Marram

by Leonie Charlton

  We were looking for Chief. We’d found Ross alone by the roadside fence being petted by walkers, he was walking beside me now through the dunes. Every now and again he’d stop and lift his head and call out a high-pitched neigh, his whole body vibrating with tremors that carried along the rope to my hand, up my arm, into my body. The three of us listened for a reply but couldn’t hear anything above the wind. Shuna was quiet. It doesn’t take long for the imagination to go into overdrive: Chief’s legs caught in wire, Chief escaped and gone for miles, Chief swimming out to sea, Chief stolen. We followed sets of hoof tracks through the dunes where they’d been galloping in the night. Down on the beach the tracks thinned to just one set of hoof prints which led to the far end of the bay. There the fence line ended a little short of the sea, and if he really wanted to, a pony could cross the rocks and head up onto the hill. Shuna set off at a run. Ten minutes later we met her and Chief coming back round the shoreline.

  ‘He was so pleased to see me! Don’t know what he was doing round there, but he’s fine. He’s totally fine.’ Relief lightened her face.

  We’d left the road and were riding down a grassy track to the burial ground on the point at Borve Point. The ponies were striding out, looking all around them, their hooves making soft thuds on the sandy soil. We passed a sheep track that trickled through the machair to a single standing stone, clearly a favoured rubbing post. There was a long fenced off potato strip, the sandy soil piled up in neat ridges, tattie shaws just starting to show. Then, between Ross’s ears, a huddle of crosses showed up on the skyline against a pewter sea. They were all facing eastwards, to us and to the rising sun. The graveyard was enclosed by a tall dry-stone dyke. It had fallen down in places and the ubiquitous strands of barbed wire were strung across the gaps, ribbons of last year’s silage bale wrap fluttered in the wind like Tibetan prayer flags. A plaited fisherman’s rope lay in recumbent coils between the dyke and the shore. It was melded into the shoreline, its hemp spirals sewn through with Moss and Silverweed. Alongside it, boulders that had rolled from the wall were embossed in yolk-yellow Lichen, cat’s-tongue rough to the touch.

  We got off and led the ponies to a gate on the far side of the burial ground. A sign told us it was a Commonwealth graveyard, that casualties from both the First and Second World Wars were buried here. We took it in turns to hold the ponies while the other wandered amongst the stones, listening, touching, reading. The lettered, dated summations of lives, short-lived and long-lived, were being taken over by Lichens, some like smooth spillages of cream, others sage-green and wiry. The air was strung with the oscillating calls of Curlews, and Lapwings flung themselves in somersaults against the wind. This place of remembrance was a sanctuary for birds. I felt a sense of privilege to be there that was almost too much to bear. We walked in silence towards the tip of the point, the carved gravestones replaced by body-sized rocks left by the sea, or glaciers, or maybe both. A Curlew whistled in alarm and we stopped. The sky was full of birds watching over their nests, we had a sense of trespassing on hallowed ground. The bird calls escalated, echoing our own sense of wonder. As we retreated a slender head and neck peered at us from above a rock, there was something strangely adolescent about this bird as it wheeled up, all awkward elegance before the sky stole it. Later, the bird book told us it was a Godwit.

  We walked back in the lee of the wall. Underfoot was a mixture of dried cow dung and sand, a refuge for cattle in the winter months. As we left quietly through the gate, its metal rungs holey with rust, an Arctic Tern trailed its long tail with impossible grace in the air above us. Shapeshifter, I thought, as a fine rain blew across our faces.

  The Curlews’ spiralling calls had tuned me in to a world tilting ever-so-slightly differently on its axis, a world I wanted to know more deeply, and one I’d need to learn a new language to explore. Shuna had told me, down at the graveyard, that Karen Matheson, her sister-in-law, had family buried there. Karen’s mother had left Barra when she was sixteen to go and work in the hotels in Oban. She had been ashamed of her Gaelic, as many were at that time, and hadn’t spoken it in the home. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Karen had gone on to become a world-renowned Gaelic singer, forming the band Capercaillie with Shuna’s brother Donald Shaw, and becoming an impassioned ambassador for the language. Her last album was a return to her Hebridean roots, recording traditional songs and poems. ‘Urram’, the Gaelic for ‘respect’ and ‘honour’. Urram, what a beautiful word.

  ‘Look, I can post my cards.’ We were back on the tarmac road and Shuna was pointing to the postbox on the verge ahead. As she leant over and posted from the saddle, delight spreading across her face, I laughed at the improbability of it all. At us Michelin women padded out in full waterproofs, our faces red-ruddy from the wind. At the two glossy postcards sent on their way at the end of a quiet township road on Barra.

  As the road cut inland the surge of beryl sea on our left was replaced by fields and stock fences. In places each barb on the wire was coated in sorrel cattle hair, like felted pearls. ‘Allasdale,’ said Shuna, looking at a road sign ahead. ‘I read what that means: elves’ milking place, from the Norse’. I imagined them nipping in and milking the cattle, their fair dues. For what, I wondered.

  We settled into a rhythm of looking behind and in front for traffic, measuring the distances to the next passing places or stepping off the road when there was room to let a car pass. The drivers slowed down, and smiling, interested faces looked out from passing pickups, cars, the post-van. There was also a steady flow of camper vans, but we got the feeling they were trying to make amends for their size and boxy ugliness with extra sensitive driving. Just as we were beginning to feel more confident about the traffic our complacency was shattered. Riding up a steep incline, where the road crosses over from the west side of the island to the east, between two hills, a bin lorry came over the skyline. It slowed down, but as it passed its hydraulic brakes hissed. Chief panicked, tried to turn and run back towards Ross and me but there was no room, so he leapt over the ditch on the left. Shuna had jumped off but had fallen in the ditch. In a nightmarishly slow-motion sequence, we were both aware of the tangled mess of old fence wire on the other side of the ditch, of the panicking pony, of the dark underbelly of the lorry, of all the things that could go wrong. By this time the shocked-looking driver had stopped. It wasn’t his fault. We shouldn’t have been so blasé. Chief is a young horse and we had expected too much of him. We should have asked the lorry to stop while we trotted back to a passing place where there was room to get well out of the way.

  The lorry left, rattling into the distance. Shuna was picking bits of bramble off herself. She and Chief were shaken, but unhurt. Meanwhile, I was in helpless fits of giggles. Not because I thought it was funny, as it clearly wasn’t, but because I have an unfortunate response to shock sometimes. I’ve been known to burst into giggles at the news that someone has just died. I remember Mum doing something similar at my stepfather’s funeral, twenty years ago in the Crematorium in Ayr. We were all waiting to go in for the service, and there was Mum, joking with her best friend, stifling laughter. My brothers and I were mortified, his three grown children sitting silently opposite. Paul, their father, and our stepfather for the last sixteen years, had hanged himself ten days previously.

  ‘I’m sorry, Shuna, I’m sorry…are you okay?’ My voice cracked on another wave of giggles. I knew she would understand they were coming from a place of distress. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen me do this.

  ‘Let’s keep walking,’ she said, knowing the best way for horses to get past trauma is movement. As we walked my giggles ebbed away. Thank God Chief and Shuna were okay. What could have happened back there didn’t bear thinking about. I found myself remembering Mum’s own funeral in Clydebank Crematorium. I hadn’t giggled then. Not once. Not even a belly-tickle hint of it. None of us had giggled on the trip down from Oban in Will’s Ford Transit minibus. Nine of us: Martin and I, our daughter Brèagha, my brothers Will and
Tom and their partners, and Dad. I will be eternally grateful for his presence that day. Christine was also there, a spiritual healer who Mum had been seeing in the five years she’d been living in Argyll. Once, when she was in the care home and still able to talk, I had walked in on a session. Christine gestured for me to sit down, and I listened as she guided Mum through a visualisation of a ‘safe place’ that she had obviously visited before. Mum described the ‘friend’ who waited for her there, a grey mare. Tears rolled down my face, suddenly seeing how little of her I’d known.

  On the day of her funeral we met Mum’s friend Moira, and her partner, Pete, at the crematorium. They had driven up from Yorkshire in a convertible with broken windscreen wipers through sleet and rain. There were eleven of us in all, so few people at the end of such a full life, and all looked shattered. It was the 24th of December 2010. There was an icy fog in Dumbarton and I remember how when we came out of the crematorium the sun broke through and a single Robin started singing, splitting the cold December air into galaxies of notes.

  Up ahead, a track went off to the right, through a gate, and alongside Loch an Dùirn. It looked like a good place to stop and we needed to get away from the traffic. We got the stove out and had tea, oatcakes and sardines. It was Barra’s rush hour. The camper vans thinned out and cement lorries, pickups and nippy cars drove past in a sudden and steady stream. A car pulled into the gateway, and a woman with a young boy got out and walked towards us.

  ‘Is it okay if we pet the ponies?’ She and her son lived in the ‘Millennium Houses down the hill’. Apparently, Prince Charles had designed them. We’d noticed them earlier, anachronistic in a cul-de-sac curve, a raised eyebrow on the hillside. The woman was interested in where we’d come from and where we were going. While we chatted, her son held gentle hands to the ponies’ muzzles. He didn’t say a word.

  ‘Ah, Tangasdale, that’s my common. The wee house up the hill, did you see it? My grandfather built it. He had the Horses too, and my dad. They worked with them. They both had a way with them.’ The woman pointed to the track where it disappeared into the hills. ‘That’s where they’d bring the peats down from.’ She was silent as we looked up at the dark ground. ‘My dad used to say that up there,’ she was pointing into the hill-buckled heart of the island, ‘that’s where it all goes on, the standing stones, the ghosts.’

  We watched the little car drive away, and were left wondering, what it all was.

  It was late in the day when we arrived at the Airport beach, Tràigh Mhòr, on the north east of the island. The tide was out and the windsocks were down; no more aeroplane landings on the beach today. The shaley sand stretched out for miles.

  We took the hoof boots off the ponies as they wouldn’t be needing them any more today, and stepped over the bright shell sand to the ripple marks that overlapped like fish scales through a thin film of water. Vehicle tracks shone in straight lines across the tidal flats and, in the distance, we saw cars and tiny figures, cockle pickers. I remembered being here with Martin and the children eight years previously. They’d been ten, eight and six. It was a cloudless day and the children, all bright blonde back then, had guddled in the sand in bare feet and bare legs. The three of them spread out, coming back with clutches of Cockles, some as big as their palms, grooved and heart-shaped. We ate a lot of Cockles on that holiday. Razor Clams too that we’d caught at low tide on the east beach on Vatersay.

  Today the sky was low and grey, but to the north, where we were headed, it was marbled with blue. The ponies’ manes lifted in the wind as they stepped lightly and loosely over the reflected sky, and the insides of my cheeks tightened with enjoyment at the sound of swashing hooves and the dense smell of the salty strand.

  ‘Let’s come and gallop on the beach tomorrow, when we don’t have any saddlebags,’ said Shuna. My heart raced in response.

  The man in a hi-vis jacket dropped Cockles into his bucket. It was the same duck-beak yellow as his wellies. I recognised the bucket. We have them at home, the sheep’s mineral licks come in them. Yellow is an easy colour to spot on the hill, easy to spot on the beach too. He leant on his rake as we approached.

  ‘I do it for the exercise,’ he explained, ‘just fill one bucket when I’m not working.’ He worked on the Eriskay ferry. ‘One week on, one week off.’

  I waved my hands towards the other cockle pickers. ‘Are the Cockles decreasing?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, they used to dredge it with tractors, but they’re barred now. All done by hand. No, they’ll never run out, the beach is too big.’ I savoured his sense of scale, his optimism, as my eyes picked out the little islands of raised sand where he’d been with his rake. We said goodbye and rode on.

  We headed towards the bar of sandy horizon between the township of Eoligarry where we were staying that night, and the uninhabited tidal island of Orosay. We could see the hills of Fuday, Eriskay and South Uist under the faraway drifts of blue sky, and passed a man and a woman with a wheelbarrow, hard at the cockling, nodding their heads at us without pausing in their work. Nearby was a pile of four nylon-net sacks, leaning in towards each other, each one packed to the gunnels with rose-ochre Cockles. We rode through a tractor graveyard, a concoction of corrosion, rufous-red angles and curves, rusting iron layered like filo pastry. I felt a pang for all that past horsepower sinking slowly into the sand. The beach at Orosay was made of whole shells, Cockles and Razor Clams that snapped underfoot. Gulls noisily relayed our arrival and wheeled over the grassy island. We stopped there for a few awe-stretched minutes before wading belly-deep through a tidal channel and heading west towards Eoligarry.

  ‘I’m not sure where Richard’s house is, but we can ask,’ said Shuna, passing me the hip flask. We hadn’t met Richard, but through Shuna’s sister-in-law, Karen, he had kindly offered us his house for a couple of nights. As we left the beach via a green-flanked sandy track, a man waved and shouted hello from the road.

  ‘I’m Rob,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking out for you.’ A friend of Richard’s, he had sandy hair and a radiant smile and had a croft where we could put the ponies. Shuna had arranged all this in advance and, once again, I felt a surge of appreciation for all the planning she’d done. We followed Rob’s instructions along a single-track road, through crofts vibrating with the courting call of male Corncrakes, past gates and fences sculpted out of bed-ends and fish crates and ropes of all colours, and of course baler twine, lots and lots of baler twine. From the glances we exchanged I could tell we both already loved this place.

  ‘Rob’s croft must be over there.’ Shuna pointed at some trees on the skyline. He’d told us to look out for the trees they’d planted. ‘Olearia, from New Zealand, they can withstand the salt.’

  The field hadn’t been grazed for a while and there was a good bite of grass. We walked down over a bank smudged in pale yellow Primroses. I had never seen so many in one place before. Beyond the fence the marram-bank dropped steeply into a biscuity band of sand. Beyond that a strip of turquoise sea losing itself eventually to the aubergine hue of the South Uist hills. I bent down and picked a single petal from a Primrose and put it in my mouth, the gentle flavour summed up the subtle-sweet essence of this place. Next to the field, and nestled in amongst the trees, was a wooden hut – with its silvering larch cladding and dove-grey tin roof it was a natural extension of all that sky and sea and sand. We found a hose and filled a wheelbarrow for the ponies. They drank deeply.

  Rob picked us up in his white Land Rover. ‘The same one we had when we lived in Africa,’ he told us warmly. ‘1993, 300 TDI, assembled in Zimbabwe.’ It had green canvas safari seats and you could almost smell the dust and dreams and adventure in their seams.

  ‘There’s Angus John wanting a word,’ he said as he pulled alongside a large man in overalls filling water troughs and surrounded by perky-faced black Cattle.

  ‘Now then, what about these ponies, they won’t be escaping, will they?’ Angus John said, coming to the fence and getting straight to the point. />
  ‘No, I think they’ll be fine,’ Shuna said. ‘They look very happy where they are.’ There was a pause.

  ‘And what would you do if they did?’ he added, clearly not too impressed with our reassurances. ‘I’ve just planted my potatoes.’

  ‘They don’t call him “the bear” for nothing,’ Rob said, smiling, as we drove away.

  The whole of the east side of the house was glass. Shuna and I looked out across the bay towards Orosay and the islands of Hellisay and Gighay with Eriskay beyond. Something tiny was meandering across the bay towards us.

  ‘It’s someone on a bike,’ I said incredulously as it got closer. We sat watching the bike weave drunkenly over the sand. As it came closer, we saw it was a man riding one-handed. With the other he was holding a full sack of Cockles, an almost impossible feat of balance we imagined.

  ‘If I lived in this house I’d spend my life right here, just sitting, looking out of this window,’ Shuna said. The view would never be the same twice. It would be ever-changing with the tides and weather and light. ‘But we’d better get going,’ she continued, standing beside a telescope as tall as she was. Rob and Kate had invited us over for supper. It wouldn’t be a hardship to leave our couscous in the saddlebag tonight. Nothing was a hardship. We had landed in the lap of luxury.

  Over dinner Rob talked both of his lifelong Rhinoceros conservation work in Africa, and his more recent work with re-wilding in Scotland. It turned out that his mother owned Taigh Cialla, a house on the point opposite Orosay, and he had spent his childhood holidays there. Rob and Kate and their own children still stayed there each year. With no electricity it was a time to ‘just be’ in this wonderful place, a time to connect with their now-adult children and others in the family. But this was a working trip and they needed the internet so were renting this cottage nearby. They came up to Barra from Cambridge as often as they could and would be here until the end of June.