, traffic thundered over it, summer visitors were escorted along the paths that criss-crossed it. And Marcus and I picked up all kinds of garbage from the shoreline that faced the two villages. (The wilder west side of the island was considerably cleaner.) The island was by no means a pristine wilderness, but away from the paths the flora and fauna were carrying on as usual – the brambles, heather and bracken smothering, birds fighting and singing and courting, and the otters slunk around. (By now I had discovered the quiet places they frequented.) We were cohabitants, the flora, the fauna and I.
Other files were filled with paperwork concerning the lighthouse, photocopies of the old Register of Lighthouse Keepers, or related to funding possibilities – applications to charitable institutions for grants to pay salaries and to help with renovating the lighthouse and its gangway.
There was a file stuffed with rainbow-coloured drawings and paintings done by children at the primary schools in Kyle and Kyleakin to commemorate the grand opening five years before. Drawings of stylized lighthouses and cottages and fishing boats; windswept lighthouse keepers with busty wives, and bridges and otters. The wild imaginings of eight-year-olds who’d now be going through the traumas of puberty.
I found photographs of the cottage taken after the bridge-builders had left – broken doors, boarded-up windows and stripped-bare interiors. There had been grass everywhere then, where now there was a jungle of brambles and bracken. I found a photograph of the rediscovery and uncovering of the cobbled path that ran between the lighthouse and the cottage, another of a bulldozer digging out the steep zigzag path between the slipway and the cottage. There were shots of the bothy before renovation – a slateless roof, blackened fireplaces, a crumbling single-ring cooker under a windowless window; a huge marijuana leaf and the word ‘Bud!’ daubed in red and green on a wall, a rotting black door with ‘10’ painted on it in white. There were photographs of scaffolding and piles of slates, of builders, of a self-important gull on one of the chimney pots, looking for all the world like a charge-hand, studying the workmen below. There was a batch of photographs of Virginia McKenna arranging articles that she had collected from Maxwell’s friends and family for the museum in the Long Room; a photograph of Gregory, in puffer jacket and sea boots, standing by the little motorboat I’d taken to the island in 2001.
In the bottom drawer of the grey filing cabinet I found a telephone answering machine. I plugged it in and pressed a button. ‘Hello, this is Gregory Turpin on Kyleakin Lighthouse Island. If you would like to leave your name and number I will get back to you as soon as I can.’ I’d met the man, I’d just been reading his letters, scrutinizing his handwriting; seen him in photographs. He’d been the last me. I felt like the Jack Nicholson character in The Shining running into ghastly ghostly Delbert Grady in the Overlook Hotel.
JACK: Mr Grady, you WERE the caretaker here.
GRADY: I’m sorry to . . . differ with you, sir, but YOU are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker.
Hearing Gregory’s voice on the answering machine, alone in the bothy, gave me the creeps.
Outside, the storm clouds were dispersing as the wind blew them south-east down Loch Alsh. I opened the bothy door and moved my chair to the doorway to breathe in clean air. Hidden in a nearby tangle of brambles the whitethroat was doing its rounds. Its unmistakable lilting song sounded out between drips of stalled rain dropping from the bothy roof. The bothy was full of dead dreams. Where there had once been energy and motivation, there was now only silence and stuff and memories, and me.
The lighthouse on the island was designed by David and Thomas Stevenson, of the famous Stevenson lighthouse-building dynasty (of which the writer of Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson, was also a member). A Stevenson occupied the post of Engineer to the Northern Lighthouse Board – the body responsible for erecting and maintaining lights around Scotland and the Isle of Man – continuously from 1799 to 1938. These days such blatant nepotism wouldn’t be allowed, but in fact the Stevensons and the Directors of the Northern Lighthouse Board knew what they were doing. The Stevenson lighthouses remain remarkable feats of engineering, and more importantly, have saved lives.
In 1853 a decision was taken by the Northern Lighthouse Board to light the two narrow channels between Skye and mainland Scotland at Kyleakin, and at Ornsay further down the coast. (Later, in 1910, a tiny lighthouse was erected on one of the islands off Sandaig, and across the water ‘Camusfeàrna’ house was built for the lightkeeper.) Plans for two identical lighthouse towers and keepers’ cottages were drawn up and bricks were shipped to the proposed sites from the nearest brickworks, two hundred miles to the south. By January 1857 the towers had been erected, the cottages built and roofed, and a decision had been made to enclose a third of an acre at each site to create a small walled vegetable garden.
The tower of Kyleakin lighthouse, seventy feet high and built on a platform of natural rock six feet above the high-water mark, shone a fixed beam of white light which in clear weather could be seen for eleven nautical miles. A red sector (panes of red glass filtering the white light) indicated safe passage through the channel. On 10 November 1857 the lights at Kyleakin and at Ornsay were exhibited for the first time. Their lamps were fuelled by sperm oil (from the head of a sperm whale) until 1900, then by paraffin.
For the first 103 years a constantly changing procession of Principal lighthouse keepers and Assistant lighthouse keepers lived in the cottages to look after the light. An Occasional keeper would come over in emergencies or when one or other of the keepers was on leave. Kyleakin Lighthouse Island is a rocky outcrop in the middle of the sea, ha
mmered by salt-laden sea winds and lashed by rain. Any habitation in such an elemental place needs constant monitoring and maintenance. As early as 1866 – only nine years after the light was first lit – an Assistant keeper was complaining to the Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouse Board of ‘great damp in my house’.
The light was on permanent standby between dawn and dusk. Before dark the duty lightkeeper switched the lamp over from a pilot flame to let it flash its unique ‘character’.1 The light and fuel levels were checked hourly; a spare flashing unit was tested weekly. The Northern Lighthouse Board’s supply vessel sailed up from Oban every three months, anchored off the island at high tide and winched supplies ashore (massive mooring hooks, cemented onto the rocks, are still to be seen today, rusting away). The Board’s inspectors thought up jobs to keep off-duty keepers busy (an idle mind being the devil’s playground): keeping a log of air temperature and pressure, painting and carrying out maintenance of the buildings, spreading lime on the jetty to keep away seaweed, cutting back vegetation, building a wall here and laying a path there, looking after the vegetable garden. And there was always a lot of polishing to be done – of the lens and the windowpanes of the lamp room, of copper piping and the brass handrails and floor surrounds in the tower. The cobbled path between the house and the tower was laid by the lighthouse keepers with pebbles brought across from Kyleakin Beach.
For a Hebridean rock station, with the two villages less than a mile away, Kyleakin must have been a cushy posting. And the keepers of Kyleakin Lighthouse were allowed to live on the island with their families, which wasn’t the norm. There was a well on the western side of the island, buried beneath the bridge now, along with the walled garden. The keepers grew vegetables, kept hens, went fishing. Hot water was a luxury in the early days, but later a small generator was installed to provide electricity. The families were reliant on a boat to get across to the villages for their canned food and tinned milk, fuel for cooking and heating, and for their mail. At one time there were nine lighthouse keepers’ children attending the school in Kyleakin. The school run, especially in the winter, must have been challenging.
In 1960 the Northern Lighthouse Board embarked on a process of automation of their northern lights, and acetylene gas tanks were installed at Kyleakin and Ornsay. The lighthouses became fully automatic, and were reclassified as ‘minor lights’. The keepers were withdrawn. Only an Occasional keeper was needed now – to change over the gas tanks when required.
Kyleakin and Ornsay lighthouse cottages were put up for sale by the Board, but they remained vacant and unsold over the next few years, quickly deteriorating, until Gavin Maxwell bought the pair for a knockdown price of £2,000 in September 1963. He only ever owned the cottages and a small piece of ground surrounding them, never the islands. Maxwell employed his acquaintances, Richard Frere and his wife, to redesign the interiors of the cottages and to carry out the conversion work. In 1967 the Ornsay cottage was sold off to help defray some of Maxwell’s mountainous debts, but the Kyleakin lighthouse cottage was retained. After he’d acquired the lighthouse cottages, Maxwell (only ever the tenant of the house at Sandaig, never the owner) mentioned more than once his intention to move to one of them in the future, and he favoured Kyleakin over Ornsay.
After Maxwell died in 1969, the Kyleakin lighthouse cottage was bought by Ian Alexander, a sometime acquaintance of Maxwell who was at that time on the staff of Dingwall Academy near Inverness. Alexander brought a donkey over to the island – quite a feat in a small boat – and over the summers of 1970 and 1971 opened the island to the public before selling the cottage on to the actor Michael Bryant, who lived in England and used the island infrequently as a holiday home. In 1981 Alexander and a colleague, Warwick McKean, bought the cottage back from Bryant and negotiated the purchase of the rest of the island, excluding the lighthouse, from the Northern Lighthouse Board. In 1984 they sold the island to Tom Farmer, the Kwik-Fit millionaire, for £58,000. In 1992 the Scottish Executive bought the island from Farmer by compulsory purchase for £127,000, and ran the Skye Bridge through the middle of it. On 31 October 1993 the last Occasional Keeper extinguished Kyleakin Light. It had been burning, continuously, for 136 years.
There are no manned lighthouses in Britain today. They’re all automatic. The last lighthouse keeper of the British Isles was withdrawn from Fair Isle Light in 1998. Seafarers of a certain age still grumble about this. It was reassuring to know, they say, that someone – other than their God – was out there watching over them.
Gavin Maxwell spent the last months of his life on Kyleakin Lighthouse Island and part of the myth will remain there, but it is more strongly linked with Sandaig – the place he called Camusfeàrna in his books. It is a place of pilgrimage for many. I first visited in 1985, the year I left school.
I got a job picking fruit and saved money for camping equipment. I decided I’d get the ‘Nightrider’ train up to Glasgow and then hitch. Daunting, but an adventure. Then I got cold feet. Hitching alone all that way? My head filled with homicidal maniacs and predatory men in macs. I phoned a friend.
‘It’s a bit last-minute, isn’t it?’ But Dara wanted to get away as much as I did.
We sat on our rucksacks in Euston Station and watched desperate men rummaging amongst tired commuters for cigarettes and begging money for drink. On the train north we were kept awake by overexcited returning Scots. We arrived in Glasgow disorientated and shattered. We took another train north into the Highlands proper.
I had never been abroad and the only mountainous region I’d visited was the Lake District. The Highlands were different. The mountains were more dramatic, more barren and more isolated than the sensuous green hills I’d climbed in Cumbria. Scottish mountains were hard as nails. We alighted at Tyndrum and trekked up to the road. We stuck out our thumbs. No one stopped. We started walking. The bleak road wound north around a long, high hill. Our rucksacks slowed our pace. We trudged on into late afternoon. Soon there was nothing but open moorland all around. We pitched the tent, scavenged wood and lit a fire for tea, and crawled into our sleeping bags in the mid-summer, northern twilight.
Rain came during the night and stayed. We ran-walked back to Tyndrum station and caught a train to Mallaig where we crossed the Sound of Sleat to Skye. Pretty white houses and sheep dotted the hillsides. A chair-filling American in a fast Italian car picked us up and dropped us at the village of Isleornsay. I wanted to visit the lighthouse keepers’ cottage Maxwell had owned there, but it was impossible to get to. Across the Sound of Sleat we could see Sandaig – the islands, the tiny lighthouse, a little white ‘but ’n’ ben’ cottage – the ‘croft’ I’d read about in the books. We were close – only a mile away, but by sea, not land.
‘Perhaps we could get a fisherman to take us across.’
‘You ask.’
‘No, you.’
We didn’t. We pitched the sodden tent in a field behind a pub in the village and the next day walked on into rain. Our map showed a footpath to Kylerhea. We left the road and got lost amidst meandering sheep tracks. We found a track through conifer forest and followed it. A heavy downpour let up a little. We trudged on through a billowing, diaphanous curtain of drizzle. Clouds of midges waltzed around our heads, bit our faces, crawled down our collars, up our nostrils, into our ears.
‘Why? Why did I agree to come here?’ Dara spat.
The track led us back to the road. A sign pointed the way to the Kinloch Lodge Hotel. We plodded up and asked a man in the lobby for hot food and something to drink. The man cast an appalled gaze at our dripping hair, over our sodden clothing and our boots and the muddy trail we’d left on his oatmeal carpet. We walked out into the hissing rain. Dara lifted a trouser leg and tugged a leech from his calf.
‘We have to go on,’ I said. ‘There’s no going back.’
By Kylerhea we pitched the tent and crawled in. Midges crawled in after us, danced, and fed. When the rain stopped I got up to watch fishing boats and coasters chug through the
Narrows between the warmly lit dwellings in Glenelg and Kylerhea. The low-pressure weather system had passed, leaving peace behind it.
We awoke to a clear blue sky but found Kylerhea devoid of a shop. My stomach rumbled. Dara told me to shut up. We squelched down the road to the Kylerhea Narrows and boarded the Glenachulish ferry, and on the other side of the Sound marched in silence the mile to Glenelg. We bought chocolate and sweets and fizzy drinks at the little shop and sat outside in the sun to scoff our treats. Only then did we start speaking to one another again.
We went back in to buy more supplies then pressed on uphill to Tormor, climbed over a forestry gate and followed a track that circled and cul-de-sac-ed through conifer forest until we came to the rough footpath that followed the burn down to the sea.
As we made our way through the trees past telegraph poles and cabling we could hear water crashing in the ravine, and through a gap in the trees I glimpsed Sandaig and my heart beat harder against my chest. Black cattle were grazing down there, some of them standing up to their knees in the sea, waiting to cross to the chain of outlying islands.
Sandaig looked just as it had in the photos I’d studied so often – a meadow ringed by the sea and a burn. Only the house, which had stood so prominent on the meadow, had gone.
I followed Dara down the mountainside to a fence and a makeshift stile. Two wrist-thick ropes, one above the other, stretched between alder trees on either side of the burn. We wobbled across, gripping the upper rope and sliding our boots along the lower one.
By the remnants of a dry-stone wall there was a cairn topped with an engraved bronze plaque three feet square: ‘Edal, the otter of Ring of Bright Water, 1958–1968. Whatever joy she gave to you, give back to Nature.’ People had placed shells and stones and dried flowers around the edges of the plaque. Offerings. Beside the cairn, a rowan tree was dying while a nearby larch grew tall.