Calum's Road

by Roger Hutchinson

  ‘How long do you think it’s going to be before you at last run the Land Rover along the road to your croft?’

  Calum looks sharply, seriously to his right, indicating with his lean face the close proximity of Torran and Arnish. ‘About three months. And I’ll get it right through to my croft. Once I get the road joined here, you see, it’ll be fit for my Land Rover to go through. So I’m within 400 yards of my house already, and once this diversion is joined up and cleared, the rest is plain sailing.’

  ‘Will there be a ceremony when you ride along it?’

  Calum smiles softly, almost imperceptibly, with his eyes rather than his mouth, for this is a harmless question. ‘Oh well, very likely,’ he says. ‘I’ll be running back and fore with the Land Rover the first couple of days, non-stop.’ Then his features relax and he chuckles slowly, not to the camera and not to Derek Cooper, but to himself.

  ‘The road itself is a major triumph,’ Cooper would write later in Hebridean Connection. ‘Calum has built culverts, blasted rock-faces, dug hillsides away almost in a spirit of desperation. No agency outside the island was going to do it, therefore he must hew it himself.

  ‘ “We petitioned the County Council to build a road years ago,” [said Calum]. “It was put off and off and the people went one by one . . . When they saw what I was doing the Department [of Agriculture] kindly offered to do the blasting and the [Skye] District Council have been very helpful too.”

  ‘Calum built his road in what spare time he had left after working his croft and keeping watch at the lighthouse on Rona as a relief keeper. Last year he took 1,000 stooks of oats off his five acres, sufficient to keep seven cows, a calf and two stirks . . .

  ‘Calum looks with pride along the empty length of his road winding round Loch Arnish, not metalled yet, but almost ready for a Land Rover . . . “I always like freedom,” [said Calum]. “It’s a fine healthy life on the hills here. I have never been an hour off duty by illness, or ever in the hands of a doctor or dentist or nurse or anybody in my life and that’s the truth.”

  ‘John [Ferguson] and I walk back to Brochel where we left the van. “They say that Calum’s road is better bottomed than any other road on Raasay,” says John. “It’s a pity it wasn’t built thirty years ago, maybe there’d be more people living up there now.” ’

  As he worked, Calum MacLeod dug into his people’s deepest past. On one occasion, towards the end of his journey, as he approached his own croft, he turned up a perfectly formed and preserved Neolithic axe-head. ‘I was digging out a soft patch and replacing it with stone,’ he would tell the writer Ian Grimble in 1984. ‘And I was down about 18 inches or thereabouts, getting close to the rock. This [axe-head] came up. And I looked at it and I remembered then what I saw in a book . . . So I came home with this stone and compared it with what was in the book.’ It was a greenstone axe-head, still with a functional cutting edge. ‘I have handled millions of pieces of stone in my time,’ said Calum, ‘and I have never seen anything like this – it is not Raasay stone by any means. I believe it to have been made in the Lake District in Stone Age times, although how it got to Raasay, I don’t know – although they have also been found in Denmark.’

  That ancient implement appeared almost as a confirmation, as evidence that people had been living and working and practising stonework in Arnish for millennia. (They had also, it might be added, been trading with and travelling to and from other distant regions of Neolithic Europe. Use of the open seaways was no recent phenomenon.) It measured roughly four inches by two, fitting snugly into the palm of Calum MacLeod’s hand. It was sent to Edinburgh for archaeological assessment, but there was not really any need. Calum understood it perfectly.

  He understood also the significance of the stretch of road that he built two thirds of the way between Brochel and Arnish, where the narrowest ridge of northern Raasay came down to Loch Arnish. George Rainy’s deer wall still stood there, apparently immutable, as big and as brash and as apparently unbreachable as ever, 100 years after it had been erected to define the difference in value between people and imported sheep or game.

  Calum MacLeod pushed his road through George Rainy’s wall; snapped the deer fence off where it reached down to the sea and left its western edge crumbling into the hillside. There is, of course, no recorded date for this symbolic event. It probably took place in stages in the very early months of the 1970s. But significant clues lie round about. Directly below the suddenly abridged end of the wall lies the sheep fold – or fank – of the MacLeod family of Arnish. A northbound traveller along Calum’s road would pass the end of the wall on their right and the sheep fank on their left. The wall, even broken and pointless, would still be impressive, snaking up its shallow glen and dipping beyond sight over the hill, towards the eastern sea.

  But the sheep fank below was and would remain a miniature Machu Picchu of stonecraft by comparison; a bewildering maze of worked granite, created and extended and embellished by succeeding generations of the masons of Arnish. Stone fank complexes are not unique to the Hebrides, but stone fank complexes which cause the traveller to pause and smile are rare. It has a practical logic of its own. Those small entrances with perfect lintels are there to admit and release sheep; not to conjure images of ancient human habitation. Those horseshoe walls dissolve into and out of the granite of the hillside because it is sensible for them to follow that course; not in order to suggest a native affinity with the environment.

  Above the fank and below the end of George Rainy’s wall the road ran past in a graceful arc. In this immediate area, as elsewhere, Calum MacLeod had built perfect holding walls. He had trimmed the cliffside edge of the road with boulders, to prevent any careless motorist from driving into the sea. Where the burn ran down beside the wall he built a culvert to allow the fresh running water free passage to Loch Arnish. He laid faggots of birchwood on the ground to cushion the flagstones which would form the base of the culvert. Then he built the small culvert walls. Then he built the road on top of that, burying his creation, hiding it from sight.

  All of that was purely practical. Any other interpretation is imaginative. But, as Calum’s friend and former neighbour Donald MacLeod would muse, ‘Not far south of Arnish he broke down the wall with which George Rainy had enclosed his sheep-tack ... I imagine a big cheer went up in his heart when he did that.’

  In some of the latter stages he had another form of help. Calum and Lexie MacLeod briefly gained some new neighbours when Raasay’s retired district nurse Nancy Park and her husband John moved into the Arnish croft tenancy and the house which had been vacated by Calum’s sister, brother and mother. John Park had the welcome asset of a tractor and was happy to assist – the Parks were attracted to Arnish as much by the prospect of a decent access road as by the calm and beauty of the place. Nonetheless, Calum’s road would not be finished, as he had hoped, by the end of 1973, just as it had not been finished, as he had predicted to Basil Reckitt eight years earlier, in 1970. The date of its completion is as obscure as the year of its commencement, and for even better reasons. When is a road finished? Is a road ever finished? He was certainly able by 1974 to drive his Land Rover or any tractor in the ample if uneven space between his exquisite stonework from Arnish to Brochel and back again. But no doctor’s or nurse’s car, no ambulance, no post office van and few civilian vehicles would last the course of such a two-mile road until it had been properly metalled, surfaced and tarmacked.

  He wanted it finished and then properly maintained to County Council roads department standards. Of that there will be no doubt. But even unfinished he considered it functional. Calum MacLeod would not bow to the minor practical limitations of what he had created. He insisted upon driving the Land Rover which he had bought – in careful anticipation of completion in the early 1970s – up and down the stone road. ‘The first time he drove it’, said his daughter, ‘he was amazed at how fast the bracken moved towards him! But he never went any further than the end of the road.’

 
That was because, just as Calum had grown tobacco although he did not smoke, and as he cultivated tomatoes without ever eating them, so Calum MacLeod, who would shortly become the most celebrated amateur road builder in twentieth-century Scotland, had never taken and would never pass his driving test.

  * Aitken, a native of Cupar in Fife, was in 1900 the president of the Road Surveyors’ Association of Scotland. He would gain international renown as a consulting roads engineer at the beginning of the age of the motorcar. In 1907 he won a hundred-guinea prize from the British Roads Improvement Association for ‘Aitken’s Pneumatic Tar Sprayer’, a machine invented to prevent dust clouds from rising on dry summer roads used by motorcars, and in 1911 he was attracted to Delaware in the USA to advise on the construction of a statewide highway.

  * Military Aid to the Civil Community (MACC) is an essential and ongoing domestic responsibility of the British armed forces. It is loosely defined as ‘providing Service personnel and equipment, in both emergencies and routine situations, to assist the community at large’.

  † The Rt Hon. Alexander Macdonald of Macdonald, MBE, 7th Lord Macdonald and High Chief of Clan Donald was a major hereditary landowner in Skye, although not in Raasay. Between 1932 and his death in 1970 he was also a central figure on Inverness County Council, of which he became vice-convener in 1952 and full convener in 1968. For most of the postwar years he was also chairman of the council’s roads committee.

  * This letter provoked an immediate and spirited response from Mrs Christina McFadden of the island of Barra. Mrs McFadden was a former member of Inverness County Council who, in the nature of most Hebridean representatives, stood some way to the political left of her mainland landowning colleagues. ‘It was not under a Socialist government that the first forced emigration of our people began,’ she chided Calum MacLeod. ‘It was not under a Socialist government that island children had to bring peats to school to help warm them in wintry weather; carry a piece of bread, usually without butter or jam, for lunch; walk miles to school, often arriving cold and wet, the lunch piece already eaten; trudge back home, lucky if a meal awaited them . . .’

  * The job description of ‘local assistant keeper’ differed only from the standard ‘assistant keeper’ in that Calum MacLeod was employed by the NLB to work only on the Rona light: he could not be transferred to other stations. Donald MacSwan, who had been born in Rona at the turn of the twentieth century, returned there for a day trip in 1973 and later recounted how ‘We walked up to the lighthouse – which is quite a climb – and there we were welcomed with great cordiality by the lighthouse keepers. They immediately made us a very welcoming cup of tea. They have very comfortable quarters there with electric fires, TV and all mod cons. The officer on duty – Malcolm MacLeod (a relief keeper from Arnish, Raasay) – showed us over the lighthouse, explaining how everything was done and how the light itself operated.’

  * As this letter attracted a bewildered response from other readers of the Gazette, who were especially startled by Calum’s reference to ‘transactions with crocodiles’, it probably requires explanation. The other correspondents may not have known that Calum MacLeod was repeating a common nineteenth-century misunderstanding. It seems likely that Calum was reading an English translation of Description de l’Égypte, a comprehensive study of the country made by French scholars who had travelled there with Napoleon’s conquering army in 1798, which was published in a number of volumes between 1809 and 1828. This flawed but original work was extremely influential. Its assertion that Egyptian fellahin had congress with crocodiles as part of divine worship was picked up lasciviously by the English explorer and author Sir Richard Burton, who quoted a French traveller’s account of bestiality he witnessed among the fellahin of Egypt. The men, taking advantage of the female crocodile’s helpless position, drive off the male and ‘supplant him in this frightful intercourse’. This congress, adds Burton, is believed to be ‘the sovereignest, for rising to rank and riches’.

  The truth appears to have been comparatively mundane. The Egyptian fellahin did indeed worship crocodiles. But in order to worship them suitably, they needed to know their gender. As a crocodile’s gender is not superficially apparent this was and is notoriously difficult, requiring delicate manual exploration of the reptile. ‘To be certain of a crocodilian’s sex’, writes a modern veterinarian,‘you need to either feel or visually identify the penis (male) or clitoris (female). In big animals, this is very easy . . . In smaller animals, however, it requires a lot more experience and skill to do it properly and not make a mistake . . . Although this procedure does not harm the animal if performed correctly, crocodilians generally object to such demeaning behaviour. Therefore, the animal should be restrained by a second person throughout the procedure.’

  It would seem that the influential French travellers had observed Egyptians sexing crocodiles, or seen or heard descriptions of the same, and had jumped to the wrong conclusion.

  * The local botanist Stephen Bungard commented on the subject, ‘There are about that many [531] types of plant on Raasay as long as one counts planted species and microspecies. There is nothing here not known elsewhere in Britain. Raasay limestone has some plants in common with the limestone in Kent, and more or less everywhere else in the UK. Calum showed the BSBI purple loosestrife near Torran – not easy to spot as it never flowered while the sheep were there.’

  A Kind of Historical Justification

  It’ll be like an Autobahn.

  Calum MacLeod, October 1982

  The fact that the new road between Brochel Castle and Arnish was increasingly noted and recognised as a wonder of the modern world did not make its passage – in any literal or metaphorical sense of the word, by car or through a maze of bureaucracies – especially easy, as the visiting exiles were the first to discover.

  ‘My husband and I’, said Jessie Nicolson, ‘went there with the car before the road was finished. I was never so scared in all my life – going over boulders – I was holding on! I’ll never forget that. It was frightening. It was frightening at the best of times.’

  By 1974 Calum MacLeod had completed, or almost completed, just short of two miles of miraculous landscape sculpture. Many rural roads qualify for that compound noun. Calum’s road attracted the adjective because he had created it alone. In some eyes his ‘land art’ was then at its idealised best. The stonework was stunningly complete. The concept was pure and the execution was unsullied. It was by no means kind to any ordinary motorist’s suspension or nerves. It was not yet complete, not yet entirely ‘practical for vehicular travel’, as the art student Campbell Sandilands would later acknowledge, but it had an incomparable artistic ‘majesty and splendour’.

  ‘I remember the first time I drove along that road,’ said John Nicolson. ‘We only reached where the deer fence is. I couldn’t get up that brae at the Arnish side. That would have been in a Morris Minor in the mid 1970s. But the road wasn’t metalled then. My wife and I were going to stay in Torran for the night, and we set off to take the car as far as it would take us. We parked it just before you come in sight of the deer fence at the corner there, and we walked from there to Torran. Which I thought was a terrific achievement!’

  ‘Calum’s road as it stands now (or rather as it runs and teeters and skitters and lurches now)’, Magnus Magnusson would suggest of that unfinished article, ‘is a work of art in itself, a monument worth preserving in its original form.’

  Calum MacLeod certainly did have a vision, and it deserved artistic recognition. It was the vision articulated at the end of Campbell Sandilands’ dissertation: ‘It will open up ground suitable to young crofters,’ Calum said of his work of ‘land art’. ‘I hope I will live to see people moving back to this lovely area.’ So Magnus Magnusson was mistaken to suggest that ‘I don’t think a bureaucratic resurfacing of [the road] will make much difference to Calum now’. It would make a world of difference.

  If Calum’s road was to be art, it must be utilitarian art. All the dry-stone
dykes, culverts and holding walls would ultimately be worthless if nobody could or would drive along the road they supported. They were not there purely to be looked at and admired. They were there to admit motorised transport to the north end of Raasay. In order for this to happen the road must be finished by heavy machinery and given a smooth topping of tarmacadam. That process would be considered by Calum MacLeod not as a dilution of his achievement but as its completion – as its final, unanswerable statement. It would also constitute a belated but satisfactory admission by local government in Inverness and Portree of their own earlier shortcomings. If then the road still qualified as art, it would be the art of Sydney Harbour Bridge or the Hoover Dam, which were dependent upon their function. If then it failed to qualify as art, it would still do service as a country road.

  It would take almost another decade for that vision to be realised. There were false starts and dashed hopes along the way. The first came from the European Economic Community (EEC). The United Kingdom had joined the EEC on the first day of January 1973. Almost immediately Inverness County Council cooked up a scheme designed to persuade the EEC to part-subsidise a £220,000 development of the road from Brochel Castle as far as Fladda, covering both of Calum’s two roads.*

  The EEC scheme fell into the mire of local and county politics. Its essential composition required the British government to stump up half of the money, or £110,000, Inverness County Council to fork out another quarter, or £55,000, while the EEC weighed in with the last £55,000. This substantial sum of British taxpayers’ and local ratepayers’ money was unacceptable to many people, including the Raasay representative on Skye District Council, Alistair Nicolson. ‘I would not have any objection to the expenditure by Inverness CC or the EEC of a few thousand pounds to surface the road Malcolm MacLeod has made’, wrote councillor Nicolson at the time. But he questioned ‘the sense’ of spending £220,000 to build a road to a place whose ‘population of two cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as a community. Is it honest for the council to put their hands in our pockets and take all this money so as to qualify for £55,000 from the EEC . . . ?’