Marram

by Leonie Charlton

  We walked silently up the fishermen’s path beside Abainn Thabhsaigh, funnelling our focus into each careful step. My legs felt weak with anxiety. Would Ross manage out in front today, or might he have lost his nerve after the horrors of yesterday? He walked out willingly, his steps steady and considered. My heart could have burst. Whether I was deserving of his trust or not, I had it. My legs started to move more fluently, my feet following the slender slots of deer.

  Certainty is the enemy of poetry and love and faith.

  I couldn’t remember where I’d heard those words. We’d got to the bend in the river where we’d been advised to cut across the moor to the hillside, time to leave behind the deer slots and gravelly song of the river. The night before we’d picked out a line of rocks, but now we were full of doubt. I left Ross with Shuna and went ahead to scout once more. ‘Okay, let’s give this a go then,’ I said when I returned. Ross and I went ahead, skirting the peat hags. We made it across to the first stony mound and chose a line to the next. It was going well when Shuna shouted out that Chief had fallen back into the underside of a peat bank and his hind legs were in deep. I felt sick. He couldn’t get out the way he was facing. ‘Shuna, if you can turn him to face downhill gravity might help him out.’ It worked. The four of us stood side by side, taking a few moments to recover. Chief’s peat-coated hocks a dark reminder of our predicament.

  ‘We did it,’ I said, when we finally reached the side of the hill. We gave each other a wan smile. We thought then that the hardest part was over, that we’d be able to follow the close contour lines of this hillside southwards towards the vehicle track that would take us out of here. Was it really just two days since we’d ridden up that track to the fishing bothy at Loch Boishimid? It felt like so much had happened since then that time had tangled up on itself.

  Following the line of the hill as best we could we realised it wasn’t going to be simple, the hillside was terraced with peat hags. ‘We’ll have to go higher,’ I said tightly. Further up we found more of the same, stepping around sink after sink of peat. ‘We’re on a fucking hillside,’ I said, in exasperation. ‘Why is there so much peat up here?’

  There were pools of quaking bog too. I didn’t want to stop, worried that I’d never get going again. Keeping my legs moving forwards I didn’t look back. Glad I wasn’t behind, I would have hated watching Ross’s legs sinking in time and again, and then having to follow. Each step was a step of faith. Finally, we reached a rocky shelf big enough for the four of us to take a breather. We were all blowing hard.

  ‘This is a nightmare,’ said Shuna. ‘Any other way out, do you think? Could we get across there to the river?’ She was pointing towards the hill we’d come down that first evening. I’d have done anything to be back there now, to scramble up that heathery nose, come across the dead deer remains again. Between us and the river was a mired mess of ground. Drumlins rose between endless glints of water and quivering patches of lurid green.

  ‘I don’t think there’s any way we’ll get across there,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to stay on this side, and gain more height.’ Mist was on the tops now. ‘Maybe fifty yards or so higher things will improve, are you okay with that?’ Shuna nodded.

  I started to zigzag my way up, Ross following, uncomplaining despite the steep gradient. There was a sense of something spurring us onwards and upwards. Then, just as I thought we were getting onto firmer ground, Ross sank up to his belly. He lay there with a look of utter resignation on his face. He was in deep but there were rocks around us and I felt calm, this time I just knew he’d get out. He did, by turning to face downhill, and like Chief had done earlier, using gravity to ease his way out. Shuna afterwards said she got such a feeling in that moment from Ross, a feeling of deep tiredness, but also a feeling from him that we were all in this together. It was painfully clear to us now that the peat was pooled across this hillside, the landmarks were unreliable, and it would be a very long way back to the track at the speed we were going. We agreed that there was nothing else for it but to get right up onto the tops, that the side of the hill was just too unrelentingly unsafe. The day was getting colder, and as we started uphill again blinds of rain closed off the view of the glen. Please, please, stay clear for us up there.

  From the top we could see over the other side and down towards the scalpel-blade glint of Loch Cheibhle. We stopped to catch our breath and the ponies snatched at thin bents of grass. It was a moonscape up there. Grey, cold bedrock crossed between massive balancing boulders. It was a landscape of leftovers and left behinds. I wished I still had my gloves, but they were lost somewhere on Uist. I pulled my buff up over my mouth, I was starting to shiver, my sweat cooling quickly. We carried on, staying as close to the top and the watershed as we could. Sometimes burns had cut into the rock making gullies that we had to follow down in order to find a safe crossing place, and we’d go all the way back up again as quickly as possible. Each time we lost height we were met with pools of peat. The ponies were magnificent. Up and down they went, their hooves clattering on the rocks. As we headed slowly towards the summit of Mullach na Redheachd a bloom of mist enfolded us, but cleared again. We came to a precipice where the hillside dropped away sharply and I shuddered imagining how much worse the conditions could have been for us up there that day.

  We stepped back from the edge and debated our next move. It seemed we had a choice. We could try heading down the steep gully now visible to the north west which would take us down to Loch Uladail. The map showed a path picking up from there that would take us back to the car park. But between the head of the loch and the path we’d have to travel beneath the overhang, Stron Uladail, where the ground was littered with huge broken-away rocks. It was impossible to tell from where we were whether there would be a way through them. If there wasn’t, we’d have to climb all the way up again. The other option was to keep going, and start heading slowly down to the south east. Either way was down, and both downs looked terrifying. I wondered what it would be like to stay the night up there. We were almost out of food but we had our sleeping bags and tent, although I didn’t know how it would fare in this wind. A part of me that was expecting to see a search party out looking for us, surely someone would be worried about us by now. When I said that to Shuna she laughed. ‘Who do you think will be worried? They’ll just be thinking we’re out of phone signal and having a great time.’

  Wondering which would be the best route down, listening for an answer in the mist, no answer came, and we went around in circles discussing the possible advantages and disadvantages of each route. In the end we opted for the better known option, and began to head slantwise down across the hillside towards Loch Bhoishimid and the wooden bothy we’d had our coffee at three days earlier. We didn’t stop for another two hours, not allowing our momentum and nerve to flag, until we reached the track eight hours after we’d left the bothy that morning. Eight hours to travel just a few kilometres! But we’d made it back to hard ground. We cried. Of course, we cried. And then we walked those delicious last miles on hard track, thinking our own thoughts, stepping out our own fears, letting the spaces between us widen because, mercifully, it was safe to do so.

  I hadn’t thought about Mum all that day, being too busy working with my wits, staying safe, surviving. I had been fully in my body, in my animal being, no space for guilt or reminiscence. That long list of regrets that had been haunting me for years was silent, the one that ran on and on: I wish I’d gone in for cups of tea, I wish I’d taken her to eat mussels on the pier in Oban that sunny April day, I wish I’d gone in to talk to the surgeon with her, I wish I wish I wish I’d done this, and not that, and definitely not that, and if only things could have been different between us while she was alive. All those regrets that made me fold over in pain. The ones I would never speak out loud, the ones I turned over and over and over in my mind. That day coming out of Kinloch Rèasort my head emptied into the banks of the burns, between peat hags, across the stony surface of the hilltops. That would ha
ve been the place to have left a bead for her, on that lunar ridge, but I hadn’t. Instead I’d left a part of Beady, a part of myself, that I no longer needed. There is a word, puhpowee, from the Potawatomi Nation, which describes the force that causes mushrooms to push up and appear overnight. I felt a new me had emerged after my night in the bothy. I’d left behind that old skin quilted with guilt. I felt raw, taken to the bone, but also excitedly ready for something different.

  I waited by the padlocked gate with Ross and Chief while Shuna hitched a lift with some birders to Aird Asaig. It would be an hour or so before she returned with the pickup. I listened to the sea slap the shore and watched the boys graze. Late sun broke through the showers. I went to the saddlebags looking for the honey, remembering something I’d read in Poacher’s Pilgrimage, that ‘the right time to feed the faeries (…) is when the rain is still raining, and the sun is beginning to shine’. I squeezed drops onto the rocks, amongst the heather and hedges. For the Faeries. Let Mum, the woman who taught me to believe in Faeries, just be a part of me now. Let that be enough. Let it be enough that this evening I am just leaving honey for the Faeries, and watching two brilliant Ponies graze in the rain.

  DAY TWENTY-ONE

  Aird Asaig to Callanish

  It was wonderful to wake in a comfy bed. I looked at my phone screen, 8.30am. My nails were still black with peat despite the bath I’d had the night before. Shuna had been right and there were no messages on my phone when we got back into signal, not even a missed call. Katie-Anne, Corina and Lauren had welcomed us back into their home in Tarbert at short notice. I looked at the two inches of sky between the curtains, the zinc cloud of yesterday was gone. It was all blue. We wouldn’t be riding into Callanish as we’d planned, or north to the Butt of Ness, not on this trip anyway. Today was our last full day in the Outer Hebrides, but I didn’t feel a trace of disappointment, just deep relief and gratitude. This journey had been richer in experience and meaning, both physical and emotional, than I could have ever imagined. Here we were back in Tarbert amongst some of the kindest people I’d ever met, and most importantly of all Ross and Chief were safe and sound a few miles away in Kenny’s field at Aird Asaig.

  Months later we’d go to a talk in Oban Library that Alastair McIntosh was giving. During the tea break we shared a little of our story with him, and I gave him a tattered copy of Poacher’s Pilgrimage to sign. Handing it back he’d fixed me with a steady eye. His writing was wiry, slanted, like windblown Marram Grass: For Leonie, To take a rucksack was one thing, but a pony – that blows my mind. Very best wishes, Alastair McIntosh.

  For the second time we said our goodbyes to Katie Ann and her girls. We stopped at the Harris Gin Distillery where Kenny worked as a Manager. On the wall was a large photograph of him and Bella. Kenny was leaning against a Stoneleigh Grey Massey Ferguson, smiling across at his daughter who was balancing on the tyres and smiling back at him, her fingers interlaced, a mirror image of her father’s. It was a picture of mutual devotion. We bought bottles of gin to take home, the colour of the sea at Eoligarry. Barra felt like a very long time ago now. Back at Aird Asaig the loch was a shade deeper than the azure sky. Starlings chattered on telegraph wires and hills lifted sheer and clear ahead of us. Below, at the head of the loch, the chimney of the Whale Station was a strike of brick-red.

  ‘My granny used to talk about the smell,’ said the lady in the petrol station, wrinkling up her nose, when we asked. But today the air was fresh and pristine. The ponies’ backs shone in the sunshine, but below their bellies, on their knees and fetlocks and threaded through their tails, were the gluey shadows of peat.

  The roads were quiet. The ponies had stepped unhesitatingly into the horsebox, were now munching on full nets of haylage as we drove along the A859 towards Stornoway. The road was smooth and easy. Water Lilies were beginning to bloom on the hill lochs. We drove through the strung-out village of Ballalan. ‘Look,’ said Shuna, nodding at a man in front of his bungalow. ‘You don’t see that very often.’ The man was cutting his lawn with a scythe. We passed several bungalows with antlers above the garage.

  That autumn I’d meet a man who used to work for Amhuinnsuibhe estate and was familiar with the house we’d stayed in at Kinloch Rèasort. He talked about walking in there with his dog on a Friday night for a drink with ‘the watchers’ and described the route over from Hamnavay, hard-going and pathless, between deep hill lochs full of Arctic Char. How he’d spot the occasional triple-fleeced tup. ‘You could see the pixies and faeries in their eyes.’

  He talked of the multi-winter Salmon running up the rivers, the world-renowned Sea Trout, how the locals hated to be told they couldn’t fish in places they’d been fishing since they were kids. How they hated the English, how he was all right because he was half Welsh. It wasn’t just the fish people were poaching. He spoke of the village of Balallan, ‘where each house has a quad shelter and antlers on the wall. Poachers,’ he said, ‘they do it just for devilment, they don’t need the money. The estate tried to prosecute them, but it didn’t go down very well.’ He told me how he and his colleagues used to shoot Deer for the estate on that ground by the disappeared postal track to Morscaig.

  ‘It would be emotional,’ he said, ‘getting them out, but I’d go back there in a heartbeat.’

  Shuna and I drove on to Stornoway and then took the Pentland Road west. This route was built in the 1890s, originally designed for horse-drawn vehicles. It was gently graded and passed through moorland dotted with shielings. Most were ruins now, they’d originally been built of stone, and peat-turf roofs with a hole in the centre to let out smoke from the central hearth. There were also more modern ones made of tin although some were already falling down: a slow collapse of roof, the flake and peel of paint and rust. Others had been done up. Glints of galvanised steel roof, a newly painted red door. It was comforting to be in the pickup, travelling through the gently undulating moors that spread out in all directions. Yesterday’s hills were a mere bruise on the south horizon, wind turbines flashed cumulus-white between there and here. A Curlew flew across the rough grasses, and an old lady wearing a pink skirt, working alone at the peats, looked up as we passed and smiled. What a picture, just her and the Curlew, out in all of that.

  Emily, who’d been following our journey on Facebook, had given us a contact for a field in Callanish. We met Sheena in the car park at the Callanish Visitor Centre. Her husband Cudaig, she explained, was in the Coastguard with Emily. We followed her car half a mile to their croft. ‘This is ideal,’ we said as Sheena showed us the field, pointing out where the water was. Chief and Ross explored for a while, then put their heads down to graze and we went off to put up the tent. Later, riding bareback, we set off down the road. The sound of hoof-horn on hard tarmac was bliss.

  Within minutes the standing stones of Callanish I came into sight and we had the place entirely to ourselves. We rode the ponies through a gate and wandered in silence amongst those megaliths of Lewisian gneiss. Even sitting on the ponies we were dwarfed by the stones. Ross and Chief reached out and touched them with their noses, these stones that had been there for millennia. A German couple arrived, smiling, huge camera lenses resting in the crooks of their arms like babies. I asked them if they’d take a photo of us and handed them my phone. I have the picture now, us amongst those stones that reached into a sky awash with clouds – stones and clouds and ponies, and our wide wind-chapped smiles. We continued down the road and along a track towards Callanish II. A stile straddled the stock fence, there was no way through for the boys so we left them tied. Over their backs we could make out Callanish I, a host of stones on the horizon.

  Callanish II and III were altogether wilder places. There was no mowed grass here and I felt at home with the mellow smell of cow dung. Even this late in the evening Skylarks were singing. Every once in a while, a vehicle would judder across the cattle grid on the main road. Snipe drummed against the last of the day. I sat down with my back against a sloping stone. Here most of the s
tones stood at rakish angles, the Cattle and Sheep had made hollows in the ground where they sheltered and rubbed against them. On some stones tufts of cattle hair clung to the Lichen, on others the marbled rock had been polished smooth. ‘The Cattle must love it here,’ I said. Later, over a cup of tea and a plate of delicious drop scones, Sheena, who was the Common Grazings Clerk, told us that Historic Scotland had sent her a letter inviting her to come and look at the damage the beasts were doing. ‘What did you say to them?’ I asked. ‘Ach, I let the letter lie,’ she answered, her eyes shining.

  ‘I think we deserve a toast,’ said Shuna, walking over from the stone she’d been leaning against and passing me the hip flask.

  ‘To these stones, to us, to Skylarks, to Chief and Ross,’ she said. I took a long sip of Oban 14 year old – light on the peat, notes of cut hay, tarry ropes and the sea.

  ‘Here’s to Mum, who loved the smell of hot tar. To Mum, who loved so much.’

  We walked the ponies slowly back towards Callanish I. We couldn’t resist a last daunder amongst the stones. I put my hand on rock that had been crushed and melted and folded for over 3,000 million years, rock that was embedded with crystals of feldspar, white quartz, hornblende, rock that had been shaped and raised by a people five thousand years ago. To the east of us a soft cottony moon, one day off full, was surfacing in the sky.

  ‘Why don’t we come back at sunrise?’ said Shuna. ‘Yes!’ I said. Perfect. I’d leave beads here for Mum as the sun rose, I’d leave the last of the beads. I tilted my face up, and in the sweep of sky overhead found two Swarovski-sharp stars. Even the way I saw the stars was informed by Mum, watching her working with all those crystals, seeing her thread them, turning them bead by bead into works of art. My appreciation of being here now, of this place, of this everything, was intensified because she’d embedded in me a love of antiquity, of discovery, of Scotland, of Horses.