We followed the tread-marks and sand-spittings from the quad bikes. White horses surged into shore under a flat monochrome sky. Oystercatchers anchored themselves on widely spaced legs. All across the beach were little monuments: shells and pebbles, upstanding, the sand swept from around their bases by the wind. I picked up Limpet shells (only the ones with holes in their tops) and stacked them in my palm as I walked. There were other things on this beach: a blue rubber glove, a piece of plastic tape that said Arctic Fish Processing, a shock of fluorescent orange netting. Before leaving the beach I threaded the Limpet shells, Mum’s beads for the day, one by one over stems of Marram Grass, little collaborations of tenacity for her, before walking slow-footed onto the road to Iochdar and the home of Billy McPhee, ‘the gentle accordionist’.
‘What’s the plan?’ asked the cheery man who met us on the road. Billy asked that question numerous times during our stay with him. We quickly learnt he wasn’t looking for an answer. From the get-go he had lots of plans, and Shuna and I were very happy to ‘go with the flow’, which was something else he liked to say. ‘I’m teaching an accordion lesson at 6.30, they’ll be here any minute. Can you cook?’ Another rhetorical question. He thrust a wok into my arms and began to fill it with food: two packets of chicken breasts, three onions from the cupboard, a packet of Uncle Ben’s ‘perfect in 2 minutes’ rice, a jar of Sharwood’s Balti Cooking Sauce and tubs of nutmeg, garam masala and cinnamon. There was also a packet of smoked salmon and two cans of Baxter’s Cream of Tomato and Lobster Bisque.
‘Cooking is no problem,’ we said. ‘Dinner at seven then?’
We left his house clutching our hoard and crossed the yard, past his grandparents’ milking shed that he was converting into his ‘music hub’, in through the kitchen door of a warm bungalow. ‘It belongs to my brother,’ Billy had said when we arrived. ‘You’ll be better in here than in my house. I’ll just turn the camera off.’ We’d watched him cross to the windowsill in the living room and fiddle with a gadget positioned on the windowsill.
‘Camera?’ I asked
‘Aye, means my brother can look at the view when he’s in Glasgow, almost like he’s here, you know.’ Shuna and I were touched beyond words.
We set about cooking tea. We dug about in our saddlebags and added a lemon, the ubiquitous Tabasco and some pepper to the mix of ingredients. We reflected on our blowy day and passed the hip flask between us as we cooked.
‘So, what’s the plan? Let’s go for a drive, I want to show you a few things.’ Billy had finished his dinner and was already standing up, laughing. He was a whirlwind of enthusiasm. He and Shuna hadn’t stopped talking about traditional music and people they both knew in that world. It turned out also that Billy, like Shuna, was a fan of Angus McPhee, but had never heard about the stone on the beach here in Iochdar that Shuna had read about. The one Angus had carved his initials on before he went off to war. ‘I think you’ll need to stay another night so we can find out about the stone. I’ll ask about. You’ll need to go to the museum too. Where are you going next?’
‘Grimsay.’
‘No need to be in a hurry to get to Grimsay. There’s a lot to see here. Let’s do a tour before it’s dark. The weather’s not up to much, but you’ll get a feel for the place.’
The three of us got into the front of his little white van and Tess, his Border Collie, jumped in the back. Ross and Chief were eating in a very green field, where neither sheep nor cattle competed for the grass. We passed shrines to the Virgin Mary already lit up in the darkening light.
‘Iochdar is made up of lots of parts,’ said Billy. ‘Each one has a different name, and each one has a shrine.’ We turned right at the main road and headed south. Water glimpsed grey on each side of the main road, we were in the middle of fresh water now, it was all so different from the coastline we’d ridden north along. Hundreds of Mute Swans lightened the surface of Loch Bì.
‘Our Lady of the Isles,’ Billy said, taking a sharp left and driving steeply up towards a mast. ‘You need to have a wee look.’ We looked down on the giant statue, glowing white in the half-light. ‘That’s a Hugh Lorimer statue,’ he said. ‘Put up to protect the island when the Rocket Range was coming in the fifties. The money that was left over paid for all the wee shrines you’ve seen. It was at the time of the Cold War, you see. People were worried.’
Once back on the main road we took another road to the left signed for Loch Sgioport. ‘It’s a very special place down here,’ said Billy. ‘See what you think, but for me, well, I think it’s very special.’ He opened the driver’s side window and cool peaty air rushed in. ‘This is Loch Druidibheag. I do a lot of fishing here, the trout have Ferox genes, you know, cannibal. I come out with a rod, it’s very productive.’ The loch was a mass of tiny islands, an in-between world of peat and water and wide-flung stepping stones.
‘What’s that?’ I asked, spotting stone walls on a promontary.
‘That’s a sheep fank. Yes, sheep out here, but not so many now. There’s the “Sheep Club”, they joke it should be called “The Not Quite Gone Club” now.’ He chuckled. ‘All this belongs to Grogarry Lodge, it’s a hunting and fishing estate. See there, the white branches, that’s where they’re poisoning the rhododendrons. Crazy, isn’t it, those rich Victorians planted them, now we’re paying to take them out. They inject them, you know. And see there, kaboom, a monkey puzzle tree, out here!’
The road weaved between rising hills. ‘Look!’ said Shuna, pointing to two small bay ponies up ahead.
‘Aye, there’s a herd of about forty-five,’ said Billy. ‘Shetlands they are, just run wild, friendly as anything. They’ll come to the window in a second. Wait ’til you see this.’ He stopped alongside them. They were right there with their muzzles, breath steaming in the cold damp air. Their manes and forelocks were magnificent, thick and dreadlocked, streaked with highlights the colour of last year’s deer grass.
‘Oh, they’re gorgeous,’ said Shuna.
We carried on to the end of the tarmac road. Billy pointed at the track that continued between side cuttings. ‘The sea’s just over there, the old pier, very steep down the other side.’ Months later I read in Terry J. Williams’ book Walking with Cattle how the cattle used to be driven from the machair on the west, never having seen a bog before and wanting to run for home, down over this steep hill onto the waiting boat. Reading about the skill of the drovers and their dogs was humbling. Reading about the horrors the cattle must have gone through was harrowing.
‘Come and have a look at this.’ Billy got out of the van. ‘See that house across there, that’s a ruin now, but the Aga’s still there, everything in it just as it was. Folks lived there until the fifties. It was hard, they used to walk out to church once a week and get a lift back. I know one of the brothers who was brought up there. He won’t talk about those years.’
On the way back, as the hills gradually lost themselves against the night sky, Billy talked about the Clearances. How it wasn’t just for sheep and changing land use that people were moved off. It was religious too. He talked about families being moved from here to there on account of what religion they were, and then others being moved in to the vacuum. Folks being put on harder and harder ground on the east, how they ‘had to take to the fishing, those who had never fished, and aye, there were the sheep too.’ He listed place names and family names, and again I was struck with the immediacy of the past and the closeness of family. ‘That’s where my grandfather on my father’s side is from.’ I got lost in place names and family names and the passing blur of rhododendron skeletons as we drove on, before reaching the main road and heading south again. I listened sleepily as Billy and Shuna chatted: ‘Old Fred McCauley, now he brought Gaelic Radio from long wave to FM.’ ‘The Marquis of Bute, he did good work, he built the hospital, this hospital, The Sacred Heart Hospital.’
My heart thumped as two Owls flew low over the ground on my side of the van. ‘What owls are they?’
‘Short Eared O
wls. South Uist is famous for them,’ Billy said. The soft sight of them took my thoughts to Anglesey, to my grandparents’ house and the stuffed Barn Owl in the hall. To Anglesey, never my favourite place but Nain and Taid had been there, and I’d adored them. To me they’d been warm and stable and loving. They’d had us children every Wednesday when Mum was at college in Bangor. They gave us fish fingers and Grenadine in milk. We’d had strict bedtimes and our own patch of flower bed each to plant. I’d felt safe there. Life with Mum was chaotic. She had a wild heart and was always up to all sorts. Shortly after my fourth birthday, early days in Anglesey, ‘the Irish’ moved in. Two young hitchhikers she had picked up. They stayed with us for a while, laughed a lot, drank a lot. They had both been Mum’s lovers, I learned many years later. They poured a bucket of cold water over me in the bath one night. Laughed and laughed. I shuddered at the memory.
‘I know it’s getting dark, but I want to show you one more place: Lochboisdale. I’ll say no more, see what you think.’ Billy wanted to show us the results of a £12 million development. ‘Good for Marine Harvest, the yachting world, no one else though. We’re all waiting for stage two, if it ever comes.’ The place felt lifeless, the lettering FAILTE dripped over boarded-up shop windows. The Tourist Information Centre was closed, the bank too. The hotel was hanging on.
‘The job’s only half done,’ he continued, ‘then various councils ship in folks from housing in Dunoon and Lochgilphead, people mostly with problems, you know. The poor souls, stuck out here with nothing, not even a shop, and most can’t drive, and the bus service is shite.’ He paused. ‘That’s enough. I just wanted you to see it. Now, let’s go back and have a beer.’
Before the turning to Iochdar we veered sharply to the right. ‘Just one more place, one more place.’ Billy pointed to a track disappearing across a peat moor. ‘That’s where Angus McPhee went to get his peats. There’s a story, that one day his father wouldn’t let him take the horse, so do you know what he did? He pulled the cart himself, that’s what he did. They say he was a strong, strong man.’
It was fully dark by the time we got back to Iochdar. Billy looked at the clock and turned on the radio, leaning in close. ‘I want to catch the news. The girls in Manchester,’ he said, ‘the two girls from Barra, there’s still no news…’ The shrines blinked at us as we approached his house and he told us about the bombing at the Ariana Grande concert the day before. ‘Terrorism, they’re saying. ISIS.’ He said that two girls from Barra were missing, that he was glad he lived where he lived now, that the world was so troubled. In that moment, on the western shore of South Uist, the world suddenly felt very small.
DAY SEVEN
Staying in Iochdar
Back in the bungalow, bacon and a snuggle of mushrooms sizzled on the gas cooker. Billy had driven us down to Garrynamonie before starting work and we’d come back in Shuna’s pickup. I was buzzing after seeing another Short Eared Owl. Sitting on a fencepost by the roadside, her wings lifting out behind her, eyes huge – so close, daffodil yellow – searing into me. We’d decided to take Billy’s advice, ‘to go with the flow and look around’, and were staying in Iochdar for another night. The ponies would get a day off. We planned to visit the Museum at Kildonan, and there was also a woodland at Loch Eynort that Morag had told us about. ‘The life’s work of a single man, an amazing place you need to see,’ she’d said. ‘A modern-day Callum’s Road.’
I cracked two eggs into the frying pan and watched the ponies grooming each other, soft shapes in the morning mist. Above them the shed’s corrugated roof bit into the air with scallop-edged rust. I opened the window and the rasping call of Corncrakes drifted in. Patches of Flag Irises gave them cover. The calls were the males attracting a female. Apparently after only two weeks the female abandons her crakelings to fend for themselves, finds a new partner and raises yet another brood.
That rasping reminded me of Tiree, the island where Martin and I and the children had spent many family holidays, and I felt wistful. Three weeks was a long time to be away. I’d never had a problem before with being away from home. It always did me good. I was surprised by the intensity of that ache, but the corncrakes were chafing at my heart. Mum had travelled a lot when we were little, business trips selling seafood, and the jewellery trips. Selling her work and buying beads. I think I’d always experienced anxiety when she was away: a deep-down fear that she wouldn’t come back. I hoped it had never been like that for my own children. Turning the eggs in the pan I soothed myself remembering words a Spanish friend had once said to me. ‘You know Leonie, you are una aguila, and eagles need to fly from their nest, but they always come back.’
However we interpret it, there is nothing surer than history has as much to do with the present as the past, said the display board on the wall at Kildonan Museum. I pressed my hand into the unyielding body of a seaweed mattress and sat on the bench beside it, a ‘being’ in Gaelic. On the being you will find carved the initials JM, where Iain Aonghais Ruaidh (John Morrison) tested out his sheep brand, having just pulled the glowing tongs from the fire. That mark could very well symbolise what this whole place is about: people’s lives etched out of the past for the sake of the future. I sat there for a few minutes, taking it all in.
Shuna was reading a sign that was leaning against the wall: Angus created hats, jackets, boots, scarves, slippers, ropes, bridles and horse nose-bags from grass, leaves and sheep’s wool. He wore grass hats and placed his creations around the trees and bushes in the hospital grounds.
‘I asked at the desk, nobody here knows about Angus McPhee’s initials either but, guess what, they’re re-doing the exhibition of his work. It’s all in the storeroom at the moment. The man at the desk said if we come back just before 5.00 he’ll let us see it!’ I smiled as much at her delight as at the invite. Later, true to his word, the objects were laid out on a table where we would touch them, and smell them. Still hay-sweet after all these years. We would feel lucky beyond words to look at the mass of woven grasses, worn soft and loose over the decades like slept-on plaits, and admired a traditional Uist horse collar, and a broom, its kinked heather twigs bound with woollen twine.
‘How about we go and see the rest of the exhibition?’ I asked. ‘Then head out to Loch Eynort?’ We walked through a room with Victorian artefacts: a telescopic silver toasting fork found in Boisdale House, used by Lady Gordon Cathcart’s family; a walking stick probably 19th century, made from snake’s vertebrae; two deer’s feet turned into ornaments. I shuddered, but Mum would have loved these things. Her eyes would have gleamed the way they did when she found something fascinating, the more peculiar the better. She loved Victorian workmanship, had a collection of oddities like snakeskin purses. She had a thing about animal skins and fur and wore her mother’s mink coat defiantly with a flash of ‘don’t you dare judge me’ in her expression. She loved ivory too, and would buy old ivory billiard balls and make beads out of them. She said it might as well be used, but of course she’d never touch modern ivory. She’d made ivory buttons for Stevie Wonder in the shape of Africa back in the eighties. I remember her telling me that as a child she used to skin animals, moles and voles. She’d tan the hides, save them and make them into things. She was very pragmatic and very creative.
Shuna and I walked through the exhibition, past spinning wheels and weaving looms and skeins of wool. We stopped in front of a display on natural dyes. I recognised some of the beautiful Lichens we’d been riding past; the gold one splashed over the rocks, Old Man’s Beard – Feasag Nan Creag, and next to it a picture of Black Crotal – Crotal Dubh – used for the original Harris Tweed brown colour. The recipe was 4 ounces black crotal, 4 pints peaty water. I read how the Crotal Dubh was scraped off the rocks with a metal spoon, the dye was made in a large iron communal dyeing pot by adding layers of fleece and Crotal and left to simmer for hours. There was a photograph of Yellow Crotal – Crotal Bhuidhe which changes to indigo in sunlight Gold on the rock/Purple in the pot. There were loops of wool pin
ned up, all different colours – beside the picture of Iris roots the wool was a gentle orange. There were also dye recipes for Bog Myrtle and Nettle, even soot: A half pound of soot produced by peat and coal/4 pints water/Iron mordant from rusty metal/Simmer for a half hour. This concoction dyed the wool a goldeny olive colour. I left that place feeling not only steeped in the past but also the secrets of plants.
The sign read ‘Arinaban Woodland’. There was an arrow pointing to the north and a thick black outline of the croft filled in with green for the woodland area. Bubble letters spelt out ‘CROFT No 8, 5 KMS PATHWAYS THRO’ CROFT. S’s written on the map showed seats, T’s indicated tables. We walked along footpaths that curved Bluebell-scented through Birches and Rowans, and passed ruins now sheltering a nursery for the trees, a square of earth sown with tatties. Thickets of wild Brambles shimmered with birdsong. One path led to a bay where a boat called ‘Silkie’ was moored in a stone-built nook between woodland and loch. The tide was out and she was tilting on the shore. I peeped into the cabin to see newspapers spread on the table, curled yellow with damp and age. I couldn’t see the date but had a feeling it had been a long time since the boat had been out in the loch. Beyond ‘Silkie’ we levered an ingenious lead-weighted pulley system to get over a stile and onto a bridge. The air was dense with the scent of Hawthorn blossom, sweet and musky as ferrets. Bees sucked nectar from mauve-speckled stamens. We walked towards an inlet where two Ducks guddled along a channel of water that curled silver through the tidal mud. Further out a Heron flew due east drawing wing-slow time in the water beneath.
On the way back, following a higher path, we came to a rock like a curved oyster shell. We sat in silence feeling grateful to the man who had placed this rock here. To the man who had made all these paths, grown the trees from seed and planted them. Who had dug earth and woven driftwood fences. A rhythmical clanging broke through the birdsong and a tall man appeared, one metal spike balanced on his right shoulder, another being used as a walking stick. Each step was marked by a metallic clank.
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