Marram

by Leonie Charlton

  ‘There it is,’ said Kathryn, interrupting my thoughts, pointing across to a fenced off area. We could see stonework through the mercurial sway of Marram Grass. We tied the ponies to the fence and stepped over the stile.

  ‘I’ll stay here and keep an eye on the horses,’ said Kathryn.

  It was like entering another world, down there inside the circular walls, out of the wind. The stones were silver, striated, strangely bare. Most had no Lichen, they’d been under the sand for centuries, maybe millennia. On some the Lichen was just starting to settle, a pearlescent bloom. There was a single upright stone, black and smooth, knee-height. I was pulled towards it. I put both hands on the top. It was warm from the sun. At its base was a beak, feathers, pieces of stitched skin clinging to a fragile skeleton. I squatted down to look more closely. The beak was long, a baby Curlew perhaps. I thought of Angus Dunn’s poem, Last Look:

  Not an ounce on her more

  than was needed to cover

  her bones

  Her mouth open in sleep,

  she looked like a fledgling –

  just as she should look, ready for where she’s going.

  At the end Mum had been birdlike, her eyes shining brightly but her fine feathers gone. No lucent eyeshadow or lipstick, no jewellery, no beautiful clothes, just practical garments that were easy for the nurses to dress her in. Things she’d have hated. Her bodyweight evaporating with each breath but her heart continuing to beat strongly. She was a survivor. That part of her got more obvious as the rest of her faded. No food for months, it seemed, and on she went. I like to think she was getting ready for where she was going, letting go, lightening her load. She didn’t need to be fierce any more. Or full of fight. Or be fabulous. Or glamorous. Her heart beat on and on and on, because that’s just who she was. Courageous, full-hearted. Better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all. I could hear her words now.

  I picked some Marram stems and covered the tiny bird, but it had been perfect as it was, lying there in the sunshine. So I laid the grasses underneath instead, realising with dismay that I had no beads with me, I’d left them in the saddlebags that were now in the pickup on Berneray. There was a snail shell lying nearby, a bruise of heliotrope just visible through the sun-bleaching. I placed the shell next to the bird. A land-lacuna, holding space for missing information, being filled with birdsong and the scent of sand and sea. I picked a primrose and placed it next to the bird and shell. Primroses were everywhere on this bit where the sheep couldn’t graze, this circle of protection that held history and bones and long-forgotten dreams in its sand-buried walls.

  We got back on the ponies and cantered along the sandy paths. They were exalted and happy to run in their group of three. We trotted down onto the wide sands of Tràigh Ear (meaning east beach) on the other side of the Udal peninsula.

  ‘That’s where the well is that I told you about,’ said Kathryn, pointing back towards the north of the peninsula. ‘It’s in amongst the rocks down by the shore. It can be tricky to find. The water’s beautiful. I think I heard somewhere that it’s where the summering cattle used to go to drink.’ We still had twelve miles to ride to Berneray and it was already getting on for six o’clock. We agreed to save the well for another time and rode for a while further across sand now covered in a thin film of sea. The west beach of Berneray was visible as a chink of white in the north, the hills of Harris dozing in blues behind.

  ‘Okay, I’d better be getting back, girls. It was lovely to ride with you. Come back again one day!’

  The A865 was quiet, so were we. Every now and again we’d ride past a house and catch a scent of dinner cooking. We passed the loch and its dun where the Swan family had crossed earlier, and I imagined the family of eight now bobbing on the sea, the cygnets growing used to the salt, the swash of kelp. On the B893 to Berneray we got off the ponies. It was good to walk, watching our shadows striding long-legged across peaty pools and hill grass turning rose in the evening light. A Redshank pipped at us from a post, his legs skinny carmine. We turned right where the sign said, ‘Sound of Harris Ferry’. We were getting nearer and the ponies sensed it. They stepped out lightly. It was nearly ten o’clock and the sun hovered on the horizon. It gilded everything to our left, the Cotton Grass, the grazing Sheep, the sea, in silver and platinum, while to our right the world was tinted with gold and rose-madder. We rode across to Berneray, loving that we had the causeway to ourselves. I lifted my face upwards, tasting all that pink light and wishing I wore feathers in my hair.

  DAY FOURTEEN

  Berneray to Harris

  It was the 31st, the last day in May, the Celtic month of love. I was sitting at the big table in Berneray Hostel, not feeling the love at all. It was breakfast-time busy and I wanted solitude.

  ‘I wasn’t okay, you know, last night when you came in so late,’ said the tight-lipped lady, looking me full in the eye. It must have been her who’d shone a head-torch in my face as I got into bed. Okay, so it had been after 11pm, but this was a hostel and we were being quiet as mice. Unlike the man in the bunk under her, perhaps her husband, the one she was now hassling about what to put in the lunch box, who had talked in his sleep. Looking for joy, he’d said distinctly at one point during the night.

  ‘There’s a lot to be said for Latin to be the lingua franca in Europe.’ A man at the end of the table was holding court, talking over the others. This same man had just told me he was a musician. He had volunteered this randomly. I hadn’t asked him who or what he ‘was’. He seemed so self-satisfied, this was something Mum used to say about people and was as damning in her eyes as people being ‘boring’.

  It was evenings sitting around a big wooden table, not dissimilar to that one in the hostel, that I remember most about the Cairnholy years. It was where all the talking got done, and where almost everything got done. The rest of the house was too blisteringly cold. I’d recently seen Allan Wright, a family friend, and one of the very few people that would regularly visit Cairnholy. He’d been in Argyll on a work trip taking photographs and had come to stay. Allan, Martin and I had sat at our table, the same table he’d so often sat at thirty years earlier in Dumfries and Galloway, and shared memories. It was refreshing for me hearing him talk about Mum.

  ‘She would decimate people with great artistry,’ he laughed, ‘but she was so lovable, as long as you were on the right side of the fence!’ He’d talked about her ‘nose for authenticity’, how she ‘didn’t suffer fools gladly’ and ‘abhorred snobbishness’. That last made me smile. How did that fit, when I remember her talking about people being ‘common’? But it did fit, of course it fitted, because she was that woman chock-full of contradictions. She hadn’t belonged in any camp, box or social class. She was a free radical, roaming at will, cherry-picking from cultures and classes whatever appealed to her in any given moment. Wrinkling her nose at that which didn’t. Retaining the right to change her mind on a whim, to scorn or revere, to love or hate, to support or drop like a stone.

  ‘I’m just nipping out to the pickup. Do you want anything?’ Shuna asked, interrupting my thoughts.

  ‘Yes, my diary, please, I want to check the ferry times for tomorrow.’

  After eating scrambled eggs we went into the sunshine with our coffee. Group photos were now taking place when earlier there’d been a flurried exchange of email addresses. Mr Lingua Franca was holding the camera. He shouted ‘sex’, everyone laughed and suddenly they were all gone, a mass exodus of good cheer and hi-vis.

  ‘Bliss,’ I said to Shuna as silence descended. I loved our shared company more and more with each passing day. Who else could I have made this trip with? Nobody else.

  The coffee was lifting my mood. It was a glorious day. White cumulus clouds scudded high above the thatched roofs of the hostel buildings.

  ‘Shit!’ I said to Shuna, looking up from my diary. ‘Our ferry is booked for today!’

  ‘That can’t be right. We’re here for a day and a half.’ I checked again. ‘To
day’s the 31st, right? Our ferry is today, we’ve somehow lost a day.’

  We talked about trying to change our tickets, but the ferries were so busy we knew that was unlikely. Also, we had rooms booked in Leverburgh for that night. We reconciled ourselves to making the most of the few hours we had left on Berneray. We had until 3pm to explore, but the loss of a day meant we only had a few hours to sort grazing in Leverburgh too. Ruari in Leverburgh had given us the name of a woman who might be able to help. We were waiting to hear back but sailing close to the wind.

  ‘Let’s check on the ponies and go and see Jinny,’ said Shuna. ‘She’s been amazing.’ It was Jinny who had given us the contacts of Naomi on Barra, Sue on Benbecula, and had sorted the ponies’ grazing on Berneray where she lived.

  ‘Wow, a field has just fallen from heaven!’ said Shuna, looking at her phone. ‘That’s Kathryn in Leverburgh. She’s got a field we can use for the ponies. I’ll just text and say it’s today not tomorrow we’re coming, check if that’s okay.’

  We packed our stuff into the pickup and headed back to the ferry terminal where Chief and Ross had spent the night on Jinny’s grazing. Common Seals were basking on the skerries along the rocky shoreline, their silver bellies on show. Meanwhile Shuna was looking on the other side of the road. ‘They have such cool tractors over here.’ The tractor in question was particularly glorious, being newly painted alizarin red, with a gleaming black funnel. Immaculate and loved.

  As we arrived at Jinny’s croft house on the Borve road a man in a green boiler suit was leaving. ‘Hello, I’m Hector,’ he said, extending a hand and a steady look from the most beautiful Prussian blue eyes, before walking purposefully towards a new agricultural building behind the cottage. Everything looked very well cared for.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse me, moving so slowly,’ said Jinny, welcoming us into her home. She nodded down at her leg in plaster. ‘I broke it checking the cows on the hill.’ She said it very matter-of-factly. That was her. Astonishingly matter-of-fact and equally industrious, we quickly learnt. As well as her full-time job for Anderson Banks legal firm, ‘my patch is Berneray down to Vatersay’, she also had a catering business. Warm jars of strawberry jam were stacked on the sideboard. We chatted ponies, she had an Eriskay called Lilly, and the original plan had been that she’d ride with us today.

  ‘I can’t believe you won’t be going to the West Beach with the ponies. The riding here is just stunning,’ she said.

  ‘Another time,’ we assured her. ‘We’ll just have to come back.’ I think Shuna and I were feeling equally embarrassed by our haphazard timetabling, highlighted by Jinny’s extreme efficiency. There was her knitting business too. She brought a traditional Eriskay gansey through for us to look at.

  ‘I’ve just finished this. Every single one I make is unique,’ she said, ‘and there is a waiting list for orders.’ The jumper was cream-coloured, and a brown label said: ‘Handmade on the Isle of Berneray. jinny@hebrides.net.’

  ‘That is beautiful,’ I said, stroking the complicated pattern. ‘How on earth do you have time for this?’

  ‘I like to be busy,’ she said. ‘I went down to Eriskay to learn from two ladies down there. There are only a few people left with the knowledge of the old patterns, so I feel very fortunate to have learned the skill. I run classes up here from time to time. We don’t want these skills to die out.’ She and Hector had moved back to his family’s croft when he retired from the RAF. ‘I’ve never looked back,’ she said. ‘Love it here.’

  We asked her what she’d do if she were us, with just a few hours to explore. ‘I’d go up there,’ she said, without hesitating, pointing at the small hill visible through her kitchen window. ‘There’s so much up there. Try not to break a leg though.’ She laughed. ‘There’s a cairn at the top, every time Hector’s grandfather walked there he’d take a stone to add to it. Boats used the cairn to guide them in. The hill is called Being a’Chlaidh, (Hill of the Graveyard) and there is a standing stone eight feet in height and what used to be a chapel, what’s left of it anyway, and a chair stone. Local folks stole the stones from the chapel for lintels when they were building their houses, some say it has brought bad luck, there are a lot of widows on the Borve road.’

  ‘I’d like to see Angus MacAskill’s birthplace too,’ said Shuna.

  ‘Oh yes, Angus the giant, you’ll need to visit his old house. There’s a Viking Court too, down on the machair, and there’s a chair stone there as well where the accused is supposed to have sat. They say they used to chop people’s heads off on the chair then bury them at Cnoc nan Claigeann, (Hillock of the Heads). There’s also a Viking pier. Oh, and the faerie milk holes down by the shore too of course.’

  My ears pricked up. ‘Faerie milk holes, what are they?’

  ‘Small round holes in the rocks. The locals used to fill them with milk to appease the faeries, so the story goes.’

  ‘Can you show me on the map where they are?’

  ‘See here, you can actually drive all the way to Angus MacAskill’s monument. If you walk from there, the faerie milk holes are somewhere along this bit, see where the shore gets rockier. You might have trouble finding them though.’

  We said our goodbyes, promising to be back one day to ride on West Beach with her, and wishing her a speedy recovery with her leg.

  ‘Angus MacAskill, 1825 to 1863,’ Shuna said, reading from a plaque that was mottled gold with Old Man’s Beard. ‘Within these walls Aonghas Mór MacAskill was born. Known as the Nova Scotia Giant he was the son of Norman MacAskill who emigrated in 1831. Standing seven feet nine inches in height and without pathological defect, he achieved many feats of strength and is remembered as a kindly and just man and a humble Christian.’ Nearby was a cairn built to his exact height, Shuna stood beside it, completely dwarfed. ‘My friend Jock,’ Shuna said, ‘once told me about the MacAskills that came from Dunvegan on Skye, they were big men, and one of them was over seven feet tall. I wonder if they’re related.’

  We walked across the machair towards Loch Borve Bay, also known as Cockle Beach. The plan was to cross the sand to the opposite shore and look for the faerie milk holes, then head up the hill to the cairn, keeping an eye out along the way for the other sites Jinny had mentioned. Empty cockles were scattered everywhere, some were being blown across the sand leaving little wavy tracks behind them.

  On the other side of the bay my eye was drawn to some smooth black slabs of rock, no faerie milk holes though. We continued checking out the surfaces of the rocks, and then there they were, about a foot apart, two perfectly symmetrical sea-spun holes. They were about the circumference of an egg cup at the bottom, getting wider towards the outer edge. Oh, thank you, Jinny. I took out the bead purse and, thinking of Mum’s grandchildren, picked out a selection of Swarovski crystals. Their tiny facets coruscated in the sunlight as I dropped them into the nearest hole.

  ‘That’s a lot of beads,’ said Shuna enquiringly.

  ‘For her grandchildren,’ I said. ‘Seven of them. She never met the four youngest, they were all born after she died.’

  ‘That must be hard for your brothers,’ she said. I picked up the bead purse again. Now, which one for Mum? A jade bead caught my eye. I placed it in the second fairy hole, it looked exquisite against the sea-darkened rock. Jade, a stone that was favoured in ancient times for its durability, its ability to sharpen made it a favourite for axe heads and knives.

  We daundered up the hill, discovering one treasure after another: the ruined chapel – lintels missing, rocks laced with pink quartz, the single standing stone, huge and yearning towards the island of Boreray to our west. Grassy tumps starred with shards of iron-blue mussel shell. Marsh Orchids and purple Field Gentians. The warm air smelt of sea and turf and tiny flowers, the Meadow Pippets’ high piping was everywhere as we climbed. I had to agree with the Scottish writer Jessie Kesson: May is poignant, the birdsong is at its sweetest now. Nothing touches the human being more than smell and song. May is the month of bot
h. By the time we found the chair stone we were both hungry and took turns sitting on it while we ate our lunch.

  ‘Hard to imagine anything gruesome happening here,’ I said, as Shuna finished a can of sardines. After lunch I leant back on the stone chair and caught up with my note taking; reading the notes months later I was taken back to that windblown day: Sound of corncrakes coming up from below/A big bee just flew by – very fast/Singing skylights. I guessed I’d meant ‘skylarks’ not ‘skylights’.

  After lunch we made our way to the cairn now visible on top of the hill. We carried our own stones to add to it. From the cairn we could make out Ross and Chief down in the south-east corner of the island, and the sweep of ultramarine sea between Berneray and North Uist, rounded into two by the arc of the causeway. ‘We’d better head back,’ said Shuna, as if reading my thoughts of missing the ferry.

  We walked quickly back down the hill, watching where we placed our feet, feeling the wind on our backs and the sun on our faces. A stone caught my eye, it seemed to be flickering. Fibres of wool were quivering in the wind, trapped by the Velcro grip of Lichen. The Lichen was a deep tourmaline. I thought of the woven pictures that had been on the walls of my grandparents’ house in Anglesey, pieces Mum had made while still at school. Six-foot-long vermiculate designs made of wool and all in autumn colours. That same tourmaline green, and umber and rust and mustard yellows, crafted with consummate skill. I wondered now what stories those welts of wool were telling. Had she already met Dad, fallen in love? Growing up, in that fraught space between Mum and Dad, it had been hard for me to imagine that they’d ever been in love.