Seasons on Harris Read online

  Looking at these black houses, which until recently formed the communal living space for families and their livestock, you feel pulled back in time to the prehistoric origins of island life, long before the invasions of the Norsemen from Scandinavia, long before the emergence of the Celtic clans of the MacAulays, MacRaes, and the ever-dominant MacLeods. All around the islands are remnants of ancient cultures in the form of brochs (lookout towers), Bronze Age burial mounds, stone circles and the famous standing stones of Callanish on Lewis, thought to have been a key ceremonial center for island tribes well before 2000 BC. The ponderous tigh dubh houses seem very much of this heritage and I experienced a strange sense of coming home again to something half remembered, deep deep down, far below the fripperies and facades of everyday “modern” life. Something that sent shivers to my toes.

  Lord Seaforth, one of the islands’ numerous wealthy “utopian benefactors” during the last couple of centuries, was anxious to improve “the miserable conditions under which these poor scraps of humanity live” and ordered that “at the very least a chimney should be present and a partition erected between man and beast in these dark hovels.” But apparently many of the crofters were quite content to share their living space with their own livestock. And they were also content to allow the smoke to find its own way through the thatch from the open hearthstone fire in the center of the earthen floor. Once every few years, when the thatch was replaced, they would use peat soot–encrusted stalks, along with seaweed gathered from the shores, as fertilizer for their tiny mounded strips of “lazybed” vegetable and grain plots (feannagan).

  But despite such conditions, the crofters were known for their longevity and prolific families. Dr. Samuel Johnson, accompanied on an island tour by the ever-faithful Boswell in 1773, put it down to island breakfasts. “If an epicure could remove himself by a wish,” Dr. Johnson remarked, “he would surely breakfast in Scotland.” I concur wholeheartedly. My first real Scottish breakfast came at the Scarista House Hotel overlooking the Sound of Taransay on Harris and included such traditional delights as fresh oatmeal porridge, smoked herring kippers, peat-smoked bacon, black pudding, white pudding, just-picked mushrooms and tomatoes, free-range eggs, oatcakes, bannock cakes, scones, honey, crowdie (a delicious rich cream cheese), cream, home-churned butter—everything, in fact, except the once-customary tumbler of island whisky, “to kindle the fire for the day.”

  “Oh, the breakfasts are still ver’ fine,” agreed Mary MacDonald, post-mistress of Scarista village, when I later sat by her blazing peat fire drinking tea and nibbling her homemade buttery shortbread. “The world’s getting smaller everywhere,” she told me, her eyes sparkly, dreamy. “Things are changin’ here too—we talk in Gaelic about ‘an saoghal a dh’fhalbh’—‘the world we have lost’—but y’can always find a good breakfast! I’m even partial to a wee bit of warmed-up haggis myself sometimes. Very spicy.”(I hadn’t yet sampled this famous Scottish delight, partially because the idea of eating anything cooked in a pig’s bladder seemed odd to the point of off-putting—and also because of an English comedian’s description of the thing as resembling “a little castrated bagpipe”!)

  I wondered about the changes she mentioned, hoping she might be a little more optimistic than Hector in Ullapool.

  “Well, we’re losing a lot of the young ones, that’s always a big problem. But those that stay still work at the crofting and keep up the Gaelic.” She paused. “I miss the old ceilidhs most, I think, when we used to gather at a neighbor’s house to talk about local things and listen to the old tales by the seannaicheadh—an elder village storyteller. Now they’re a bit more organized—more of a show at the pubs with poems and songs and such. Not quite the same.”

  I asked about the famous Harris Tweed makers of the islands. “Oh, you’ll find plenty of them—more than four hundred still, I think—making it the old way in their own homes on the Hattersley looms. You can usually hear the shuttles clacking way back up the road.”

  Mary was right. I went looking for Marion Campbell, one of Harris’s most renowned weavers, who lived in the tiny village of Plocrapool (not the easiest place to find, as all the signposts are in Gaelic!) on the wild eastern side of the island, where the moors end dramatically in torn cliffs and little ragged coves. And I heard the urgent clatter of her loom echoing against the bare rocks long before I found her house, nestled in a hollow overlooking an islet-dotted bay. Through a dusty window of the weaving shed I saw an elderly woman with white hair working at an enormous wooden contraption.

  “Aye, come in now and mind the bucket.”

  The bucket was on the earth floor crammed in between a full-size fishing dinghy, lobster pots, a black iron cauldron, cans of paint, and a pile of old clothes over the prow of the boat, just by a crackling peat fire that gave off a wonderful “peat-reek” aroma.

  “You can always tell a real Harris Tweed,” Marion told me. “There’s always a bit of the peat-reek about it.”

  She was a small woman, sinewy and intense, and she worked her loom at an alarming pace. The shed shook as she whipped the shuttle backward and forward between the warp yarns with bobbins of blue weft. I watched the blue-green tweed cloth, precisely thirty-one inches wide, with “good straight edges and a tight weave,” grow visibly in length as her feet danced across the pedals of the loom and her left hand “beat up” the weft yarns, compacting them with her thick wooden weaver’s beam. Then her sharp eyes, always watching, spotted a broken warp yarn. “Och! I’ve been doing this for fifty-nine years and I still get broken ones!” She laughed and bounced off her bench, which was nothing more than a plank of wood wrapped in a bit of tartan cloth, to fix the errant thread. “And mind that other bucket.”

  I looked down and saw it brimming with bits of vegetation, the color of dead skin and about as attractive. “That’s crotal. Lichen—scraped from the rocks. For my dyes.” In the days before chemical dyes most spinners and weavers made their own from moorland plants and flowers—heather, bracken, irises, ragwort, marigolds—whatever was available.

  “I’m one of the last ones doing it now,” Marion told me. “By law all Harris Tweed has to be handwoven in the weaver’s own home on the islands here from Scottish virgin wool, but I’m doing it the really old way—dyeing my own fleeces, carding, making my own yarn, spinning, weaving—I even do my own ‘waulking’ to clean the tweed and shrink it a bit. That takes a lot of stamping about in Wellington boots!”

  I pointed to a pile of tan-colored fleece and asked if it had been dyed with the lichen. Marion giggled. “Ooooh—no, no, that’s the peat—the peat soot. Makes a lovely shade.” I suppose I looked skeptical. “Wet your finger,” she told me, so I did and she plunged it into a pot of soot by the boat. “Now rub it off.” I obeyed again and—surprise—a yellow finger! Her laughing made the shed shake. “Aye, you’ll be stuck with that now for a while.” Eight days actually.

  Later I sat by her house overlooking the Sound of Shiant as Marion spun new yarn for her bobbins. On an average day she weaves a good twenty yards of tweed. “I do all the main patterns—herringbone, bird’s eye, houndstooth, two-by-two. I like the herringbone. It always looks very smart.”

  On the hillside above the house I could see a crofter walking among his new lambs in the heather: out in the sound another crofter was hauling his lobster pots, or creels, as they call them here.

  “You’re a bit of everything as a crofter,” Marion told me as her spinning wheel hummed. “You’re a shepherd, a fisherman, a gardener, you collect your seaweed for fertilizer on your ‘lazybed’ vegetable plot, you weave, build your walls, cut and dry your peats, shear your sheep at the fank-pens, cut hay, dig ditches—a bit of everything. In the past you’d leave the croft and go to your ‘shieling’ shack in the summer to graze the cows and each night or each week—depending on the distance—the girls would carry the milk back to make butter cheese, and crowdie. Och—I remember that so well. Lovely times they were…” Then Marion’s face changed and a flurry of
frowns chased across her forehead: “But of course, y’had the potato famines and the clearances—terrible times—and then the crofters started fightin’ back against the lairds in the late 1800s—och, well, then y’had the rebellions and the land raids especially at Pairc up in Lewis—not good times at all.”

  On Harris you use—and you often fight for—what’s at hand. In the last century there were well-intentioned but often eccentric schemes to “improve” this lonely island suffering from signs of terminal decline. One German inventor, Gerhard Zucher, failed gloriously with an epic explosion in July 1934, to promote “mail by rocket” as a way of speeding up the delivery of goods between the islands. The soap industry magnate, Lord Leverhulme, who purchased Lewis and Harris in the early 1900s, tried to establish a major port at Leverburgh (it flopped), to make sausages for African nations from surplus whale meat (ditto), and even built an elaborate mill to increase the efficiency of the tweed industry (likewise ditto). Lady Dunmore, whose family built the grandiose baronial Amhuinnsuidhe Castle here in 1868, was more successful in her efforts to enhance the tweed industry by organizing the cottage-based system.

  The main town of Tarbert (An Tairbeart in Gaelic) was founded as a small fishing village in 1779. With a population today of around five hundred, huddled mainly in cottages on the hillside above a small quay and ferry dock, it’s hardly anyone’s idea of a Hebridean hot spot, although its cluster of small stores (refreshingly free of homogenized English brand-name outlets), pubs, restaurants, and churches provide an evocative community spirit. At the southern tip of the island, Rodel (Roghadal) possesses a sturdy sixteenth-century church with ornately carved tombs of the MacLeod chieftains, and there are a couple of notable guesthouses on the island offering fine and authentic regional cuisine. You might also catch glimpses of red deer, otters, seals, golden eagles, and even the occasional dolphin off the Bays. But none of these are the true appeal of this place.

  So what is the lure?

  Try silence, wilderness, solitude, dramatic soul-nurturing scenery, and a sense of coming home to something bold, basic, and honest—things that endure warmly in your memory.

  And I remember so many moments on these islands—some sad, all revealing—seeing to the heart and core of things. I remember the shepherd, Alistair Gillies, recently returned after years of adventure in the merchant navy, only to lose a third of his ewes in this year’s long, cold winter and spring. “You can’t win in a place like this,” he told me with Gaelic melancholy. “All you can do is pass y’r time here. Just pass time as best you can.”

  And I remember young Andrew and Alison Johnson’s honest island cuisine at their Scarista House hotel, where you dine on Harris crayfish, lobster, venison, salmon, or grouse (whatever is fresh that day) as the sun goes down in a blaze of scarlet and gold over the white sands of Taransay Sound. And then the two brawny Johnnys—the brothers MacLeod—on “the first good day at the peats in nine months” slicing the soft chocolaty peat with their irons into even-sized squares for drying. I talked with them at dusk as they moved rhythmically together along their family peat bank (their piece of “skinned earth”). “Another eight days like this should see enough for the year,” the elder Johnny remarked, still slicing. The younger Johnny nodded, foxily eyed the whisky bottle half hidden in a nearby sack, and reached out surreptitiously with a thick-veined, peat-stained hand. “Not jus’ yet,” said the first Johnny. The second Johnny grunted and lifted his fifteen hundredth peat of the day.

  I remember the Sunday silences too when no buses ran and everyone was “at the stones” (at church); I remember Catherine MacDonald knitting her highly praised woolen cardigans and jumpers from hand-dyed island wool; the stooping winkle-pickers of Leverburgh whose sacks of tiny shellfish leave the island by ferry for the tables of famous Paris restaurants; the first taste of fresh-boiled island langoustines; ninety-three-year-old Donald MacLeod carving sheep horns into elegant handles for shepherd’s crooks; the sight of a single palm tree against the enormous lunar wilderness of Harris (the offshore Gulf Stream keeps the climate mild here). Then I remember Derick Murray at his tweed mill in Stornoway eyeing with pride the tweeds collected from the homes of his crofter-weavers; the strange conversations in “ganglish”—an odd mix of Gaelic and English; the lovely lilting names of tiny islets in the Sound of Harris—Sursay, Coppay, Tahay, Ensay, Pabbay; the huge Blackface rams with their triple-curl horns on the beautiful machair land of the Scarista golf course—an unexpected nine-hole gem of close-cropped grass and natural sand traps snuggled in the bosky dunes by the ocean and those pristine white beaches; the gritty and occasionally grim Calvinistic Protestantism of Lewis compared with the Catholic-Celtic levity of the Uist and Barra islanders in the southern part of the Hebridean chain.

  Most of all I remember the Hebridean light—sparkling off the roiling surf in the turquoise bays, crisping the edges of the ancient standing stones of Callanish on a lonely plateau overlooking Loch Roag, making all the colors vibrant with its intensity and luminosity—making the place just the way I knew it would be…

  Pure magic.

  NOW ALL THAT, ALL THOSE LONG-REMEMBERED experiences, speak of an era when crofting and fishing, while diminished, still provided a viable way of life here, and tweed weaving was a vital part of both the island economy and its proud heritage.

  Today, as Anne and I quickly learned, things are rather different. Harris hangs ever more precariously on the cusp of a dying culture. Despite the islanders’ determination to keep their Gaelic heritage and traditions, the strict Calvinistic underpinnings of their faith and their tiny shards of rock-rough land, their predicament is perilous. True crofting has virtually vanished now, the once teeming shoals of herring have long gone, and fishing is limited mainly to shellfish, occasional runs of cod and ling, and salmon farming. Added threats to the old ways encompass the increasingly rapid and usually lifelong out-migration of the younger generation to the job-rich mainland cities of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Inverness: the burgeoning arrival of “incomers” (also derisively labeled “white settlers”), particularly from the affluent fleshpots of London and England’s southern counties, which has driven up real estate prices here far beyond local affordability, and of course—most sadly of all—the slow, ongoing decline of that once great, handwoven tweed cottage industry.

  Despite a plethora of investments, some more insightful than others, by the Western Isles Council in a wide range of community and commercial projects, and recent initiatives for the creation of a huge rock quarry (defeated) and vast wind turbine “farms” on the Lewis moors (pending), the supportive pillars of the once-unique Harris lifeways are still being eaten away by the voracious termites of twenty-first-century realities.

  And yet…and yet…

  God is still definitely in the details here. Some say the Devil, but I’ll accept Mies van der Rohe’s interpretation relating to fine architecture. Because the architecture—the whole physical spirit of Harris—still manifests itself in its infinite microscopic details.

  The main inhabited part of the “island” (actually a southern “almost-island” appendage of the far larger island of Lewis, sixty miles long and up to twenty-eight miles wide) lies south of the mountainous wall of North Harris and is barely twelve miles long by six miles wide. Even as islands go in Scotland, that’s small. Very small—with fewer than two thousand inhabitants (Lewis is far larger, with around 17,500, and the Outer Hebridean chain as a whole claims a total of around 25,000 islanders). But when I try to define the fascination—the seduction—of this island, it is in its multitude of “places” and experiences, each one unique and entire in itself. From the tiny black lochans in the high moors, the vast creamy swathes of the west coast beaches, the chiseled intricacy of The Bays, and the wind-racked summits of Clisham and Bleaval, to the secret fishing lochs of Amhuinnsuidhe, the tight intimacy of Tarbert town, the proud isolation of Rodel and the southern islets, and the wild glens and corries of the North Harris hills—each place re
sounds with its own distinct individuality and presence. Each one says to me: I am unique, intact, and proudly distinct from all other places on the island. Even each hidden, peat-bound lochan—and there are hundreds of these tiny freshwater lochs—possesses its own special aura; some are high and broad on the cusp of the watershed between The Bays and the west coast beaches; others are so hidden by crags and shadows that you barely see them at all until you reach their boggy blackwater edges.

  Harris is an island that never bores. And how can it? It would take half a lifetime to truly explore the wealth and variety of sensory and aesthetic experiences here. Whatever you discover on a long, hard hike is merely prelude to the next day’s discoveries and the next and the next. Deeper and deeper. Mood upon mood. Detail upon detail.

  If the creator does indeed express itself in such details, here it has done so with encyclopedic subtlety and scope. There is no end to Harris. Only new beginnings. Every single day you are here.

  And despite all the charges since our first visit here, all is not quite lost, as will be revealed in these tales of “an island on the cusp” of major choices and changes. Out here, on “the edge of the world,” not everyone, despite the gloom-and-doom-sayers and local media, has given up on an authentic and optimistic future for Harris. Recent events, miraculous to some—particularly with regard to the great Clo Mor tweed industry here—suggest that new possibilities, new initiatives and synchronicities, may still revitalize the looms and lives of the weavers and restore balance and harmony to the future of this “little island that could.”