A Croft in the Hills (24 page)

Friends of ours, who know something of the practical difficulties we have had to overcome in the years we have spent in the hills, sometimes wonder how it is that we look so fit and are
obviously so happy in what must seem to them extremely precarious circumstances. I think it is because we’ve learnt to set our lives to the old rhythm, we’ve learnt a little of the old
wisdom. Men and women everywhere are burning their brains out in the gigantic effort to change the face of things, but there is, in fact, a point of submission. The small man, whose work is
governed by the movement of sun and wind, of star and cloud, knows this, and so is set free. It is the marvelling eye which sees the flower pushing through the sod, beside the food-crop, and the
roughened hand reaches down to gather it. Grace before meat has a meaning to folk who have nursed their potato plants to fruition and tended the cow till she yields milk abundantly. The songs that
are still sung in the west all celebrate some human fundamental—birth, love, marriage, death, harvest, home-coming. Where there is no superfluity of trappings, people get the whole savour of
living, and the savour so delights them that they must make a song on it.

In these hills we are still too near to ‘civilising’ influences. The town is only twelve miles off and we can go there every week if we will on a bus which now passes our gate. The
younger people are gradually adopting contemporary habits of speech and dress. They no longer think long thoughts, or assess things in terms of human values. The members of the older generation,
who were as individual as the numbered pines on the hillside, are dying out. Already some we knew in our first years here are becoming a legend. Willie Maclean has gone, and Johnny F., and now
Willie Fraser and Neil, the retired schoolmaster, and John Maclean, who wintered sheep with us. Men such as these were shrewd, and could be tough and obstinate when circumstances pressed hard on
them. But they held their heads high, as members of an old race do, and their everyday speech had the far-sounding echo of poetry. Why was this? It was because they were conscious of playing a real
part in the fostering of life, and the things they spoke of were real things, closely observed, as the poet, the ‘seer’, observes them. These people had the manners and breeding of
natural aristocrats. To boast, to show curiosity or surprise, to admit to poverty, was a thing they abhorred. You could be sure of a welcome in their house at any hour of the day, however busy, and
you were never allowed to go without your taste of whatever their cupboard held.

Why is it that we go so gladly to visit an old lady who has lived all her life across the burn from us? It’s because we know that she’ll draw us in by the hand to a seat at her fire,
her eyes alight with welcome: that we shall talk of the way the larks are singing, or the corn yellowing, or of the good thing it is that the hens are back on the lay. When we talk of the weather,
we shall not dismiss it as some vague nuisance in the background of our lives. We shall speak feelingly of the May frost, for it blighted the young potato crop, on which we depend so utterly. We
shall congratulate ourselves on the heat in the autumn sun, which encouraged a late green bite for the cow. We know that our old lady will chuckle, as she sets the kettle simmering and patiently
teaches us a Gaelic phrase (‘There are some things you can’t get
the feel
of, in the English!’). We know that we can sun ourselves in her warm, well-mannered geniality,
that when she says ‘Haste ye back!’ she will mean it from the heart. She is genuinely, closely, in touch with life.

We are glad that Helen is spending her formative years under a wide sky, near to the roots and bones of things. I think, wherever she may go in later life, her yardstick will remain here.
Whatever doesn’t measure up to the standard of the hills she will instinctively reject. She’ll need the sky’s space, the cleanness of snow, the invigoration of winds blowing off
the moor, the coolness of loch water and the warmth of a high-riding sun to keep her world in perspective. Already she can look and listen, and that is more than halfway to understanding. Touching
will come later and then, perhaps, she will be ready to make her own contribution to things.

A child engaged in watching a chicken emerge from an egg will not bother to raise her head to watch the antics of the latest jet-aircraft in the sky. She takes aerobatics for granted. They are
mostly a matter of mathematics, and can be understood. There is nuclear fission but that, too, is understandable, though the threat of its misused effects, dimly grasped from the reading of a
newspaper column, is something she recoils from in dread. The real wonder is close at hand, close, yet infinitely remote, lovable, inexplicable, and thus an endless fascination.

As for living, making the most of the space between the mysteries fore and aft of her, I think the gift for that is in her hands. She loves to run out barefoot on a summer morning, to warm
herself at the fire on a frosty night, to climb trees, to make things out of discarded scraps, to lie on her stomach in the grass doing nothing, but utterly absorbed in being. She’s found her
identity, she’s in tune.

And what of our two adult selves? We’ve learnt this much—to work with unending patience, and to work with the rhythm of the unfathomable, never against it; to recognise the point of
submission without qualm or bickering; and to make a small ceremonial about the simple acts of living. Moving this way, we can feel the light and warmth that is at the core of things fall, like a
blessing, on our faces and hands.

END PIECE

I
T
is nearly twenty years since I set down this account of our life on the croft in the hills above Loch Ness, yet each day’s doing is as bright
in my mind’s eye as if it happened yesterday. I am thankful that we had the immense good fortune to live for even a few years among the members of that small community which has now all but
vanished. Linking hands with them, setting our lives to the rhythm of theirs, we were conscious of reaching far back into the folds of time. The signs of continuity were everywhere. The shieling
huts of ninety years ago were made to the same pattern and of the very stones of those of the people of four thousand years before. Flints were picked up and used as pipe-lighters. The fields
carved from the heather were not much bigger than those hacked out by the farmers who settled in the age of bronze. The sun was still the dominant factor in life. How could it be otherwise when
survival depended on ripened crops and fattened beasts? The feel of veneration was still there, though the rituals of worship were long overlaid by those of Christian belief.

Now, during the last ten years or so, change has almost overwhelmed us. The green slopes of the high strath of Caiplich are nearly all deeply scarred and planted with conifers. Some of the
surviving older people can hardly pass that way for sorrow. Land that was originally cleared, thousands of years ago, for food crops and has been added to slowly, over the generations, and drained
and walled, this good land has reverted to timber. Some is owned and neglected by absent proprietors. A field which I look at every day from my window was taken out with the spade by a man whose
grandson tells me the children had to take him by the hand to his work in the morning and lead him home at night, when his eyesight was failing. It is still green, this hard-won field, but
unworked, and the heather is creeping back.

But our own old place is still an oasis. And it has been added unto. Several of its heather slopes have been drained and ploughed and brought into cultivation. Cheering, too, is the sight of the
two well-worked crofts beside the little loch, with their quota of black cattle in the fields and hens strutting round the midden. Two resident proprietors of some of the highest ground are wisely
allowing the old fields to be worked again and the rotational grazing of cattle and sheep is slowly building up fertility.

I suppose we are all, in varying degrees, subservient to technology now and the small green upland places are not much more than breathing and stamping grounds for those fully engaged in it. Yet
there is a steadily growing demand, especially by young people, for a stretch of earth, a small, plain house, some place where a simple lifestyle can be followed. Where will they turn to when every
inch is covered in holiday homes or commercial forests?

But this story of ours is no lament. It’s rather a giving of thanks. And I am still, in the way life moves, very fortunate. I have only to cross the threshold to find myself walking on
moss and in heather, through scattered pines and over rock, to the ridge where time stops still. Right round the horizon are the unchanging outlines of the hills. I can stoop to gather a palmful of
spring water and turn to watch snow-bunting on the wing.

I am still aware of blessing. I live in the old school-house that used to seem a mansion and, from the front porch, I work what some say is the smallest Post Office in Scotland. I must use the
singular pronoun for Jim, now, walks the fields of Tir nan Og. A stone of hill-top granite stands in a quiet corner of Kilianan and bears his name. His sayings are in many minds and the way into
that croft of ours is still known as ‘Stewart’s gate’. Helen, after studying and travelling Europe-wide, never lost touch with the homeland and lives with her husband and family
on a small farm only twenty miles away. She milks the Jersey for the children and is as proud of a well-doing calf and a row of sturdy cabbages as ever we were with our lambs and turnips on the
croft.

I have only a garden now, but it produces all the fresh food I need, and to spare, and is a habitat for bees and chickens and a goat. What is missing is the sense of community, the sharing of
glad things and setbacks by people engaged in a common way of life. So, in a sense, this story of ours is a tale of other times, almost a glimpse of legend. To us it was the reality of our
lives.