Seasons on Harris Read online

  “It’s almost like he lived in those times—going back five thousand years!” I heard one of the group whisper to a friend as Bill pointed out the remains of clustered dwellings, shell middens, cooking hearth pits, part of a burial ground, and a heap of round “boiling stones.” These, he explained, were necessary because the primitive clay cooking pots of the early inhabitants could not withstand direct heat, so stones had to be roasted in the fire and then added to the water in the pots to prepare food.

  After another mile or so of slow uphill walking on the machair, we reached the most dramatic ancient remnant of all—the thick broken walls of Teampall na h-Uidhe. Located on a high point with broad vistas in all directions across this lonely, wind-smoothed landscape, and immediately adjoining the circular foundations of an Iron Age dun (fort), the teampall, Bill suggested, was founded in the days of the earliest Christian missionaries. “It’s possible that St. Columba himself was here, but more than likely it was first built by followers of St. Maelrubha of Applecross.”

  Doubtless, with a more learned crowd, there would have been murmurs of recognition at this point. We, however, remained mute in mutual blissful ignorance.

  “Y’mean these stones date from the second or third century AD?!” asked one of the group finally.

  “Well—certainly the stones might, but these walls are what remain of a fortified chapel built by Alasdair Crotach around 1528. He was the clan chief of the MacLeods of Harris who also rebuilt St. Clement’s Church at Rodel—our ‘Cathedral of the Isles’—which I’m sure you’ve all visited…”(Some vague but unconvincing murmurs here from our group.)

  Anne and I were moved by the power and presence of this bold ruin built upon the two-thousand-year-old foundations of one of many hermitage chapels and monasteries scattered along the ragged island coastlines of Scotland and Ireland.

  Teampall na h-Uidhe

  “What a faith they must have had…,” murmured Anne as she stroked the smooth, ancient corbel stones. Bill overheard the comment and smiled in agreement. “Oh, yes,” he said, “makes us all look a little religiously…wimpy today, wouldn’t you say?”

  There was a hearty roar of laughter from behind us. We all turned to face the beaming bearded face of a thin, elderly man dressed entirely in black. He had lagged behind for much of the walk, seemingly lost in his musings and constantly stopping to stare at the vista over Northton, Rodel, and the wild lochan-laced spine of the island.

  “Sorry—sorry,” he said, still chuckling. “Couldn’t help but hear your last remark there, Mr. Lawson.”

  Bill wasn’t sure whether to smile or apologize. Religious sensitivities are thin-skinned here, although, even from his brief remark, the man’s accent seemed very nonlocal.

  “Charles Campbell…er…Reverend Charles Campbell.”

  Bill looked even more uncomfortable but gave a noncommittal “Aha…”

  “From Melbourne, Australia. Or close by, anyway. But I suppose y’recognize an Aussie accent, Mr. Lawson. Y’must have many of us comin’ to you for our family charts.”

  Bill’s face brightened with relief, obviously pleased he hadn’t offended a potential customer. “Oh yes, indeed,” he smiled. “A lot. Canada was the most popular place with the lairds here to send their clansmen in the clearances…but Australia was not uncommon at all.”

  “Yes, I know. We’ve got a bunch of Campbells around where I have my church. And my great-grandfather left here in the late 1800s. And quite a few MacLeods too—their ancestors were pretty disgruntled about being cleared, particularly as this was once all MacLeod territory!”

  “I imagine they were,” said Bill. “Do you have family here now?”

  “I’m not too sure…yet. That’s where I might need your help, Mr. Lawson…”

  “Bill,” said Bill, sensing a promising “roots seeker.”

  “All right then—Bill. All I know of so far is that my third cousin, Hamish Taylor, lives in the Bays and has a boat there for island trips.”

  “Oh, yes—indeed he does,” said Bill with genuine enthusiasm. “He’s quite popular with visitors in the season.”

  “Well—I’ll be meeting him. Tomorrow, I think. And then we’ll see where it all goes from there.”

  “And are you looking to reclaim your family croft too?!” I said lightly, and then realized that I might be in danger of loosing a “legalistic foray for lost lands”—an occasional island predicament here on Harris.

  The minister laughed and his weather-lined face, bronzed to a leathery hide by torrid Australian summers, seemed suddenly younger and animated—“Oh, no, no—that’s all past now…I just decided it was time I visited the home of my ancestors while I’ve still got…well, y’know…oh and, and also…this…”

  He opened his anorak pocket and pulled out a very creased photocopy of something printed in an uneven and old-fashioned typeface. “You may be interested in this, Bill.”

  He handed the sheet to Bill, who studied it carefully, nodding with professional appreciation, and then passed it to Anne and me. “So typical of the time,” Bill said, with a sad smile and a wispy sigh.

  It turned out to be a clipping about a ship that had left Skye for Harris on the sixteenth of December, 1852, to pick up one of many cargoes of emigrants. Parts of the photocopy were blurred, but from what we could tell, it must have originally been written in log form by the captain or one of his literate officers. It read:

  Fine vistas of Harris from a distance. Background of hills of most rugged character. Soil of massive peat and compost. Upon landing we saw their black houses…pervaded with filth to an extent we feel reluctant to describe…What a coarse and rugged place with the inhabitants in a most wretched state. Getting the poor creatures on board was really very affecting and the parting scenes were most distressing…

  The next paragraph describing the voyage was difficult to decipher except for one touching sentence:

  Few of these wretches were not sick and many died on the voyage, but their habitual reverence was not diminished and evening services were observed daily throughout the many weeks of our hard crossing…

  We all stood quietly for a while imagining the plight of these crofter and cottar (squatter) families abruptly uprooted from their homes and cast into the unknown of the “new world.”

  The minister finally broke the silence. “Well—that was more than a hundred and fifty years ago and, terrible as it must have been for them, many went on to help build fine communities in Canada—and certainly in Australia.”

  “Yes,” agreed Bill. “Chris and I often go to visit these places—mainly in Canada and the USA.”

  “Well,” said the minister, with a broad grin, “we’ll have to see if we can’t get you an invitation to come and visit our little town near Melbourne.”

  “That would be very nice.” Bill smiled. “Whereabouts are you exactly?”

  “Smallish place called Hamilton, just over a hundred miles from the city.”

  “Ah,” said Bill.

  “What?!” was my amazed response. “Hamilton. I don’t believe it. I’ve been there. Ten years ago…I have an aunt there. She’s living in a nursing home on the edge of town. Near that wool museum of yours—that place with ‘the world’s largest ball of yarn.’”

  “Too much!” laughed Bill. “This is becoming like one of my genealogical reunions!”

  IT WAS TIME FOR A SHIFT of focus. Anne felt the same but was content to catch up with “domestics” and e-mails in our cottage. I needed the open road, huge vistas, and spontaneous serendipities—and the best place I could go to find such diversions was Lewis, Harris’s “big sister” isle, land-linked over the North Harris hills. And Stornoway. Focal point of the two islands and a place I’d not seen in over twenty years.

  I think Anne was delighted by the idea of having the cottage all to herself for a day and even promised to “make a surprise” for my return. Of course, like the fine wife she is, she had to remind me how much she’d miss me, et cetera, et cetera,
but I could tell by her smile that she was not altogether sorry to wave me off on my mini-odyssey.

  THE FIRST PART OF THE THIRTY-MILE or so drive north from Ardhasaig to Stornoway is by far the most dramatic on the conjoined islands. One moment you’re skimming the flanks of West Loch Tarbert and then you’re suddenly up and off and climbing the narrow, twisting road high up into the North Harris mountains. Even on a sunny day Clisham and its coterie of great monoliths seem to crowd in with their shadowy heathered slopes and black broken summits. They’re ominous but also gloriously distracting in their brooding power and their multibillion-year-old permanence. The key here, however—a very critical key if you wish for a healthy longevity—is not to be distracted. The road is little more than a paved cart track at first and barely wide enough for one vehicle, so drivers must constantly be looking out for the irregularly spaced “passing places” designed to permit a semblance of two-way traffic. Most drivers are generally generous and polite, and a combination of accurate distance gauging to determine who will pull over for whom, and lots of we’re-all-in-this-together hand waving, will generally suffice to ensure safe and uneventful passage over the high watersheds. (Apparently, since our departure, this notorious road has been widened a little—but caution is still advised!)

  And then, of course, there are the sheep. Thousands of them—who know nothing of civilized highway codes and gentle manners. Their greatest delights seem to include sprawling themselves leisurely on the road if the pavement is warm, making sudden suicidal chicken-run leaps from one side of the road to the other immediately in front of your car, or, in the case of overprotective ewes, standing in aggressive don’t-you-dare postures in the middle of the road while their young spring lambs amble and frolic to the other side. Even woolly skeletons in the roadside ditches (watch out for these—some are deep to the point of being vertical drop-offs)—gory evidence of unfortunate confrontations between vehicles and sheep—seem not to have registered in their minds. To them, these high moors are their territory and we are the barely tolerated intruders. And in most instances they get their way as drivers shrug and meander around sunbathing flocks, barely bothering to honk their horns. Most have learned from long-past experiences that the creatures are not only dumb, arrogant, and self-destructively defensive—but also apparently rather deaf too.

  As the road widens (a little) and swoops down the long slopes of Tomnaval and Liuthaid, the vista expands to include the sinuous mountain-bound expanse of Loch Seaforth. A small, elegant “castle” appears—Ardvourlie—built as a hunting lodge in 1863 by the Earl of Dunmore, owner of much of this region at the time, in traditional Scottish style. Recently this was for a while an elegant hotel but now apparently has “gone private” again.

  And then, abruptly, the high moors and glens fade and a vast glowering expanse of peat bogs and blackwater lochans stretches out ahead for mile after mile to misty horizons. There are brief interludes of straggly crofter communities at the side of the road, but these are merely human-scaled frills on the fringe of this dark, threatening infinitude of…nothingness.

  Even on warm, sunny days, this is an eerie emptiness, pockmarked here and there with remnants of ancient peat-cutting beds and collapsed frames of summer “shieling” shacks suggestive of traditional lifeways long abandoned to the silence and slow imploding suction of the bogs.

  I’m heading for Stornoway, but a sign appears at the roadside pointing westward across the bogs to the remnants of settlements and forts and standing stones, many of which are thought to predate the great Egyptian pyramids—most notably the 4,500-year-old stone circle of Callanish.

  I’d intended to revisit these places with Anne to see if they’d impress us the same as they had more than twenty years ago. But the hell with it, I thought, this day is all mine and I can go wherever I want—so why don’t I just nip over and take a peep, then return some other time with Anne to investigate their mysteries more fully.

  Great idea, responded my little serendipitous self. Go! So I went, easing my car off the main road and heading due west across the wild fringe of Barvas moor.

  Bleak barely describes the next twelve miles. I was now alone on one of the loneliest roads in Britain. Naturalists and ornithologists of course love this place for its untrammeled wealth of flora and fauna—harder to spot here than in verdantly lush machair locations, but that’s what makes the moor so captivating to the knowledgeable viewer able to identify all the sproutings of ling and bell heather, bog asphodel, sundew, cotton grass, bog myrtle, blue moor grass, deer’s hair grass, and those spongy green masses of sphagnum moss.

  I obviously respect their enthusiasm and certainly empathize with their virulent opposition to one of the most ambitious mega project concepts to ever hit the Hebrides—that proposed creation of one of Europe’s largest wind farms across these moors. The actual scale of the concept varies depending on the perspective and political savvy of the presenters, but according to the latest headlines in the Stornoway Gazette, there’s talk of as many as six hundred four-hundred-foot-high turbines that could generate “enough sustainable energy for half the Highlands of Scotland” and ensure “considerable economic benefits” for the rather sparse coffers of Lewis.

  The objectors of course decry the destruction of “a unique and beautiful wilderness,” the decimation of “countless thousands of birds every year” in the huge whirling blades of the turbines, and a wide array of other traumatic factors, including “the pathetically meager royalties that the private investors proposing the scheme would donate to the island as token compensation for their capitalistic greed and topographical and aesthetic ruination.”

  This, I thought, as I scurried across the dark moors and bogs, is yet one more of those dramatic confrontations between traditionalists, environmentalists, and futurists. It’s early days yet but already, in the strident pro and con letters to the Gazette and furious village meetings, I could sense the battle lines forming and the fear of yet one more unwanted invasion—invasions that for thousands of years engendered so many of the ancient remains of forts and huddled settlements in defensive locations scattered up and down the west coast of Lewis.

  These remnants of threats and bombastic responses were all still intact as I meandered my way along the coastal road—the modest stone circle and standing stones of Garynahine, the Breaseclete burial chamber, the restored Norse mill at Shawbost, the enormous towering bulk of the Iron Age Carloway broch or dun (much archaeological argument here about whether brochs are fortified homesteads and duns are actual forts or…), and the excellent renovation and museum at the Old Blackhouse Village at Gearrannan—a flourishing community in the 1950s of over twenty tweed weavers that traces its origins back more than two thousand years. And these are merely a handful of the outstanding sites here.

  Callanish Standing Stones

  All these I left for later explorations with Anne and ended up, as intended, walking up the long rise from the recently opened visitor center at Callanish to stand—alone and whipped by a vigorous Atlantic wind—at the base of the great standing stones themselves.

  Nothing seemed to have changed since our last visit two decades ago. Which I suppose is what one hopes to find when faced with such splendid white stone monoliths more than four millennia old. Furious debates continue as to their origin and purpose: Were the stones actually “erratics” pushed south by glaciers or were they hauled across country by mysterious means like the huge components of Stonehenge? Was it a Druidic ceremonial center, astronomical observatory, Christian sanctuary, Neolithic trading post, “ancient saints turned to stone,” focal point of invisible energy “ley lines,” or a flying saucer landing site for extraterrestrial tourists? Many accept the simpler description I found in one of the Hebridean guidebooks:

  The stones at Callanish are older than those of Stonehenge and were erected sometime around 2900 BC. A worthy rival of Stonehenge, Callanish is outstanding especially in the context of the many other smaller stone circles within the area. It cons
ists of a stone circle, a central monolith almost twenty feet high, and five radial “avenues” of standing stones.

  Another commentator was fascinated by the comparative age of this remarkable creation:

  Built two centuries before the Egyptians constructed the Tomb of Tutankhaman, 600 years before Solomon began his temple in Jerusalem, 8000 years before Nebuchadnezzar’s Hanging Gardens of Babylon, 1200 years before the Greek’s Temple of Zeus at Olympia. And when the Chinese started to build The Great Wall these stones had been in position for fourteen centuries.

  Numerous learned tomes (and many far more erratic monographs and lunatic fringe diatribes) have been written on Callanish and the archaeological wonderworld of Lewis’s west coast. I will therefore leave any further academic descriptions and speculations to the “experts” (despite their remarkable ability to disagree on just about every detail and nuance of this amazing place), and merely suggest that Callanish seems to speak to everyone who comes here in a unique and very personal way.

  It helps of course to have the place to yourself, as I did on that first exploratory day, when I sat quietly sheltered from the wind by the central stone and let the magic creep in slowly. And what I sensed was not so much the ghosts of ancient generations (or any “beam me up, Scotty” sci-fi hallucinations) but rather an overpowering sense of the bold certitude—and fortitude—of the builders of these places. On subsequent visits I was equally beguiled by the certitude of some interesting (and occasionally rather odd) characters I found here, lured to the stones by their metaphysical presence and power. Neo-Druids, crystal planters, Travelers (sort of New Age gypsies), worshippers of solstices and the ancient earth goddess Brighde, practitioners of Wicca (white magic), and admirers of the winter northern lights (aurora borealis), which are particularly mystical here—all are lured to this remote and lonely place, seeking spiritual revelations and confirmations.