I was drifting going no place.
Hypnotized by sunshine maybe,
barking back at seals along the beach.
Skipping flat stones on the water,
but much too wise for sand castles.
My castles were across the sea
or still within my mind.
Listen To The Warm – Rod McKuen
Within the anguished debate on human migration one place is largely forgotten. This is a landscape beyond the ken of most Britons south of the Scottish border. This is a land of boulders and rocks, a lot of water and few inhabitants. In winter it is a wild and inhospitable place but in spring it is transformed into an enchanting paradise for those who crave tranquillity. Hidden from view is a turbulent past that is largely missing from the contemporary debate. The Outer Hebrides are a string of islands off the north west coast of Scotland, the last before crossing the Atlantic westwards to Labrador. In more worlds than the physical they sit on the periphery of Britain.
What may be unfamiliar to all but a few travelers today is the eviction of thousands of Hebrideans from their homes by estate owners or their factors with the ‘Highland Clearances’ in the mid-eighteenth century. Tenant farmers and crofters with a tradition of land occupancy behind them were evicted in the name of agricultural development. Some landlords were callous in their disregard for the evicted. Many of these unfortunate souls were shipped off forcibly to Canada and the United States. Why am I not reading about demands for reparation from those Hebrideans’ descendants in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Montana? I have not seen any yet. I wonder now if some of the folk I met when I travelled through these Canadian provinces over fifty years ago were descendants of Hebridean refugees.
“Tyrannical Victorian exploitation”; “rich aristocrats abused the local people”; “inhabitants forced out of their homes” are some of the familiar accusations written as newspaper headlines topping articles on our culture wars surrounding the British Empire. On my visits I have read about the slave trade in the West Indies, the Raj in India and the treatment of the Aborigines in Australia. Being as I am British, some like to make me feel guilty for the acts of my forefathers in the Empire. The apologists demand reparations. And then I recall from another persecuted race came Golda Meir, a prime minister of Israel, who once said:
“One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.”
I believe this to be true and a sentiment worthy of reflection as I write about a small portion of land on the outer edge of Britain. For here in the north west is a complex history peopled by Vikings, the Scottish clans of Macdonald and MacLeod and the Scottish Government (there is nothing unique about the Salmonds and the Sturgeons when they were in office, their predecessors were equally slippery). Worthy Victorian gentry and rapacious industrialists played a part too. We cannot undo their lives. This is the story of the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides.
The clearances did more to shape the socio-economic development of the Hebrides than any other subsequent event. They caused pain and bitterness for families forced off their land who resented unscrupulous landlords for years after. Following the Jacobite uprising in 1745 clan chiefs were denied their own armies. Fewer young men were killed off in battle and family sizes grew. The population in the Outer Hebrides nearly doubled in the years after the rebellion. Crofting was encouraged to attract families onto the land. This was due also partly to the successful introduction of the potato. Yet there were insufficient jobs for everyone and clan chiefs persuaded many local people to emigrate. However, there were some thoughtful landowners who invested in a range of other commercial enterprises that offered employment. Fishing was one activity. The production of soda ash from kelp was another. (Kelp is a versatile resource. I shall mention it again when I describe the current commerce of Harris.) The boom in fishing and kelp was short-lived however. The market for these products declined and landowners contracted their operations. They narrowed their farming activities to keeping sheep which at this time were a lucrative resource. Clearly there was a reduced need for labour. After Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in 1815 a new generation of returning soldiers found few employment options. The unlucky ones and their families were evicted. The potato famine in 1846 was the last straw for many who upsticked and left the islands forever.
Noble industrialists and aristocrats who owned the Isle of Harris and other Western Isles of Scotland were the latest of centuries of outsiders to be attracted to this wild and barren landscape. All had ambitions but were frustrated by the land’s unwillingness to yield to their desires.
In 1844 James Matheson (of Jardine Matheson & Co of Hong Kong, a man who was made wealthy with his partner William Jardine from the trade in Chinese opium – another dubious activity to set modern sensibilities aflutter), was one who bought the Isle of Lewis to the north of Harris. Almost immediately he perpetrated what many would say was an act of cruel and inhumane brutality. He cleared the island of over five hundred families and forced them to emigrate to Canada. He was only one of many landowners in Scotland who aided the eviction of farmers from their land.
In Matheson’s defence it must be said that whilst he owned Lewis he did give employment through building roads, a castle and social projects. He also provided famine relief to his tenants when potato blight caused the staple island crop to fail in 1846/47. Yet his hardheartedness and unwillingness to find alternative employment for other crofters changed the social structure of the islands from then on. At least Catherine Murray the Countess of Dunmore gave financial assistance to those she evicted and paid to emigrate. The countess had inherited a large estate on Harris in 1845 on the death of her husband. She made some attempts to establish some foundations for the threatened community by building a school. She also took an interest in one industry that offered a living for some Hebrideans, that of the production of Harris Tweed.
In 1918 an industrialist named William Hesketh Lever bought the Isle of Lewis for £143,000. In 1919, Baron Leverhulme, as William is better known, bought the Isle of Harris for £36,000. His plan was to start up a herring fishing industry based out of the harbour at Stornoway on Lewis. The local people on Lewis were wary of Leverhulme. Being Gaelic-speaking crofters of an independent mind many Hebrideans were subsistence farmers and it was not in their nature to be herded into organised communities like Leverhulme’s soap makers in Lancashire. For the indigenous crofting community land was not an asset to be bought nor sold but an inheritance a family had the right to pass on from one generation to the next. Some clung on to their way of life and were rewarded later in the century by William Gladstone who brought The Crofters’ Holding Act to their help in getting security of their land.
On Harris, however, Leverhulme’s desire to industrialise some communities had a more favourable reception. The people here possibly had a more worldly view than their cousins on Lewis. After all, the landscape on Harris is a tougher one than that on Lewis. The former’s terrain is largely devoid of cultivable ground save the thin strip of machair on the littoral. Anyone who could promise prosperity from work on the island might be regarded sympathetically, especially as it did not involve the crofters investing their own money.
Harris (its name comes from a Norse word for ‘high land’) is hilly, barren and grey. The landscape is made up of rock, peat bog and heather and is largely treeless. Today ribbons of narrow roads snake around the fringes of the island. The hinterland has a bedrock of impenetrable Lewisian gneiss. I find it ironic that despite Harris lacking any prettiness in its interior landscape one of its principal economy drivers today is based on tourism. Yet what the land lacks in beauty is made up by the western shores.
As our travelling companion says: “Beaches and yet more glorious beaches. Losgaintir, Seilebost, Sgarastaigh, Horgabost. They are forever changing, shifting and evolving. The natural 'artwork' I found this year on the sand at Losgaintir astounded me. An arrangement of sand and peat particles left by the receding tide, that is all, but the exquisiteness and the brief existence of the result leaves a deep impression.” These expansive beaches are formed of crushed shells giving a glistening whiteness. A visitor to Losgaintir will be rewarded with astounding sights across the beach to the mountains in the north. Undulating layers of pale grey, blues, turquoise, greens and yellows stretch from wide on the left to deep along the estuary to the right. And when we ventured into those mountains in the north, close to Loch Scourst and found a mountain that is home to golden eagles we saw one, solitarily gliding in the glen in search of an evening meal.
Wild places tend not to attract many people. The Vikings raided here around 800 A.D. and some had settled by 850 when a Norse king, Ketill Bjornson, who was descriptively nicknamed Flatnose, ruled the land. In the ensuing years Harris and the Western Isles as in much of Britain came under varying occupying adventurers. I am once again reminded of modern-day Britons who protest at immigration in the twenty-first century and who choose to ignore that our culture, our history and our influencers have always come from overseas.
For all its isolation on the periphery of Britain Harris has had a past full of distinctive people.
Brawny clans of Macdonalds, MacNeils and MacLeods lived and fought for supremacy here. Charles Edward Stuart, otherwise known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, escaped from Skye to Harris in 1746. Large estates including that of the Countess Dunmore boosted the Harris Tweed business.
Our travelling companions know these islands well. They have often talked about them with a fondness that I could not fathom from their descriptions. Barra, South Uist and Harris clearly hold a power of them and others who return each year in springtime. This power that the Isle of Harris has over its visitors is what interests me. My travels through many landscapes usually reveal a tight bond that people build with their land. Some may have an attraction to a climate or a particular terrain that rewards them with abundant harvest of food or wine. Then there are the landscapes that do all they can to break human souls and a will to survive yet the people stay on. They remain for the oldest and best of reasons; because it is home.
On the surface Harris today offers few opportunities for commerce and therefore few employment opportunities for the local population. Agriculture provides lean pickings. There is little industry to provide work for young people. Shops and schools are thin on the ground. Theatres and sports stadiums are absent. There is some flora and fauna but little to attract international birders, botanists and zoologists. (There is the ubiquitous ground-dwelling cuckoo, one with an extended family near our lodge. Their daily quadrophonic repertoire of song around the lochs and rocks echoed through the silence.) Seals and otters like this place yet this does not make it unique. To be fair to the place there is that golden eagle and the machair.
Yet during our time on the island, we encountered an assortment of visitors from Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and France. They all bring a most valuable and essential commodity: cash. Harris is a long way from Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin and Paris. It is even a long way from London and Glasgow. I started to wonder why the Belgians, Dutch, Germans and French come here. Many are loners, looking for solitude as they motor or cycle around the narrow roads. It seems to me that these Europeans from the mainland see Brexit from a different perspective from us islanders. I for one thought Brexit would be a terrible mistake and I believe it has been so far. It could be that these mainlanders visiting Harris don’t like their version of ‘Europe’ either and they come to the Outer Hebrides to experience a wilderness untrammelled by contemporary ways of living. So that is why they come; to leave behind and blot out the insanities and the inanities of their twenty first century European lives.
Life is lived slowly here. As our companion says of her love for the Outer Hebrides, “There doesn't seem to be much point in hurrying, somehow - simply allowing plenty of time to get anywhere or do anything is a better way to be. The roads cannot be negotiated safely at speed, so speed is out. I feel a better person for accepting this.”
Also, a good person when in another’s country can meet with the locals and understand their land, their culture and their perspectives. In the bars and cafés there are Americans too. What do they come for? Some have visited, returned and stayed because they are captivated by the peaceful lifestyle that can be attained easily in this place; they buy a bothy and hang out in the quietude. One even founded a new whisky distillery.
After a day or two on the island I became more aware of the two commercial enterprises that may well lead Harris into a stable future; Harris Tweed and whisky. Sheep are an undervalued animal in Britain today. (This summer some sheep farmers are driven to desperation by low prices and are burning their flock’s fleeces because the cost of getting them to market is higher than the £0.40 per kilogram of wool offered to them). As more Britons shun the eating of red meat, they are matched in numbers by those buying their clothes from Vietnam and China, despite the high environmental cost of importing these products. I have some sympathy with climate change protesters and in particular the Just Stop Oil pressure group but if they changed the emphasis of their protest to lowering our food import carbon footprint, I believe they would attract more followers. The once common-place woollen jumper past generations grew up valuing is now, for many, replaced by Lycra. Harris Tweed uses wool produced in the Outer Hebrides. The industry that has built up uses cloth handwoven by local people who also dye and spin the wool. Keen interest shown by the Countess of Dunmore has been followed by the cloth becoming fashionable again in the present century. Leading fashion brands in London, New York and even South Korea are marketing Harris Tweed as a trendy, and to use the overworked word ‘sustainable’, material. This is good news as I support the production of British clothing made from natural materials and even better news for the Hebrideans. The future of this industry looks bright.
The Scotch whisky industry has been through many of degrees of popularity. In the late twentieth century a number of distilleries were closed or mothballed. Some were bought by conglomerates, some by Japanese companies and some just faded away. An enterprising American musician, Anderson Bakewell, discovered the Isle of Harris one day, and like some before him, fell for the island’s charms. To quote the distillery’s website, “he believed that the rare and elusive spirit of this island could be captured in a bottle and shared with the world”. The ‘Hearach’ will be the first single malt whisky that the distillery produces and is released in September 2023. Local people work in the creative process in Tarbert on Harris. As with all new whisky distilleries it is some years after the processes are started before they can sell the proper thing. Like other founders of new distilleries before them the team at Tarbert immediately started to make and distribute Harris gin. Needing little resting time after distillation it has quickly become popular. Sugar Kelp has found an updated use after the previous industrial use fell away; local kelp gathered from the sea lochs around Harris is used as a botanical ingredient.
So wool and whisky are leading the Isle of Harris out of the post-covid economic doldrums. They provide employment for a growing number of Hebrideans, bring more foreigners to savor their benefits which will in turn underpin the tourist business. I just hope the government are not tempted to widen the roads. (There is little risk of this as the government cannot even fund and provide a modern ferry service between the islands which the locals depend on.)
On Harris there are no reminders of our culture wars, the Russian war and inadequate and self-serving politicians in Edinburgh and Westminster. There are no neon signs nor advertising hoardings nor graffiti. What there is has a plentiful supply; the sound of silence. Our spring days were calm. The sea loch in front of our lodge provides a playground for over thirty grey seals. They frolic and tumble noiselessly in the water then flop onto the rocks to demonstrate that idling in the morning sun is highly recommended.
The quiet of the land is matched by the quiet on the beaches. There is not a sound from some women walking wolfhounds, beachcombers collecting and bathers shivering. Once you leave the beaches you then discover the machair. Confined to some Atlantic coasts of Ireland and Scotland the machair is a narrow strip of land behind the beaches, underlaid with crushed shells and overlaid with a thin covering of peaty soil. Wild flowers abound providing a palette of colours to please the artist, walker and photographer. It is ironic however that in our lodge the coffee-table book of photographs by a local photographer was entirely made up of monochrome images. For me it is forgivable to see this landscape in black and white.
Come the autumn and winter months, gales and storms crash across the rocks and the heather, whipping up the sea and driving salt-laden rain into every crevice. A house has to withstand ferocious weather. Gardens are annihilated. That is why Harris is largely treeless. If you love trees and hedgerows – as I do for all their rich textures of varying shades of green and visual beauty; if you love to explore castles, country houses and gardens – you will need to find another place as you will not find them here. There is, however, one vital commodity of life the human mind does need and it is in short supply in many places and for much of the population. There is an abundance of it on Harris. In springtime and in summer it is all around. That sound of silence. No wind, no rain and no traffic. No trains nor planes. No noise and no crowds. There is an absence of all those features that blunt our senses regularly.
The poet and musician Rod McKuen wrote in the nineteen sixties of “love, loneliness and the alienation of our present era”. Back then he sang about the human need for contact. Contact not just with other minds but with sensual experiences found in nature and wilderness. I believe that it is easy to feel a sense of alienation today not just in the cities but also as we rush more and more into a human designed catastrophe within the natural world. I retain my optimism by enveloping myself within my castles of home, family, music, books and green countryside.
This land of Harris gives little else but peace. I am with Rod, my castles will remain across the sea.
