Marram

by Leonie Charlton

  Here in South Uist the ponies’ hooves made a pleasing hollow sound on the wet tarmac. Down through the decades I could hear Mum’s voice saying Bombalina, a name she reserved for me in our private moments together, and in her letters. Walking down that township road in the heavy rain I knew that I’d had her love. I’d just chosen to turn away from it for reasons that were well-founded at the time, but that no longer served me.

  The ponies continued walking, bending their necks away from the driving rain and skirting around the silver puddles. Their coronet bands were soaked and shone moon-white above their black hooves. We passed a sprinkling of buildings: a stone cottage with an aquamarine-streaked tin roof, a concrete byre with no roof, bungalows set dismally to the wet wind, a thatched cottage dark with rain, parked outside it a long wheel base Transit van, its white panels smeared with rust, its doors and wheels long gone. The red shock of three gas bottles against a stone shed. In the doorway, under a low stone lintel, was a short man holding an axe. He shot us a shy, toothless smile as we passed, his eyes keenly following the ponies. The fields were fenced into a craziness of tiny triangles, a few sheep in each one. One of them stared at us, chewing in clockwise circles, showing us her single tooth. On the mainland she would have been sold long ago but here, on this sweet machair grazing, things were different. And how green the grass was. It was different out here with all that sky, even when it was overcast the light made so much more of the colours.

  At the end of the tarmac road the wind was full of the tang of the sea. A wooden arrow indicated the Machair Way, a path that wound alongside twenty uninterrupted miles of sandy beach. We stopped to read a sign set down low.

  MACHAIR LIFE+. Machair is the Gaelic term for a distinct type of coastal grassland that supports a huge diversity of plants, birds and invertebrates, some of which are now rare in the UK. Seventy per cent of the world’s machair occurs in Western Scotland and is currently under threat. The MACHAIR LIFE+ Project is part funded by the LIFE+ programme of the European Union. The project aims to encourage traditional forms of crofting, a wildlife-friendly method of working the land, resulting in the creation, protection and enhancement of this unique ecosystem.

  Beside the text was a line-drawing of a Corncake, the birds which, after reading Kathleen Jamie’s essay Crex-Crex, I will forever see as ‘the little Gods of the field’. I felt a familiar wave of worry, wondering what the future held for the Corncrake, and the Lapwing and the Great Yellow Bumble Bee.

  As we rode northwards thick cloud glowered over a jade sea. To our right the machair shares ran in parallel lines towards the hills in the east. Some had been planted with potatoes, the sandy ridges running in concentric curved lines. Other were ploughed and swept smooth by the wind, ready to be planted. Some were already greening up, perhaps with a crop of grass and corn, a preferred choice out here for silage which would feed the cattle through the winter months. Some areas were uncultivated. The information board had talked about rotational cropping, when the ground was left fallow for two or three years, enabling breeding birds and insects to thrive amongst the wildflowers. Great rusty spheres lay amongst the dunes, iron fishing buoys washed up in storms. They grounded the landscape, weighting down its hemlines against all that airborne and seaborne transience.

  We passed a green-domed tidal island, another ‘Orosay’. The remains of a jetty, with just the upright timbers remaining, scored its shoreline. On our side of the tidal strand, was ‘Orosay Net Station’. So said the sign attached to the fence that ringed it, ten feet tall with concrete pillars and crowned in barbed wire. On the other side of the fence were mounds of nets. Not so long ago they used to repair nets here for fish-farm cages, but now the nets were rotting away. Rows of black silage bales muscled up along the edge of industrial-looking sheds. On our side of the fence were stacks of parlour creels, the type used for Crab and Lobster fishing. They were filled with small buoys coloured in sea-faded pinks and creams and yellows. More old nets were layered like breton crêpes with four-foot-high rusted anchors holding them down. Everything here was taking the wind into account. Were those fierce fences for the wind too, or was something else going on in the net station?

  It felt like worlds were colliding here. The delicacy of old nets and wooden built jetties with the harshness of barbed wire and concrete. Again, the scales were all out of kilter, like the church and croft house at Garrynamonie. It left me feeling uneasy as the wind supped at my breath and ribbons of silage plastic yapped in the fence wire.

  Sand skittered across the beach in front of us, making Chief startle. I felt motion sick with so much shifting sand and sky. Looking out to sea to balance myself I saw a skerry of rocks draped with the black shapes of seals. They were common seals judging by the way their noses and tails scooped up at each end, like little dugout canoes. As we rode closer, they slipped one by one into the water, their heads bobbing between us and the rocks. I started to count but gave up after twenty. In an instant, sunshine switched the sea from jade to turquoise. The seals’ black muzzles faced us, glistening now. They were fascinated, moving alongside us in the waves. Every now and again they’d all go under with a splash, then the sea bounced them up again like rubber balls. They looked at each other, in the same way that Ross and Chief do when they’re playing, tossing their heads. As we got closer to the tideline, the seals were emboldened and moved in towards us. The ponies were wary of the waves but intrigued by the seals. We persuaded them to walk in the deeper water where it wasn’t so splashy and were quickly encircled. We were infused with a sense of these exquisite creatures with their lambent eyes and long wet whiskers. Sanderling flurried ahead of us, their wings like beaten-light on the water.

  Back on the dry beach we broke into a trot and the ponies’ strides lengthened across the sand. The bob of seals kept pace and sunlight splashed down between the clouds. We rounded the next point breathless and laughing and the world suddenly changed. We’d left smooth sand and Sanderling and Seals behind and entered a place where Ravens stalked stiff-legged amongst thickly laid banks of rotting seaweed. Herring Gulls squabbled through yellow hooked beaks. Old silage bales lay slumped on the beach where they’d been dumped. A rain squall hit us hard and we were soaked in seconds, the wind pushing the rain through our waterproofs. The seaweed was hard going underfoot and heaved up the smell of rotting cabbage. We were glad when we were on the Marram Grass again, breathing in lungfuls of turfy air, and rejoined the Machair Way that curved along behind the dunes. Pink Pigeons lifted off ploughed earth.

  ‘Fancy some lunch?’ I pointed to a shed up ahead. We stepped out of the wind into the semi-darkness of the cattle shelter. The roof was low and flat and rain pinged overhead. The building was relatively new, judging by the small amount of rust on the box-profile sheeting, and had the sweet herbal smell of dry cow dung. After leaving school I went to Australia and worked as a jillaroo on a cattle station in Queensland for six months, and that smell reminds me of sunshine and space and galloping horses. I loved that spell in my life, not that I was particularly happy in myself, but it was a huge adventure, and it was good to be away from everything at home. Dad phoned looking for me. Weeks had gone by and they hadn’t heard. As a parent I can now appreciate how worrying that must have been, but at the time, with no mobile phones, no Facebook, no emails, I hadn’t given it much thought. I was too busy living in the moment. Sweaty dusty adventures hurtling through hilly scrubland after long-legged Brahman Cattle.

  I remember getting a letter from Mum, the envelope addressed in her familiar left-handed writing, rounded and jaggy at the same time. I don’t recall the details, just the way I felt after reading it: wracked with guilt, confusion, rage, helplessness. Sitting in the Toyota Ute with Kay, the manager, on our way to repair fences. The look of incomprehension on her face as I sobbed and sobbed. I couldn’t explain to her, I couldn’t put into words that which I had no way of understanding myself, but I see in that scene how messed up I was around Mum. There was love undeniably, but there was als
o sadness, dislike, mistrust and a lot of confusion.

  Shuna and I ate smoked mussels and oatcakes for lunch. We made tea and passed the cup backwards and forwards to each other. It was good to be out of the wind, so we leant back against the walls. The ponies were happy to rest, standing quietly tied to the wooden frame of the shed. The wind had taken it out of us all. There was a single dove-grey Rabbit’s foot on the ground near me. I picked up a handful of the dry dung and crumbled it between my fingers. Even in full waterproofs, with rain hammering overhead and wind finding every nail-hole to squeeze through, the smell pulled me back to Australia. Lunchtimes when the Horses would be tied to Eucalyptus trees and we would open our leather saddlebags, reaching in for the sandwiches we’d carefully wrapped in newspaper that morning. Always beef sandwiches. Beef for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I stretched my hand out to touch the telegraph pole. It was shiny where Cattle had rubbed against it and my heart felt full of sunshine. After twenty-seven years those neural pathways were still in good health.

  Ross and Chief lifted their heads and started to shift their weight between hooves. We gave them an oatcake each, packed up, and set off stiffly into the wind; we’d got chilled sitting down for so long in our damp clothes. Shuna looked at the map. ‘We’re north of Daliburgh now, Angus McPhee will have ridden this stretch on his way to war. Did you ever get round to reading The Silent Weaver?’

  I shook my head. ‘I will though.’

  ‘In the first chapter he’s riding down here, before heading across to Lochboisdale to get the boat. It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. There’s a photograph of Angus and his fine gelding. That’s what it says, his fine gelding…’ She fell silent.

  It would be months before I finally got round to reading it, sitting in my writing box on a diluvial November afternoon, 3pm and almost dark, my tears blurring the broken arms of winter-bracken outside the window.

  Early in September 1939, riders in battledress cantered down a broad, grassy plain on the western edge of Europe. The young men of Uist were going to war again. (…) They and their animals were the last representatives of an equestrian culture which had flourished on the greensward of western Uist for millennia.

  As they rode to war they skirted mile after mile of ground which their people had turned over for grains and root vegetables using horse-drawn ploughs. They passed over the arenas for popular horse races in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They led their mounts through communities which had not yet been colonised by the motor car, the lorry and the tractor.

  They rode from all parts of the three distinct islands of North Uist, Benbecula and South Uist. Some districts contributed more horse soldiers than others, by virtue of their greater reliance on horses in everyday crofting life and consequently their superior horsemanship.

  One such district was Iochdar at the north end of South Uist. “The horses in Iochdar were famous throughout the Uists,” said a local priest. “The Iochdar people have always had the reputation of being ‘big farmers’ and the horses were the most important farm animals. They had to be fed first – every type of croft or farm work depended on them.”

  The young Lovat Scouts who rode out of Iochdar on 4 September 1939 included a tall, shy, quietly spoken 24-year-old named Angus Joseph McPhee. (…)

  Angus and his comrades ignored the main arterial road which ran through the middle of the long island of South Uist. Instead they took their horses, invariably their best and favourite horses, southwards down the machair, along that broad, grassy, westernmost plain, with the Atlantic Ocean surging on their right and the high brown hills of Uist rising on their left, for almost 20 miles until they turned east to the ferry port of Lochboisdale.

  Angus McPhee and the other Lovat Scouts from Iochdar rode proud and erect, in their tunics and their Balmoral bonnets with a diced band, through the busy, familiar townships of the machair. They were almost the only ordinary soldiers from Britain to take their horses to the second industrial European war of the twentieth century. They were amongst the very last active, rather than ceremonial, British horse soldiers. They were also the only members of the British Army whose horses’ bridles were traditionally hand-plaited from coastal marram grass.

  Months before we left on the trip Shuna had told me how Angus McPhee had gone off to war, come back damaged, and been sent to Craig Dunain, a psychiatric hospital near Inverness. He’d stayed there for fifty years, not speaking, but making things by weaving wild flowers, grass, leaves, and sheep’s wool. He’d eventually returned to his beloved Uist in his eighties. Shuna had got in touch with Pip Weaser, a basket-maker who lives locally to her, to ask about making us bridles from marram grass. It was a lovely idea that never quite got off the ground, but sometimes the thought is enough, living on in our imaginations as a notion, or, like the growing list of places we wouldn’t manage to visit on this trip, it can be stored away for another day.

  We rode for miles, alternating between the beach and the dunes, the afternoon brightening all the time. The track switched between farm vehicle tracks and narrower paths shared by walkers and sheep, rabbits and cattle. The sun easing into the west balanced the clouds. The hills of Barra were behind us, and to our right South Uist opened up in layers: cultivated machair, then a strip of grass sward with faraway Cattle silhouetted against silver lochs, and beyond that the Heather hills still brown from winter. The sun roamed across the landscape spotlighting a single silver Swan, a red Calf, the gold-gilt of Marram Grass. Our shadows were stretching out long to the east when we moved inland from the shore. We passed a single standing stone, a toggle on the Buttercup-felted machair. In front of Loch Toronais, the ground changed underfoot.

  ‘Oh my God,’ I breathed, ‘look at those flowers, they go for miles.’ I jumped off Ross and squatted down.

  ‘They’re Pansies, the tiniest I’ve ever seen.’ They were flame-yellow with crimson rays across their petals. Droves of Daisies too, their petals closing for the night over yolk-yellow centres. ‘Can you hold Ross for a moment?’ I said, passing the reins up to Shuna. I needed to see the world through flower-eyes. A myriad of bright Pansy-faces watched me as I lay down in their terrain of laughter and light. When I stood up, I stepped into Ross’s shadow. It was woven of dusk and daisy-stars. His shadow, his soul, I thought, as Shuna handed me my reins. Back in the saddle my eyelashes were wet, my heart strung tight.

  Beyond Loch Toronais a fence separated us from a rake of machinery: heavy field rollers, harrows, big tractors with their spikes to the sky, round-bale feeders, water containers all neatly lined up and ready to do whatever was necessary. Ahead of us a Cow was scratching her white face against a gate. We were following the Hebridean Way now, a new walking route which had absorbed the older Machair Way, and a circular sign nailed to the fence clearly indicated that the way on was through this gate. There were scores of cows and calves grazing on grassy flats that seemed to stretch as far as the walls of Ormacleit Castle far in the distance. We have a herd of Luings at home. I feel comfortable around cows, and Ross does too. He’s used to them. Nonetheless, I have a healthy respect for cows I don’t know, especially when they have young calves at foot, and these were big continental crosses with the muscled stamp of Simmental and Limousin. They were a magnificent bunch, rippling with good health, and there was nothing for it but to ride through them. I got off to open the gate and the Cow backed away. A nick in her ear showed where she’d lost a tag. She was so close I could smell her, and wanted to reach out and touch the damp swirls where a friend had been licking her. The ponies were on their toes with cow excitement. The rest of the herd eyed us up but made no signs of coming towards us. For now they were content to stay where they were, enjoying the warmth of the afternoon.

  The gatepost was today’s bead place. It was made from the trunk of a big tree, some kind of pine. It was weathered silver and weeds had seeded themselves on top. I chose another marble bead, the twin of the one I’d left at the bothy below the standing stones on Barra. Was tha
t really just yesterday? It seemed so long ago now. Placed carefully inside the top of the gatepost, the bead would be safe. The weathered wood gave the machair plain gravitas, a grainy voice amongst the Clovers and Daisies and Grasses, suggesting long-ago times when trees covered the Western Isles. As we left I noticed a bright yellow ear tag, number 00324, tucked into the wire that encircled the post, and I wondered if it belonged to our white-faced friend.

  ‘Nice pair of horses,’ the man said, laying down the wire strainers, stepping away from the fence.

  ‘You’ll need your hats on if you’re headed that way.’ The man was smiling, he had an open attractive face.

  ‘The terns are nesting over by the next gateway. They’re fearsome,’ he said, laughing at our confused expressions. ‘They’ve been frightening off walkers with their dive-bombing and their screeching. I’m Alasdair, by the way.’

  He asked where we were headed for that night.

  ‘We’re staying in the hostel at Bowmore. Hopefully, there’ll be room. You can’t book ahead,’ Shuna said, ‘and someone called Chrissie in Drimisdale has a croft where we can put the ponies. We’ve been told to look out for a house with a red roof.’

  ‘That will be my sister, Chrissie.’

  ‘I haven’t actually spoken to her, it was a woman called Beatrix who gave me her name,’ Shuna said. ‘Beatrix was going to have the ponies on her croft, but she was away until tonight and would have had to move her own horses. So she suggested Chrissie.’

  ‘Aye, they’ll be fine on Chrissie’s croft. It stretches way out around the back. You’ve still quite a way to go though. How do you know Beatrix?’

  ‘Well, I don’t really.’ Shuna laughed. ‘She’s the friend of a friend and gave us a contact for where the ponies stayed last night in Garrynamonie, and she sorted somewhere for us tonight. She’s been really helpful.’