Calum's Road

by Roger Hutchinson

  At the end of that fifth of a mile on this exposed plateau Calum MacLeod, in the middle of the 1960s, came across a short but extremely steep slope. He overcame this challenge not by cutting straight up and over it, as a deer, a horse or a footpath might have done, but by carving a single hairpin bend out of the hillside, thereby steering his road up two relatively gentle gradients.

  The inner elbow of this hairpin bend required fortifying against the slope. So Calum MacLeod then embarked upon his first substantial piece of masonry on the Brochel to Arnish road. About a hundred blocks of granite, ranging in size from a scooter wheel to the tyre of a lorry, were cut, shaped and carried or otherwise manoeuvred by hand to the roadside. Calum then built them into a solid dry-stone holding wall. The foundations of the bend in the road were laid invisibly behind this facing, and its level surface was laid on top. There can be no doubt that Calum MacLeod was unaware of the fact, but when he placed the last rock in what he would have been proud to acknowledge as an effective and well-made form of dry-stone dyke, he also laid the cornerstone of what others in future would choose to describe as a phenomenon of ‘landscape art’.

  It was an instantly unfamiliar sight on an extremely familiar track. The men of northern Raasay may not have had much to do with the south. But over the centuries they had walked across this plateau on their way to market, to emigration, and to war.

  * * *

  In 1939 and 1940 the Raasay men went off to war again. In the islands of the north-west of Scotland 3 September 1939 ‘was a very wintry day with hail and sleety showers and terrible thunder and lightning, which all seemed very fitting for a day when war was declared’. And as international hostilities commenced, domestic hostilities were suspended. There would be no more petitions or rate strikes or angry letters to the council until Hitler had been defeated.

  When the Second World War broke out the 27-year-old Calum MacLeod was excused conscription as an active crofting tenant, in the reserved occupation of agricultural production. Many of his friends, neighbours and relatives from northern Raasay went to fight or to serve in the merchant navy. His brother Ronald joined the Royal Navy. John Cumming of Kyle Rona joined the army. The younger Nicolsons of Torran entered the infantry by way of the Territorial Army. ‘By 1941 my brother Willie was in the Faroes, and later in England preparing for the D-Day invasions,’ said John Nicolson. ‘My other brother Murdo was a prisoner-of-war. Of course, I was the next to be called up. Our brother Alec was older than me, but Alec couldn’t go because he was assigned [like Calum MacLeod] to look after the croft. So, like everybody else of my age at the time, I was wanting to go. That was the thought – let’s get out there and help the rest, and get it over and done with. It wasn’t just me, it was everybody of my age.’

  They all came home. As the memorial at Suisnish in the south of the island reminds posterity, twenty-three Raasay men had fallen in the First World War, including two from Rona, two from Kyle Rona, two from Fladda and two from Arnish. Calum MacLeod himself had lost two of his uncles in the ‘Kaiser’s War’. Seven Raasay men gave their lives in the Second World War, all of whom were residents at the time of the centre or the south of Raasay. The island group had made its usual disproportionately large sacrifice, but for once the north was spared.*

  In 1942 a new teacher arrived at Torran School. Her name was Alexandrina Macdonald. She replaced a schoolmistress from the western mainland who had been in Torran for six years, and whose name also had been Alexandrina Macdonald. Such a confluence would have been quite implausible anywhere but in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, where both Macdonalds and Alexandrinas abounded. In Raasay it barely merited comment. The first Alexandrina Macdonald remained in the island, settling in the village of Inverarish.

  The Alexandrina Macdonald of our story, Alexandrina the second, had been born, one of a pair of twins, thirty-one years earlier in northern Skye. She was brought up in a crofthouse built by her father and uncle at Uiginish, a small and isolated village separated from the north Skye township of Dunvegan – and the mediaeval battlements of Dunvegan Castle – by an intrusive, narrow sea loch. Ina Macdonald, as she was known in Skye, was an exceptional woman. She left Dunvegan School at the age of fourteen but, unusually for a girl in 1925, then progressed by scholarship to the small but growing Portree High School, which had twenty years earlier been recognised as a Higher Grade provider of secondary education. Like Calum MacLeod, Ina Macdonald had as a scholar also won a Gaelic writing competition. Ina became the high school dux before passing her highers and entering a teaching course at Jordanhill Training College in Glasgow. She emerged from there with a Primary Certificate and taught in Glasgow, Glen Nevis and in the Outer Hebrides before returning to the Skye archipelago.

  Back in her native islands she first of all taught the children of the three dozen people on the tiny island of Soay off the south coast of Skye. Ina Macdonald then moved to Penifiler, on the east bank of Portree Bay. A short walk from Penifiler would have put her within easy sight of the sun-dappled slopes of Raasay, to which she moved in time to begin the new school year in autumn 1942, and where, in accordance with local nomenclative custom, Alexandrina Macdonald would forever more be known not as Ina but as Lexie. ‘All of the Skye people called her Ina,’ her daughter, Julia, would say. ‘She was Ina to her mother. To all her nieces and nephews she was Aunt Ina. And then on Raasay she was Lexie. Lexie’s her Raasay name; Ina’s her Skye name.’

  Lexie Macdonald stayed with Torran School until Torran School was finally closed for good twenty-five years later. Her job description was formidable. John ‘London’ Nicolson had left Torran and moved to Oscaig in the south shortly before Lexie Macdonald’s arrival. He would write that ‘The one and only teacher in many Highland schools, of which Torran was but one, had to be capable of dealing with school subjects covering an age-group of five to fourteen years. The range included: Bible study, spelling, transcription, dictation, composition, recitation, history, geography, grammar, English literature and language including roots, arithmetic including mental exercises, algebra, geometry, Gaelic, reading, writing, art, nature study in and out of doors, physical exercises, gardening, singing, handcrafts, cooking.’

  The requirements of state school education, even in the north of Raasay, had changed radically since the days of Seumas Ruadh MacKinnon. The 31-year-old woman who moved into Torran Schoolhouse in 1942 was extraordinarily capable, qualified and intelligent. Lexie Macdonald from Uiginish also saw no reason why living and working in such a peripheral place should compromise her personal standards. ‘She was . . . different,’ her daughter would say. ‘She had fish knives and forks, pale green soft leather slippers and a dark green leather coat, big fur gloves and fox-fur. She would go to church and her hat always had a front leaf or feather or something sticking out of it – most of the people wore flat hats that hugged their heads. And mother always had her court shoes. She might have her wellies on for part of the way, but when she went into church, it was her court shoes. Everybody else wore flatties. So she was different. She certainly wasn’t used to the labour of Arnish. I think she anticipated the job at Torran as a temporary appointment.’

  Calum MacLeod of Arnish was just seven months younger than the new schoolmistress at Torran, and, like her, was single. Her anticipation of an abbreviated stay in northern Raasay was short-lived. In the words of his daughter, Calum MacLeod was ‘stubborn – he was broad-minded in some ways, but at other times he had tunnel vision. If he wanted something, he went for it until he got it.’

  Calum got his woman. He married the new Torran school-mistress in April 1944. The wedding was conducted by the Reverend Donald Campbell at Torran Mission Hall, and the reception was held in Torran schoolroom. ‘No broad bands of gold were allowed,’ Lexie MacLeod would later write to her grandson of her wartime marriage. ‘The rings were merely very slim bands of gold. Then wedding cakes, or bridescakes, posed a problem as the various ingredients were rationed. Bakers were unable to help. However, the bride�
��s friends and also the groom’s friends helped as much as possible by giving up some of their own rations. These were given to the baker who was only too glad to bake a beautiful bridescake, and put it at first on display in his shop window for a few days.’

  The newly-weds moved at first into Lexie’s schoolhouse at Torran. While Lexie was teaching every subject in the encyclopaedia, in English and in Gaelic, to a handful of juniors and young teenagers, Calum was growing tobacco in the schoolhouse garden. This was a remarkable, if entirely characteristic, achievement. It was remarkable because the plant genus Nicotiana tabacum is neither native nor suited to the British Isles. The only commercial tobacco plantations to succeed in Europe have been on the hot and humid shores of the Mediterranean. It was characteristic of the MacLeods to grow Hebridean tobacco because they believed increasingly, with every passing year, that the north of Raasay could, with God’s blessing on the will and work of humanity, provide for every mortal need.

  ‘He was once taking seaweed for manure’, said John Nicolson, ‘from the east side shore opposite his own house, down to the croft below his house. I said to him, one time we were over there, “Here, Calum, you have some haul there.” He said, “Oh, it was fine once you got to the top at the other side, it was all downhill then!” There was no word of what it was like to go up to the top of the cliff, and that was with seaweed in a creel.

  ‘I said, “How many creels did you take?” He said, “Oh, I’m sure I must have taken fifty or sixty creels – about four in a day, a bhalaich, it didn’t take long. I just couldn’t leave it, it looked so good for fertilising the croft.”

  ‘These days my nephew and I gather sheep up there. My nephew’s always up there, and he says, “Well, John, every time I go past, I’m seeing Calum with the creel full of seaweed coming up.”

  ‘I remember going over to Arnish once, and meeting Calum, and he said, “John, a bhalaich, a calamity in the spring – I lost my cas-chrom, a bhalaich.” I said, “What happened, what did you do? Did you use the spade instead?” And he said, “Oh, shìorraidh, no. I spent two days looking around in the trees in Torran until I found one which had exactly the wood I needed, exactly what I wanted, a bhalaich.” He built a new cas-chrom. He planed it, and dressed it, and everything. He said, “I wasn’t too particular as long as it wasn’t too rough where the hands went.” ’

  There were more complex factors at work here than stubborn self-sufficiency. Calum MacLeod was displaying and embodying a deep belief in the capacities and qualities of a certain way of life in his small corner of the world. He would never lose that trust in his place and his people; he never faltered in his confidence that Gaelic resilience was adamantine, that Gaelic resourcefulness could move mountains and that the Gaelic language had evolved to describe miracles. Nothing more was needed. By sustaining that personal faith against all evidence and opposition he turned a great portion of it into truth. The intensity of his conviction would inform the smallest and the largest of his legacies.

  He grew tobacco in Torran because, like carrying good seaweed on his back from the shore, or rebuilding his own cas-chrom, there was no good reason not to. ‘’N aìm cogadh Hitler [at the time of Hitler’s war]’, he would tell the broadcaster Cailean Maclean in 1986, ‘tobacco was getting scarce. Although I wasn’t smoking, my father was a tobacco smoker and many of the neighbours round about were too.

  ‘So we ordered six tobacco plants in the springtime. Before the plants arrived I got a basket of herring, and I put the guts of the herring on the tobacco plants. They grew, and they grew very well, and I was told not to let any slugs near them. If I didn’t kill off the slugs, the slugs would eat them altogether.

  ‘When the plants were my height I took off the leaves. They were like big dock leaves. They were eighteen inches long by four inches wide. When my father was at sea abroad, off America, he said he was getting the tobacco leaves very cheaply. They would take them aboard ship and dry them off. They were soaking them in rum or treacle and then rolling them up to dry, hanging off ropes. They would hang the soaked, rolled tobacco up for a few months until it was well seasoned before it would be opened. They were then opening it and smoking it as they needed to.

  ‘When the leaves were ready I did exactly the same as my father said – when they were dry enough I put rum or treacle on them. When they were matured I gave them to my father, and he said it was the best tobacco he’d ever had. It was nice and light and there wasn’t the same black oil in it as his usual tobacco.’*

  In 1947 Calum’s retainer from the Northern Lighthouse Board was both consolidated and increased. The Graham family had left Torran, and Calum MacLeod was made boatman-in-charge of the Rona lighthouse attending vessel. In 1950 Lexie MacLeod gave birth to a baby girl at Broadford Hospital in Skye. She was christened Julia, after Calum’s mother. When Julia MacLeod was six months old the new, young family moved into Calum’s grandfather’s house at Arnish.

  This crofthouse had originally been thatched, but in the twentieth century it was reroofed by Calum’s grandfather with corrugated zinc sheets from the Raasay Estate’s redundant pheasant hatchery. It faced, across a hundred yards of good croftland in a shallow, small and sheltered glen, the home of Calum’s mother and father. It was a place of peace and beauty. It would become in time the last redoubt of the human civilisation of northern Raasay.

  In the Hebridean context, a mains electricity supply arrived early in southern Raasay. On 29 October 1954 a letter arrived at Inverness County Council from the secretary of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board. The letter stated that ‘some time ago it had been decided to lay a submarine cable from Skye to Raasay, to give supplies in the vicinity of Inverarish.

  ‘Recently it had been decided to extend the distribution to the south of the Island and as far north as Balmeanach, so that electricity would be available to 134 potential consumers on the Island and only a few in the north would not be catered for.’

  ‘. . . only a few in the north would not be catered for’.

  Inverness County Council ‘agreed to note the position with satisfaction’.

  Calum MacLeod decided to generate his own electricity.

  Winter nights are long in the Hebrides. Calum MacLeod’s outdoor work between November and February would necessarily come to an end when he would bring in the cows from pasture as early as 3.30 or 4.00 p.m. After that, said his daughter, ‘well, the [battery-powered] wireless was very much part of our life.

  ‘We had to listen to the broadcasts from the lighthouse in Rona to the shore station at Portree, as well as to the daily shipping forecast. If there was any problem, my father might have to gather up his crew and go out. We needed the wireless because we had no phone – there was a phone box at what is now the upper car park, a few hundred yards away and it could ring forever, but nobody was there to hear it. So he had to listen to the lighthouse broadcast. I think that was twice a day. We listened to this daily broadcast from the rock and we took great interest in this. Then there was the news. Mealtimes were timed with the news. Lunch was one o’clock to coincide with the one o’clock news, and the evening meal was at six o’clock to fit in with the six o’clock news.’

  Throughout his life, Calum MacLeod read voraciously and eclectically. Along with all of his neighbours in the north, and those in the south of Raasay until their mains electricity arrived in the 1950s, he did so during the winter nights by the light of a Tilley lamp. His household heat came from the peat-fired solid-fuel cooking stove,* and both heat and light were delivered by the paraffin-fired Tilley Storm Lamp which had been a feature of Highland and Hebridean homes since it was first put on the market in the 1920s. (Tilley also manufactured a popular paraffin laundry iron.)

  But, if electricity, as well as tarmacadamed motor roads, was the coming thing in southern Raasay, Calum saw no reason why – even if the Hydro-Electric Board as well as Inverness County Council declined to cater for those ‘few in the north’ – Arnish should not also benefit from its own suppl
y.

  Wind turbines, which fifty years later would become a source of headline controversy in the Highlands and Islands, were an infant technology in the early 1950s. It is difficult to know which variety Calum MacLeod located and installed.* But it was about the height of a telegraph pole, and it had vanes, accumulators and batteries. He erected it in the garden and – some of the time – it powered bulbs in the hallway, the kitchen, the living room, and a large window-light in the front porch.

  For a while then, said Julia MacLeod, ‘with our electric light we were the bee’s knees. But it had its own sting in the tail. My father discovered that the electric light was not so good as the Tilley – you didn’t get the same heat off it. And if it was going to get too stormy you had to shut down the vanes in case they spun off.

  ‘The final crunch came when he had six weeks of flat calm and frosty weather. There was no wind, not a breath, and everything went flat. And everybody else in the neighbourhood said, “Well, our Tilley’s still going!” So he went outside and chopped the windmill down and turned it into firewood.

  ‘He reverted to the Tilley lamp until the calor gas canisters came in – you get a bit of heat off calor gas. He never had any other form of electricity generator. It was always just the Tilley and the stove, and then the calor light and gas stove.

  ‘Oh – and in 1957 he took up recreational knitting. He bought a Knitmaster machine and made intricate Fair Isle patterns – sweaters, gloves and socks, which mother grafted in the final make-up.’

  Between 1949 and 1952 Calum MacLeod built his first, albeit minor, roadway in the north of Raasay. The track to Fladda, where three families comprising twelve people still lived in 1951, as well as being in the usual sorry condition, had never been more than a side line heading west off the main Torran to Kyle Rona path. The quicker and more obvious route was to run a footway around the mile of coast between Torran and the Fladda narrows.