Calum's Road

by Roger Hutchinson

  Inverness County Council was only five years old in 1894. A previous Local Government Act in 1889 had established it to govern over not only mainland Inverness-shire but also the urban burghs of Fort William, Inverness and Kingussie and the inhabited island groups of Barra, Canna, Eigg, Harris (but not Lewis, which was delivered to Ross-shire), Muck, North Uist, Raasay, Rum, St Kilda, Skye and South Uist. It would retain the same character and constituency – an immense Gaidhealtachd jurisdiction dominated by members of the mainland acreocracy and island ministers and priests – for fully eighty-six years, until a further Local Government Act swept Inverness County Council away in 1975.

  In 1894 there had been very few motorcars in Britain, and those that existed could be taken out on the public highways only if preceded by a man carrying a red flag. Of course, there had been a substantial increase over the previous hundred years in the numbers of long-distance horse-drawn wheeled vehicles. But Wade’s 16- to 18-foot-wide crushed stone and gravel surfaces on a convex pitched foundation could, with a minimum of maintenance, accommodate carriages, horses and carts.

  The Red Flag Act was removed in 1896. Ten years later there were 16,000 motorcars in Britain. By 1920 there were just under a million. By the 1930s there were 2 million and rising. They were increasingly to be found jerking and spluttering past Loch Lomond, through the Trossachs and the Grampians and into the great uncharted motoring country of the Highlands of Scotland. And there, it was quickly discovered by motorist and county councillor alike, what had been good enough for General Wade and two centuries of his inheritors was by no means suitable for the internal combustion engine and rubber pneumatic tyres.

  Highland roads had, therefore, to be rebuilt. If there was one subject upon which some of Inverness County Council’s more eminent hereditary members were qualified to pronounce, it was the function and future of the motorcar. Men such as Lord Lovat and Cameron of Lochiel were among the first in the region to have experience of, as well as a personal interest in, the adventure of motoring. Perhaps partly as a result of this, main roads were rebuilt throughout the Highlands. The Islands were slower to benefit, for which the council was hardly to blame. Places like Barra, Canna and the Uists were a long sea journey away from any garage, and had few if any motorised vehicles until the 1940s. Skye, being closer to the mainland, saw them earlier. Raasay had two cars before the Second World War: one belonging to John M. MacLeod, the parish councillor and shoemaker, and one to Ewen MacRae, the piermaster at East Suisnish.

  In order to cater for those gentlemen, and for the hundreds and thousands of motorists to come, Lovat, Cameron and their county council colleagues adopted, maintained and improved the existing eight miles of spinal road on Raasay between the East Suisnish pier and Brochel Castle. It is perhaps inevitable that they did not extend their responsibility north of Brochel. Inverness County Council, like its predecessor, the Inverness County Road Trust, was obliged to operate almost entirely across a jigsaw of large private estates. When they adopted roads they did so wherever possible upon the advice and with the cooperation of the landowners – several of whom sat on the county council themselves. They had, therefore, a marked tendency to adopt and improve the roads preferred by the estates’ proprietors. In the view of all previous private proprietors of the Raasay Estate, from the Wood family to William Baird & Co., there was no requirement whatsoever for a road north of Brochel Castle. They had never attempted to provide one, and so Inverness County Council followed suit. The public road, like the private one, ended at Castle. At that point the people of Torran, Fladda, Kyle Rona and Arnish got down and walked.

  At first they had asked merely to have their pathways north from Castle improved. In the summer of 1930 the Department of Agriculture, as the new landlord of seven years’ standing, wrote on their behalf to Inverness County Council ‘regarding the repair of footpaths leading from Brochel to Fladda and Kyle Rona’. The council’s roads committee was fully aware that agreeing to undertake those repairs would be a large step towards formally adopting – and therefore accepting permanent responsibility for – the problematic or non-existent routes north of Brochel Castle. So they shook their heads and threw the matter at Skye District Council. Skye District Council threw it back again. At a certain point in this rally the correspondence hit the net between them and fell limply to the ground, from there to roll out of sight.

  When, a year later, in July 1931, they received that petition from ninety adults of north Raasay and Fladda asking for a full public highway between Brochel Castle and Fladda, the county council was no more likely to agree. In September 1931 its roads committee was presented with ‘re-submitted letters of complaint regarding the condition of Raasay Roads and petition for a new Road from Brochel Castle to Fladda, Raasay, which were considered at the last Meeting of the Roads Committee but regarding which a decision was delayed pending receipt of the recommendations of Skye District Council.

  ‘Submitted letter from Skye District Council intimating that the Council are going into the question of these Roads and in the meantime are pressing the Department of Agriculture to make the new Road for the benefit of their own tenants.’

  Skye District Council considered that it had neither the resources nor the remit to start building roads in the north of Raasay. The Department of Agriculture, in its recently acquired role as a Highland landowner, was anxious to shuck off as many of its own established roads as possible, dropping them onto the shoulders of the local county authorities. The department had, in fact, only just succeeded in doing exactly that with the 2,000-yard stretch of track in the south of Raasay between Suisnish pier and the village of Inverarish, which Inverness County Council had agreed that same September to ‘take over . . . and add it to the List of Highways when it has been put into a proper state of repair’.

  Inverness County Council considered itself in the early 1930s to be bombarded with requests for new or upgraded roads from every corner of its 4,500 square miles of challenging terrain.* The people of northern Raasay clearly believed themselves to be in receipt of a raw deal. But so did the people of Wester Ross and Skye. And there were cars in Wester Ross and Skye. There were none in northern Raasay. Its people had walked throughout the preceding centuries; what was left of them could surely walk for a few decades more.

  The next small rebellion came from Fladda. The five families living there in the late 1920s had an extra grievance. Not only was there no road from the island to Brochel Castle, there was still no bridge over the short tidal narrows between Fladda and Raasay. Children from Fladda attending Torran School had perforce to run a race against the incoming sea on their way to and from school. Sometimes they missed school in the morning, and sometimes they failed to get home in the afternoon. Early in 1932, shortly after the rejection of their petition requesting a road from Brochel, which could have brought a short bridge in its wake, the people of Fladda had asked the education committee of Inverness County Council to build them a school on the small island. The education committee noted their request, and moved on to other matters. The Fladda parents addressed the impasse by the simple expedient of keeping their children off school altogether.* If they thought that would prick either the roads or education committee into prompt action, they were wrong.

  In October 1934 the staffing and organisation subcommittee of the county council recommended to the roads committee that it ‘should consider the question of construction and maintenance of a proposed bridge for the use of children between the Islands of Fladda and Raasay – subject to the Department of Agriculture for Scotland being prepared to contribute 75 per cent towards construction – the remaining 25 per cent being met by the Education Committee’. The roads committee agreed that as ‘the Department of Agriculture had not so far indicated their willingness to meet a proportion of the cost’ they as councillors could ‘take no action in the matter meantime’.

  Some of the householders in Fladda then went on rate strike. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps because the education depa
rtment was seriously concerned about the handful of children who were receiving no education, late in 1935 the council’s director of education visited Fladda. Following his excursion the education committee agreed to build and staff a single-teacher school on the island. In March 1936 the Department of Agriculture allocated a piece of land for that purpose. There were by then five families in Fladda, with a total of six children between the ages of five and ten years, none of whom had ever attended school. The school was built and a teacher employed.

  It would have been not much more expensive, and would certainly have satisfied more people, if instead a single-track highway and a connecting bridge or causeway had been constructed between Fladda, Torran, Arnish and Brochel Castle. But that was not the job of the education department. It was the responsibility of the roads committee. In the mid 1930s the roads committee, in collaboration with the Department of Agriculture, relented to the extent of funding a brief, cheap track-improvement scheme between Brochel and Arnish, employing some workless Raasay men. No tractors or other mechanical aids were provided. ‘It was sheer hard labour’, wrote John ‘London’ Nicolson, ‘with pick-axe, sledgehammer, shovel, spade and barrow . . . the pay was poor and bore no relationship to the work that was done. The track had been widened slightly in parts but it was still not suitable, even as a cart road.’

  The message from the roads committee of Inverness County Council in the 1930s was unmistakable. It read that while the age of motorised transport was rapidly dawning, even over Raasay, it would never shine on the north of the island. The residents of Arnish, Torran, Kyle Rona and Fladda must walk to meet the twentieth century at Brochel Castle. Their visitors, district nurses, doctors and postmen must walk from Brochel Castle into the unchanging past.

  Either that, or they could move south. So they began to move south. Alasdair ‘Suilag’ Gillies and his wife, the healer Peggy Beaton, left their new house unfinished in Kyle Rona and relocated to south Raasay, within reach of the ferry, the district nurse and the road. ‘The people were gradually leaving Kyle Rona,’ recalled their young neighbour John Cumming, ‘some going to the south and one or two families moving to Brochel Castle. In the end only Tormod Dubh [Black Norman], known locally as Thorny, and his sister, and our own family were left. When Thorny’s sister died he went away to the south end. In 1942 I went into the army. My parents by this time were getting old. My father got a croft at East Suisnish [in the south]. When father died we moved to Inverarish.’

  By 1937 the roll at Torran School, which ten years earlier had numbered twenty children, had reduced to seven scholars. Umachan was emptied. One whole family of Nicolsons, including the man who would later be known as John ‘London’, left Torran for Oscaig in the south in 1939. ‘When they left’, said their cousin John Nicolson, who was sixteen at the time, ‘that was a big blow to us because we had no-one of our own age to play with in the evenings, or anything like that. That was a big, big blow . . .

  ‘But you could see that there was, not exactly unrest, but you could see people gradually drifting away, losing heart and, not only losing heart, but losing a sense of the future, because there was no work.

  ‘There was perhaps a future in the north end of Raasay if there was a road – this three miles from Brochel Castle to Arnish or Torran, or Fladda. But there wasn’t, so the population gradually haemorrhaged. My own uncle was the first, and then a family went from Arnish – two ladies who were staying on their own there went down to Inverarish. And the Kyle Rona crowd went, which was the favourite place for us to go and stay a night. And then another family went from Arnish, and the Graham family went from Torran and we were left on our own there. That was the beginning of the end really. Then it got worse after the war.’

  * The market price of Raasay iron ore had therefore collapsed in peacetime to roughly 5 per cent of its wartime value.

  * The prime minister, David Lloyd George, happened that September to be on vacation in Gairloch on the neighbouring Ross-shire mainland. This normally unremarkable fact became celebrated, not only in Raasay but internationally, owing to the troublesome and extremely public peace negotiations with President Eamon de Valera’s provisional government in Ireland which Lloyd George conducted partly from his Wester Ross holiday retreat, and which led to him convening in Inverness on 7 September 1921 the only British Government Cabinet meeting ever to be held outside London.

  Lloyd George, who was immersed in lengthy translations of de Valera’s Gaelic-language assertions of Irish independence, suddenly received in Gairloch another long complaint from a smaller and hitherto less troublesome province of the Gaidhealtachd. The parish councillor, John M. MacLeod of Raasay, a shoemaker who lived in Clachan but had been born in Rona, took the opportunity of the prime minister’s proximity to write – in English – and tell him that just twenty-five miles away men who in 1914 had ‘responded willingly to the call of duty’ were even now being ‘hunted like vermin for asserting their right to live in the country which gave them birth, and in defence of which they fought so well’. John MacLeod received a quick acknowledgement and the assurance that David Lloyd George would give the matter his attention. An offer to send a delegation from Raasay to Gairloch, in a small but singular echo of the conference which Lloyd George was attempting to set up with the Irish, was politely declined.

  * During the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century patriarchy of the Lordship of the Isles, and in the clan system which survived it, many professions were hereditary. Medicine was one of them. This discipline was the province of the MacBeth, MacBeatha, Beaton or Bethune family. Their role pre-dated the Lordship of the Isles: one Patrick MacBeth/Beaton had been the court doctor of King Robert Bruce in the 1310s. After the lordship’s demise the family continued to ply its inherited trade in Islay and Mull – where they settled for the surname MacBeth – and in Skye, where they finally became Beatons. It has been widely assumed that the last of them to practise the family skills in their communities was Neil Beaton of Skye, who died in 1763 and was described by Martin Martin thirty years later as an ‘illiterate empiric . . . who of late is so well known in the isles and continent, for his great success in curing several dangerous distempers, though he never appeared in the quality of a physician until he arrived at the age of forty years, and then also without the advantage of education. He pretends to judge of the various qualities of plants and roots by their different tastes; he has likewise a nice observation of the colours of their flowers, from which he learns their astringent and loosening qualities; he extracts the juice of plants and roots after a chemical way, peculiar to himself, and with little or no charge.’

  From John Cumming’s account it would seem that the Beaton family’s medical aptitude did not die with Neil, but was still being practised by their clanswoman in the north of Raasay in the first half of the twentieth century. Some idea of the ‘alternative’ medical aid dispensed by such as Peggy Beaton may be found in I Remember, John ‘London’ Nicolson’s memoirs of his Torran boyhood in the 1920s and 1930s. Treacle and vinegar were favoured ingredients, cods’ livers were melted down for their oil, seal oil was rubbed into wheezy chests, ringworm was dabbed with ink, chrysanthemum leaves were eaten for headaches, cobwebs stemmed bleeding. Modern treatments were not despised: castor oil was a primary treatment of any internal upset, and ‘iodine was the first line of defence for injuries’. Lint, zinc ointment and Germolene were also kept to hand. Any or all of these were usually more efficacious than waiting for the district nurse to walk up from Brochel or Glame.

  * Braxy is an acute ovine disease also known as bradsot. In this instance the term ‘braxy mutton’ refers to the meat of a sheep which has not been deliberately slaughtered but has died apparently of natural causes.

  * Ronald MacLennan of Rona had told the Deer Park Commission thirty years earlier that he received five shillings a week as an ‘attendant boatman’ on the ‘lighthouse packet’.

  * The square mileage of the shire of Inverness, without its offshore islands, was 4
,351. It had a 1920s and 1930s population of 80,000. Inverness County Council was therefore administering a mountainous region that was over a third of the size of the countries of Holland and Belgium and four times the size of Luxembourg, but with a scattered population which was a small fraction of the European average.

  * ‘There were barely twenty children at Torran School when I went there [between 1928 and 1937],’ says John Nicolson. ‘But there was nobody there from Fladda. They were at that time, perhaps, fighting for a school of their own, because there were children in Fladda who were coming up to school age – one boy was seven before he went to school because they refused to send him to school unless they got a teacher there in Fladda.’ In the meantime, according to John ‘London’ Nicolson, a Fladda woman ‘acted as a voluntary and unpaid teacher’, giving the children fluency and literacy in both English and Gaelic.

  A Few in the North Would Not Be Catered For

  After the Second World War, people came back. We all came home, most of us came home after the war. And I reckon myself that, if there had been a road or a road was in the offing when the boys came home, things could have been a lot better in the north end of Raasay.

  John Nicolson, Torran

  The second fifth of a mile of track between Brochel Castle and Arnish undulated, wound and dipped over and between stony hillocks. ‘Now, if Calum was doing anything,’ a neighbour would say, ‘he didn’t do it the hard way. If there was an easy way, he did it the easy way. He was a terrific engineer. He looked at the contours of the land, and the surface of the ground, and if they meant going down a certain way, and it was easier than cutting up another way, that’s the way Calum would go. The hard way may have looked shorter, but it might still have been harder to do – so he would dig a wee turn.’