Marram

by Leonie Charlton

  DAY NINETEEN

  Kinloch Rèasort

  The ricochet-call of a Red Grouse woke me, punctuating sleep-soft memories of other sounds during the night: Snipe drumming overhead; water unspooling in the rivers; the tide hesitating between rocky shores; a high bird call I didn’t recognise; the ponies treading by. Even before I opened my eyes I felt the brightness and warmth of a sun already high in the sky. I could hear the comforting sounds of Shuna moving around up behind the tent. I felt deeply rested, in fact, I felt great.

  ‘Ready for porridge?’ asked Shuna as I walked towards her. The stove was on, water was boiling and breakfast supplies were laid out; zip-seal bags full of oats and coffee, a wedge of cheese, a small tub of honey. The ponies were lying side by side in exactly the same position, they were doing everything in tandem now; sleeping, peeing, even sighing and blowing was done in sync.

  ‘I’m starving,’ I said, my bare feet sinking into the deep moss. ‘What a morning, what a spot, this must be one of the most beautiful places on earth.’

  ‘Pretty damn perfect,’ Shuna replied as she killed the steam in the pan with a handful of dry oats.

  ‘The ponies were both standing when I got up, they don’t seem any worse for wear after yesterday,’ she said. ‘Incredible really.’ I nodded. They’d had some bad moments yesterday, sinking into peaty riverbanks studded with boulders that could maim a muscle or a tendon if caught wrong.

  After breakfast I put on my socks and boots, still soaking from the night before, and went for a wander with my camera. Heading back towards the ‘whitehouse’ on this side of the bay, I stopped to watch lambs racing along the edges of banks. They were strong-looking, their mothers too . It was a grass-haven for sheep out here in the middle of all those thousands of hectares of peat. The sheep had been clipped last summer, no roughies: sheep that have gone unclipped and are carrying multiple years of fleece-growth. These were well-tended sheep. I stopped by the walls of a ruin. Inside was a carpet of bed springs, old fridges, plastic plates, fishing buoys, rusted tin cans. Outside on the grass was a cream-coloured aluminium jug, its soft lines curved like a sleeping duck. The whole of its base had rotted away. Placing it on a stone windowsill, I stood back to admire it, and looked beyond across the bay towards the duck-egg-blue roof, and the runrigs that rippled down to the shore in the morning light. Shuna looked up from the map as I approached. ‘Shall we do a recce without the ponies to see if we can find a way to the Mhorsgail postal route?’ she said. ‘According to the map it’s not far from the house over there,’ she said, pointing across the bay.

  ‘Good idea,’ I replied. ‘I’d love to walk up that other river.’ I traced with my finger the blue line that ran to a big pencilled-in oval where Ruari had told us the beehive dwellings were. I clumsily read out the name of the river, ‘Abhainn à Clàr Beag.’

  ‘Great,’ said Shuna, ‘let’s get a move on then, we don’t want to be leaving too late with the ponies, who knows what the old postal route will be like.’

  We took down the tent, repacked the saddlebags, and left everything in a neat pile before heading back across the bay. ‘Back soon,’ we told Ross and Chief. We had to ford the river again, this time noticing the remains of a stone bridge that would have given easy access between the settlement of Crola, here on the Harris side of the river, and Luachair on the Lewis side.

  From the house we found a good track that went eastwards through a gap in the dyke, the gate long gone. Under the thin turf this was a proper track, but within the next few strides it abruptly ended in peat moor. Just a tiny tantalising stretch of track, something begun and never finished. We checked our bearings on the map and began to pick our way across the moor. It was peat as far as we could see, but not like the peat that we were used to on the mainland. This peat chequered the moor neatly in raised plateaus with dry waterways between. It seemed doable to pick our way from one raised bed of peat to the next. The ground felt surprisingly firm, and after ten minutes or so we both agreed we’d give it a cautionary go with the ponies. The land rose gradually towards a low-backed hill, Shèlibridh, alongside which, according to the map, we’d pick up the old postal path, and then hopefully the going would get easier.

  ‘Let’s go and find the beehives,’ I said, both of us now feeling more positive about the route out. We followed the river south, its banks rich with the scent of new growth. Bright yellow-green leaves of Butterwort glowed starlike over mossy banks, some were flowering, splashes of violet at the end of bowing stems. This insectivorous plant was thriving out here in the acidic ground. Oil seeped from the peat and a rust-red pool was overlaid with rainbow iridescence. The reeds were also red, iron minerals in the ground here had permeated everything. On a rock were two Damselflies attached end to end, lover-lines of vermillion.

  Further along, in a place where the burn converged with two more, we found a beehive shieling of half a dozen dwellings. Two were on their own little island where spating water had sluiced through the ground between the burns, another had been cleaved in half by a new watercourse. Water was marking time here. The beehives were small round hummocks, about six feet in diameter, crowned in brown heather-wood. At one time they would have been igloo-shaped, stonework all the way to the top and covered in turf, leaving a small hole for the smoke. They were roofless now. I crouched down in one of them, eye-height with Vole holes in the Moss and Heather that covered the curved walls underneath. There were small recesses in the stonework, like cupboards. I put my hand into one, brought out a clear glass bottle rimed with earth. I put my hand back in and touched something that crumbled to the touch, a wafer-thin piece of oxidised tin, food cans from goodness knows how long ago.

  I’d find out later that just a few hundred yards south of where we were was another shieling where the beehives were intact, the one that Alastair McIntosh describes as a vision straight from Middle Earth. In his book he goes on to quote a ‘Captain Thomas of the Royal Navy’ who in 1859 wrote about the beehive shielings: all the natives agree that no-one knows who built them, and that they were not made by the fathers nor grandfathers of persons now living. Captain Thomas on a later visit met the dwelling’s summer occupants, three shieling girls who during the day ‘minded and milked their cattle’ and during the night ‘slept inside the ancient shelter, just as their sisters before them had always done’.

  I sat on a bed of dried sheep droppings, the walls obviously a favoured shelter spot for them. I reached into my pocket for the bead purse and took out three, one for each of my children. I chose three ceramic glazed beads, one bronze, one terracotta and one royal blue. I threaded them together onto a single string, I didn’t want them to become separated. They sat on the curve of the beehive, their sheen picking up the yellow of the Tormentil flowers threading up between the Mosses. I placed the beads in the earthy darkness of the recess. Maybe, I thought, Brèagha, Finn and Oran will come here one day. I liked that thought.

  We led Chief and Ross through the gate. Nearby were the long-abandoned blackhouse ruins where the night before we’d stowed the saddles under stone lintels. We tacked up while the ponies grazed the short sweet grass growing along the top of the blackhouse walls. Thick-shelled blue mussels and white cockles were scattered there, it was clearly favoured by birds as a feeding spot. Alongside the houses swept an ancient Goat Willow, its thick trunk spreading perpendicular to the ground, while new shoots sprouted upwards. The tree seemed to hold the heart of the place within its reaches, and between its branches somebody had made a tin-covered shelter, a wooden bench. Behind the tree was a disused sheep dip, a 45-gallon drum lying beside it, rusted away save for one side, and the rim, a perfect circle remaining. So many outlines here, spaces to fill with imaginings of all that had been and gone in this place. I took out a large obsidian bead, black with silver veins, and tied it firmly amongst the silver-green willow leaves.

  We left with smiles, and in sunshine, but already we could see a deep bank of clouds coming in. We needed to get a move on. We had no in
tention of riding as we would need to be close to the ground to read it, and the ponies could do without carrying any extra weight. Crossing the river we walked past the house with its duck-egg-blue roof and up the little spur road to nowhere. Then we began to carefully pick our way east through the patchwork of peat. It was going well, there was movement in the ground, but it was dry and firm on each separate peat plateau. Ross was taking his time, treading carefully, using his nose as I’d seen him countless times before on wet and peaty ground. I was in front and Chief and Shuna followed behind. With hindsight I think there had been a hesitation, a cautionary feeling from Ross behind me, but it all happened so fast. I’d crossed the ground between two peat plateaus, he followed, and there it was, the unmistakable grunt of distress. I spun round and his hindquarters were in deep, he’d broken the surface of what I’d just walked across, what I’d thought was fine and firm. He scoured for purchase with his front hooves but only succeeded in spinning his front end round, away from the dry ground I was on. He was floundering. I had a sense of looking down on the scene from far away, this can’t actually be happening.

  ‘Beady!’ shouted Shuna. ‘Don’t put any tension in the rope. Leave him be!’

  It was his tail I couldn’t take my eyes off, spread out behind him in coils across the skulking surface of 7,000 years of peat formation. It was beyond anything I had ever seen, nothing like our previous experiences in peat. I reached across trying to undo his girth straps, succeeded and somehow pushed the saddle over onto the peat on the other side of him. My arms felt watery and weak.

  ‘Okay,’ said Shuna. In that one word I heard calm, and I heard a plan. Then Ross started to plunge again, going ever deeper downhill, further into this underground current of peat-hell. The peat hags lifted higher around him.

  ‘Come on, Ross,’ I said, trying to angle his head towards the drier ground.

  ‘He needs his head, don’t put anything in the rope,’ Shuna repeated. Her words finally sunk in. ‘Okay, he needs to rest.’ She squatted down beside him and reached out her hand, gently stroking his face. ‘It’s going to be okay,’ she said.

  Choking back tears, I watched the amber in his eyes darkening in fear.

  ‘He needs to rest. He knows what he’s doing, Beady, he’s a pro,’ she said, willing me to be present. ‘He needs to recover his strength for the next try. He’ll try again, and we need to make it as easy as possible for him to get out.’ At that he heaved again, but he was only sinking deeper. His struggles stopped quicker this time and he lay quiet. Meanwhile Chief stood motionless behind Shuna, we were both acutely aware of the danger Chief was also in.

  ‘Let’s try to dig a space around his legs.’ We knelt down and scraped away from his forelegs, handful by handful of bituminous black peat. We couldn’t reach his hind legs, one of them looked like it was bent back behind him at an unnatural angle. I looked away. We were working furiously now, slowly creating a pocket of air around each of his motionless legs.

  ‘Is he exhausted?’ I asked Shuna.

  ‘No, he’s resting. I told you, he knows what he needs to do. He knows better than we do. Keep digging.’ I finally reached a hoof, curled my fingers around the horn wall.

  ‘Now, we need to find anything we can to put under the hooves that that will give him traction: coats, bags, anything,’ said Shuna, standing up. We pulled off his saddlecloth, our coats, waterproof trousers, and packed them as quickly as we could under his hooves. Ross tried again with us both urging him on. ‘Come on, Ross, come on, Ross.’

  He couldn’t shift himself. He just couldn’t do it, even with the air pockets around his legs, even with the new traction beneath his hooves. He couldn’t get any purchase on the peat. The grip the bog had on his hind legs, the suction on his belly, it was too much. He rested again, his eyes dulling.

  We stood in silence. I was doing the sums. Eight hours on foot back the way we came to get a phone signal. God knows how long if one of us carried on to the postal route, so many unknowns there. One of us would have to stay with the ponies. Where would Chief be safe? How would that be, in the peat, all those hours? What about that hind leg, that angle? Would a helicopter come, how else could he be lifted out? All these thoughts blooming like an oil spill in my mind. You need to focus, Beady.

  ‘We have to get this right,’ said Shuna. ‘I think we only have one more chance. We’re going to put more stuff under his hooves. We’re going to let him rest. Then I’m going to lead Chief away. We’re only going to get one shot at this. I’m hoping seeing his friend leaving will give him the extra impetus he needs.’ I nodded. After a few minutes she said, ‘Okay, Beady, I’m going to go away now, remember, do NOT pull on his head.’ She started to lead Chief away, as best she could, following in our earlier footprints. We knew now that the whole area was treacherous, that we probably couldn’t even trust those hoof prints from earlier, but it was the best we had to go on. This Lewis peat was an entirely different beast. Ross was trying, pushing, grunting. Keep the rope loose. ‘Come on, Ross,’ I said out loud. Something was happening, he was moving. He was making headway. He got his front hooves on the plateau that Chief had just left, he heaved and he pushed and with a groan ripping from deep inside him he hauled himself out of that shifting morass of blackness.

  ‘Hold him! Make sure he doesn’t fall back!’ shouted Shuna.

  He was unsteady. I soothed him with words, put my hand on his neck, saw his four hooves on the ground and stemmed back the tears.

  Shuna was taking off Chief’s saddle. ‘We’ll come back for the saddles later. We have to get them back on safe ground.’ We lost our footprint trail almost immediately but saw the hole in the dyke, the track, and carefully picked our way towards it, step by step, all our senses on high alert. Not until we were standing on that stony track did we allow ourselves to relax, and then the tears came.

  ‘Thank you, Shuna. Thank God for you. Sorry I was so useless.’

  ‘You did great, I can’t imagine how I would have felt if it was Chiefy back there. We’re not going anywhere else today. We need to get them back to the field, get the maps out, and find another way out of here. Ross needs to rest. He looks fine though. What an amazing horse you are, Ross!’ He was standing square, as if it had never happened, but for the peat clinging to his legs, his underbelly, in his tail. The same colour as him, except without the amber that was now back burning in his eyes.

  I left Shuna with the ponies grazing by the house and went back for the saddles. We rested by the stone-blinded windows and I remembered the small bottle of Rescue Remedy in my saddlebag and, with still-shaking hands, squeezed drops into Ross’s bottom lip. I was in shock, struggling to organise my thoughts, and very, very scared.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Shuna. I looked across the bay towards where she was pointing. My confused mind couldn’t compute what I was seeing. My heart started to race, not in a good way. Battle-ship grey. Boat? Or barge? Barge-boat? Landing craft? Men on deck with binoculars, looking right at us. Navy? I was confused. I was thinking military. Secret. I was thinking war. I was thinking weird.

  ‘It’s probably an estate boat,’ said Shuna. Yes, that made more sense than the Navy. My mind was scrambled. It wasn’t a big boat. ‘Maybe they’re the watchers we’ve heard about, coming to check for poachers.’ A wave of relief spread through me. Maybe they could help. If they were local they’d know the ground. A way out. Routes. Local knowledge.

  ‘Looks like they’re landing on the other side.’ The boat lined up alongside the rocks below the willow tree.

  We set off across the bay, hopeful, excited to meet these people.

  ‘Shuna, you talk to them, they’ll be more friendly with your accent.’ I still had this thing, this shame thing around my accent, worry of being pigeonholed, misunderstood. It went way back to school days, being taunted for my English accent.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, knowing this wasn’t the time to tell me, yet again, that people didn’t care about my accent, that I had a lovely voice.<
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  A tall, bearded man, rosy-cheeks, loose-fitting jeans, answered her greeting. ‘Thought we were seeing things when we saw the ponies,’ he said. ‘I could do with a pair of ponies like that to get the deer off the hill.’ Okay, I could place him now. A stalker. A friend. Fabulous! I’d been a pony girl in my late teens, carrying deer off the hill with Highland garrons, and was still passionate about the tradition of working ponies in this way.

  ‘What are you all doing here?’ I asked him. There was someone with red hair, smart binoculars hanging over checked shirts. I remember that, but was it one pair of binoculars, or several? I could only take in small pictures at a time, still struggling to make sense of things.

  ‘We’re from Amhuinnsuidhe Estate, bringing in building supplies for the house over there,’ he said, pointing to the whitehouse this side of the bay.

  ‘It’s a three-bedroomed house,’ one of the other men said. ‘All mod cons.’

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ our friend asked.

  ‘We camped here last night, came in from Loch Bhoishimid yesterday.’

  ‘That would have been some tricky ground to cover,’ he said. I heard understanding in his words. Yes, these folks got it, hopefully they’d be able to help.

  ‘We were planning to ride north, to connect with the postal path to Morsgail,’ Shuna said.

  ‘That path doesn’t exist,’ somebody said. I was looking at my blackened hands, feeling the shame build like the pressure of the peat under my fingernails. How had we thought it’d be okay to come out here without doing any proper route planning?

  ‘One of the ponies got badly bogged, just beyond the house over there.’ Shuna nodded over the bay. ‘We’re staying another night and looking for a better way out.’

  ‘You got bogged that close in?’ said the man with red hair. ‘It only gets worse after that.’