Calum's Road Read online

  Within this microcosmic culture the small but separate villages retained their own identities in idiosyncratic ways. Some communities ate ‘braxy mutton’* and dried dogfish, which would be rejected by the handful of families in their neighbouring townships. The people of Arnish were partial to conger eel, despite the bones and despite the fact that this delicacy was judged unsuitable for pregnant women. Calum MacLeod’s mother, Sheila, put raisins in her mealie puddings, which was also unacceptable in Torran, where they preferred steamed cod’s head stuffed with cod’s liver, oatmeal and onions, while spurning, as also did many in Kyle Rona, the conger eel which was popular elsewhere. Calum MacLeod himself retained a lifelong fondness for ‘the lovely dark meat’ of cormorant, or ‘scart’ as the species was known locally. He would shoot the birds – with notable accuracy – from a high rock beside Loch Arnish, after which they would be skinned, the tail-end chopped off – otherwise it had an overly fishy flavour – and made into ‘excellent broth’ which was deemed particularly efficacious in the treatment of the common cold.

  These were antique diets, but Calum MacLeod grew up in a world where the distance between history and the present was often truncated; where large fragments of the past were tangible and everyday. There was no piped water. It was drawn daily from a number of ancient wells. The wells were often specialised: one would provide good-quality drinking water; another might be used only for washing. One day, said John Cumming, ‘I found an old musket hidden in the heather on a ledge above the well from which we got our drinking water. I can’t remember anything about what happened to that gun. How long that gun was hidden there is anybody’s guess, probably from after Culloden when people were prohibited from carrying guns.’ The Battle of Culloden was fought in 1746. In this place, in some ways, it was closer than the twentieth-century mainland.

  There was a postal and telegram service, but no tap water. There were local government rates, but no electricity. There was a telephone wire, but no vehicular access road. When Calum MacLeod was twelve years old, in 1923, his neighbour John Nicolson was born in Torran ‘in the last occupied black house in Raasay’. Just as Calum was the great-grandson of the Charles MacLeod who testified to Lord Napier’s Commission in 1883, John Nicolson was a grandson of the Murdo Nicolson of Torran who had told Lord Napier that he wished ‘for a better place’.

  And just as life in Arnish had hardly changed between the times of Charles and Calum MacLeod, so in Torran it had remained for John as it had been for Murdo Nicolson. John Nicolson would recollect the strict, time-tried itinerary laid out by the unwritten Book of Hours of crofting life. ‘The thing that I think of today’, he said in 2005, ‘is the way that the people worked. They had a method with everything, when I think back on it today. They didn’t wait for the weather or the seasons – they did things in stages all through the year. Once New Year was passed, the fishermen were away at the creels or whatever they were doing and after exactly three months on the water, once the end of March came, all fishing stopped and they started the croft work.

  ‘They turned the ground with the “cas-chrom” [traditional foot plough], went down to the seaweed for manure, carried it up to the crofts, started planting the potatoes in the first or second week of April. All the croft work was finished by the end of April, the seed was sown, everything.

  ‘And as soon as that was finished, they started doing the fencing – the fencing, in those days, wasn’t what we now know as a fence. If there was a wire fence, oh boy! that was something. Fencing then was stone dykes or earth dykes, one or the other, the dykes to keep the sheep out and the dykes to keep the cows out.

  ‘So, by the first week in May, the sheep that were on the crofts were taken away to the hill and they were there for the rest of the summer. After that was done, you then started on cutting the peats about the middle of May. Fair weather or foul, the peats were cut. More often than not, when you think back on it, it was good weather in May – not brilliant every year, but quite often it was. I remember because we were barefooted then – once the first of May came, off came our boots and we were barefoot.

  ‘While they were cutting the peats the lambs were all sorted out, they were castrated and all the rest of it – marked out so that everyone knew which was whose. They cut the peats and then, by the beginning of June, the drying peats were being lifted and then made into stooks out on the hill. When we were in school, once we got our summer holidays in July, that was our job, to take the peats home and put them into a shed – it wasn’t a shed as we call a shed today but it was a building with a thatched roof on it and they took home as much of that peat as they possibly could so that when they started the harvest work, nobody had to go to the peats, it was already there.

  ‘The harvest work, more often than not, started after what they called the Portree Communion which was the second Sabbath in August – the harvest work started then and it carried on until the potatoes were lifted at the beginning of October or the end of September. This was how they worked things. The sheep that were out on the hill were then taken in on the crofts, and they were on the crofts all winter. Today you see sheep on the crofts twelve months of the year, which I don’t think is right – that wasn’t what we were brought up to. The cattle were the same. I always remember we had two cows – I think it was two cows and a follower we were allowed.

  ‘More often than not the potatoes were lifted if at all possible before October, because at this time they were getting ready to start the lobster fishing. Those who were at the lobsters went away in the early morning and they were back by three in the afternoon or something like that – rowing most of the time because a sail took up too much room in the boat. The boat that my father was on was working about eighty lobster creels, and it was twenty each that they had, if I remember right, there were four of them in the boat.

  ‘New Year was a holiday, but if it was New Year at the beginning of the week, on the Sabbath, it was very seldom that they went out that day. They would go out next day and the day before. The other thing we looked forward to was seeing our cousins coming home from Glasgow in the summer. We looked forward to this because they were there for a month, so we looked forward to this when we were going to school. The same happened in other houses round about, the summer visits of the families that had left and gone away to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen or wherever.’

  John Cumming and his brothers and sisters walked four miles each morning of the academic term down the track from Kyle Rona to Torran School, which they attended with Calum MacLeod and John Nicolson, and then each weekday afternoon they walked four miles back again. In places, John Cumming would recall, the old cart path which Edward Herbert Wood had spent £395 on improving half a century earlier had all but disappeared: ‘there was no road, only bogs and sheep tracks’.

  ‘It was a long, long walk for them,’ said John Nicolson. ‘It was the same for the people from Brochel Castle in the south, except the Brochel Castle people perhaps had a better path to walk on, to and from Torran, than the Kyle Rona crowd did.’ The track did have some compensations. As John Cumming and his siblings and their neighbours from Kyle Rona lived more than three miles from school they would normally have qualified for transport provision from Inverness County Council. Local authority school transport being, in their circumstances, inconceivable – and the liberal Seumas Ruadh MacKinnon being their teacher – ‘we were never on time reaching school, we took advantage of being outside the three-mile limit. We didn’t get punished for being late.’

  Calum MacLeod left the cheerful Gaelic anarchy of Torran School in 1926 with his Celtic Society of New York medal and subscribed at the age of fifteen to the life for which his schoolday evenings and weekends spent on the croft, the hill and the water had been an apprenticeship: the full and unrelenting seasonal vocation of the adult male crofter-fisherman. He went to work on a creel and ground-net fishing boat, firstly with the men of the Graham family of Torran on their Isabella, and later, in their own vessel, the Flora, with his
father Donald and brother Ronald.

  Creel boats, as we have seen, were effectively a part-time operation. The crew of three or four would set off in the winter mornings and return by mid-afternoon. Lobster creels were – and remain – underwater traps for crustaceans. They were cages with a couple of one-way entrances, baited inside with some roughly preserved fish such as mackerel, and lowered down from a buoy through the cold water to lie on the inshore seabed. The job of the lobster fisherman was to haul them up as regularly as possible, retrieve any captured lobster, rebait the creels and return them to the sea. Creels were naturally homemade and hand-made, and damaged creels were restored onshore during the long winter evenings.

  ‘Wood would come ashore [as flotsam] mostly,’ recalled John Nicolson of Torran, ‘or the men would be over to Portree in Skye to get a packing case to make lobster creels. The creel frames were made with wood and the netting was made with what you got on the trees – willow fibre and the rest of it. So that kept them going at night-time during the winter, those that were working with lobster creels. And if he wasn’t making creels my father used to mend his herring nets during the winter, and the others were the same – that was the nets ready to go out when they started fishing for the herring.’

  The Flora, the boat which Calum would crew with his father and brother, was a substantial 35-foot vessel brought in from the traditional fishing village of Tarbert, Loch Fyne in Argyllshire. She moored alongside the Isabella and the Fladda Maid mainly in the protected southern narrows of Fladda, and in the short months of summer calm at Port an Altainn in Loch Arnish.

  When Calum MacLeod first went out into the Sound of Raasay as a stakeholder, rather than a schoolboy in a boat, lobsters were sold in Portree for roughly twelve shillings and sixpence – sixty-two and a half new pence (around £17 in the early twenty-first century) – a dozen or a shilling – five new pence – each. But although lobsters were in the 1920s comparatively plentiful, no creel – and no boat – rendered a lobster at every haul, and the lobsters from north Raasay were not always acceptable by the time they reached their distant market. ‘They used to go over with the lobsters to Portree on a Monday, maybe every fortnight,’ says John Nicolson. ‘They weren’t sold in Portree, they were sent off to Billingsgate in London and sometimes the card would come back from there with “lobsters dead” written on it, and then they got nothing for them. That didn’t happen often, but it happened.’

  Calum grew up in a mixed economy. His life was sustained by a combination of subsistence vegetables and grain from the family croft, game and domesticated meat, common seasonal fish such as herring and mackerel when the great shoals arrived, and a local social system of barter and exchange which took care of most surpluses. His life was enhanced by occasional forays into the world of cash. There were several sources of banknote and coin available to Calum MacLeod and his neighbours, other than shipping lobsters to Billingsgate. Sheep wool and the sheep themselves were sold at market, along with excess male cattle. The crews of the three ground-net fishing boats from northern Raasay, the Flora, the Isabella and the Fladda Maid, netted white fish and herring for sale in Skye or on the mainland. Three local men were employed part-time by the Royal Mail to collect the outgoing post from Kyle Rona, Fladda and Castle, deliver it to Seumas Ruadh MacKinnon at the sorting office – the middle bedroom of his raucous schoolhouse in Torran – and take the incoming mail back home again. There were also occasional council and other public-sector contracts to be had.

  And there were the whelks. Like many a Hebridean teenager before and since, Calum MacLeod supplemented his income from the whelks. Whelks are winkles in the Highland vernacular: small edible gastropods which eat seaweed and therefore flourish in the kelp forests on the shoreline of north-western Scotland. They are prized, both for their meat and as a garnish, by seafood restaurants. When Calum MacLeod collected them by hand at low tide off the shore of northern Raasay during the months of deepest winter – the whelk season is short and chilly – in the mid 1920s, the wholesalers paid him seven shillings and sixpence (equivalent to around £14 today) for two bushels of whelks. A bushel is a unit of volume equivalent in this case to eight imperial gallons. Each tiny living whelk – for empty shells had, of course, to be rejected – was plucked by hand from the thickets of weed in the January sea. Calum’s sacks or creels of whelks were then left, hopefully preserved, in the cold and the wet just below the high-tide mark until the time came to ship them by the double-bushel to market and collect his seven-and-six per brace.

  In 1927, when he was sixteen years old, Calum MacLeod had his first stab at one of the salaried and pensionable public-service posts which were so prized by men and women who were otherwise wholly dependent on the harvests of a thin soil and a fertile but unwelcoming sea. The Isabella, upon which he crewed, became the Rona Lighthouse Attending Boat.

  There had been a lighthouse on the northern tip of Rona since 1857. Its keepers were by 1927 the only inhabitants of Rona who were destined to remain there. They were served by one of the local fishing boats, which, as the Rona Lighthouse Attending Boat, was paid a retainer to take the keepers to and from Portree every two months at the start and finish of their shifts, and to keep them supplied with provisions. This job had always previously been done by one of the Rona boats, but the rapid depopulation of Rona in the 1920s led to it being offered to the Grahams of Torran. ‘They got paid extra for that,’ says John Nicolson. ‘What it was I can’t remember – it would be peanuts really, but they did this once a month so there was something coming in.’*

  This combination of subsistence farming and hired labour was sustainable only for so long as northern Raasay and Fladda maintained a certain level of population. Postmen would not be employed if there was nobody to send or receive mail. Schoolteachers would have no jobs if there were no school-children. Boats could not take to the water without crews. The social system of barter and exchange would collapse if there was nobody to barter and exchange with. Much of the fabric of crofting activity, from gathering sheep to peat cutting and harvesting, was communal and dependent upon a healthy diversity of age groups. ‘The townships of Brochel, South Arnish, North Arnish, Torran and Kyle Rona’, wrote John ‘London’ Nicolson of Torran in the late 1980s, ‘combined their labour resources like a workers’ cooperative, for potato-planting, seed-sowing and raking in the spring . . . there was a repeat performance in the autumn with potato-lifting. A neighbourly helping hand was given with haystacks or cornstacks to an older or less fortunate crofter.’

  It began to dawn on the inhabitants of northern Raasay and Fladda that since the Board of Agriculture had taken over the bulk of the Raasay Estate nobody was paying much attention to the surviving small communities north of Brochel Castle. Central and southern Raasay were being repopulated apace. Families were returning to the green lands of their grandparents. But, to the north of George Rainy’s wall, the few thousand acres around Arnish and Torran and Kyle Rona, which the authorities had recently either designated or accepted as the fitting last refuge and rural ghetto of all of the native inhabitants of the archipelago, were now, apparently, of little interest. In the space of a couple of decades northern Raasay and its remnant population had become invisible. The road, and everything else, stopped at Castle.

  It was a strange, inverted kind of injustice. Everybody had resented the forced overpopulation of the district. But nobody had suggested that, outside Rona itself, the answer to over-population was depopulation. Everybody was pleased that the Raasay Raiders had succeeded in reopening the bulk of the island. Nobody had imagined that this revolution would result in the disenfranchisement of the families they left behind. Barren, stony Rona had historically been a special case. The solution which was applicable to its hungry population was quite unsuitable to the meadows of Fladda. Those families which had been in Arnish and Torran before the MacLeod and Rainy clearances, and many of those who had not, wanted little more in the remainder of the twentieth century than the freedom to live their
lives and work their land, assisted by the modest public facilities which were due to them as tax- and rate-payers. They had never asked to be expunged from the map.

  On 1 July 1931, when Calum MacLeod was in his twentieth year, the roads committee of the County Council of the County of Inverness met in the Highland capital. Its distinguished members had before them a petition dated 3 June 1931. The petition was ‘by residenters in Raasay appealing for the construction of a Road from Brochel Castle to the Island of Fladda – a distance of 3½ miles or thereby’. The roads committee meeting minutes noted that this matter had been tossed back westwards to Skye District Council for their ‘observations’.

  Inverness County Council’s roads committee was, in the 1920s and 1930s, a busy and important set of men. The arrival of the motorcar in the Highlands and – to a considerably lesser extent – the Islands of Scotland had presented the local government of this vast and often intractable land mass with a seemingly infinite series of challenges. The Highlands had been historically famous for their inaccessibility. The men who had built the first proper marching roads and paved bridle paths in the area, men such as the eighteenth-century General George Wade, Member of Parliament and extraordinary military engineer, were famous for it. Their 200-year-old highways were frequently still in use and still bore their name – a ‘Wade road’ remains a familiar trademark in the twenty-first century Highlands. But General Wade and his successors had not catered for motorised transport. That became the task of Inverness County Council after 1894, when the Local Government Act of that year transferred responsibility for the maintenance of public highways from the Inverness County Road Trust to the rural district authority.