Seasons on Harris Read online

  Seasons on Harris

  A Year in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides

  Written and Illustrated

  by David Yeadon

  Foreword by Adam Nicolson

  Afterword by Bill Lawson

  For

  Sydney Coultish

  “Our Dad” of ninety-three years, whose Yorkshire humor and daily delight in life and living have long been both celebration and inspiration to us both.

  In Memoriam

  We remember five precious people who passed away this year.

  We especially think of Anne’s mother, Vera, with great love and tender memories. Her pride and delight—and quiet smiles—will remain with us forever…

  Also Cynthia, David’s gloriously outspoken yet very private aunt, whose views on life always enriched journeys back to our Yorkshire homeland…

  We celebrate too the vibrancy of two longtime American friends: Jo Blaine, with her constant passion for her life in Manhattan; and Herb Miller, dear friend and professional colleague, a man of extraordinary vision, focus, and humor, whose partnership in the field of special education for children with visual and other disabilities we shall always remember and treasure.

  Finally, we remember the sudden and very recent passing of David Hackley, one of the most cheerful and creative friends we have known.

  —Anne and David Yeadon

  Contents

  Epigraph

  List of Illustrations

  Foreword by Adam Nicolson

  Prologue: Dreaming of Tweed

  The First Spring

  1. Learning the Land

  2. People of the Tweed

  3. Clisham Keel Gleanings

  4. A Day with the Lobstermen

  5. Cooking with Katie

  Summer

  6. Scenes of Summer

  7. Man Sitting…

  8. Sunday Silences

  9. Barra and Back

  10. The Funeral

  11. The New Crofters

  Autumn

  12. Time for a Change: Life on the Sands

  13. Dawdle Days in the Dunes

  14. The Sheep Farmer, The Fank—and The Finnock

  15. Sammy and the Salmon

  16. The Lure of St. Kilda

  17. A Journey to St. Kilda

  18. Artists and Creators

  19. Visiting the Bard

  Winter

  20. Hogmanay Interludes

  21. The Arts Meeting

  22. Seals, Silkies, Shape-Shifters, and Other Mysteries

  23. A Journey to the Shiants

  24. Leaving the Island: A Tweed Revival?

  Postscript: Toward a New Abundance?

  Afterword by Bill Lawson

  About the Author

  Other Books by David Yeadon

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Map of Hebrides

  North Harris Vista—Restored Black House with “Lazybed” Plots and Peat “Cruach”

  Cottage Weaver at a Hattersley Loom

  THE FIRST SPRING

  Gearrannan Blackhouse Village

  Roddy MacAskill

  Teampall na h-Uidhe

  Callanish Standing Stones

  Lews Castle, Stornoway

  Donald and Margaret MacKay—“At the Peats”

  Donald John MacKay—At the Loom

  Angus Campbell’s Harmony

  Amhuinnsuidhe Castle

  Katie MacAskill at the Stove

  SUMMER

  MacLeod Stone, Scarista

  Tarbert Stores, Tarbert

  Black House Interior

  Kisimul Castle—Castlebay, Barra

  St. Clement’s Church, Rodel

  Highland Cow 202

  AUTUMN

  Luskentyre and Seilibost

  West Coast “Pancake” Machair

  Gray Seal

  The Pernicious Midge

  Ian MacSween—Sheep Farmer

  David Brown, Ghillie Supreme

  Red Stag

  St. Kilda—Village Bay

  St. Kilda

  Boreray and The Stacs

  Steve Dilworth—Sculptor

  Alasdair Campbell—Writer

  Iron Age Carloway Dun

  WINTER

  Bays Scene

  Willie Fulton—Artist

  John MacAulay—Boat Builder

  Shiantscape

  Puffin

  Gannet

  The Pride of the Tweed

  Black House on The Bays

  WORDS OF APPRECIATION

  Our deepest gratitude goes to all those individuals mentioned in this book. Without exception, each one of you added immensely to our understanding—and our love—of Harris, its long, rich, and often sad history, its many challenges today, and its hopes and dreams for the future. And in addition to these newfound friends, we also thank the scores of others on the islands who took the time to talk with us, advise and guide us, offer hospitality and wise insights. Without you this book would still be a dream. With you, it has become a reality—and something Anne and I hope may help further perpetuate the compelling and unique spirit of Harris.

  Our sincere thanks also go to Hugh Van Dusen, longtime friend, editor, and (when our ears are open) mentor, with deep appreciation for years of patience, advice, encouragement, and mutual enjoyment of life’s bounties.

  We also thank our friends who took time to visit us on Harris and let us experience the island through their sensitive eyes and minds: Robby and Celia Teichman, for their interest in and warm affection for the islands and our island friends; Michael Storey, entrepreneur-extraordinaire, who is still formulating novel ideas for encouraging the expansion of the “cottage” Harris Tweed industry; Christopher Little, literary agent supreme, who would have made it to Harris had it not been for the incessant demands of a wee gentleman known to the whole world as Harry Potter…And of course, Adam Nicolson, for generously giving his time and energy to share the magic of his Shiant islands and remind us, once again, of the power and magic of these remote places—the very qualities that lured us to the Outer Hebrides in the first place.

  We are also indebted to the ever-cheerful, ever-meticulous Bridget Allen, whose word processing skills transformed rough drafts into neat, crisp, and rigorously spell-checked pages.

  FOREWORD

  by Adam Nicolson,

  author of Seize the Fire and Sea Room

  One of the greatest landscape moments in the British Isles comes when you are driving from east to west over the hills of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. It is a tortuous journey, making your way between old and twisted rocks that have been filed and sanded by the glaciers into half-shaped lumps and half-gouged hollows. The hard-boiled gneiss of the land around you is about 3 billion years old, the oldest rocks in Europe. Look at any one of the pebbles that lie along the roadside and you see in its warped and creased layers, doubled over, with the folds doubled over again, a vast geological history. These are the roots of mountains that disappeared long, long before life emerged from the ocean. They have lasted so long only because they are so hard. They are the basement of life on this rough and rugged northern island.

  Perhaps because of all that ancientness, it feels, particularly on the kind of bleak rainy day in which Harris specializes, as if the Ice Age ended here about a week ago. The glaciers have just retreated and the surface of the earth has been left, as W. H. Auden described his beloved, lump-strewn Icelandic tundra, “like the remains of a party no one has bothered to tidy up.” Gray-faced sheep stare at you from next to black-watered pools. Peat cuttings leer around corners like soft, collapsing quarries. The sky looms as if it is an extension of the rock itself. Harris up here looks like the world before God gave any atte
ntion to it: formless and void, the meanest of landscapes, giving nothing, bitter, recalcitrant, a place that seems as if it has been ground between the twin millstones of the sky above and the land beneath. How, you think, as the windshield wipers beat their endless rhythm across the glass in front of you, can people have ever lived here, have ever loved it, or have ever called it home?

  But then, in this symbolic ten-mile journey from the east side of the island over to the west, you top the final rise and, as if by a miracle, the world changes. There, laid out far below you, still miles away but radiating its life and beauty across the intervening air, is something else. Suddenly, there is form: the huge extent of the Atlantic stretches to the horizon. The road winds its way down a valley toward it. There is an island offshore. Up to the right are the shoulders of the Harris hills. But in a sense none of that matters because what has changed, above all, is color. No longer the sour, tweedy dun of the acid moorland and its ribs of gneiss, but an unmatched set of the most beautiful colors in the world: the iron gray of the Atlantic transmuting into dark blue, then paler blue, then a dazzling, flickering, Bahamian turquoise which from time to time flashes pure white as a breaking wave slowly unfolds onto the white sands of the most perfect beaches in Europe. It is a vision of paradise seen from hell. There are tall dunes, scattered with marram grass, and inland of them, the sheep-nibbled lawns that, as you come closer, park the car, and walk out onto them, you find dotted with the spangle of buttercups and heartsease, milkwort and orchids, the sort of carpet that until then you might have thought existed only in the imagination of a Botticelli. It is the sort of place, as you walk these miles of empty beach, as the wind blows in off the Atlantic, where you remember again what the point is of being alive.

  When you first see this transformation—and you should save and savor it like your first visit to St. Mark’s in Venice or the Acropolis—it is unbelievable. In a matter of moments, you have flicked from the world of the fjords, the punishing north, to a kind of tropical heaven. It is a spectacle worth traveling halfway around the world to see, but unlike most spectacles, this one has a deep and shaping reality behind it. That polarized difference between the rocky, acid east of Harris and the sandy, limy west is a diagram of what the island itself has always been. Ever since people came here in the Stone Age, the sandy fields on the edges of the Atlantic have been the good side. It is where most of the ancient monuments are. It is where archaeologists have found the fragile remains of the first Neolithic farms and the more substantial ruins, buried in the sand, of the Viking settlements. Over on that Atlantic side, the winter storms blow the sand up onto the peat—that mixture created a light, friable loam in which the early farmers could plant their crops. It is where the beautiful stands of barley and oats, filled with marigolds, corn cockle, and cornflowers can still be seen. It is a place of well-being and settlement.

  Needless to say, it was over on that Atlantic side where, historically, most of the islanders chose to live. But now those wonderful fertile lands are virtually empty. In the great clearances of the nineteenth century, when the landlords wanted to make more money out of the good land than the people’s rents could give them, the people were driven away from the shore, and from the sandy islands that lie off it, and forced onto the acid east side. Their fields and farms were replaced by sheep walks. Historically, the movement has been in precisely the opposite direction to your marvelous, revelatory morning’s drive over the top of the island. Not from acid to sand, but from sand to acid, from heaven to hell.

  When the people of the nineteenth century were driven to the poverty and difficulty of the east side, many went farther, on to the industrializing cities of the Scottish mainland, to Canada and New Zealand. Many of those who stayed lived a life close to starvation. You can still see the tiny, garden-scale plots of cultivated ground they somehow scraped from the rocks and peat they found there. Some of these cultivated plots are, quite literally, no bigger than the top of a kitchen table. They are life squeezed from bone. Removed from the fertile soils that had always sustained their ancestors, the men were driven to sea, to the fishing, which before the nineteenth century few of them had practiced. And there, in one sad story after another, many of the young men drowned. Sit down for a cup of tea in any one of the houses, and it isn’t long before you begin to hear what that life was like, a memory still potent in the Harris islanders of today.

  For this reason, Harris remains the most poignant of landscapes, a landscape at heart of cruelty and deprivation. Over on the sandy side, there is one place in particular that embodies the sense of loss and outrage: the graveyard at Luskentyre on the Atlantic shore. It would be difficult to think of a more beautiful place to be buried. It is raised just above the huge, pale expanse of a beach that fills the hollow between hills on either side, as calmly full as if cream had been poured into a bowl and settled there. Here the Atlantic rolls in week after week, month after month, in vast, American-scale combers. The wind blows the sand from the beach over the graveyard so that even in midsummer it seems to have a light dusting of snow. This is the old burying ground and here, even after the people were cleared across to the east side, they continued to bring the bodies of their relations to reclaim some of the good land in death. Long slow processions still follow the moorland road, across the acid peatlands, down to Luskentyre’s oceanside beauty. The rollers curl in off the Atlantic. The fine machair grasses poke their tips above the blown sand. The stones of the most recent graves are big, black slabs, with the names of people from the villages and islands of the east side, Rhenigadale, Scalpay, Urgha, Tarbert, Geocrab, Flodabay, carved on them, but the most touching of all these memorials are the earliest, scattered around a low hummock to one side of the cemetery. They are poverty itself, a flake or two of pink-veined gneiss, picked from the surrounding moor, neither polished nor engraved, but markers of a kind, scarcely articulate but articulate for their inarticulateness. Nowadays a thicket of roses is encroaching on this oldest part of the Luskentyre burying ground and inside that thicket the wrens jump from one thorny stem to another, landing from time to time on the little stones that record the burying places of the forgotten dead.

  Who could remain unmoved by these last journeys back to goodness? It is a testament to belonging, to a remembered past, to a living grievance at the cruelties done to the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of people alive today. But it is also a mark of continuity and a persistence, a communal decision to do things in the way they have been done and perhaps should be done, whatever life or history or the demands of the rich might throw at them. Each stone is a statement of courage.

  One of the most remarkable qualities of David Yeadon’s book is that he has discovered this other Harris that lies beyond and within the place usually visited by tourists. He comes, quite explicitly, as an outsider, a Yorkshireman who is also an American, who has wandered far and wide in his life, and led many lives within it. And as he says, he is far from being the first outsider to have come to Harris and to have written about it. The stream of those author-travelers has been pretty well unbroken since Dr. Johnson decided to make his journey to the islands and mountains of Scotland, a part of the world he explicitly compared to “Sumatra or Borneo.” Even in the twenty-first century, a Scottish judge decided that to exile a repeat-offending criminal to Leverburgh on Harris would probably be a “more effective punishment” than sending him to jail on the mainland.

  In outsiders’ minds, in other words, Harris has always been and remains a foreign world. And that foreignness has usually induced in those traveler-authors a reaction of patronizing superiority. Harris has been seen, first, as a natural paradise in which other human beings are a slightly unwelcome excrescence, an interference to the traveler’s undiluted commune with the wild. There is of course a deep irony here: much of the emptiness in Harris and its twin island of Lewis, which the nature traveler sees as the unadorned work of the Almighty, is in fact the product of nineteenth-century landowners who didn’t like the idea
of other human beings interfering with the view.

  That first reaction slides over into the second: the men and women of the Outer Hebrides have often been regarded as if they were wild animals themselves, with their charming, simple ways, their closeness to the soil, their dreamy visions of Celtic twilight and Celtic “otherness,” all buried under an assumption that somehow they spend their lives with the fairies. And then there is the guilty and suddenly ferocious reaction to that: the Hebrides are too good for the people who live there. Compared with the perfections of nature, what are they but degenerate man?

  This muddled mixture of admiration and contempt has been the tone of writing about the Hebrides since visitors first started to come there in the eighteenth century. Of course, this set of reactions and interpretations have usually been more to do with the author-travelers themselves than with anything they actually encounter. David Yeadon’s careful attention to the details of people’s lives, his natural warmth, his ability to combine a sharply tuned eye with a tolerant and sympathetic heart, has allowed his book to stand well outside this often-repeated pattern. The flickering wit of the Hebridean frame of mind; the customary fluency and expertise in the English language that are the natural products of highly literate culture, and one whose religious practices are based firmly on the word; the deep attachment to the place itself, combined with a withering realism about its opportunities and drawbacks; a distrust of the inflated, combined with a willingness to drift off on the most romantically inflated of ideas; a warmth of welcome, which is both courteous and well-honed from being in constant use; a rage against the sort of landowners and incomers who do not bother to understand the workings of the community; combined with a readiness to go the extra mile, or five, for anyone in trouble or need: these are real human qualities in Harris, and all of them are displayed and celebrated in this book.