‘I wish I was riding ponies for a few weeks,’ she said. ‘Getting away from the end of term madness. It’s always hectic, but the Manchester bombing, those poor girls from Barra, well, it’s hit everyone really hard. A lot of the children knew the girl who died, Eilidh, from the pipe band. They’ve decided to cancel the provincial Mòd next week.’ Dorothy’s words tumbled fast, full of feeling, as we drove back towards the North Ford Causeway, past the squat grey church we’d ridden past earlier with its algae-smeared ‘For Sale’ sign.
Dorothy pointed over to the shore on her left. ‘That’s the seaweed cutting there.’
I craned my neck.
‘See, they’re like circles on the surface of the water, that’s what Iain does, he’s a cutter, his father too. You harvest the Kelp when the tide’s out, then put a rope around it in a circle. When the tide comes in it all lifts up, keeps it together until you’re ready to sell it. There’s a seaweed drying and processing plant on Uist. It’s hard graft though,’ Dorothy continued. ‘Iain’s got the perfect Hebridean build for it, a short back. You need to be very strong for that work.’
I was captivated by the image of the floating seaweed corrals. I’d never seen them before, nor even heard of them. I looked it up in my book Flora Celtica when I got home: ‘Cutting the seaweed was the best work that ever came for the crofter because you had one week on and one week off, because of the tides.’ Like working for CalMac, I thought. The book continued to describe this centuries-old tradition:
‘Teams of men worked down the beach with the receding tide, cutting the weed and throwing it behind them. As the tide turned they put a rope made from twisted heather stems around the floating mass, and at high tide pulled in the ropes and loaded their harvest onto hand barrows or carts. If working offshore, they towed it home behind the boat.’
We left the floating rope circles behind us as we drove across Benbecula, down through the water-drawn heart of it. Water, water everywhere. The mizzle was falling strongly now and we couldn’t see Eabhal. Dorothy talked about this place, her life here, her family. She was a force, and I was full of admiration for her. There was a fierceness about her that made me want to duck low, to choose my words with care. A female Hen Harrier circled the land to our right, her banded tail spread wide. For a fleeting second I saw the fullness of her owly face. This place: strong birds, strong women, strong men. The Hen Harrier dissolved into the mist and I was left with a feeling of vertigo. We and the ponies were just clipping the edges of the circles-upon-circles of history and community and nature that lapped this place.
We stocked up at the Co-op in Benbecula and drove north, having reconnected once again with the pickup. We’d promised to pop in on Cubby and Anne who lived on North Uist, just east of Carinish. Driving over a carpet of Sea Thrift up the long track to their house, we saw the car and trailer parked outside. The cloud had lifted a little and we had 360° bird’s-eye view for miles around, and there she was, Eabhal, back in sight. We knocked on the door and walked around the house but there was no sign of life. Another car arrived and a man approached. He was short as a child with a deeply lined face, a toothless grin.
‘Are they in?’ he asked, his eyes full of light, the bluest light.
‘Well, they might be, but we can’t raise them.’
Just then I saw a figure behind one of the windows.
‘Did you see that?’ I said. ‘Looked like a person.’
Shuna shook her head.
‘Aye,’ said the man, ‘I saw it too, maybe it was a ghost.’ We knocked on the door again and this time Anne welcomed the three of us in.
Angus was a fisherman from Grimsay who had been helping Cubby with an uncooperative outboard motor. While they talked boats, Anne got a map out and showed us places to visit: Barpa Langas burial mound and Pobbal Fhinn stone circle just a few miles from where we were. I was struck again by Anne’s voice. She spoke the Gaelic place names with her English accent, softly, clearly, roundly, owning every consonant and syllable. She talked about music, and the course she was studying in traditional music at the University of the Highlands and Islands. She also talked about starting up her own archaeological tours business. She was immersed in this place. No pretension, no changing her accent or muffling her words. She was who she was. Another map showed the island of Vallay where we were headed the next day. She pointed out where the standing stones and cup and ring markings were. ‘And this place,’ she said, pointing to Udal peninsula to the East of Vallay. ‘It’s something else. Make time to ride around it if you can.’ She reeled off a list of its special interests, its wheelhouses and well.
We drank coffee and looked out on those south-west-facing views. There was a fledgling native tree plantation nearby. Cubby and Anne were keen to plant more themselves and to fence the sheep out. We told them we’d seen a dead lamb on the road at the Grimsay turning that morning, its mother grazing by its body. Cubby shook his head. ‘Poor wee critter, the crofters put them on the roadside for the better grass, but ach, what a price to pay. The drivers are so fast. I won’t even use a pushbike now, too dangerous. With the wind in your ears you can’t hear vehicles approaching. Aye, what chance do the lambs have?’ He went on to talk about his time working and living on Shetland. ‘The animals were mad with hunger. They didn’t clip the sheep up there, just pulled the wool.’ He made a gesture with his hands. ‘They were so starved the wool just came out.’
‘Just pulled the wool,’ repeated Angus.
Cubby went on to talk about the same Norman MacLean we’d thought about calling in on the day before on Grimsay. Cubby lived and worked on boats at one time, based out of Oban. He talked about one occasion when Norman had been on a bender and had spent four days on his boat.
‘Every morning I’d give him his eggs. A West Coast man always has two eggs, by the way,’ he said with a wink. ‘So I’d give him his eggs and soldiers and a £20 note and off he’d go to the Claredon in Oban. After the fourth day my wife said I had to get rid of him. ‘Either he goes or I go.’ At that time my wife was my crew. We were due to head out to Tobermory the next day so I had a last go at him, trying to stop him going into the ‘blue room’, to use Norman’s own words. He lost the rag: “Who the hell are you to be telling me what to do? You’re in the premier fucking league yourself!”’
Before we left, I took screenshots of the sites Anne had circled in pencil on her maps.
‘When you get to Vallay,’ said Cubby, as we said our goodbyes, ‘go directly north across the island. There’s a bay there, a beautiful spot, and there are always ducks on the sea. If you approach carefully, you’ll see them. Mind to look out for those ducks.’
We drove north again, past Chief and Ross standing in their field. They looked up, recognising the sound of the pickup. ‘I’m feeling bad for them in that rain,’ said Shuna. ‘It’ll be nice to give them a feed later. Did you soak some speedibeet?’ I nodded. We drove through sheets of rain, the windscreen wipers swiping drops across the views of lochans and low black cloud.
‘I think we turn right here,’ I said, seeing a sign for Barpa Langass. We parked in the car park. It seemed like the first place we’d been to that was properly set up for visitors, with signage and a good path. We put on our waterproofs inside the cab as it was blowing a proper hoolie outside. Past the kissing gate was an information panel, the cairn we could see on the skyline, a pile of grey stone through the rain, ‘was about five thousand years old, a chambered cairn built by Neolithic farmers, a great mass of stone which would have dominated the surrounding landscape with a relatively small burial chamber inside’.
It also told us that five thousand years ago the landscape would have been covered in woodland before the spreading of the blanket peat.
Walking heads down, hoods up, over the smooth heather-dark hillside towards the pile of stones described in Alec Finlay and Ken Cockburn’s book the road north: ‘after a mound of time/the pickle of boulders/is still sound’. Unfortunately we couldn’t go inside where the poe
ts had sensed the dark ‘as a membrane/of time’. We’d take their word for it. Time was doing its thing, moving on, and now it was deemed unsafe to enter the cairn. We peered through a metal grill, busy imagining, as rain ran across the backs of our hands.
Back in the steamy pickup we continued down the road to Poball Fhinn Stone Circle. It felt a little less well-trodden here as we moved aside pink Dog Roses that claimed the path. They were heavy with rain and the scent was intense. Walking in silence along the little path that led to the stone circle, we drifted apart on our own urges. Shuna walked uphill into the mist and I stayed put. Rain blurred my sight and my eyelashes flickered against my hood like heartbeats.
Mum would have loved this place.
Mum would definitely have come to this place.
Mum must have been here.
This is so Mum.
I felt in my pocket for the bead purse, not there. Tears surfaced. It must be back with the saddlebags and ponies. I bent down and picked a tuft of Cotton Grass, and a pink flower which I looked up later, Heath Milkwort, and laid them both across the top of the stone that had most drawn me. It was cleaved into three, like those trees that begin as three and grow together, their trunks melding into one over time. The rock was like that, individuating but collaborating. The flowers lay bright in a fold of stone. I touched the Bog Cotton, silky soft, and picked another two, one for each of your children, Mum. You said you’d have had more children if you hadn’t got sterilised. Funny to imagine you like that, maternal.
I looked over Loch Langais to the south, remembering a holiday in France. I couldn’t sleep for hearing Mum and Paul ‘making babies’ as they called it, the noises had terrified me. I knocked on the door and said, ‘Please can you stop that noise.’ Paul had looked round, eyes strange and huge with his glasses off. ‘We’re allowed our fucking fun too,’ he’d shouted.
That same holiday I’d bent down to kiss Mum goodnight. She was reading in bed and lifted her head up at the same time, crack, the blaze of her pain, my shame. ‘I think you’ve broken my nose.’ I’d hurt her when all I’d wanted was to give her love. She maintained her nose was never the same again.
The rain wasn’t letting up. Still no sign of Shuna. I was suddenly missing her intensely, but soon she reappeared out of the mist and joined me amongst the standing stones. There, in the waist-high Heather, was the softest brush of pale green. The Willow was flourishing in the shelter of the Heather, keeping a low profile amongst the fallen stones. Growing so green, so surprising. Willow, ‘seileach’ in Gaelic. Each letters in the Gaelic alphabet was traditionally associated with a native tree, in one version seileach represents the ‘s’. I plucked the end from a delicate branch and laid it against the flowers I’d put in the hold of that stone. There, Mum. You’d like that. S for sex.
The sky was lower than ever as we drove over the causeway onto the island of Baleshare where we would spend the night with Shuna’s friend Anna-Wendy. Following her precise directions, counting down gates and cattlegrids, a schoolhouse and a caravan, we reached her house. By now we were soaked through. She showed us the drying room, invited us to have a hot bath. It was perfect.
The house was filled with musical instruments. A bright yellow trombone caught my eye. Both Anna-Wendy and her husband, Simon, were professional musicians. She was the Programme Leader for the applied music degree at the University of the Highlands and Islands. I loved listening to her talking about falling in love with this place, about the view from the plane flying in. ‘This place is mostly water, you know.’ Her skin shone as her words gave shape to her life there. ‘I love that hill,’ she said, nodding towards Eabhal. ‘I love being able to look out at it every day.’
That evening Anna-Wendy had an exhibition opening at Taigh Chearsabhagh Arts Centre in Lochmaddy. Shuna and I needed to find somewhere to leave the pickup and trailer near the island of Vallay. We arranged to drive across and find a spot to leave it, and for Anna-Wendy to pick us up on her way home. We drove slowly up and over the Committee Road. This straight road through the heart of North Uist to the village of Sollas, opposite the island of Vallay, was organised by a committee charged with providing famine relief in the 1840s. Building it was a way to give people a wage. We topped the highest point on the road and descended alongside a commercial pine forest that stretched down to the shore where the tide was well in. Vallay sat across the water. We drove along the road past a few scattered houses. There was little sign of life, it was late, and I had a feeling of wanting to disappear, to not ask any more favours of anybody. We were listening to the first track on Far Flung Collective, lyrics written by Alex Roberts and a CD Anna-Wendy had collaborated on:
A small world indeed
and it begins at your door
the middle of nowhere
and the centre of all
There were a couple of building plots for sale. We stopped and saw a phone number written on the ‘For Sale’ sign. ‘We could try giving them a call and see if they’d mind us parking the horsebox there for a couple of nights,’ I suggested. Shuna volunteered to make the call, and while she wandered off to get phone signal, I looked across to Vallay, listening to the rest of the song:
dots, specks of land
remote and unknown
and far-flung and far-fetched
and far too far from home
but listen but listen if you have ears to see
this tune’s from a small world
a small world indeed
Shuna opened the door. ‘They sound lovely, Angus and his partner Kathryn. They live just along there, a new house in the trees. She has horses and we can leave the box there. We’re to go along now. Heh, maybe she’ll want to ride with us tomorrow.’
As we turned back onto the road a Short Eared Owl flew alongside us, skimming the Pine-tops with the last of the late light.
DAY ELEVEN
Carinish to Vallay
It was Sunday. At home that’s the only day we’d choose to ride out on main roads; no wood-wagons or delivery vans, and a lot fewer cars. But here on North Uist the cars kept coming. We were in the middle of church rush hour, going both ways it seemed. Southwards to the Free Church of Scotland in Carinish, and northwards, in the same direction as we were riding, to the Church of Scotland in Clachan. When we got to the church the car park outside was packed with more vehicles in one place than we’d seen since leaving Oban. A broad man was attending at the church entrance. He smiled at us, and an inquisitive part of me would have liked to have tied up the ponies and joined the service. We waved as we passed and a body of churchgoers cheerily waved back.
We trotted along the main road making good time, turning off the A865 onto the single-track Committee Road before the wave of after-church traffic started. We got off the ponies and walked, I took off my hi-vis jacket and stuffed it into a saddlebag. Just then a police car came up behind us and I had my customary gut-jolt of guilty conscience, but the car slowly drove past. What a day! The sun was shining and everything was lucent and sharp-edged compared to the rain-slurred dimness of the day before.
After stopping by a grassy gateway to let the ponies graze, I sat on the verge looking through the gate, its rungs sawn through with rust, meeting like ill-knitted bones. Strands of wool hung on the fence wire. This was the tup park, where a group of half a dozen, a mixture of deep-horned blackfaces and oval-eared cheviots, gazed at us with interest. Behind them, lifting over the flatness of the peat moor to the south, was Eabhal.
‘Feels like it might be lunchtime,’ Shuna said, mirroring my thoughts.
‘How about we go to the standing stone and stop for lunch?’ The stone on the skyline leaned heavily to the east above where the road curved away beneath the contour lines of Beinn á Charra. Back on the ponies we followed the road. It felt strange to be travelling in such a straight line.
The road was open to the moor on both sides, rectangles where peat had been cut in previous years were a-quiver with bog cotton, and peaty pools shone between
. We left the road at the end of the straights, walked through a gate and headed up the hillside. The ground here had clearly been improved over the years. Between the patches of rushes was good dry pasture, but I was aiming straight for the stone on the skyline. A group of Blackface Ewes appeared beside it and only then did I see the scale of the standing stone, it was huge, over nine feet tall. We heard later that it had been put there to look like a human figure on the hillside, the idea being that invading Vikings would have been so horrified by the size of the locals that they’d have turned their boats and gone elsewhere to maraud.
‘You’d never know it was this big unless you walked up here,’ said Shuna, resting back against the broad lean of the stone’s body. On the grass we picnicked on oatcakes and a tin of ‘Filets de Maquereaux à la Moutarde’. A breeze blew warm on our faces and the air trembled with the sorcerous call of a Curlew. What a magical place. The stone is known in Gaelic as Clach Bharnach Bhraodag, (limpet stone of Freya), Freya being the Norse goddess of love and beauty, and it dwarfed the ponies as they grazed. The Committee Road glinted like a seam of quartz through the flat peat moors below. My eyes picked out the white boxy shape of a Transit Luton van beetling along, taking me back to another van, on a day as dreich as today was sunny.
After Mum died neither Will nor Tom nor I had the heart to empty her flat, but Will finally forced the issue by emptying its contents into a Luton van. The flat had never belonged to her. It belonged to Will, and now he was renting it out for holiday lets and needed it emptying. The van was also his, and it was going out on hire the next day. So, we just had to get on with it, this sorting out of her stuff.
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