Calum's Road Read online

  Julia was boarded in the Margaret Carnegie Hostel for Girls in Portree for the whole of her secondary years, except for school holidays and occasional long weekends. She had effectively, at the age of twelve, left home. Julia MacLeod would never return to live in northern Raasay. ‘You were taken away at twelve,’ she said, ‘and you left school to do something else, somewhere else. I mean, what would you come back and do in Arnish? Milk half of the cow – let your father milk the other half? What would you do? I remember my mother said we should have a chinchilla farm – she was desperately trying to think of what would make money and provide us with a livelihood. I did try to crew the Janet Mackenzie with my father, but catching mooring buoys and climbing perpendicular pier ladders were beyond my abilities!’

  Calum MacLeod never forgave the state for removing his only child. His life’s experience had taught him to cherish what was independent and peripheral and to mistrust centralised authority. That mistrust would in the following years veer towards hatred.

  Eleven years after Julia’s departure for Portree, Calum prepared an article on ‘The Ruination of Raasay’ for the West Highland Free Press. ‘Another factor that caused bitter discontent’, he wrote as the days began to shorten in the September of 1973, ‘and added to the depopulation of the island is the tyrannous system of centralised education pursued by the Scottish Education Department during the last two decades.

  ‘In practice, this form of education compels every pupil on attaining 11½ years of age to leave home and be boarded elsewhere for the rest of their education – about 4½ years. The result is that homes in rural areas are systematically emptied and, in fact, all rural areas and especially the islands reduced to a skeleton of aging population while villages and towns are crammed by youngsters outwith parental supervision and growing up urbanised to such an extent that they become practically alien to home environments or participating in agriculture or fishing. In fact, industrial or manual work is frowned on, while moral delinquency, especially immorality, vandalism and drinking has increased to an unprecedented scale. This moral rot with a major decline in teaching and especially lack of training for future citizenship is simply due to the policy pursued by the Scottish Education Department.

  ‘A tourist that saw the system in operation in Sutherland – children removed by buses for nearly 100 miles from homes, on poor roads, in inclement weather, and brought up compulsorily amidst permissive environments – described it as “the most devilish system of education I have ever seen in my worldwide travels”.

  ‘Such has been the system of education forced on Raasay during the last two decades. It was rigorously enforced by Inverness Education Authority as represented by Dr J. A. Mac-Lean and his depute, Mr Lawson. Before me lie their worthless written assurances to parents regarding children so removed. To quote a few – “Children so removed will be well cared for.” “With children so removed progress educationally is most remarkable, and marvellous in sociableness and poise.” “In their best interests to attend Portree High School.”

  ‘. . . Raasay has been ruined by the gross maladministration (if not criminal) of St Andrews House [the Scottish Office], and the gross negligence of Inverness County Council, and by the tyrannous system of education advocated by the Scottish Office, and rigorously pursued by the county’s Director of Education – Dr J. A. MacLean, and his depute, Mr Lawson – heirs typical of the infamous Loch and Sellar* – of the former century – harassing and driving their less fortunate fellow-countrymen out of their homes.’

  Expressing his ire in the columns of local newspapers was both catharsis and a form of revenge for Calum MacLeod. But it would not bring his daughter or his community home. And this was a restless, physically active man. He needed to do something that was solid and practical and equally shaming to the authorities.

  So, at some uncertain point in the 1960s, he decided to build the road from Brochel Castle to South Arnish himself.

  * Calum was referring here to James Loch and Patrick Sellar, the Scottish commissioner and factor respectively of Lord Stafford’s immense Sutherlandshire estate in the 1810s. Loch and Sellar enforced the wholesale and frequently brutal removal of the estate’s tenants to make space for sheep-farming, and have been accused of seminal responsibility for the institutionalised clearances that affected the north and west of Scotland for much of the rest of the nineteenth century.

  * The disproportion of the sacrifice is best illustrated by the fact that those twenty-three servicemen sacrificed between 1914 and 1918 represented 5 per cent of the total population of the Raasay archipelago. From the whole British population of 45 million, slightly more than 700,000 men were slain. That represented a fatal casualty percentage of 1.5 per cent. It was a hideous statistic, but it was only a quarter of the toll extracted from Raasay, Fladda and Rona.

  * Lexie and Calum’s success with Nicotiana tabacum is less surprising in the light of the fact that Calum was an extremely skilled and productive agriculturalist. He devoted his own garden not only to fruit trees and root vegetables, but also to lettuce and other such native American species as tomatoes and courgettes. He personally disliked tomatoes and was not sure what to do with courgettes, until both were used by his wife in her celebrated variety of homemade chutney. Spare lettuces were offered to the cows, who rejected them.

  * Like many a Highlander and Hebridean of his and other generations, Calum MacLeod refused to countenance burning coal. It was not only a question of coal costing money while peat was freely cut from the hill. ‘Dad hated coal,’ said his daughter. ‘Black dust, dense smoke, large fire-rakings – coal was no match for the fragrant peat smoke.’

  * His daughter Julia remembered the apparatus as a ‘Lucas Freelight Windmill’. It seems likely that Calum bought one of the first small electrical-output wind turbines, which had become popular at homesteads in the American Midwest, and which simply used modified propellers, or vanes, to drive direct-current generators. By the middle of the 1920s one- to three-kilowatt wind generators had been developed by American companies such as Parris-Dunn and Jacobs Wind-electric. These systems were only installed at first to provide lighting for remote farms, and to charge batteries used to power crystal radio sets. Their use was later extended to an array of direct-current motor-driven appliances, including refrigerators, freezers, washing machines and power tools. But that would be rather too late for Calum – or more relevantly, in the case of washing machines and refrigerators, Lexie – MacLeod. They eventually settled for a paraffin fridge.

  * Calum would later recall that his first wages from the post office were deducted to the tune of 7s 6d a week to pay off a £100 loan from the Fisheries Board, which he had borrowed to buy ‘lin falmair’, or hake nets, in the 1930s before prices tumbled and he abandoned fishing as a livelihood.

  * The Closed, or Exclusive, or Darbyite Brethren are a splinter of the Plymouth Brethren, a Protestant Nonconformist group founded in 1827. The Open Plymouth Brethren are prepared to share a communion table with other, unaffiliated Christians. The Closed Brethren are not prepared to do so. The Closed Brethren attracted a following in the fishing ports of north-eastern Scotland, where as late as 2002 a visitor to Fraserburgh, just twenty miles from Macduff, discovered that ‘members of the Closed Brethren still serve tea in a separate room for guests who are not of the faith’. There would not, presumably, have been a separate room in which to offer Calum MacLeod tea on the otherwise friendly fishing boats which he encountered in Macduff.

  No Chance of Being Run Down by a Car

  The tools which each foreman roadman should have are a shovel, spade, line and reel, pickaxe, barrow and a hand-machine scraper.

  Thomas Aitken, Road Making and

  Maintenance, 1900

  It is difficult to be sure in which year – let alone which month, week or day – Calum MacLeod began first to build Calum’s road.

  John Nicolson of Torran, who was by then living in Skye but who returned regularly to the north end of Raasay, thought t
hat it was as early as the 1950s: ‘In the ’50s you were seeing that Calum was doing things to the road. When you leave Brochel Castle, and the road goes right up near the top – he’d started making a road below that. That’s when we became aware of it first. And in other places, where the road was going down steep braes, he was making detours, and I suppose it was after I moved back to Skye in 1954 that we realised what he was trying to do.’

  Calum’s daughter Julia said, ‘I think he started in 1962. I think it was the sheer frustration of me having to go to Portree that made him begin it.’

  Calum himself told the West Highland Free Press in August 1975 that he had worked on the road from plans drawn up ‘eight years ago’, in 1967. He would tell the same newspaper in 1979 that he had commenced road-building in 1964. He repeated the year 1964 to the Scotsman in 1980. He told the journalists Magnus Magnusson in 1982 and Tom Weir in 1986 that he had started in 1966. Colonel Basil Reckitt’s Raasay journal records him as starting in 1965. In 1973, following a meeting in Raasay with Calum MacLeod, the broadcaster Derek Cooper reported that Calum ‘began to convert this track into a road . . . four years ago’, in 1969 . . .

  Much of the confusion is explicable, and has little to do with Hebridean disregard for the precise recording of time. As the local postman, Calum had to walk the old track every other day. As a crofter, his family’s peat-cutting was at one side of it, closer to Brochel than to Arnish. As a father, his only child was boarding in Portree and depended upon the pathway to get home at all. So Calum MacLeod maintained the track between Brochel and Arnish for many years when it was in his interest to do so, and there may be a fine line between watching a man maintain a track, and watching a man in the first stages of turning that track into a twelve-foot-wide roadway.

  There is also a fine line between planning something and beginning to put the plan into effect. It is certain that Calum MacLeod had thought long and hard for very many years about a road between Arnish and Brochel. He was a practical man. His experience in engineering the Torran to Fladda coastal footway, and his even greater experience of walking between Brochel and Arnish, had afforded him both the qualifications and the opportunity to work out how such a road could be built. He and his brother Charles had been told that the path to Fladda would be a difficult if not impossible task. But they had built it. By later in the 1950s and into the 1960s Calum MacLeod was being told by Inverness County Council’s officials ‘that £30,000 [equivalent to £450,000 today] at least would be spent before any vehicle could cross these 3,000 yards’ between Brochel Castle and Arnish.

  How, considered the man who had built the Fladda track himself, could they have come to such an absurd conclusion?

  He bought a book. It was an obvious book to buy. For half a crown (or two shillings and sixpence, or twelve and a halfpence, or approximately two pounds in twenty-first-century value), Calum got hold of a hardback original of Road Making and Maintenance: A Practical Treatise for Engineers, Surveyors, and Others, which had been published in 1900 by Thomas Aitken.*

  Aitken’s great book was a DIY manual to building motor-ways where motor-ways had not previously existed. It was intended as a guide to every rung on the road-building ladder, from surveyor to engineer to foreman to gang, and as Calum MacLeod intended to be his own surveyor, engineer, foreman and gang virtually every chapter was relevant and instructive. Turning absorbedly through its 440 pages, Calum will have alighted on two especially encouraging passages. ‘The width of a new road’, observed Thomas Aitken, ‘will be determined by the prospective wheel traffic. It is a common practice to make a road sufficiently wide to allow for two or more vehicles passing each other easily when travelling fast. For ordinary road traffic 12 feet of metalling will be sufficient.’

  Calum did not anticipate extraordinary road traffic between Brochel and Arnish. The road he planned would be twelve feet in total width and nine feet wide within its outer drains and dry-stone edges. In order to achieve this, ‘the tools which each foreman roadman should have’, wrote Thomas Aitken, ‘are a shovel, spade, line and reel, pickaxe, barrow and a hand-machine scraper’. A shovel, spade, line and reel, pickaxe and barrow were easily supplied. Upon further reading the hand-machine scraper turned out to be unnecessary in the short term, it being a device for cleaning and clearing the finished surface.

  Calum requested the assistance of two officers of the Royal Engineers in surveying the lines of the new road. Major Mitcham and Captain Harrison duly arrived in Raasay and the three men staked out a route between Brochel and Arnish. ‘After the war’, said John Nicolson, ‘the army were helping people like that in different places. “Aid to the Community”, it was called.* And they were going to do Calum’s road, before he began it himself. It was even pegged out. He pegged it out along with the army engineers who came there. He showed them where it should go, more or less following the road as it is today. A stop was put to it after that, as far as I can understand, by certain members of Inverness County Council.’

  ‘The Royal Engineers were going to do the road in the 1960s,’ said Calum MacLeod in 1979. ‘But the old Lord Macdonald caused trouble.† He was convener of this and convener of that [on Inverness County Council]. Wherever you turned, he was in the way. He diverted the Royal Engineers and had them build instead some track in the Cuillins that nobody ever used.’

  Major Mitcham, Captain Harrison and Calum MacLeod at least managed to get most of the road planned before the enforced military withdrawal. And they did so according to the precepts of Thomas Aitken. ‘The selection or location of country roads’, advised Aitken, ‘is carried out by making an examination or reconnaissance of the tract of country to be traversed, so as to obtain the requisite data for the purpose of determining the best route and gradients for the proposed line of communication.’

  Calum MacLeod had been making that examination or reconnaissance for the best part of half a century.

  ‘The most direct or shortest practicable route between two points at once suggests itself,’ continued Aitken, ‘but this, in every case, must be governed by the natural features of the surface of the country. The object aimed at is to ascertain the most favourable direction in which to lay out a road, so as to convey the traffic with the least amount of motive power consistent with reasonable economy in construction and in the subsequent maintenance of the road and works.’

  Those words chimed perfectly with Calum’s philosophy, as already established: ‘If Calum was doing anything, he didn’t do it the hard way. If there was an easy way, he did it the easy way . . . He looked at the contours of the land, and the surface of the ground, and if they meant going down a certain way, and it was easier than cutting up another way, that’s the way Calum would go. The hard way may have looked shorter, but it might still have been harder to do – so he would dig a wee turn.’

  Aitken noted helpfully that ‘existing roads . . . in hilly districts in most parts of the country, have to a great extent been laid down with only one object in view, namely, that of a direct line. The great sacrifice thus entailed, through steep gradients, in the cost of transportation, is a serious one, which could have been avoided in many cases by a little scientific knowledge of what is necessary in laying out a new road, so as to accomplish the greatest amount of work in haulage at the least expenditure of motive power.’

  In other words, roads which ran straight up a steep gradient were delusory. They looked quicker and cheaper, but they were not. A gentle, winding slope over twice the distance was actually more efficient. And there was another factor: ‘A sinuous course is in most cases a decided advantage, from a maintenance point of view, as on a winding road the wheel traffic spreads over the whole surface, which seldom takes place on a straight road.’

  Messrs MacLeod, Mitcham and Harrison had little difficulty in staking out the recommended sinuous course between Brochel and Arnish. The terrain demanded that they either go around outcrops of granite the size of a banqueting table or blow them up, and in most cases they preferred
to skirt them.

  But at certain points something more than sinuosity was required. At about halfway along the route the old track had encountered a steep-sided glen. This defile ran from east coast to west. Its southern slopes were difficult; its northern slopes were almost inaccessible. So the old track had run straight down the side of the southern slope, crossed the narrow, flat bottom, and then followed the foot of the northern slope down to the seashore at Loch Arnish.

  Calum MacLeod probably did not need Thomas Aitken or officers of the Royal Engineers to tell him that the route straight down the southern slope of the glen was not only inefficient for wheeled transport, it was arguably impassable. A lengthy diversion was called for. He abandoned the old track altogether and laid out a massive dog-leg which ran firstly away from the western coast up the valley, and then down the other side towards Loch Arnish, casually picking up and tucking under its arm the residual track as it passed on its way to the sea. From there it would run around the placid side of Loch Arnish, where the few white houses of Torran came into view across the water on its northern bank, before wrestling through more birch trees and ascending a final hillside into the township of Arnish. He originally planned another short diversion, to the south of George Rainy’s wall, but it was abandoned. His stone markings of this uncompleted detour still stand in the heather, remnants and evidence of those months of survey.

  When the officers returned to barracks, Calum began to clear the land, to lay foundations, to build holding walls and culverts. A student at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee named Campbell Sandilands would in the early 1980s spend time with Calum MacLeod in order to write a dissertation on his road. In the early stages, Sandilands learned, Calum had ‘by hand to make a “tram-line” of stones defining the finite boundary of the road. This was then filled in with more stones and then smaller stones between the larger ones . . . Gravel and small stones were quarried to complete the road surface.’