Calum's Road Read online

  ‘Fladda was just served by a branch of the road going to Kyle Rona,’ said Calum’s brother Charles. ‘At about a mile and a half up that track, there’s a branch going down to Fladda. I can still pick it out among the heather and the rocks. But it was very inconvenient, of course, for the Fladda people. I reckon the council decided in about 1949 they would just make a track, a footpath, directly along the shore.

  ‘They had only small sums of money available – I think about three sums of £70 [roughly £1,700 in today’s terms] a year in all. But £70 would go a long way at that time. And we were paid by the hour, I think, when we started it off. Calum had been looking after the earlier footpath for years. The roads surveyor came along, and he just showed us roughly the way they wanted the track made through Torran straight on to Fladda.

  ‘It started at the old mission building at Torran, and Calum and I worked there for three winters, I think we started in 1949, that would be 1949/50, 1950/51 and 1951/52, three winters. And each year we got £70, or £35 each, so the track cost £210. Which was not so bad for us in 1950. In 1950, one pound would go a long way.

  ‘There had been a rough track going through Torran but we improved that, we widened it a bit, to about three foot wide. It couldn’t take a cart, the actual path being only about three foot wide. But you had a grass verge on each side, probably a foot, so we would have to clear an area about five foot wide.

  ‘We put some hard stuff in the middle and you had a grass verge of about a foot on each side, where that was possible – in some places it wouldn’t work because there were too many rocks. It wasn’t too bad when we left it and for years after that was used a lot and was very passable.’

  John Nicolson of Torran would consider the Torran to Fladda coastal route to be one of the MacLeod family’s unsung achievements. ‘Everybody’s all talking about Calum’s road from Brochel to Arnish,’ he said, ‘and what a terrific feat, right enough, and everybody agrees about that. But I think something that people have forgotten about is that Calum engineered the road from the schoolhouse in Torran to Fladda.

  ‘I wasn’t at home at the time, but he and his brother Charles made that road. The roads engineer in Skye at the time, he went over, and they walked where the path is today between the schoolhouse in Torran and Fladda and his comment to Calum was, “If you can make a road there, you’re welcome to carry on with it!” And he gave them an estimate of what it would cost.

  ‘That track itself was a feat, when you look at the terrain that they were going through. Although they were only making a footpath there, it was even worse than the land he had to cross from Brochel Castle to Arnish. He and Charles engineered and made it themselves, and that path today [2005] is very nearly as good – except in one or two places where the rain has got the better of it because the drains haven’t been kept cleaned and nobody is looking after it – it is nearly as good as the day it was made. A lot of people don’t know about this, because the road from Brochel Castle to Arnish overshadowed everything else that Calum did.’

  Calum MacLeod was firefighting the decline of northern Raasay with buckets and a hand-pump. Subsidising his new footpath between Torran and Fladda was no more than a rare conciliatory gesture by Inverness County Council. In October 1950 the Department of Agriculture, as Raasay’s state landlord was then known, ‘intimated to Inverness County Council that they were prepared to undertake the widening and diversion of a section of the road and footpath between Brochel and Tarbet [half a mile south of Arnish]. The future maintenance of the road and footpath would be the responsibility of the local authority and the number of people to be served would be approximately 30.’ But the county surveyor recommended to the county’s roads committee that ‘this road and footpath be not taken over as a Public Highway’, and the roads committee happily agreed.

  At the same meeting in Inverness the county council was also presented with yet another petition requesting a short footbridge to Fladda. It met the same fate as so many of its predecessors. It was volleyed with unreturnable force back to the district committee in Skye and was never heard of again.

  Twelve years later, in 1962, Calum MacLeod himself raised with the local authority the possibility of a Fladda causeway. Lieutenant Colonel Neil McLean, DSO, MP, replied from the Scottish Office in London that ‘The Engineer who visited Fladda in this connection has now reported that some 1,500 cubic yards of rock would have to be put down to ensure that the crossing could be made by foot at all states of the tide and he estimates the cost of the work at £210s to £3 per cubic yard [around £35 to £40]. This means that the total cost would certainly equal and perhaps exceed that of a footbridge and we have already felt obliged to dismiss the latter project because of the prohibitive cost in relation to use.’

  The prospect of land, electricity, public services and paid work in southern Raasay – where in the 1950s a forestry plantation scheme was started – Skye and further afield leached away the people of Fladda, Kyle Rona, Torran and Arnish. That two-mile hiatus of empty moorland and peat bog between Brochel Castle and Arnish loomed like a canyon between the future and the past. ‘After the Second World War’, said John Nicolson of Torran, ‘people came back. We all came home, most of us came home after the war. And I reckon myself that, if there had been a road or a road was in the offing when the boys came home, things could have been a lot better in the north end of Raasay.’

  Ironically, it was the same North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board that refused to connect northern Raasay to the national grid which gave John Nicolson his first job away from Torran: ‘After I got demobbed, in ’47, I came home to Raasay, to Torran. My father was alive then, and my mother, and Alec, my brother. So I worked on the croft for that summer, giving everybody a hand, the same as I did before I ever went away. And I stayed at home for August and September after the harvest – and then I went away to work on the Hydro schemes in Glen Affric.

  ‘After that I joined the lighthouse service in Orkney, and I then came back to Portree in Skye. I think it was around then that I began to be aware of some chronic decline in the north of Raasay. My own father died, and you then start to think, “What’s going to happen now?” I knew fine that the tradition was in the old days that the oldest person in the family got the croft, so I didn’t have a look in really. So after I got demobbed, I got married and went away. I knew fine, that was me finished as far as the croft was concerned, unless we could get another one. And there was no work. There was no other work.’

  John’s older brother Murdo returned from the prison camp Stalag AB at the end of the war and in 1948 married a woman named Jessie MacLeod from Balachuirn in central Raasay. Murdo Nicolson also joined the lighthouse service, working at Cape Wrath and the Rona light until Murdo’s father died in 1954 and Murdo and his wife Jessie moved back to the family’s Torran croft. Their return with a school-aged boy revived Torran School, which had been closed due to an absence of pupils. Lexie MacLeod had been tutoring her young daughter Julia at home in Arnish, but when the family of Murdo and Jessie Nicolson arrived the education department of Inverness County Council re-employed Calum’s wife as schoolmistress, and in November 1955 they opened the schoolroom doors once more.

  ‘We started off with two of us,’ said Julia MacLeod Allan, ‘and the most pupils that were there in my time, up until 1962, was four. It was mostly part-time education, something like ten a.m. until one p.m., but when there were the four of us it went on until three o’clock – with breaks.’ Jessie Nicolson would bring up four boys, and the youngest two would also be the last students to be taught by Lexie MacLeod, or anybody else, at Torran School.

  For a short time in the 1950s the situation in this fragile, neglected peninsula seemed once again to stabilise. There were three families totalling twelve people occupying three houses in Fladda. There was Murdo and Jessie Nicolson and their sons in Torran, as well as Murdo’s widowed mother and his brother Alec. The schoolhouse there was inhabited by Murdo Nicolson’s sister Chrissie, her husband and
her brother-in-law. There were three houses in Arnish, one of them occupied by Calum, Lexie and Julia MacLeod, another by Calum’s parents, Donald and Julia, and his brother and sister Charles and Bella, and the third, on the brae of North Arnish, by their MacLeod cousins, a family of five.

  ‘It wasn’t really all that quiet a life,’ said Jessie Nicolson. ‘Not really – there was always somebody coming and going, especially as we were in between the two villages of Fladda and Arnish. There was always somebody calling. And of course, you’re busy when you’re bringing up four boys in a dangerous place like Torran. It’s not an easy life, and you couldn’t relax because it was dangerous with the rocks and being so near the seashore. Of course, when we got them to bed at night, that’s when the work was done. There was no television, but we had the radio right enough. Och, it was great – we were quite happy. Nobody moaned or complained. We just took everything in our stride. We were happy with our own wee world, as you might say.’

  In 1958 the MacLeod family left North Arnish for Eyre in the deep south of Raasay, reducing at a stroke the north’s population by a further 17 per cent to twenty-four people. They had run the small local post office, and after their departure that franchise was passed on to Jessie and Murdo Nicolson in Torran. Calum MacLeod was by then the only postman serving northern Raasay, collecting the mailbag three times a week from a mail van at Brochel, carrying it on his shoulder along the broken footpath to be sorted at Torran, and then delivering to Fladda and to his family at Arnish.*

  Conversations over the parcel- and envelope-sort at Torran post office were possibly unique in the annals of the Royal Mail. ‘Calum took so much interest in what had happened on the island in the past,’ said Jessie Nicolson. ‘The history of Raasay, you know – he could go back to when Raasay was in private hands – when a Mr Wood had Raasay, and he had stories about Rainy too, about what a bad, ruthless factor he had. Very interesting stories like that. I’m sorry now that I didn’t pay more attention. But this was what we used to talk about, when we had the post office, when we were getting the Fladda mail sorted – this was the conversation most of the time: the nineteenth century and Rainy and Wood, while we were sorting the mail-order clothes for Fladda. Nice times to look back on, very nice times to think back on.’

  Apart from the postal delivery and one or two courtings, the north remained as separated from the south of Raasay in the 1950s as when the landowner Rainy had built his wall almost a century earlier. The north, with that wasteland between its crofts and the adopted road at Brochel, looked instead westward, over the water to Skye. ‘As far as the north end and the south end of Raasay were concerned’, said John Nicolson, ‘they were two different places. The fishing boats from the north end of Raasay went to Portree. We got all our stores from Portree. The only time you went to the south end to get stores was if it was bad weather and you couldn’t get to Portree – more often than not it would be to get tobacco for the old folk, because being without tobacco was worse than being in jail!’

  The administrative and shopping centre of Portree in Skye was five sea miles from Loch Arnish. Calum MacLeod’s job as boatman to the Rona light required him to ferry the keepers to and from Skye and Rona every two weeks to work their staggered, overlapping shifts. He had also to keep them in supplies, which enabled him also to pick up the shopping for the north of Raasay. ‘We got all our supplies from Portree,’ said Jessie Nicolson. ‘Calum had the lighthouse boat, and we got all our supplies from Portree, we had no dealings with the south end. We used to say “the north end doesn’t belong to the south end!” The lighthouse boat was our lifeline. Calum would bring over everything that we needed really. We posted our orders over to the shopkeepers in Portree, and Calum and Donald and Calum Tom from Fladda, or whoever was available, they collected our groceries for us. And then you had to improvise, you know, make do with lots of things.’

  This maritime provision of supplies to the district was a lengthy process which was undertaken at all times of year and in most weather conditions. It was more than a quick hop across the Sound of Raasay. A typical run might involve the boat in a one-hour voyage from the Fladda narrows to Portree, then a two-hour crossing to Rona, then a two-hour return to Portree, concluded by another one-hour return to Fladda and Loch Arnish. At every stage, of course, men and supplies had to be embarked and unloaded.

  ‘There were three men on Rona,’ Julia MacLeod Allan explained. ‘They were there for four weeks on, two weeks off, and my father would take the new person out from Portree with all the gear that went out to the lighthouse. He would go from Portree to Rona, take the “going home” lightkeeper back to Portree, collect our provisions and bring them back into Loch Arnish, drop them off into the dinghy there, and then drop the rest off in Fladda. So, we got that every fortnight, weather permitting – and the Portree merchants J. & R. MacLeod permitting, Malcolm Gillies permitting, Lipton permitting! Mother used to write wee things like “or nearest” on the order, because if it didn’t come, you were stuck, with no alternative. If you were wanting strawberry jelly, for instance, you would have to add “or nearest”, because you wanted some jelly even if it wasn’t strawberry. Any jelly is better than no jelly! She also had an account with the department store Copland and Lyle in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow. Copland’s was probably the equivalent of . . . Harrods is maybe pushing it a little bit, but it was quite “up there”.

  ‘Dad was always on the go,’ continued his daughter, ‘always rushing hither and thither when the time and weather allowed. He took things personally; he took everything to heart; he saw almost everything as his own responsibility. Because of their croft and animal commitments, Mum and he could not holiday together. Dad usually went to Nigg on the north-east coast and stayed there with his brother Ronald. He saw more marvels between Raasay and Nigg than others did when travelling the world! And collecting various boats for the Northern Lighthouse Board took him to places such as Barra in the Outer Hebrides and Macduff in Banff.

  ‘I remember that at Macduff he was held up while technicians worked on his boat, the Janet Mackenzie. She was moored alongside several fishing boats and he had to cross over many decks to get to the harbourside and his hotel and his cups of tea. The fishery crews were so nice and chatty – but, mysteriously, none of them offered him a cup of tea. Only later did he discover that they were all Closed Brethren.’*

  The insularity of northern Raasay had, since the nineteenth century, been bolstered by the fact that its children got all of their schooling at Torran. Before the Second World War a standard regimen applied to all small rural state schools, instructing and enabling them to supply a basic all-subject junior/secondary education to scholars between the ages of five and fourteen years. There was a possibility of a fuller term of secondary education, but for many it was a very remote possibility indeed.

  In the Highlands and Islands of Scotland only some towns offered that extended secondary education. After 1918 travelling expenses or a lodging allowance became available for pupils from remote areas who had passed the examination qualifying them for secondary education, and some children could also apply for a bursary. To accommodate those children residential school hostels were built in such parishes as Dingwall, Inverness, Golspie, Dornoch, Fort William . . . and Portree in Skye.

  ‘When we came to twelve years of age’, said John Nicolson, ‘the qualifying papers arrived at the school, and you had to pass the qualifying before you went to Portree High School. Now, all the time that I was in Torran School, there was only one person that went to Portree and that was Sheila Cumming, who was in the same class as myself. You needed to go for a grant, and to go and ask for anything like that in my young days was unthought of . . . if my father or anyone asked for money! Oh gosh me, that was the last thing on earth you’d do – to go to ask anybody to help you. It was hard enough for them to go to the bank to get five pounds or ten pounds to buy herring nets or other things they needed for their livelihood. But to go and send me or anybody else to Portre
e to get their education . . . no!’

  By the time that Calum and Lexie MacLeod’s daughter, Julia, reached the age of twelve at Torran School, legislation had changed. The 1945 Education Act (Scotland) had raised the school leaving age to fifteen years, the last three or more years of which were to be served in a specialised secondary school. That additional tier of tutelage was both free of charge and compulsory.

  And so in 1962 Julia MacLeod ‘got a letter saying, “Thou shalt have two skirts, four blouses, one tie, one dressing gown . . . And so when I was twelve all that was packed in a trunk and shipped off to Portree High School, along with me.’ She was dismally unhappy: ‘I’ll never get over the move to Portree, it was awful. I don’t think anyone is ready at twelve to sever all ties. I became one of sixty-seven girls, having been the only girl in school all through my primary.’ Julia’s misery at being wrenched from the small, Gaelic-speaking extended family of northern Raasay, transferred from part-time to full-time education and tipped into a crowded, suburban, impersonal, rowdy, entirely unfamiliar and often Anglophone school was compounded by the fact that she was hardly ever able to get back to Arnish. The Caledonian MacBrayne steamer timetables did not offer a daily crossing between Skye and Raasay, and nor was one provided on Friday night and Monday morning. Her predicament was complicated further by the absence of a motor road between Brochel and her home.

  At the start of their holidays a car would taxi Julia MacLeod and a succession of the Nicolson boys from the ferry pier in southern Raasay up to Brochel, where they would be met by parents and from where they would walk. Even that arrangement could break down. On one occasion in winter a heavy snowfall blocked the adopted road, and Julia and her schoolmates were left on the high moor south of Glame, some miles from Brochel and even further from South Arnish. The children walked northwards with their suitcases before seeking shelter in the lee of a rock, because the snow had obscured the margins of the open road, and because they understood the mortal danger of losing their bearings in a blizzard. They were discovered there some hours later by Calum MacLeod.