Seasons on Harris (6 page)

• the dawn mists moving wraithlike, snakelike, and low across the surface of the loch outside our living room window;
  
• the soft lemony flecks of new morning light touching the hugeness of the North Harris hills;
  
• that first shaft of real sunrise sun flooding across the lower flanks of Clisham and bathing the rock beaches far below our cottage in a liquid amber;
  
• the incessantly cheerful chuckle of the stream running down at
  the side of the cottage, bouncing over boulders and swirling off under the spikey tussocks of marsh grass;
  
• the faintest shimmer of wavelets across the loch, suggesting a slow turning of the tide;
  
• a scurry of new spring lambs, hyperactive bundles of white fleece, nudging their reluctant mothers from sleep and demanding their milky nutrition from warm, dewy nipples;
  
• The first guttural shrieks of seagulls way down at the pier waiting for a fishing boat to come in or for the arrival of the salmon farmworkers to take the food sacks out to the fish pens in the middle of the loch;
  
• The scrabbling intensity of Joan's hungry hens scurrying about their enclosure, seeking early morning tidbits or a cozy place in the grass to lay their eggs of the day;
  
• The steady strengthening of the sunlight as it eases up the spectral range from pearly sheen to bronze to gold to lemon-silver, burning out the shadows and the mists and bathing the loch, the mountains, the bumpy stumps of old black houses, and the marshy-rocky pastures of the Ardhasaig peninsula—everything—in mellow morning warmth;
  
• The clouds!—so many shapes, so many moods, from tiny planktonlike “mackerel” flotillas, slow-moving stratus creatures like manta rays, and huge bubbled thunderheads to cumuli crisp-edged as breakfast bacon and cirrus like sheened flights of goose-quill pens.
  

You could write a whole book on just one day of such microde-lights. Our long, slow DDD ended in another spectacular moon-glow night, with the faint lights of distant croft cottages on the far side of the loch flickering against a velvety black landscape. Our landscape now.

And while on the subject of books, Roddy was most enthusiastic about the idea of our
Seasons on…
opus. I was a little surprised by this because he had a library full of books on the Hebrides and I thought he'd possibly dismiss it as just one more diatribe by a neophyte outsider aimed primarily at the island's slowly increasing tourist trade.

“Y'know…y'may jus' gi' us somethin' a wee bit diff'rent…'specially as y're livin' on-island for a while…and not jus' poppin' in an' off like so many o' the others. Journalistic types y'ken…”

“I hope so,” I said. “That's certainly what I'll try to do. Somebody famous—I've forgotten who for the moment—once said that ‘journalism is literature in a hurry.' And we're in no hurry here…”

“Well tha's good—and the first thing y'might want t'do is meet with our famous historian, Bill Lawson. He'll give y'a far better picture of the island than I can. I'll just gi' you the best jokes!”

Bill Lawson is intelligent, erudite, occasionally irascible, invariably outspoken, and always a man exhibiting the honesty and integrity of a truly professional researcher, particularly in the convoluted field of local genealogy.

And that was our opinion of him even before we'd met him.

Roddy had loaned us one of his many books,
Harris in History and Legend
, and we relished Bill's no-nonsense revelations of island traumas, inequities, and scandals.

According to Bill, the real trouble on Harris began when a Donald Stewart arrived as “factor” (a sort of estate manager) for the MacLeod clan, owners of Harris:

However, then Bill adds with a not-so-suppressed glee that the Hebridean clearance diaspora and the sheep-farming “revolution” failed,
and Stewart eventually lost, “for Seilibost was turned back into crofts again a hundred years later, after the First World War.”

Bill also maintained a healthy skepticism about some of the “utopian benefactors” whose visionary exploits for island enhancement—aesthetic, social, and economic—often floundered on equally unsound and quixotic decision making. Lord Leverhulme, for example, owner of the vast Lever Brothers'“soap empire” (his island nickname was “The Wee Soapman”), purchased Lewis and Harris in the 1920s and tried to develop Lewis first. After failing there (primarily because of the crofters' love of their small patches of land and their reluctance to become “industrialized”), he came to Harris with his schemes for a vast fishing industry and port at a “new town” to be created around the village of Obbe, at the southern end of the island, which he, of course, renamed Leverburgh, after himself (a popular habit of benefactors in that Victorian era of rampant but often self-serving philanthropy). Unfortunately for the little lord, he apparently failed to notice that the waters off his new town were a labyrinthine chaos of rocks, shoals, and tidal islets that could quickly decimate the “majestic fleets” he envisaged harboring here.

Ironically, while the scheme floundered following the sudden death of Leverhulme, a far more realistic and modest kind of scheme many decades later for the Leverburgh
An Clachan
Cooperative survives and flourishes today. And while Bill is a little skeptical—“It was a mistake to expect a committee of amateurs, in the best sense of the word, to be able to run a wide range of businesses”—the place remains a welcome resource for locals and visitors alike, offering a well-stocked store, café, book and souvenir “loft,” and an exhibition area featuring the intriguing Harris Tapestry—a series of large, colorful panels handcrafted by islanders and depicting key aspects of local history and folklore.

Bill's constant frustration with past and present schemes and dreams of island improvement is echoed by Roger Hutchinson in his recent book
The Soap Man
, which chronicles Leverhulme's activities here. He writes:

Bill writes about similar visionary high-mindedness and is particularly outraged by all the controversy and confusion of the proposed (now rejected) proposal for the Lingarabay Superquarry way down at the southeastern tip of the island near Rodel.

This ongoing island project of a questionably boondoggle nature reflects an attempt to eliminate a few mink that are said to be scurrying around the island and possibly threatening the eggs of some of the nesting birds. Results to date have been “rather ambiguous verging on total failure,” according to one of our more reliable island sources—“almost as daft as the hedgehog hunt!” This second bizarre initiative is mainly a project on the Uists, farther south down the Outer Hebridean chain, and as such projects invariably do, it has set animal-loving St. Tiggywinkles and other environmentalists, who want to trap and relocate these egg-eating
critters, against the more pragmatic “certain-death techniques of the Scottish Natural Heritage who to date claim over one hundred fifty kills.”

One feels tempted to agree with Bill's outrage at such sorry sagas, particularly when the hedgehog-trapping environmentalists claim that the “ridiculous profligacy” of the Scottish Natural Heritage has so far amounted to an outrageous cull-cost ratio of over five hundred pounds (nine hundred dollars) per hedgehog!

Profligacy was indeed once again the hallmark of one of the earlier benefactors of Harris, the Earl of Dunmore, who decided that his aristocratic status was such that he needed a fine Scottish-style mansion overlooking Soay Sound on North Harris. And in 1867 the impressive Amhuinnsuidhe Castle (of which, more later) was built. In addition to satisfying the earl's overbearing ego, the structure was also intended to impress his son's highly placed fiancée. Alas, however, her rather cruel remark shortly after its completion that his extravagant creation, twenty times larger than the average crofter's black house at the time, was “not even so big as my father's hen hut,” resulted in such frantic, free-spending efforts to expand the place that the earl virtually bankrupted himself and his family. And of course, as no “lady of position” would ever dream of marrying a penniless suitor, the engagement was dissolved and the castle quickly sold “at a calamitous loss.”

“Roddy's right—we've got to meet this Bill Lawson,” said Anne as she read his hilarious—and sad—tales of island history and life.

So, that's exactly what we did.

Throughout the warmer months, Bill and his wife, Chris, both enthusiastic naturalists, in addition to all their other interests, offer short walking tours for anyone who cares to join them. The meeting place is either at the William MacGillivray Center, a modest place of homage to one of Scotland's finest, if rather neglected, naturalists in Northton, or at the nearby notable Lawson creation, a modern white painted barnlike structure opened in July 2000, adjoining their home in the old schoolhouse here, which not only offers an intriguing exhibition of local and natural history but also houses Bill's Genealogy Research Center, an extensive and meticulously prepared repository of island genealogical data known as
Co Leis Thu?
(Who Do You Belong To?).

Here in scores of black binders are thousands of family-tree charts mostly prepared by Bill in his tiny neat handwriting (a remarkable feat for a man with such unusually large hands).

“It's so intriguing,” said Bill. “We have all these people coming here, often from thousands of miles away and looking for links to their ancestors on the island. You feel as though you've given them a new perspective on who they really are…an anchor for their lives. Real, almost tangible roots…and then it all happens again when we go off to the USA and Canada—usually a couple of times a year—and visit places where the clearance immigrants built a new life for themselves in the mid-1800s. They're keener than even the locals here to find their family histories…”

The Lawsons quickly opened our minds and eyes to island history, family heritage, nature, humor, and just about anything else we cared to ask them.

We enjoyed their company too, right from the start—the tall, stooped Bill with his self-effacing chuckle, and the confident eyes and bright smile of Chris. Despite their local status as “incomers” (Bill from the Scottish mainland and Chris from Lewis), they both live, breathe, and adulate their adopted island of Harris, and on our first walk with them out across the vast flower-bedecked
machair
sheep pastures below the conical summit of Chaipaval, it was obvious that we had met a couple who had truly found their mutual purpose—and passion—in life.

But that didn't stop them from being direct and blatantly honest in their comments and opinions on the islanders and island life in general.

“Northton's a pretty odd place today,” Bill chuckled as we set off in discovery of a series of beautiful secluded beaches overlooking the Sound of Harris. “Only forty or so houses, but since we've lived here, there's been a surge of ‘incomers' to the islands buying up the old crofts at prices that are cheap for them but very inflationary for us. It's become a real eclectic mishmash here—folks moving in from America, Ireland, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Holland, even Morocco. The original village here of
Taobh Tuath
was a couple of miles away but, like all the west coast
machair
, it was cleared in the mid-1800s to make way for sheep. Typical of the lairds in those days. Just listen to their justification: ‘This will ben
efit all parties, relieving these lands of its redundant populations will improve the conditions of those who remain behind and at the same time relocate the expatriated in a sphere where there is certainty of finding productive outlets for their energies…' Then, when all that nonsense stopped—when the sheep economy failed—a ‘new village' was rebuilt here from the earlier 1900s onwards. It was virtually a model crofting community with clearly fenced twelve-acre crofts in a line above the bay and open grazing all across Chaipaval—or to give it its correct Norse name,
Ceapabhal
—‘the bow-shaped hill.'”