Calum's Road

by Roger Hutchinson

  That proposal sank out of sight, and was pursued by another. In August 1975 the West Highland Free Press reported that ‘The truly astonishing story of Calum MacLeod’s road on Raasay is about to reach its conclusion. Within the next couple of weeks a team of Royal Engineers will move onto the island to surface the two and a quarter miles of road [sic] that the man built with a pick, a wheelbarrow and his bare hands.’

  The scheme actually involved 518 Company of the Royal Pioneer Corps and was the brainchild of the Highlands and Islands Development Board. One week after its initial report the West Highland Free Press was obliged to note that ‘our story . . . was quickly overtaken by events . . . the Highlands and Islands Development Board, who are acting as go-betweens, have now heard that due to “operational priorities” [the Royal Pioneer Corps] are unable to undertake the work for the time being. But, said a Board spokesman, “they’re still very keen on it – it’s just a matter of getting the time.” ’

  They never did get the time. Dark and unevidenced rumours circulated once more about the malicious intervention of one or another of the Inverness-shire landowner-councillors, and the Royal Pioneer Corps stayed away from northern Raasay.

  In 1975 Inverness County Council was abolished and Calum MacLeod found himself paying rates to a new local authority. Its name was the Highland Regional Council. It was based in the same administrative headquarters in Inverness, it retained most of the old officials and it was comprised of many of the old councillors. But it no longer had responsibility for the Outer Isles between Harris and Vatersay, which had been subsumed into a new Western Isles Islands’ authority. The few islands still governed from Inverness included Skye, however, and Skye’s satellite neighbours of Raasay, Fladda, Rona and Tighe.

  If there was no dramatic change in personnel, there was a marginal shift of perspective. Inverness County Council had lost Harris, the Uists, Barra and Vatersay amid charges of neglect. Highland Regional Council was consequently sensitive to such allegations from its remaining island dependants. At the very least, one or two councillors and one or two officials considered themselves mandated to take a fresh look at the requirements of their insular peripheries.

  In these new circumstances, in August 1977 a memo was sent from Inverness to the regional council’s subdivisional engineer in Portree, asking him to cast light on a certain homemade road between Brochel Castle and Arnish in the north of Raasay. Three weeks later, following a trip to Raasay, the engineer replied to his director of roads and transport.

  ‘This is the road that gained considerable publicity a few years ago’, wrote the engineer from Skye, ‘as it was constructed over a number of years by a sole crofter.

  ‘. . . it can only be traversed with a Land Rover and is generally extremely rough, with steep hills and many bad bends. The existing surface is generally very loose and rough . . . The road is, of course, unadopted.

  ‘To bring this road up to a standard suitable for adoption, you would be talking in a price of well over £100,000 [over £420,000 today], but if a job creation project was considered any price between £10,000 and £15,000 could be put on the scheme, but to substantially improve this track a high proportion would be required in machine and machine time and cost of materials.’ At least it could be said that, after half a century and the loss of 98 per cent of the population of northern Raasay, Inverness was looking seriously at the road between Brochel and Arnish. A key to the reason may be found in the observation of the Skye divisional engineer that ‘This is the road that gained considerable publicity a few years ago, as it was constructed over a number of years by a sole crofter.’

  Calum MacLeod was, as Derek Cooper, Radio Four and the Daily Telegraph had revealed, and a score of later journalists and broadcasters would discover, excellent copy. His road was an irrefutable achievement. But if the man behind it had been slightly less intriguing, less charming, less perfectly rounded in his presentation of the independent but beleaguered Gaelic crofter resisting with infinite wile and resourcefulness the baleful forces of government, it might never have gained quite so much publicity.

  That is not to say that Calum MacLeod presented an artificial front. He did not, because he did not need to. He was fully aware of the power of his case and the seductive charms of his culture and way of life. He simply needed no persuasion to advertise them. And if the broadcast result was a little more Brigadoon than he, more than anybody, knew the reality to be, he could shrug and chuckle.

  Calum would become a celebrated subject for celebrity journalists, and it cannot have been a comfortable experience for councillors and council officials, past and present. Magnus Magnusson, the Icelander who had become a popular television quizmaster, would turn up to discover that Calum’s road ‘is officially designated as a “public footpath”, but in fact it takes tractors or 4-wheel drive vehicles at a leisurely pace – about 4 mph, ideally, making a journey of about half an hour. The surface leaves something to be desired; but the bottoming – ah, that is something that road-men will sing about for years to come!

  ‘Calum is retired from the Lighthouse Service now. He and his wife live in a little red-roofed crofthouse with whitewashed walls (fully modernised by Calum himself, of course) in the marvellously sheltered and fertile dell of South Arnish. Here, by the sweat of his brow, Calum MacLeod has created a veritable Shangri-La. His house is crammed with books, for winter reading and study. He and his wife have milk from their own cow, they grow their own vegetables, their larder overflows with fish and rabbit-meat (he’s a dab hand at the sea-fishing and with a gun); and he is also an accomplished knitter – he has two Knitmasters . . .

  ‘People might say that Calum MacLeod is eccentric. I suppose he is, in the dictionary sense that “he differs from the usual in behaviour”. Last year, for instance, he added another acre to his eight acres of arable land by reclaiming an area of boggy, rush-ridden rough grazing. The ground was too uneven for a tractor, so Calum tackled it with a spade and the traditional Hebridean foot-plough, the cas-chrom. Eccentric? Perhaps – but you should have seen his first crop of oats.

  ‘Calum is a living reminder to us all of what the peasant crofting culture of the Gaels is capable of producing, if we ever need reminding: the lad o’ pairts who becomes the man for all seasons. A lot of people write knowingly about crofting and its cultures; Calum not only writes about it – he lives it.’

  That kind of coverage, and there was and would be a good deal more of it, made difficult reading in the government offices of Edinburgh, Inverness and even Portree. Magnusson might reach the personal conclusion that for artistic reasons Calum’s road should not receive a ‘bureaucratic resurfacing’, but the broadcaster stressed that that was his own aesthetic preference, and did not diminish the legitimacy of Calum’s claim. ‘Certainly,’ wrote Magnusson, ‘Calum MacLeod and his neighbour in South Arnish deserve a decent road to help them maximise their efforts as crofters. Certainly, a proper road north of Brochel Castle might encourage a repopulation of the north of Raasay. Certainly, a road to Arnish, 55 years after that first petition by the islanders, would have a kind of historical justification about it.’

  In such very public circumstances Highland Regional Council had no serious option but to act, or at least to try to act. Sam MacNaughton, a future head of county transport services, would recall, ‘When Calum’s road was being built I was in contract administration in Inverness, controlling the budgets and sucking in monies through grants and other avenues as contributions towards our projects. I was involved in Calum’s road since we managed to get a township road grant from the Scottish Development Department towards the cost.’

  There were a dozen different avenues through which finance and manpower could be attracted to Calum MacLeod’s road from a dozen different bodies. At least two of them – the EEC and the British military – had previously been attempted and had failed. The question facing Sam MacNaughton and his colleagues at the end of the 1970s was which one next, and at what cost: £10,000, £15,0
00, £100,000 or more? According to the divisional engineer in Portree in November 1978, ‘the Brochel–Arnish Road would cost approx £50,000 to be improved under this system [the Scottish Development Department’s Township Roads grant scheme], at a cost per head of the resident population of £12,500, and at this cost the scheme would be unlikely to receive approval from the Scottish Development Department.’ The Skye divisional engineer then suggested that as the Township Roads scheme was unlikely to come through, his own Unadopted Roads Budget could foot the bill – if it received a 100 per cent budget increase!

  At sixty-seven years of age, Calum himself was impressed by neither the idea of a four-year Township Roads scheme nor the different council engineers’ ‘fantastic estimation’ of the cost. ‘I have lived to see vehicles’, he wrote to the roads department of Highland Regional Council in August 1978, ‘from the JCB to “Beatles” [Volkswagen Beetles] using the road at the total cost [of] £1190 to the DOAFS [Department of Agriculture and Fisheries Scotland] who helped me [the actual cost had been £1,900], but not one penny from your Department or Council while I paid the full Road Tax for my vehicles – and that for over ten years – this in addition to that paid by other users.

  ‘To delay improvement for a further four years is simply following the infamous tactics of infamous maladministration pursued by your ignominious predecessors for over fifty-four years, with disastrous consequences to this area.’

  In the council offices of Portree and Inverness, at the headquarters of the Highlands and Islands Development Board, in the Scottish Development Department in Edinburgh, at Department of Agriculture sub-offices the length of Scotland, Calum’s road was threatening to cause chronic migraine.

  Early in 1979 another divisional engineer visited the road. Upon his return to Skye from Raasay he scribbled his impressions in pencil upon a sheet of paper. ‘The existing road has been constructed’, he wrote, ‘over the past 10 years by Mr Callum MacLeod No 1 & 2 South Arnish assisted by Mr Parks No 3 & 4 periodically. The road has been constructed from a plan proposed by an engineer from the Royal Engineers some time ago. Mr MacLeod had the assistance of the Dept of Ag and Fisheries in the form of labour and machinery where blasting was required.

  ‘Otherwise, he has constructed the road himself, building drystone retaining walls where the road is in need of embankment and forming a roadbase of rock and gravel from the borders along the length of the road. The horizontal and vertical alignment of the road, considering the location and volume of traffic, are adequate and basically what is required to bring the road to adoptable standards is a small amount of rock excavation to widen the road at various points, some drain work, 4” of bottoming throughout, basically to regulate the surface and bitmac* surface.’

  It is difficult not to discern here a discrepancy in approach, even a clash of attitudes. However essentially practical he may have been, Calum MacLeod carried the weight of his people’s history on his shoulders and in his mind. Council bureaucrats and engineers, however imaginative and however willing to be sympathetic, saw nothing but a bumpy, dusty track to nowhere. Calum saw children playing and old ladies enjoying the autumn of their lives in Arnish, Umachan, Torran and Fladda. Officials saw ruined houses, no electricity, overgrown crofts, and a lost community which no highway on earth could restore. They could rarely have understood the debt of gratitude which Calum MacLeod felt to the place which had raised him and his family in health, the place which had provided him with everything that he held dear. Calum knew what Hebridean ghost towns looked like; he walked through them every week. He was determined that his beloved South Arnish would not share the fate of Umachan and Kyle Rona.

  But it was this unexceptional report, fine-tuned and typed up, which apparently persuaded the Scottish Development Department to acknowledge on 13 February 1979 that the proposal to upgrade and improve Calum MacLeod’s road from Brochel to Arnish through a Township Road Grant ‘does seem to be eligible’. The cost, Highland Council estimated, would be £45,000 (£150,000 today). ‘We would expect the SDD’, a council official told the press, ‘to make a decision on whether or not to provide a grant within six months. Only if they do provide a grant will we act.’

  Six months passed and no decision was forthcoming. Eight months passed, and in September the council’s divisional engineer, Michael Courtney, informed the Department of Agriculture’s estate office in Portree in writing that ‘The Brochel/South Arnish route is currently being submitted by the Regional Council to the Scottish Development Department for grant assistance under the Township Road Programme and the Congested Districts Act, but I have no indication to hand how this application is being considered.’

  Early in 1980 the MP for Inverness-shire, Russell Johnston, was made aware that a year had passed since the Scottish Development Department’s acknowledgement of Calum’s road’s ‘eligibility’, but that nothing had since happened. Russell Johnston elicited a reply from an under-secretary of state at the Scottish Office, Malcolm Rifkind MP, which assured him that ‘This application is being given urgent consideration, and it is hoped to issue a decision soon.’

  In fact, Calum’s road had become a victim of the local authority spending cuts which were immediately enforced by Margaret Thatcher’s and Malcolm Rifkind’s Conservative government following its election in May 1979. Highland Regional Council did not finally deliver to the Scottish Development Department all of the required details of the project until June 1979, a month after that election. Once the scale of the public spending cuts were made clear, it became apparent to the council that – whatever the Scottish Development Department decided – they themselves would not be able to fill their own side of the bargain in that financial year. ‘There was no point’, said Philip Shimmin, Highland Regional Council’s depute director of roads and transport, ‘in applying for something in 1979 that we couldn’t afford to start that year.’

  So the application to the Scottish Development Department, carried forward by twelve months and with a revised estimated cost of £80,000 (£230,000 today) was posted from Inverness to Edinburgh in February 1980. It was approved. In November 1980 Calum MacLeod’s landlords, the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, formally gave Highland Regional Council permission to cross the common grazings in northern Raasay ‘for the purpose of carrying out improvements to the Brochel–South Arnish township road’. Four conditions were attached to this permission. The last one stated that ‘The Highland Regional Council shall maintain the said road in the condition in which it is, consequential upon the completion of the work to be carried out.’

  On paper at least, Calum MacLeod had won his long war. The former enemy had committed itself to reparation. Calum was a Christian, and was not given to gloating. But he was also a Celt, and was inclined to rhapsody. He would write a ballad to recall the concept, immortalise the toil and celebrate the imminent final stages of his highway.

  Yet I was undismayed, [it read in part]

  With peg and line and level too

  its course was then surveyed.

  No bulldozer was to be got,

  no crusher and no digger

  Just brawn and strength to do the lot,

  and, working like a nigger.

  For six long years the work goes on

  by crags or mossy hollows.

  The tourists are amazed to find

  a road they now can follow

  Round many a curve and rocky cliff

  the road now does meander,

  and you will find a motor-car

  where only sheep could wander.

  And, when at last it is complete,

  the battle will be over,

  and walking will be obsolete

  We all go by Landrover.

  The road a monument will remain

  in memory of one fellow

  who saw his countrymen swept away

  by the heirs of Patrick Sellar.

  The war of words had indeed been won. But on stone and earth and bitmac there were still s
kirmishes to fight. As Calum MacLeod passed his seventieth birthday in 1981 the council’s sixman Raasay road squad had still been unable to start work on his road. The further delay was due to the fact that, for a variety of reasons, £80,000 would no longer cover the bill. Thanks to inflation, £80,000 in the summer of 1982 was worth rather less than £80,000 in February of 1980. And neither Calum nor his road were getting any younger . . .

  ‘As a result of adverse weather,’ Highland Council’s capital works depute director Sam MacNaughton wrote to the Scottish Development Department in November 1981, ‘and in particular the exceptional rainfall over the period since 1979, large areas of the existing track are now severely damaged and a recent estimate based on an updated survey of the track’s condition has indicated that the present estimated cost for the work is likely to be approximately £120,000 compared with the original estimate of £80,000. On these considerations I would like to resubmit this scheme for grant on the basis of the revised cost.’

  The Scottish Development Department replied to MacNaughton requesting further details of and justification for the increased grant to finish Calum’s road. Sam MacNaughton’s reply illustrated a sea change in Invernesian attitudes towards what had previously been their headache in South Arnish.

  ‘The two inhabited crofts in South Arnish’, wrote Mac-Naughton, ‘are vigorously worked with the remaining uninhabited crofts and common grazings well stocked. The provision of a proper access will permit the bulk deliveries of foodstuffs and fertiliser for reseeding and reclamation purposes. The improved access will make the crofts easier to work and make the area more attractive to live in, all helping to revitalise the economy of the northern end of Raasay.’