Marram

by Leonie Charlton

  Twenty winding minutes later we parked alongside the sign that said Eagle Observatory 2km. There were several cars parked, and a steady trail of walkers dotted the glen.

  ‘Popular spot this,’ I said to Kenny as he came towards us.

  ‘Aye, there’ll be a few people on the track to the observatory, but after that you won’t see many people. Shall we head back now?’ he asked, looking at Shuna. They’d arranged that she’d drive her pickup and box back to Aird Asaig and he’d bring her back. It would be a lot easier if we were hitchhiking to get a lift back to Aird Asaig, which was on the main road to Stornoway, than to get a lift out here.

  While I waited for Shuna and Kenny I put the ponies’ hoof boots on, checked the wires were secure, the Velcro straps snugly closed. I put the saddles on, then the saddlebags, heavier today with all the camping gear. Ross and Chief stood looking brightly towards the other ponies from where they were tied to a padlocked gate. It struck me then, that although locked gates were a common enough site on the mainland, it was the first I’d seen on this trip. Kenny said he’d got a loan of the key so that he could drive on up the glen and be there in case the girls needed him during our ride. I was touched by his fatherly care.

  Shuna and I followed the girls whose ponies were setting a fast pace. We rode past an enclosure that had been planted with native trees and crossed a brand-new bridge, everything was smart and well maintained.

  ‘Great to see the tree plantings,’ I said. A sound drifted across the boggy moorland on our right, a clear ringing triple-call that I’d never heard before. We both stopped. I could see a wading-type bird with a long beak, its underparts white. Some walkers were coming towards us, led by a stocky-legged woman with an expensive-looking pair of binoculars around her neck. ‘Do you know what that bird is?’ I asked her.

  Without lifting her binoculars she said confidently, ‘It’s a Greenshank, we saw it on the way up.’ I smiled my thanks. It was the first time I’d ever seen a Greenshank, a bird, like the Redshank, associated in Gaelic culture with the liminal space between worlds. We passed the eagle observatory, a quirky wooden building with a glass front. Then the rain came on. The wind was barrelling up the glen throwing it hard against our backs. After an hour or so we met up with Kenny. He decided the girls and the ponies could go back now, the return trip might well feel longer as they’d be riding into the rain, and they were already wet, but happy. We shared the last of our mint Kit Kats with them and said our goodbyes.

  It was well past lunchtime when Loch Bhoishimid came into sight, and my heart lifted when I saw the newly built fishing bothy: wooden clad and flat roofed. Perhaps we’d be able to shelter inside for a while. A cold wetness started to seep in at the base of my neck and down the backs of my legs. I turned around in the saddle to see if Shuna had seen the bothy, but she and Chief both had their heads down. My friend, head-to-toe in waterproofs, was as dark as the steep face of Sròn Ard which rose almost vertically behind her. It was a shock, suddenly being in the shadow of these hills and the thick furrows of raincloud. Chief, and the slate-silver track he was walking on, offered the only brightness in that rain-blackened glen. I followed the curves of the track back towards Loch a Siar, now just a thin chink in the distance.

  The bothy was padlocked but along the glass front that faced the loch was a bench. It was sheltered there in the lee of the wind, and we got out the gas stove and made a strong coffee. Then another. Under the bench were stacks of offcuts from the cladding, bright and dry and smelling comfortingly of freshly sawed wood, of the log-pile at home. In near silence we watched the water dripping down the ponies’ flanks, running in rivulets off their muzzles, their manes, the loops in the lead ropes. They stood tied to a fence, motionless and resigned to the rain, while we felt the caffeine kicking into our bloodstream. Faraway light licked the skyline, a wave of brightness swept across the loch and suddenly the ponies’ wet faces were gleaming in full sunshine.

  ‘I’ve got a shitload of stuff in here.’ Shuna was packing away the stove in her saddlebags, and I heard in her tone the nervousness we were both feeling. Shortly, the track would come to an end and we’d have some potentially very tricky kilometres, with no path, to navigate before reaching the head of Loch Rèasort. I silently questioned the wisdom of abandoning the original plan of sticking to tracks and roads on the east side of Harris. But I was already bewitched by this place, drawn towards those lines on the map that looked like the head of a water horse, each-uisge in Gaelic. Its tongue, the river marking the boundary between Harris and Lewis. One meaning of Loch Rèasort is ‘division fjord’. We both felt a powerful pull to go into the heart of this land mass, to the remote abandoned settlement at the head of the loch, and hopefully to continue north to the road that would take us to the standing stones at Callanish. That was our plan A, while plan B was, ‘If it gets too difficult, we’ll turn back.’

  ‘It’s rough, but at least the ground is firm,’ I called over my shoulder. Ross was doing a magnificent job of helping me pick the route. I was respectful of the knowledge that ran deep in his blood. We were keeping high up on the shoulder of the hill where the grass was long and tussocky and hadn’t been grazed by sheep for years, if ever. Deer were here though, and I felt a rush of gratitude every time we picked up one of their narrow weaving paths, noticeable by the golden colour of last year’s trampled Molinia grass, and the scatterings of their droppings. We stopped to catch our breath while water flickered like minnows amongst the dunlins and peat hags below.

  ‘I’m glad we’re up here, we did the right thing to stay high.’ Stating the obvious is something I do when nervous. Over the next two hours we inched our way round the side of the hill. As the crow flies it was hardly more than a kilometre, but at the pace we were going it felt like ten. We picked our way through piles of stones tangled through with Moss and aged Heather, and ridden with hidden holes, leg-breaking holes. My thoughts were getting darker.

  ‘Look, the Deer,’ shouted Shuna. Away down below us I saw them and automatically started to count, seven, a good sign. They floated up the hillside in a soundless curve, much lighter than the Deer we were used to seeing in Argyll. Less red, more of a silver sandy colour, like moth wings I was thinking, when Ross stumbled behind me, his front hoof catching my right ankle. Pain burned and, for a white-hot moment, I wondered if my ankle was broken, but already I’d taken the next step and it was weight bearing and therefore okay.

  Here the ground was more level, but the glen floor below was as disarrayed and mired as my thoughts were becoming. Pain, adrenalin and lack of food were taking their toll. Breathe, Beady. Two Ravens flew below us, dropping vocables into the brightening afternoon, so close I could hear the air shush past the tips of their primary feathers. They landed up ahead. As we approached the pair took off in a clamour of discordant protest from their treasure, a half-eaten Deer carcass. Past the stripped bones, I knew I had to watch my thoughts as closely as I was watching where I was putting my feet. The resin-sweet smell of decaying flesh followed us.

  I turned around to warn Shuna but she’d already spotted the carcass and was stepping around it. Behind her I could still see Loch Bhoishimid, where in 1912, while fishing this loch, JM Barrie got the inspiration to write his play ‘Mary Rose’, in which he explored the effects of war on a child’s subconscious. In these quiet days of riding I’d reached a new understanding of how a different kind of war, my parent’s divorce, was still affecting my own subconscious after all these years. I had also gained a fuller appreciation of how the things closest to my heart were gifts they had both given me: a love of Birds, wildlife and the outdoors from Dad; a love of Horses and literature from Mum; a love of Scotland from each of them. To them both I owed this feeling of belonging in Scotland that didn’t, some would say, fit with my accent, or my birthplace, but that I knew perfectly fitted the shape of my soul.

  Three hours and two kilometres after leaving the fishing bothy we reached the dip on the skyline that the seven Deer had disappeared
through. We were now on the ridge that ran from the top of the hill we’d been traversing, Cearascleit Mhor, down to the top of Cearascleit Beag. According to the map we’d get a good view from there as far as Loch Rèasort. We felt light-headed and light-hearted as the sun reappeared and glanced off the pale rocks all around us. The late afternoon promised to be a stunner. I’d been saying out loud at regular intervals, ‘We can always go back,’ but it had been a tough few hours and the thought of having to return as we had come wasn’t appealing. We were being pulled onwards. We picked the stoniest route towards the nose of Cearascleit Bheag. Broad patches of fiercely weathered bedrock felt impervious underfoot, the ponies blew appreciatively. A landscape opened to the north and east as far as we could see. My heart sank. It was brown, very brown, and scored with dark lines showing us that it was peat hags, miles of peat hags, that lay between us and the stone-happed hills to the north east. According to the map it was in these hills that we’d pick up the old postal route. But perhaps there’d be another route out. I brought my gaze closer in, there were two rivers below us, both meandering their way towards the same oval of water.

  ‘Look! That must be Loch Rèasort, and there’s a shieling.’ I looked to where Shuna was pointing. The straight lines of the faraway building, its pale roof, the different tone of green where animals had grazed, sent a thrill through the two of us.

  ‘I think it’ll be fine. We can get down to the river from here, and then follow it to the loch. The riverbanks look good.’ I nodded in agreement, both of us in denial of the ‘going on regardless’ mist that had descended in our adrenalin-kindled minds and bodies.

  It had been eight hours since our breakfast in Tarbert, the most delicious bacon and egg rolls we’d ever had. When we’d told Katie Ann she’d answered, ‘That’s because the rolls are from Stag’s Bakery in Stornoway, they’re the best.’ I’d had a feeling it was her generous heart that had been the magic ingredient though. We stopped on the nose of the hill and I poured the sardine oil into the rough grass. For the faeries, I thought to myself, as I now did every time I drained a can of sardines or smoked mussels into the ground. Adrenalin had taken away my appetite and the oatcakes and sardines were hard to swallow. I wondered, sitting there, how it had been for Mum choking on the least-tiny bit of food, in the end not even being able to suck on a piece of chocolate. She had so loved her food. I looked at the rocks above me. This was a scraped-bare place. I remembered the cold day my brothers and I took Mum’s ashes up to the top of Deadh Choimhead (meaning Good View), a hill in Glen Lonan that is visible from our three homes. I remembered the wind that day, how it had blown her ashes back against us, into our eyes, our hair, our mouths. I forced myself to think of something else, to focus on the skyline as I swallowed each dry mouthful of my late lunch.

  It was an easy enough scramble down to the river. The banks were green and firm, grazed by Deer. The river was scallop-edged with buff sand. In some places, where the pools were darkest, you could see how the water had cut in under the overhanging peat. And then I saw it, there in the grass and heather, a perfect circle of low stone wall, the remains of a beehive dwelling, and a second, and a third. I hadn’t realised it at the time but the beehive huts that Alastair McIntosh describes in Poacher’s Pilgrimage were just over a kilometre to the east of where we now were. It was his vivid descriptions of how dangerous the ground was in this part of Harris that had originally made me rule out this whole west coast as a possible route. I had forgotten all of that, hadn’t connected the two places. Afterwards I’d wonder if it was my subconscious that had drawn me there, knowing this place had something to teach me.

  Leaving the ponies to graze on the harlequin-green grass, we went and sat down inside the closest beehive dwelling, our backs to the Lichen-mapped walls. On top of the stones was a thick cushion of Heather, its edge sculpted round and smooth by the weather. ‘How lucky are we,’ I said, smiling across to a very tired but contented-looking Shuna in the melting evening sunshine. The river bent around us singing over pink gravel shallows. Kenny had told us that this river, Abhainn Mhor, was famous for its Salmon and Sea Trout runs. I could picture the fish now, silver from the sea, following their noses upstream, finning in pools made dark by peat. I took the bead purse out of my pocket. Mum had been, in her own words, ‘a culture vulture’, with a lifelong passion for archaeology and ancient civilisation, so many passions. I chose a bright red glass bead for the beehive dwelling. Red for love, I said quietly as I laid it amongst the Heather branches. And red for danger.

  We set off down the river leaving the bead behind, shining, the red in the glass picking up the blush at the tips of the new Heather shoots. We lost count of how many times we crossed that river. The Deer, in Gaelic ‘crodh-sìth’, cattle of the faeries, were still guiding us with their hoof slots in the sandy crossing places. They had mapped the firmest parts of the riverbanks for us, but as we got closer to Loch Rèasort the green riverside turned to treacle-coloured peat that collapsed under foot and hoof, and the trails of heart-shaped hoof prints disappeared. We had to walk long stretches in the river itself, up to our knees in places, the ponies treading gingerly over slippery stones. By now we all smelt of river.

  Soon we were in the open at the head of Loch Rèasort, breathing in the salty air lifting off the tidal flats, while the Oystercatchers trailed orange-beaked calls in the last light. We were standing in Lewis now, on cropped grass in front of the house we’d seen from the hilltop. Its tin roof was an ethereal duck-egg blue. Starlings hopped on the chimney breasts, their young croaking coarsely from pitchy nesting places. We walked around to the back of the house where the windows and doorways were filled in with boulders. Stone walls funnelled into the side of the house, a sort of sheep fank we guessed. The walls had incorporated faces of blue-grey bedrock. At the front of the house were two windows looking out across the river mouth and head of the loch. The tide was low and wet shingle shone orange beyond the river. This must be the ‘watcher’s cottage’ we’d heard about, where estate workers from Amhuinnsuidhe Estate came to keep an eye out for poachers. Even though the land was now community owned by the North Harris Trust, the fishing and sporting rights were still privately owned.

  As remote as we were, evidence of humans was everywhere: in the blue-keeled sheep; this boulder-blinded building; the white cottage across the river; the stone ruins of black houses reaching out to the west. There was another river that flowed into the loch just beyond the one we’d followed in. This second river was noisy, we could hear it collecting in invisible pools higher up, then spilling over rocky shelves in an expressive water-led ‘yes’, over and over again.

  ‘D’you see that fence?’ I said, pointing over the bay. ‘I’ll go across and check if it’s an enclosure we could put the ponies in, maybe we could camp over there too.’ Relief washed over me as I waded across the river. The low-angled sun dispersed a green sheen through the shallows; a band of weed grew there, perhaps it marked the line between saltwater and fresh water. I stepped out and headed across the gritty sand towards the stone ruins and the fence line, crunching over large blue Mussel shells. Water oozed from my boots. We were in luck, the fence was in good repair, the ponies would have a big field for the night. Even more incredibly there was good grass. We’d already worked out that if we camped on that side of the bay we’d get the morning sun. I waved and shouted back across to Shuna, indicating for her to bring the ponies over. A Sea Eagle flew low and slow directly between us, so close I could see the sharp closing angle of her yellow beak. I shouted and waved again, pointing at the bird, but Shuna was already busy leading the ponies down the narrow stone-cut steps to the river.

  While I was waiting, I wandered across to the other house. I read later that these houses, one on Lewis and this one on Harris, were ‘white houses’ originally built for the estate gamekeepers to live in. They were the only two buildings still with roofs on. The whitewash of their walls was now barely discernible, although the front wall of this one had been re
done more recently. By the padlocked door there was a hand-painted sign Welcome to the last resort. You will never leave. I smiled, walked on past a verdigris tap attached to a post, and towards two old cast-iron gateposts. There was no fence left, no gate, just these two posts, framing in bright rust the hills we’d come through earlier. I felt so glad we’d made it to this place. I turned and walked back towards the remains of the black houses, and dear Shuna, and the weary magnificent ponies.

  ‘Bloody lucky us!’ Shuna said, as we finished the last of our chicken curry and Lidl’s tinned aubergines. We both laughed. The ponies looked up at us, stalks hanging from their lips. They dropped their heads again. A breeze was keeping the midges away, we were being so well looked after. We’d been told you could get ‘a good feed’ of Mussels in this place, but even though the tide was out, we decided to leave the Mussels to themselves, and to the Birds and Otters. We had so much already.

  ‘This is the life,’ I said, rubbing my bare feet, which were slowly warming now they were rid of the sodden socks and boots. Just then the Sea Eagle did another fly-by, leaving a startle of bird calls in its astronomical wake; it seemed it was us she had in her inquisitive sights though, not dinner. Then we saw the rainbow, a broad bright thumbs-up of a rainbow, over towards where we hoped to pick up the postal track the next day – good omens all round. We were still spellbound when we lay down inside the tent on the mossy footprint of a black house. We fell asleep quickly, blissfully unaware of how much a place can change in just twenty-four hours, or that we’d be forced to stay another night out there, in the house with stone-filled windows. That second night the words Welcome to the last resort. You will never leave would take on a whole other meaning.