Seasons on Harris (10 page)

The tasting, however, was flowing along delightfully. To my palate, the Berserker beat them all and I told Andy this. So, fine host that he was,
he opened a second bottle and we supped away happily as he recounted the tale of his innovative venture here.

“I suppose I've always thought of m'self as a Lewis man. Even though my family lived in Kent, only a couple of hours from London, they all came originally from Stornoway. I came here first time when I was eighteen, but jobs were scarce then for a young lad—still are—so it was back to Kent for a while until the idea of a brewery first raised its ugly head a few years ago. I brought two friends of mine to sample the delights of Lewis. It was during the British Lions' tour of South Africa and, as we were all avid rugby players, much of the time was spent in pubs watching the matches. Poor excuse, I know, but that's how we passed the time. After a few sessions it became apparent that the choice of beer on the island was seriously lacking any diversity or flavor and so we wondered why nobody had started a local brewery here. A lightbulb went on in my head.”

Andy paused to refill our glasses. “I'd just inherited my grandfather's croft here, which had been in our family since the 1890s, and so I thought about living permanently on the island. But first I decided I'd better attend some courses and seminars dealing with the independent brewing industry. I met Don Burgess from the Freeminer Brewery in Kent when he was one of the speakers. Since then we've become really firm friends. Don is very well respected in the independent brewing industry. He's got a wallful of awards for the beers he produces and his help has been invaluable. I even spent time at his brewery and gained a lot of practical experience.

“Finally, I was ready. I took early retirement from my job with a pharmaceutical firm, got a small bonus handshake, and came back here in 2001 to get things started. There were problems, as always, but eventually we were off and rolling and by October I produced my first batch just in time for the Royal National Mod—y'know, that huge Scottish event. Kind of an annual competition of Gaelic songs, music, dancing—that sort of thing. A year later we were gaining quite a reputation—even winning awards, and making a special brew for the Stornoway Hebridean Celtic Festival. We called it Celtic Festivale and boy—was that a hit with the local pubs!

“A lot of the small island breweries brew and bottle down in Edinburgh under contract…I see that as cheating and refused to do that right from the start. I wanted our products to be authentic here. Y'see, my grandfather loved this place and he brought me up to love it too. So whatever I did, I was going to do it right. And I decided if I could generate five or six jobs here for the locals—especially young ones—then I'd be happy. We lose so many youngsters every year. There's no jobs here for them so they go to the mainland—and usually stay there. So—it was a kind of mission. And my parents supported me—they even come up for the summer to lend a hand.

“There are some problems still with pubs and pub ownerships. Some resist new brews. Six Stornoway pubs in town won't even think about stocking my products. They'd rather stock rubbish American beers like Budweiser and Miller than deal with small-scale breweries like ours. But in Harris, though, we're everywhere! I've even got more sales in Skye than I have on Lewis. That's the most upsetting thing. They don't always seem to appreciate having a brewery in their own town. It can take forever to change opinions here…but it's always the same story with small businesses like ours, particularly in remote places like Stornoway. The big guys are always hovering around trying to nip the life out of you. But so far we're still here and proving that this kind of effort can work if you really try hard. And that's what we need on the islands. People with energy and vision willing to tough it out without government subsidies and all that ‘crofter dependency' stuff. Easy money can kill initiative. It's happened so often here. People give up too soon—confidence collapses—and eventually so does the whole island economy.”

“So, are you optimistic or not about the future of these islands?”

“Mmm, sometimes yes. Sometimes no. So much money has been wasted here on big fancy projects that go nowhere. We need more investment in small-scale, less airy-fairy businesses. We need to create more work for the young people. Too many are leaving and most'll never come back.”

“What about the older traditional industries—fishing…tweed?”

“Well—fishing's not much good at the moment. We lost the big runs way back. Prawns and lobsters are still okay, though. Enough to keep
quite a few boats floating. But who knows in the long term? Sometimes those wind farm proposals, that's one of the latest mega-investment schemes here, seem to offer some serious money for our future, but—I ask you, can you imagine hundreds of those four-hundred-feet-high turbines all up and down the middle of our Lewis moors? It would change everything—all that wilderness—everything.”

“So, I guess that leaves tweed.”

“Ah, yes, our lovely Harris Tweed. Well, I dunno…everything's always on its way to somewhere else, isn't it. Everything. And no one seems to know where tweed is headed—but it looks like we're not giving up yet. Rough times, but we're still in there trying. Maybe something will come along…I've heard rumors…”

“Yeah…so have I. But I can't get anything definite. Maybe it's just that island stubbornness that keeps it going. Maybe it's time for all those churchgoers and ministers to pray really hard!”

“Oh, they're real good at doing that here. Embracing the mysteries an' all that. And who knows, m'be the good Lord'll listen this time…”

O
H AYE
—M
ARION
C
AMPBELL
—a lovely person,” Roddy said one morning shortly after our arrival. He was at his store, just across the road from our cottage, and we were discussing the current predicament of the island tweed industry—a constant item of island concern. I'd described our first introduction to its nuances and traditions when Anne and I met Marion way back on our first visit to Harris.

“Yes, she is—we've both been looking forward to seeing her again.”

There was what you might call a rather uncomfortable silence. Roddy was fiddling around at the cash register and then slowly turned to look out of the window at the North Harris hills bathed in soft spring sunshine.

“Ah well, now…,” he said quietly. “That'll be a wee bit difficult…y'see, she passed on…quite a few years back…1996 I think it was…”

“Oh,” was all I could think to say. Marion had been one of the most celebrated weavers on the island. She was one of the last true “traditionalists,” still performing all the steps herself—dyeing, spinning, warp preparation, and weaving—on her huge wooden loom, and then the laborious process of waulking (shrinking). She seemed to be the kind of individual who would go on forever performing these arduous and meticulous tasks. But then I realized that when we first met her, she must have been in her late seventies.

“Aye,” said Roddy, “a fine woman. Took a bit of our island with her when she left us. But close by her home in Plocrapool there's her cousin,
Katie Campbell. She's a good weaver. And Katie's daughter too, Katherine. They don't do their own dyes and things like that but they still use the old single-wide Hattersley looms. Make some lovely tweeds too. And her shortbread…that's very good if y'manage t'get y'selves invited in for a spot of tea—we call it
strupach
or
scrubag
dependin'on which island you're on.” Katie's tea and delicious shortbread were indeed one of the first highlights of our visit to her home the following day. We had driven on the tortuously narrow and winding “Golden Road” (a very expensive and boondoggled feat of local engineering) to a typically tough little Bays cottage, perched on a rocky bluff overlooking a cluster of wave-gouged inlets and, way across The Minch, the towering cliffs of Skye. It's wild country here—scenes from the epic
2001: A Space Odyssey
were filmed in this lunar landscape, which doubled as the surface of Jupiter.

The sea views of the open ocean were tantalizing through Katie's small living room window, and the room itself possessed a cocooned coziness. You could imagine dark winter days by the peat fire here, with the wind howling off the moors outside and hurtling across the sound and the aroma of fresh-baked bannock cakes wafting in from the adjacent kitchen. It was a true crofter home—small, intimate, thick-walled, and full of that aura of close-knit bonds of kinfolk, and a
ceilidh
cohesion evolved through eons of communal singing, storytelling, long nights of laughter, and maybe even a spot of Highland dancing if the mood was right.

Katie was delightful—a small, gracious elderly woman haloed in a profusion of light-colored hair and eyes that sparkled with kindness and good humor. As she served us our tea by the fire, she told us about the old tweed-making process that began with a cleansing of the “dirty” (greasy) wool from Blackface and Cheviot sheep in a mixture of soap and washing soda. Then came the dyeing, traditionally in vats of homemade dye extracted from crotal (lichen scratched off the moorland rocks), peat soot, and a wide range of local plants.

“What—you just let the plants and the fleece sit in water?” asked Anne.

“Well,” said Katie, “y'know what y'should do if you want to learn all about the dyeing—go see Margaret MacKay in Tarbert. Lovely lady. She's got a place called Soay Studio near the school and gives classes in tradi
tional techniques. People come from all over the world. She's very particular about the process…although I don't think she uses the
maistir
anymore!” Katie gave a mysterious chuckle. “No, I doubt very much she'd be doing that!”

Anne sensed she was missing something. “
Maistir
…what's that?”

Katie smiled demurely and left the explanation to me.

“Oh—sorry, darlin', I thought I'd told you about…er…the pee pots…chamber pots. They were…ah…emptied every day into a barrel—the pee-tub—or something like that outside the house and…er…left to ferment…mature…”

“Mature! Are you serious?!”

“Well, apparently the ammonia or whatever in the urine got stronger with age and was perfect for the…‘fixing' of the dye in the wool…”

Anne gave me one of those “Well, thanks so much for sharing that with me” glances followed by a half-whispered “Okaaay…”

“Anyway,” said Katie, obviously happy to have been excluded from that little digression, “after the dyeing and fixing came the teasing, blending, and carding processes. By that time the wool's a fluffy mass of thin fibers and ready for spinning into yarn for the warp and weft weaving threads. Nowadays the warp is prepared by the factory with six hundred ninety-eight threads, each measuring around ninety yards in length, which are delivered to the cottage of the crofter-weaver along with some forty pounds of weft yarns. These are then woven on the home loom, usually in check, two-by-three, or herringbone patterns. Sometimes we use diamond or bird's-eye—that last design looks especially smart.

“If the weaver's fast, they can do up to sixty yards—now they work in meters—a day of ‘single wide'—around thirty inches wide—depending on the thickness of the threads, and who's doin' the weavin'. On Harris it was often the women—but on Lewis it was traditionally the men. But at this point the tweed's a wee bit messy. There are oils added in the blending process to make the spinning of the yarn easier and you'll get some extra dirt and machine oil on it in the weaving shed. So the last bit—the ‘finishing'—is very important. You've got to scour it again in soap and soda and then ‘waulk,' felt, and crop—or ‘nap'—the cloth to give it a smooth feel and ‘a good handle.' And then each bolt has
to be inspected by the Harris Tweed Association—they're real sticklers for any broken threads and other imperfections—and afterwards it's stamped with the ‘Orb' certification mark, every yard of it, and each piece is given its own production number.”

“Complicated—and all very ‘official,'” said Anne.

“Well—we're very proud of that,” said Katie, with a grin, as she handed round more of her shortbread. “I think we're the only cloth anywhere in the world to have an official Act of Parliament to protect it…d'you want to know what it says?”

“Of course.”

“Well—it goes something like this: ‘The production of the handwoven tweed known as Harris Tweed has been woven in the Outer Hebrides for centuries and provides the main source of work within the private sector in the region and it is vital to the economy of those islands that the integrity, distinctive character, and worldwide renown of Harris Tweed should be maintained'…and then it goes on to say that our tweed must be ‘made from pure, virgin wool, produced in Scotland, spun, dyed, and finished in the Outer Hebrides, and handwoven by the islanders at their own homes.'”

“And all this was stamped, sealed, and signed by Parliament?” I asked.

“Absolutely. No one can take it away from us now. It's our cloth…no one makes it quite like us and everyone in the world has heard of it. No one can claim to make ‘Harris' Tweed unless it's done right—and done here. Others have tried to sneak their cloth in with our label—‘poachers' in Italy and Canada, and even the Japanese—can y'believe they went so far as to name one of their islands Harris?!”

“From what I've heard,” I said, “the islanders have always been very proud and particular about the way they make their tweed.”

“Oh—my—yes! Very particular. Lady Catherine Dunmore—actually she was a countess—did a lot to get the cottage industry started here in the late 1800s, but then along came Lord Leverhulme in the 1920s with his newfangled ideas and things got a bit…feisty. He wanted the weavers to use machine-spun wool to save all that time they spent carding, hand spinning, and making bobbins and whatnot at home. He spent a small fortune building a special carding and spinning mill at Geocrab
just up the road here in 1922, but the machines never seemed to work properly. Anyway, the weavers believed that any kind of mechanization would remove the special reputation of home-produced Harris Tweed and so they stuck to their own old ways for quite a while after that…”

“When it was all hand done—y'know, the dyeing, carding, spinning, and all that—what was your favorite part of the process?” asked Anne.

“Och—the waulkin' o' the cloth…that was so much fun! More than the weavin' really because it was an excuse for us all to get together. Especially the young girls. They didn't get out much then. It's all gone now of course. The shrinkin' and fullin' is done at the factory today after they get the tweeds from the cottages. They say the old way dates back to Roman times—maybe earlier. I think they did it by foot then. Like they did in Ireland. But here we used a big flat board—a door would do fine—and you'd get three of the women—up to six sometimes—sittin' on each side. And then the singin' starts. Morag MacLeod on Scalpay has collected lots of the old waulkin' songs—‘
Orain Luaidh.
' Some were hymns an' the like, depending on the people who were there—but they were all very rhythmic…a nice fast beat and we all pushed and pulled the dampened cloth together for hours across the board.

“There was one song I remember—a sort of hymn—that sounds a bit sort of depressin', but when you sang it in the Gaelic it really got you movin':

“Oh—very cheerful!” I said.

Katie chuckled. “Well. You've got to imagine it with a table full of women—churchgoers, God-fearin' women. They could really put a lot of energy into those words…but, with the younger ones, we had a bit more fun, and some of the songs were very…‘female,' y'know—lots of local gossip thrown in and comments about the men in the village and whatnot. A few were a little racy too, y'know…”

“Can you remember any of those?” I asked, and received an abrupt elbow nudge from Anne.

Katie chuckled. “Oooh, no, no, I don't think so. But there was one I used to like very much…it went something like…

Katie half spoke, half sang the rhythmic verse in a soft, gentle voice. “'Course we sang in the Gaelic and much louder than that and with a lovely steady beat.”

“That was beautiful,” said Anne. “And you've got a good memory too.”

“Ah, well.” Katie smiled. “Don't forget, Gaelic's a very ‘oral' language—you had to learn how to remember all your songs and hymns.”

Mike Russell, in his book
A Poem of Remote Lives
, celebrates the spirit of the waulking ritual:

Then it was my turn for a little recitation: “I found this great little poem about the tweed and wrote it down. I don't know who composed it but it made me realize that
Clo Mor
was much more than just cloth…it was the spirit of the island too…something you could never lose…

Somehow, for me at least, those few lines captured the whole mystique and magic of the island cloth—a warp and weft not just of spun wool but of interlocked lives, memories, traditions, and experiences, many traumatic and decimating, but shared by all crofters and weavers here, bound together in this wild, ancient, and beautiful place.