‘They’re good people, her boy helps me out a lot. He’s mad for the crofting, great with machinery and a good help with everything. I work twenty-seven hours a week at the Military Range, the rest of the time, evenings, weekends, I’m doing this.’ He spread his arms wide. ‘I can always do with a good hand. The silage making, now that’s a big job, there’s a team of five of us, we do the contracting. I take a week off work in August, and a week off in September, and we pack in as many hours as the daylight and the weather will allow us.’
‘And there’s always fences to repair,’ I said, nodding to the fence behind him.
‘This is a township fence. We’re getting 80 per cent grant to replace it, but see trying to get folks in a township to agree on anything.’ He smiled. ‘Impossible!’
‘And then there’s the sheep.’ He pointed to the hills in the east.
‘Beinn Hecla, Beinn Choradail, Beinn Mhor, they’re twelve-hour days with the gathering and the clipping, and there’s less and less that are able to do it. Nobody has dogs any more, and it’s hard ground to gather.’ He paused as we looked up into the hills, imagining.
‘In the spring I spread seaweed with the muck-spreader. That’s my machair share there.’ He pointed to a patch that was greening up nicely. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how he got all this done.
‘Where do you live then?’ asked Shuna.
He nodded towards the ruins of Ormacleit Castle that were now to the south of us.
‘I was born in that white house next to the castle. That’s a Clan Ranald castle, the last castle built in Scotland, 1700. It was burned down, a roast of venison they say, just fifteen years after it was built. After the white house we moved into the house next to it, the one with no roof. After that I built my own.’ He pointed to a bungalow a short distance from the other buildings.
‘Do you ever get off the island? Do you have time?’ I asked.
‘Oh, you have to get off the island every now and then or you’d go mad. Casinos, that’s where I go. On the mainland, sometimes America. I always say, if there was a casino on the island I’d have no shoes on my feet.’ There was an easy smile on his face.
As he was talking, Mute Swans coasted on the loch behind him and a Sandpiper’s three-note call wove through his softly-spoken sentences. I could have listened to him for hours but, like he said, we still had a way to go.
‘Mind to put your hats on,’ he called after us.
It must have been after 9pm by the time we reached Drimisdale. The evening was golden, windless, the sky almost cloudless. ‘Lovely to be here without a midge in sight,’ Shuna said. We both knew that at home a still evening like this would mean midges for sure. We watched an old man move his cows, patiently and slowly. The low-setting sun glinted off his two crutches. He looked like he’d been moving cows at the end of the day for a hundred years.
Chrissie’s husband, Angus John, and his brother John met us in the Kawasaki Mule, an all-terrain buggy. Angus John had had a stroke ten years earlier which had left him partly paralysed. The Mule was how he got about. ‘Follow us,’ he called cheerily as they sped away across the grass. We cantered to keep up, grinning across at each other. The ponies sensed the end of the day. Once we were on the road the brothers told us where to go and zoomed off ahead. A woman was walking briskly towards us. She was slim with silvered hair and, as she got closer, I saw she was wearing pink trainers and pink lipstick. Her eyes sparkled.
‘Is one of you Shuna? I’m Beatrix. We’re just back from the mainland. We were down at the Royal Welsh Show. Sorry you couldn’t stay on the croft, but it was too complicated with the horses.’ She walked beside us and chatted, stopping by a gate. ’Here I am, this is home, just keep going along there and you’ll find Chrissie and Angus John.’
There was a strong family resemblance between Chrissie and her brother. She had the same warm open face. She showed us where to put the ponies and let us put our tack in her barn for the night, then offered us a lift round to the hostel.
As we bounced along in the Mule I told her about the man we’d seen with crutches, moving the cows.
‘Ah, that’s Father Time,’ she said, ‘that’s what we call him. He’d have been putting the cows down to the machair for the night. That’s the old way.’
We said our goodnights and headed towards the hostel, a renovated blackhouse with a thatched roof and whitewashed walls that glowed in the low light. Chrissie’s words, the old way, were turning in my mind as Shuna pushed open the hostel door.
DAY SIX
Howmore to Iochdar
We walked slowly from the bunkhouse door, passing the row of stones that weighted down the tight roof thatch, towards the building where the kitchen was, and paused to take in the scene. It was a grey-silk morning with soft patches of mist lying over stone and bone. The crumpled curve of an old dyke, topped with a collection of weather-worn animal skulls, ran down towards gravestones which leaned softly towards the arched windows of the ancient chapels of Tobha Mòr.
The kitchen was a-clatter with busy breakfasters: the beautiful lookalike couple, both over six feet tall, slim, very blonde, wearing skin-clinging cycling gear who volleyed words of lightly veiled blame: ‘It always rains when you plan our holiday’; the young German man travelling in a car; the middle-aged English man with an air of defiant aloneness. ‘Using the buses,’ he told us; the two cyclists from Stornoway, commercial divers, who talked about GoPros and beer and tight hamstrings. We ate our porridge outside and watched the beginnings of blue start to burrow into the grey sky. We’d added blueberries and chopped apple and honey to the porridge. Picking some fine white pony hairs from my porridge, I wondered what those early Christians had eaten for breakfast.
The sound of Snipe drumming over the lower marshy ground carried in the damp air. After coffee we wandered down towards the chapels. I let my fingers rest on bones – a cow’s skull, a sheep’s jaw – smooth and warmer than the air. The chapels were soft-edged with weather and lichen. In his book Poacher’s Pilgrimage Alastair McIntosh describes these islands as being ‘saturated in the twilight of sanctity’. This was a peaceful place, in the simple beauty of Dugald’s Chapels I thought again of Mum’s relationship with the Roman Catholic Church. Her grievances and sense of betrayal by those in the convents in Belgium and England who were supposedly caring for her, and by her own parents. When I asked my Uncle Kevin about his own and Mum’s respective boarding school experiences, he’d said, ‘They take away your childhood, and you spend the rest of your life trying to reclaim it.’ A picture of Mum as a tiny girl floated into my mind: freckled, thin, long thick plaits, the softest smile breaking through. I remembered my grandmother, Mum’s mother, looking at the picture with me and saying over my shoulder, ‘I don’t know what went wrong with your mother, she was the sweetest little girl…’
Shuna and I walked slowly back towards the hostel, just as ‘using the buses’ man arrived back. We’d seen him leave for the bus an hour earlier. ‘No bus,’ he said, shrugging. ‘I’ll try the next one.’ He seemed happy enough to settle in the kitchen with a cup of tea and his book. It would be lovely to spend the day in this gentle place, I thought, but we needed to get going. We thanked Betty the warden when she turned up for her daily visit. She was full of the joys, and when she spotted our saddlebags we talked about ponies. She took us outside and pointed out her own Eriskay ponies, two precious brown dots on a faraway hillside.
We said our goodbyes, picked up our gear and set off towards Chrissie’s croft. The saddlebags were heavy and we rested by a gate. I lay down on my back. I was taking better care of myself since having back surgery six years previously. There had been a time when I thought it was fine to push through pain, I did it for years in a job that I loved. As an equine podiatrist I spent a lot of time bent over under horses, trimming their feet. I’d felt at last that I’d found my career. Then, when Mum died, whatever had been holding my discs together gave way and splurged out. The next nine months were horrendous. As the
pain became unbearable I took more and more painkillers, but as I took more pills my fear and sadness increased. Finally, I had surgery. It was my last resort, but I will never forget the immense gratitude I felt for that surgeon when I came round from the anaesthetic and the nerve pain had gone.
I was also very lucky with my friends and family, with Martin, keeping it all together. He must have been scared too, I don’t remember him ever showing it, or complaining. And my friends, not least Shuna, who spent hours and hours on the phone, hearing my fears and my sadness. Really hearing me, and reassuring me. In her sitting room is a postcard titled, ‘What is a friend? (…) He understands those contradictions in your nature that lead others to misjudge you (…) you can weep with him, sin with him, laugh with him, pray with him. Through it all – and underneath – he sees, knows and loves you. What is a friend? (…) Just one with whom you dare to be yourself.’
Cirrus-cloud rayed out above me and a strong breeze was blowing owl notes through the broken rungs of the gate. I stood up slowly and picked up the saddlebags. The ache in my lower back had eased. ‘You good to go?’ Shuna asked. I nodded.
Those ruptured discs in my back had changed my life. In her book Braving the Wilderness Brené Brown talks about the Buddhist term ‘strong back, soft front’. She quotes Buddhist teacher and activist Joan Halifax: All too often our so-called strength comes from fear, not love; instead of having a strong back, many of us have a defended front shielding a weak spine. In other words, we walk around brittle and defensive, trying to conceal our lack of confidence. While Mum was dying, and then after her death, many of the stories I’d told myself about her, and myself, gradually dissolved.
I believe that my anger and mistrust towards her had been my armour, my ‘defended front’, and without it my back literally collapsed. I needed that physical and emotional breakdown to be able to build myself up again, from the spine out. It is also what led me to writing. My defences around Mum, and the intensely physical work of hoof-trimming, had been crutches. Without them I collapsed, and then, step by slow step a more creative path opened up to me.
We unbolted the heavy door into the barn where we’d left our tack the night before. The building had been built to last, had the best of fittings including a solid steel frame, and it felt like everything of importance on the croft was sheltering here from the weather.
‘Look at this,’ said Shuna, pointing at an L reg ‘International’ tractor, bonnet off and bleeding beads of oil onto the cardboard and spanners lying under its chassis. There were holes in the bodywork where rust had eaten all the way through. ‘The tyres are brand new, never been used, look!’ Shuna’s fingers held out the threads of rubber still attached to the treads. The old tractor with its brand new tyres. Things were well cared for around here. I loved how Shuna’s more practical eye picked out different things to mine.
There was a ride-on mower, a strimmer, galvanised cattle gates set up in the far corner, a sawhorse, piles of neatly stacked logs, bags of nitrate fertiliser, a sack barrow, plastic cockle baskets, dog beds and 45-gallon drums. Oiled top-links hung from a crossbeam and bottles of Round-Up sat high out of harm’s way. There was a measuring wheel, windproof netting, a never-used garden rake, light boards for trailers with their cables wrapped round them, a set of drain rods and four smiling scarecrows, their lips stitched on in big looping smiles. The fur of a dead rat was a slash of poisoned weave against the concrete floor.
‘Oh, wow, an Albion,’ said Shuna. It looked antique, the name ‘Albion’ painted in elegant letters. A small cast-iron seat sat up high, reminding me of a distant memory; bare metal cold against my bum, feet dangling, small hands on a wobbly steering wheel.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘A binder, I think, for oats, barley. Shian used to have one of these at the farm.’ ‘The farm’ is on Loch Melford in Argyll, and is where Shuna has lived for the last twenty years building up a horse business. The farm is owned by Shian MacLean, in her eighties and still formidably active and impassioned about all things to do with the land. Months later Shuna sent me a link on Facebook to Greylag: Corn: Crofter, a creative documentary made by Beatrix whom we’d met the evening before. There was that same binder turning on a summer’s evening, the air full of chaff caught in the dropping sun, and Alasdair and Chrissie and Beatrix’s son working together with friendly focus.
We picked up our saddles and walked outside. The ponies were grazing nearby, their rumps towards us. A flock of chickens dotted around them, a mixture of Black Rocks and Red Rocks, their skirts lifting in the wind. ‘Good morning, how are the ponies today?’ Chrissie was wandering down from the house towards us. ‘Will you come in for a cup of tea?’ The three of us walked past a pile of freshly cut peats, an axe lying on top, past a quad bike and trailer and into their porch where a dozen duck eggs were incubating. A milky-eyed Collie followed us to the sitting room and flopped down with the suddenness that comes with worn-out joints. Angus John was in his wheelchair by the window, a cigarette sending delicate smoke signals across the view of Loch an Eileen to the hills beyond.
‘Is that a dun on the island there?’ I asked, sitting on the sofa beside John.
‘No, that’s a castle,’ he said, reaching to put out his cigarette.
‘Don’t put it out on our account. I love the smell of tobacco,’ I said. He looked surprised, brought it back to his mouth, and exhaling a cloud of smoke said, ‘Aye, it’s a castle, Caisteal Bheagram, and see that line of rocks there, on the other side, they’re clapping stones. Do you know what they are?’ He looked at me directly, his eyes bright. ‘They’re there to warn of anyone approaching. If you stand on them they tilt and make a clapping sound.’
‘Clever,’ said Shuna.
‘What a great spot to build a house,’ I said. ‘You can see for miles’.
‘It wasn’t always like this. Fifteen of us brought up in a thatched cottage. It wasn’t easy. And you know something, all of us are still living.’
‘Fifteen of you!’ I said.
‘Oh, there was some that had more than fifteen children. Do you remember, John, the McGoughans, they had twenty.’
Their surname was Laing. ‘From De Laing, the first Jacobite fighters who came over from France,’ John told us. The two brothers talked about the Jacobite Uprising and the Highland Clearances as if they’d been there themselves. They spoke of ‘Butcher Cumberland’ with as much detail as they described their schoolteacher who used to come to school in a kilt, who’d worn a full beard to hide his bullet wounds from the First World War. Their sentences slid up and down the centuries like fingers on the chanter.
‘Have a good trip down North,’ Chrissie said as we pulled our boots back on. ‘Down North’, how curious, I thought, as we walked towards the ponies.
While we’d been inside the wind had strengthened and now, early afternoon, following fences towards the shore, my map case was being spun on its cord until it jammed tight. Manes whipped the backs of our hands. We didn’t even try to talk as rain hit our faces. It was wind with a capital W like in Chrys Salt’s poem The Island: ‘It is all Wind, all of it –/ripping thatch/from roofs; earth from grass roots;/ scattering stacks/plucking fence-wire to a jangled/bent disharmony./Slicing the sky to tattered rag above/Corghadal, Hecla and Ben More.’
The beach that took us almost all the way to Iochdar was marked ‘danger area’ in red on the OS map. The Laings had said we’d be fine as long as the flags were down. If they were up it meant they might be firing missiles from the range. There was no sign of the flags, but nonetheless we kept a keen eye out as we rode along. The wind was behind us, flinging sand between the ponies’ legs and against our waterproofs. It was a low-slung sky and we kept our eyes looking downwards, our hands in our pockets, buffs pulled up over our mouths, hoods pulled up over our riding hats. My stomach had been rumbling for a while. I thought about the drovers of old who’d walked cattle from all corners of Uist onto boats to the mainland, then over the hills to Crieff or further S
outh. They and their dogs would head off with little more than some oatmeal to eat. Hardy beyond belief.
When it started to rain heavily again, we left the beach looking for somewhere sheltered to eat lunch. An empty silage pit hidden in the dunes, and its high walls offered some protection from the wind and rain careering up from the south. We ate yesterday’s spaghetti reborn with a can of sardines and a few drops of Tabasco. After lunch we stuck to the dunes as they offered some shelter. Rabbits sprang up underfoot and, on the skyline, appeared what looked like giant lamp posts. As we rode closer we saw they were floodlights and there were sky-grey bunkers. It was an airstrip. A jeep zoomed towards us and as it got closer it veered off the runway and bounced over the dunes, barely slowing, to come to a sudden stop nearby, against the high fence.
‘Oh, shit,’ said Shuna.
A man in overalls got out. Alasdair on his day job. He told us they’d been watching us from the tower for ages, ‘and no, it was fine, no testing today’. After he sped off we meandered on through the dunes, passing mats of old silage in hollows where they fed cattle in the winter. Feeding spots out of the wind with sandy soil to keep hooves and legs dry. I thought of how we struggled at home to keep the cattle out of mud which seemed to get worse each year. I had serious sandy-soil envy.
‘What’s that noise?’ Shuna asked. I pushed my hood back. It sounded like something vast and mechanised was about to come crashing over the dunes at us. I was actually ducking down, my heart in my mouth, as we trotted up the bank in time to see a raft of camouflage quad bikes racing past us on the beach. They were very close but none of the soldiers saw us, intent as they were on racing down the beach, and maybe having a tough time seeing through the wind and rain. We walked the ponies onto the sand feeling relieved. ‘That was surreal,’ I said. Ringed Plovers scattered at the wave-edges like our adrenalin-fired thoughts. I got off Ross to walk for a while and warm up my joints.
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