Harris in History and Legend E-Book

Bill Lawson

• Herausgeber: Origin
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 402

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Occupying the southernmost part of the largest of the Western Isles, Harris boasts some of the most ruggedly beautiful and unspoilt landscape in Scotland. In this book, Bill Lawson, who has lived on Harris for many years, not only introduces the reader to the events that have shaped the island's history, but also dips into the local legends, traditions and tales, as well as his own personal reminiscences. The result is a unique insight into Harris and the life and industry of its people through the ages. 'There is no greater authority on the history of Harris and Lewis alive than Bill Lawson' - The Herald

Leseprobe

HARRIS IN HISTORY AND LEGEND

For Chris

This edition published in 2024 by

Origin, an imprint of Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

First Published in 2002 by John Donald

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Bill Lawson 2002

The right of Bill Lawson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 83983 064 8

eBook ISBN: 978 1 78885 735 2

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typesetting and prepress origination by Brinnoven Printed and bound by Ashford Press, Gosport

CONTENTS

Prologue

Part One – The Machair

Part Two – Tarasaigh

Part Three – Caol na Hearadh

Part Four: Tairbeart and na Baigh

Part Five – The Forest and Scalpaigh

Part Six – Hiort (St Kilda)

Epilogue

Appendix

References

Picture Credits

Maps

Index of Persons

Index of Main Topics

Index of Places

PROLOGUE

Clach MhicLeoid (MacLeod’s Stone)

On the wild headland of Aird Nisabost, on the west coast of Harris, above a pure white Atlantic shell-beach, stands Clach MhicLeoid – MacLeod’s Stone. The name is, of course, a recent one, as the stone is far older than the MacLeods, or their Viking ancestors. It is a relic of Neolithic times, which in Harris were about 5000 years ago, one of a set of three still standing along the western side of the island. Clach MhicLeoid stands about 12 feet high and the others, at Sgarasta and on the island of Tarasaigh, about 6 feet, and they were probably erected as calendar stones and as religious sites.

1. Clach MhicLeoid

But why is it called MacLeod’s stone? The most likely answer to that is that at the time when the MacLeod chiefs owned Harris, most of the people, of the south end at least, lived on the machair and the off-shore islands. When the chief wanted to gather them, for rent payment or for war, the Aird Nisabost stone was used as a central gathering point, visible from all the area around – and that is how it got the name MacLeod’s Stone.

The Standing Stone had watched over much of the history of Harris. In its youth – perhaps even before it was hewn out of the rock – the Beaker people were making their homes across on Tarasaigh. That could have been about 5000 years ago, more or less, and still little shards of their pottery appear on the shore there, eroded out from the sand-banks. Then came the Bronze Age and the Iron Age – the age of the duns, or forts, some for refuge and others as watch-towers. Chains of the latter type are found all along the coasts, and speak of settled communities, sufficiently in touch with each other to send word of approaching danger – danger caused by an apparent deterioration in the climate and consequent competition for the best remaining land. The Stone had seen many a fire-message passed from the dun on Tarasaigh to the dun at Na Buirgh, alerting the machair people to a danger approaching from the sea.

Somewhere about 500 AD the stone would have seen the arrival of the first Christian missionaries, making their way up the west coast from bases in Iona and Lismore, only to be wiped out again by the raids of the Vikings in the 800s – wiped out except for the testimony of the place-names given by the Vikings, such as Pabaigh – ‘Priest’s Island’. The Vikings came first to raid, and then to settle as a ruling class, and the Stone remembered the days when the Norse galleys swept through the Sound of Tarasaigh, and the wrecking of one galley on an off-shore rock, still known as Bo Uspaig – the rock of Uspak, the Viking.

In 1266, the Islands were formally ceded to the Scottish Crown, and a half-Norse, half-Scottish lordship arose there – the Lordship of the Isles. Here the descendants of Somerled the Viking established for themselves a realm to the west of Scotland, and for many years virtually independent of Scotland. Subject to them were other families with Viking roots, among them the MacLeods – descendants of Leod – who ruled Harris, and had given their name to the Stone. The Lordship had its own court, its own judges, its own bards, and formed a centre of culture independent of, and in many ways in opposition to, that based on the east coast of Scotland. As the Scottish kings developed a better grip on their mainland possessions, so they began to take more account of the Lordship, and when the then Lord of the Isles entered into the Treaty of Ardtornish, by which he and the English king were to partition Scotland between themselves, the struggle between the Lordship and the Scottish Crown reached its final stage, resulting in the downfall and destruction of the Lordship.

In 1494 John, the last Lord of the Isles, submitted to James IV of Scotland, but although the Scots Kings had been able to defeat the Lordship, they were unable to administer it. The various clans, which had been held together in a degree of peaceful government under the Lordship, were left without central control, and the period of inter-clan warfare began, fomented for their own reasons by the Scots Kings. A lasting symbol of the break-up of the power of the Lordship can be seen all over the Islands, as clan chiefs, who had hitherto been buried in Iona, the Lordship’s religious centre, now began to assert their independence by building churches for their own family burial, like the MacLeod chiefs with their new Church at Roghadal.

As the clans jostled to fill the power vacuum left by the Lordship, so their raids on each other’s lands began. The Stone could remember the great raid on Tarasaigh in 1544, but there had been many others, some now forgotten, and others remembered only in snatches of poetry or in sayings. Gradually the clans had achieved a form of peace and their tenure of lands became fixed. The chiefs, who had relied on their clansmen for support in battle, now began to look to them as a source of income, as they turned to farming in the more settled times.

The Stone remembered some of the great gatherings in the early 1700s, when MacLeod of Harris had gathered all his tenants together to pay their rent and to renew their leases. The settlement pattern then was very different from that of today. The modern centres of Tairbeart and an t-Ob were merely a few houses on the shores, the rugged east coast, the Bays, was virtually empty, and the population was concentrated on the west machair shore, the off-shore islands, a few sheltered spots among the hills of North Harris, and around the religious centre of Roghadal.

The main centres of population were on the islands – Pabaigh, Bearnaraigh and Tarasaigh – where the land is more fertile than on the mainland, and on the machair strip running from Taobh Tuath to Losgaintir. Each village, in addition to its own town-lands, had a grazing area for airighean, or summer shielings, and these occupied most of the Bays, and large tracts of the North Harris hills, among which were also located the homes of the foresters, or gamekeepers, of MacLeod’s deer-forest.

These villages were largely self-supporting, with some trade in small black cattle. In contrast to today, there were only a few sheep, but there was much more growing of small oats and bere. Bearnaraigh, Tarasaigh and Roghadal had good natural harbours, and fishing was a year-round occupation there. But the Atlanticexposed shores of the machair on either side of the Stone had no harbours, and the people there had to rely on summer fishing in their shieling lands in the Bays.

In 1779 Harris had been sold to Captain Alexander MacLeod of Berneray. He reckoned that the fishings of Harris could be changed from a seasonal activity to a full-scale industry. This could only be done on the Bays side of the island, with its hundreds of little bays facing the Minch, so he constructed a harbour at Roghadal, and set up fishing stations all up and down the Bays. Some of the people of the machair and the islands had moved to these new villages, but many of the new settlers were from Lewis, Uist and Skye, together with masons, boatbuilders etc. brought in from the mainland. Captain MacLeod’s experiment worked well for a few years, but after his death, much of the impetus was lost.

But already a new industry had appeared, which provided an unheard-of income for the islands, and in the end ruined their economy. This was the period of the French Wars, and with overseas markets closed to Britain, there was an unprecedented demand for minerals, many of which could be derived from the ash of kelp, or seaweed. The Bays and Islands of Harris were ideally suited for the collection and manufacture of kelp, and the whole economy of the island was changed to one based on the value of the seaweed. More and more people were encouraged to settle on barren shores, where they could not possibly feed themselves from the land – but that did not matter so long as there was employment on the kelp. The landlord had of course got most of the profits, but there had been plenty left over to buy food and to pay the rents, which had been increased to take account of the value of the weed on the shore. Even on the machair, the kelp cast ashore by the Atlantic storms had been gathered and burned, instead of being used for manure on the land – the Stone could remember the choking clouds of acrid smoke coming from the burning kelp.

After the wars came the inevitable crash. The continental markets were open again, and could produce better and cheaper minerals than could be got from kelp-burning. The price for kelp plummeted, and landlords and tenants alike lost their main source of income. Captain MacLeod’s son and grandson had become society gentlemen on the strength of the kelp boom, and when it burst, it was reckoned that they lost three-quarters of their income. Unfortunately, like most Highland proprietors, they looked to their estates to replace their lost income. Rents were increased quite beyond the ability of the tenants to pay, despite the fact that they too had lost as great a proportion of their income.

Most of the landlords in the Highlands and Islands left the management of the estates to factors, and on Harris control of the estate was given to Donald Stewart, a sheep-farmer. His idea of a solution to the problem was to evict the crofters from every worthwhile bit of land, and to let it to a sheep-farmer. The Stone remembered the clearance of nearby Horgabost and Nisabost, some of the first villages to be cleared in Harris – it had been strange to have the land around its feet grazed by sheep, where there had once been cultivation, and the noise of people.

After the collapse of the kelp industry, many of the Harris crofters could see only too clearly what the future held. Those on the better lands were conscious of the threat of the expanding sheep-farms, and those on the kelp-shores could see no future but ever-increasing rents, with no income to pay them, and more and more people crowded on to the already insufficient land.

Cape Breton was being laid out for settlement at this time in the 1820s, and hundreds of families decided to emigrate and settle there, mainly around St Anns and Baddeck. When the Clearances began in earnest, the evicted people also went to Cape Breton, but since much of the better land had already been taken up, they tended to settle on the higher, poorer, land behind the coastal settlements, in areas like the North Shore, or at Loch Lomond and Grand River in south-eastern Cape Breton.

By the 1840s, there were no people left on the machair except a few sheep-farmers and their servants. For miles on either side of the Stone where there had been busy villages, there was now the desolation of the sheep farms, many of them run by Stewart and his own relatives.

Matters had become even worse with the advent of potato blight in the 1840s. In most of the Bays, the potato was the only food crop which could be grown on the poor land, and when that failed, there was no choice left but either emigration or destitution. Hundreds of families left from this area too, but by this time the potato blight was in Cape Breton also, so the destination of the emigrants changed to Australia, with the financial assistance of the Highlands and Islands Emigration society.

The government was eventually forced to pay attention to the distress of the crofters, and the Napier Commission was set up to investigate the causes and possible cures for this distress. The Commission visited Harris in 1882, and the evidence given before them is a valuable record of the history of Harris. The Commission recommended a limited degree of security of tenure for crofters, and after the passing the Crofters Act in 1883, much of the harassment of crofters by factors ceased.

In the early 1900s, the Congested Districts Board supervised the setting-up of new crofting villages at Taobh Tuath and at Borgh in Bearnaraigh, while the Department of Agriculture sponsored a move to Portnalong and Fiskavaig in Skye and to the Loch Portain area of North Uist. After the First World War, the Department acquired the machair farms and resettled them as crofting townships. Once again the Stone could hear the sounds of people working their crofts – and if the sound was that of tractors instead of the horses of the old days, well – that was progress!

But the Stone also knows another story about its own origin – the one the old people told. Long ago, before the time of history, there was a Cailleach in Harris. The Gaelic word Cailleach means an old woman, but in this sense it means specifically a witch – and a fearsome witch she must have been! She was very fond of limpets – and if you have ever tried gathering limpets, you will know how difficult it is to dislodge them from their rocks. So the Cailleach had a stone hammer to knock the limpets off the rocks, and she wandered the shores, gathering her limpets. On Aird Nisabost she saw a particularly large one, and gave it a sideways hit with the hammer. Nothing happened! Another blow, and still nothing happened! Gathering all her strength, the Cailleach gave a third blow to the limpet, which flew off the rock into the sea. But the hammer broke into three pieces with the force of the blow, the smaller parts going flying across the sea, one to land on the island of Tarasaigh and the other along the shore at Sgarasta, and the largest part landing on the hill behind her, where it is still known as the Ord Bhairnich – the Limpet Hammer.

And there you have the two types of story we can tell about Harris. Some are based on historical fact, but others are yarns heard around the fireside. Some are true, and others might not be, but they are all well worth telling!

PART ONE – THE MACHAIR

Losgaintir (Luskentyre)

The village of Losgaintir lies at the end of a side-road from the main Harris road, and the views from that side-road must be among the most beautiful in the whole island – especially on a summer’s evening, looking across the sea-pools and the sands against the light of a setting sun. At the end of the road is one of Harris’s pure white stretches of shell-sand, with views across to the mountains of North Harris and to the island of Tarasaigh, while the machair itself is a carpet of wild flowers in the summer.

Machair is special to the Atlantic coasts of Scotland and Ireland. In the shallow seas of the Atlantic shelves are great forests of seaweed, and in them great colonies of shellfish. The shells are ground down and washed ashore in the winter storms and blown inland by the gales, giving the land a top dressing of lime-rich shell-sand. It is this wind-blown shell-sand which creates the machair and its lush summer vegetation, but it is a thin soil, liable to sand-blow and needing much feeding with seaweed and byre manure to bring it to its full potential. Many of the wild flowers, too, cannot break through an established sward of grass, and it is on land which has been ploughed in the last few years that the best range of machair flowers can be found.

2. Nightfall at Losgaintir

The easily worked and fertile soil of the machair has been an attraction to settlers since prehistoric times, and until the late 1700s, the machairs of the west coast and the islands were the main areas of settlement in the Islands.

Robert Heron’s General View of the Hebrides, published in 1794, gives a description of the various types of land tenure on the machair then.

The inhabitants . . . consist of several classes, distinguished by gradations of rank and property. Mr MacLeod of Harris, the proprietor of the land of the island, receives, chiefly from tacksmen, to whom it is let out in extensive tracts, £888 sterling of yearly rent. Beside the farms possessed by the tacksmen, here are small tenant farms, possessed each by a number of petty tenants, who live together in a village, hold the farm by one common deed of tack, and have it parcelled out among them in penny and farthing divisions. The tacksmen’s tenants differ from those in situation, only by holding from the tacksmen instead of the landlord, having no connection with one another in their tenures, and seldom having formally executed leases. The tacksmen’s servants have their wages assigned them, in pasture for a cow, a horse, a breeding mare and any number of sheep; a farthing division of land for corn and potatoes, with a due proportion of sea-ware for manure; a kail-yard; fuel; an allowance of a peck of meal a week; beside a day in the week allotted for the cultivation of their own little possessions . . . The condition of the scallags, or servants, may be deemed hard; not so much because their labours are oppressive, or their wages unreasonably small, as because they are too entirely excluded from the choice of variety of employments, and of such a change of masters, as seems necessary to give the labourer comfortable independence.1

At the start of the eighteenth century, Losgaintir was a part of the great tack of Bearnaraigh, held by a cadet family of the MacLeods of Harris. In 1730 William MacLeod of Bearnaraigh gave up the tack of Bearnaraigh itself – for the usual reason of increased rent – and settled at Losgaintir. He died a few years later, in 1738, and is buried in the family caibeal – private burial enclosure – in the churchyard at Roghadal, where his son Alexander erected a tablet to his memory.

Here lieth William MacLeod, eldest son to Sr. N. McLeod of Berneray by K. McDonald daur. to Sr. J. McDonald of Slate, who dyed upon ye 18th of Febr. 1738 in ye 77th year of his age. He was married to M. McKenzie, eldest daur. to Capt. K. McKenzie of Suddie and by her had sevl. Children, 4 of whom survived him viz. A. his eldest son . . . R. McLeod, Wr. to the Signet, his 2nd son married to a daur. of Bannatyne of Keimes of Bute, Margt. married to ye Capt. of Clanranald & Alice to McNeil of Barray. He was good husband, a kind parent & master & a sincere friend, remarkable for Charity, Piety, Integrity of life, which made his death much regretted by all his friends and dependants.

This Chappel was built by ye said A McL and this stone therein by ye said A McL in honour of his father.2

The sculptor who inscribed the tablet made a mistake after the words ‘his eldest son’ and had to erase the next few letters. Local legend has it that a son’s name was erased because he disgraced the family, but a careful reading of the text and expansion of the abbreviated words shows that all four of the family are listed. Probably the legend arose from confusion with a kidnapping blamed on a son of a later MacLeod of Bearnaraigh – but that story belongs properly to Fionnsbhagh in the Bays.

Losgaintir passed in the late 1700s to Alexander’s daughter Isabella and her doctor husband, William MacLeod of Glendale in Skye. William had a bad reputation for being a petty tyrant to his farm-workers and sub-tenants: John Lane Buchanan has plenty to say about him in his Travels in the Western Hebrides from 1782 to 1790.

Soon after he had acquired possession of the vast tract of country already mentioned, he began, with undaunted courage, to double the rents of the subtenants, either by adding more money to their former rents, or by adding two or more tenants to one bay or town, by taking islands from another, by extorting some tuns of sea-ware for kelp from a third, though their lands should want manure and themselves bread; nay, and to erect new bays in places formerly altogether uninhabited.

. . . before he dared to practise those oppressions, he thought it adviseable to fortify himself by a strong matrimonial alliance. This he did by marrying an old maiden lady; who, in her younger days, would have treated the idea of being united to such a man with the utmost scorn.3

John Lane Buchanan is particularly scathing in his comments on MacLeod of Losgaintir, but we do have to remember that he had just been dismissed from his post as missionary on the grounds of immoral behaviour, largely at MacLeod’s instance, so his evidence may not be altogether trustworthy.

Mrs MacLeod herself was well enough liked – and a good bard. One of her songs about her own boys going off to the army is still sung in Harris.

Dh’fhalbh na gillean grinn

Fo’n cuid armaibh,

’S ann leam fhin a’s boidheach

Thig an cota dearg dhoibh

Dh’fhalbh na gillean grinn.4

The bonny boys have left / each with his own gun. /They look so handsome to me / in their red jackets.

(I think I should state here that it is with the greatest trepidation that I have put in rough translations of Gaelic poetry throughout this book. I am only too aware that, except in the hands of another poet, translated poetry is usually doggerel, but it did seem necessary to me to give non-Gaelic readers some idea of the meaning of the words of a poem, even if the music of the words is wholly lost.)

One of the ‘gillean grinn’ was named Bannatyne after his grand-father’s brother’s wife, who was one of the Bannatynes of Port Bannatyne in Bute. He got on well with the local people, and one time he gave a golden guinea as a christening present to one of the farm-workers’ children across in Seilibost. A golden guinea was well worth having, so all the families in Seilibost called a son 'Bannatyne', and that is why you still find the name here, though it is usually shortened in speech to ‘Panny’. If you find a family with the name Panny anywhere in the islands, you can be sure that it traces back to Seilibost.

After a few years, the doctor gave up the lease of Losgaintir and removed to Steornabhagh (Stornoway). James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, thought of taking part of the farm for a time, and a formal lease was even drawn up, which gives an interesting description of the rights of the farmer.

William MacLeod subsets the grazing of Shelibost marching on the one side with Horguebost and on the other with the river of Laxdale, reserving to himself the sea ware growing on the rocks alongst the shore of Shelibost and liberty to cut his peats as usual on the south side of the river of Laxdale also reserving the whole salmon fishing on the water of the said river, also liberty if required to pluck heather on the hills for ropes to houses. Also subsets the use of the two houses now in Shelibost and the cast sea-ware for manure to the ground, with the whole hill belonging to Shelibost and Luskinter and the pendicle of Laxdale and Bay of Meavac with the liberty of grazing such of the horses of the farm of Luskinter as may be necessary.5

The plan fell through and Losgaintir, along with Seilibost, passed eventually to one Donald Stewart, of a mainland family who had been shepherds in the Pairc area of Lewis. The Stewarts had a bad enough reputation there, and the tenants of Bearnaraigh tried to keep him out of Harris by offering a higher rent for Losgaintir themselves, but the estate preferred Stewart – and the clearance of the villages of the machair began.

When the sheep farms began to fail in the face of competition from Australia, all the northern part of the machair and the hills behind it became deer forest, with its main hunting lodge at Losgaintir. After the First World War, Losgaintir was broken into crofts for families who were threatening to raid the farm of Sgarasta Bheag, and it is now firmly on the tourist map, partly for the beauty of the area, and partly because of Donald John and Maureen MacKay, whose specialist patterns of Harris Tweed are justly famous.

Neil MacDonald was one of the raiders on Sgarasta Bheag who later got a croft in Losgaintir, and his song Oran an Reididh – Song of the Land-raids – tells the story of the machair.

Eisdibh rium, a shluaigh nam beannaibh

Thoiribh aire, ghillean og;

A h-uile neach a chluinn an duan seo,

Togail suas e le deagh cheol.

Chaidh ar cairdean chur an fuadach,

Cuid dhiubh dh’fhuarbheannaibh a’ cheo

’S a dh’Ameireaga air chuantan

Siud mar chuala sinn na sgeoil.

Thainig saighdearan bhon Bhanrigh

Dhan an aite seo gun choir;

Dh’fhasaich iad an taobh a bh’fhearr dheth

’S dha na Baigh gun deach an corr

Is ’nan aite chuir iad caoraich,

Cuid dhiubh maol, is damh nan croic

’S nuair a thoisich blar na daorsa

Cha robh h-aon dhiubh air an leoin6

Listen to me, people of the hills / pay attention, young boys / everyone who hears this song / raise it to a good tune. / Our friends were put to flight – / some of them to the misty mountains / and America across the seas – / so we hear in story. / The soldiers of the Queen came / to this place unjustly. / They cleared the better part of it / And sent the rest to the Bays. / In their place they put sheep – / hornless sheep and antlered deer. / When the fight for freedom began, / none of these were among the wounded.

A trace of the old deer forest still remains on many maps, where Beinn Losgaintir and the surrounding area are shown as the ‘South Harris Forest’. Unfortunately the Ordnance Survey, in their new maps with Gaelic place-names, translated this as ‘Coille Ceann a Deas na Hearadh’, not realising that the proper Gaelic for a deer forest is frith and that coille means trees – there must be many a perplexed visitor hunting in vain for the trees on the slopes of Beinn Losgaintir!

The hill of Beinn Losgaintir itself is well worth climbing for the view. From the Losgaintir side it is a steady, though stiff, climb to the top, but on the north side it drops in cliffs and gullies to West Loch Tairbeart. The cliffs on that side are dangerous, and it was there on the Tarcla that Duncan Campbell, the grieve, or farm manager, of Losgaintir fell to his death in 1875.

Seilibost

Seilibost had at one time been a part of the tack of Losgaintir, but in the early 1800s it was divided into crofts. Previously most of the townships of Harris had been nuclear villages, with the houses all together in a clachan, and the land held as a single unit, divided annually in rotation between the joint tenants, according to their needs and abilities. Crofting, on the other hand, gave each tenant his own strip of land, for the rent of which he was wholly responsible. The nuclear village had the disadvantage that the tenant could have a different piece of land each year, and so would have little incentive to improve it, whereas in the croft, his landholding was fixed, and so worth improving. The drawback to crofts was that in the nuclear village a family who had fallen on hard times could take a smaller share of the township land and of the liability for rent, whereas in a croft, the tenant was liable for the whole rent, and if he could not pay, risked eviction and the loss of everything.

3. Seilibost and Beinn Losgaintir

The purpose of the introduction of the crofting system was to get as many people on to the land as possible. This was the period of the boom in the kelp trade, and the landlords wanted as large an employment pool as possible on their estates. Crofts were intentionally made too small to maintain a family by agriculture alone, so that the tenants would have to take work on the kelp in order to supplement their income. Crofting was never intended to be a full-time occupation, and crofters relied on ancillary employment also, and it is the loss of this employment – mainly weaving and fishing – which has created such problems for the crofting communities today.

The crofting of Seilibost and the other machair villages was successful so long as the kelp trade prospered, but when that began to fail, in the 1820s, arrears of rent began to mount, and the estates began to look for alternative sources of income. Large-scale sheep farming looked to be a preferable source of income, and the days of crofting on the machair were numbered.

It was a bad day for Harris when Donald Stewart came to Losgaintir as a sheep-farmer. When he became MacLeod’s factor nothing would do for him but that he would turn the whole of the machair side of Harris into sheep-farms, and send the people away to Canada. Sgarasta had already been cleared, but Stewart cleared na Buirgh, and in 1838 evicted the last of the people from Seilibost.

Not content with clearing the living, he had to clear the dead out as well, for he took over the graveyard that the Seilibost people had at Cnoc na h-Iodhlainn, and ploughed it up. Alexander Carmichael, commenting on the encroachment of the sea on the coast of Tarasaigh while visiting there in 1877, remarks:

The tide being as ruthless as Stewart who had Loscintir and who ploughed the cladh [burial ground] the people had at Seilibost, the oldest in Harris, till skulls and thigh bones etc. were rolling about on the surface of the ground like stones in a stony field, the ground being literally covered with them. The crops were so heavy that the place had to be kept from manure for many years. That is when they made the graveyard at Losgaintir itself. These Stewarts were the greatest curse that ever came upon Harris.7

But the Stewarts lost in the end, for Seilibost was turned back into crofts again a hundred years later, after the First World War, and the big rock, where Stewart poured out the pails of milk when Norman MacKenzie was evicted from his house became the cornerstone of the new house his great-grandson built.

If you were cleared out of your house in those days, you might be able to find a site in the Bays; there was plenty of stone there to build a house, and heather for a roof, but where were you going to find timber for roof-timbers? In the old houses, timbers had been gathered from the shores – and in one house on the island of Scarp, whalebone had been used. That is why it was so final when the factor burned the houses: without the roof-timbers you couldn’t build another house. So after the first burning of the houses, when people were threatened with clearance, they dismantled the roof themselves and took the timbers with them; and there are many stories of families going through the moors to the Bays of the east coast, the women and children carrying what furnishings they could, and the men carrying the old roof-timbers.

It is sometimes assumed that if the Clearances had not happened, life in the islands would have continued in an idyllic form. Of course this would not have been so, and even in pre-Clearance times, there were major problems. The Revd John MacLeod, writing about Harris in the Statistical Account of 1792, described the methods of agriculture whereby the land, after being manured, would yield one year’s crop of potatoes, then two of small oats, then three or four of grass, before being cultivated again. He added:

The grass is the main object for which the farmer labours. It is not for the best returns yielded by his crop of corn that he is at the toil and trouble above described, but chiefly to lay in a store of winter provender for his cattle, and to improve their summer pasture, by meliorating the natural barrenness of the soil as far as circumstances will permit. Could these ends be otherwise obtained, no corn crops ought at all to be raised here, especially on any of the lands unmanageable to the plough; for though no people labour harder, beginning this dreary process so early as the month of November, and continuing it occasionally, as the weather permits, as the cast of the sea-ware may chance to come, and as the necessary attention to their cattle and to the other branches of husbandry allows them, till the month of June; yet the whole produce of the three crops, barley, potatoes and oats, may be fairly estimated at little more than 2000 bolls, Linlithgow measure, even in the best of years; and in bad years the crops fail so miserably as to yield little more than the seed requisite for the next sowing . . . All the bread is generally consumed before the month of June; and such as cannot then afford to purchase imported meal, subsist chiefly on the milk of their cows and sheep, with what fish they may chance to catch, till their wants are relieved by the first fruits of their potatoe crop early in harvest.8

It can be argued that MacLeod gives a pessimistic view of the agricultural economy because he himself was of the tacksman class, but 1792 is well before the beginning of any move towards clearance, so he had little reason to show bias in his report.

It is clear then that the agricultural economy of Harris was on a balance of profitability – a good year could give a profit, but a bad one meant scarcity.

With the advent of the kelp industry, much of the sea-ware that had been used for manuring the soil was diverted to burning for kelp-ash. The land suffered, as did the crops, and what had been a borderline economy became even more difficult. Many families emigrated, especially to the newly available lands in Cape Breton – facing the difficulties of life in a new land seemed preferable to remaining in the deepening economic depression of the old one. Despite this, population numbers rose in Harris, putting further pressure on the economy. It would be an exaggeration to say that the Clearances merely removed those families who had not already been able to remove themselves, but like most exaggerations, there is quite a lot of truth in it.

In the Dunvegan Estate Papers, we find cases of tenants being granted ‘rests’ – years free of rent – because of their poor circumstances, but when the relationship between landlord and tenant became more commercial after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, there was less sympathy for the tenant in a bad year. Still, there was no great danger of dispossession, for what other prospective tenant was any better off? Once the sheep-farmers turned their eyes to Harris, however, there was an alternative tenant for the land, with capital to carry him over a bad year, and the days of the crofter on the machair were numbered. Taobh Tuath and Horgabost were cleared first, then Sgarasta and na Buirgh. Part of Seilibost was cleared in 1829 and the remainder in 1838, and not a single crofter was then left on the machair, only a few cottars and farm-workers, allowed to remain because their labour was necessary to the new farmers.

At the moor end of Seilibost, at the end of the present-day causeway, is a little hill called Cleit na Duthca, with the ruins of two houses at the shore. One of these belonged to Neil Morrison – Niall Choinnich Neill – who spent several years shepherding on the island of Pabaigh and is better known as Am Bard Pabach – the Pabaigh Bard. In the other house was a widow with her son Donald – Domhnall Bessa – who went to Pabaigh along with the Bard. He was not very bright, for Neil refers to him as ‘Domhnall gorach, le seacaid bhan air’ – ‘Foolish Donald, in his white jacket.’9

When Seilibost was cleared only one house was left, for the dairymaid Oighric Mhor. Every day she had to cross the bay to Losgaintir Farm, and that could be dangerous, for Seilibost Bay itself is a huge expanse of white sand at low tide, but the tide comes in quickly, and there is quicksand behind the mouth of the river. That is where John MacKenzie – Iain Thormoid Ruairidh – was drowned in 1865, when his horse stumbled in the quicksand and he was thrown into the river, and it was under the surface of the sand that they found their bodies.

To make sure that not a scrap of grazing was lost, Oighric Mhor’s house was built right on the shore of Seilibost Bay at a spot called Luib a’ Speuradair – the Stargazer’s Corner. Who knows who was the man who watched the stars, but Oighric certainly watched the sea, for they had to build a turf barricade outside the door, to keep the high tide out.

Seilibost became part of the deer forest, and the corner of the hill to the east of Luib a’ Speuradair is still called Creag Royal, after a ‘royal’ – a stag with fourteen points to its antlers – which was shot there.

Seilibost east of Creag Royal is reckoned as a separate entity, under the name of Crago, and it is here that the old ‘coffin-road’ from the Bays reaches the west coast. A new causeway cuts across the head of the bay here, with its salt-flats of thrift or sea-pink – a haze of pink above the water in the summer.

I remember camping once on a little green patch of flat ground, beside the bridge where the old road crosses Allt Gil an Tailleir – the stream of the tailor’s gully. As it got dark, I realised that there were eyes watching me from the stonework of the bridge! I wish I had known then the opening verses of Bard Pabach’s ‘Oran an Rodain’:

’S dh’aithnichinn rodain Bho na Ghille

’S iad bu ghile na cuid Chrago10

You can tell the rats of Bun na Gill – / they are whiter than those in Crago

I did not wait there long enough to check on their colour!

Horgabost

The very name of Horgabost is full of history, for it is the name the Vikings gave to the place over a thousand years ago ‘-bost’ for a village and ‘Horgr’ for a grave – and not just any grave. Here, at the corner of the village road, are the remains of a chambered cairn, which could be 5000 years old and more. So today we are calling the village by the name the Norsemen gave to it, because of the ancient grave they found! And not just the one grave – the whole headland between here and MacLeod’s Stone is a mass of burials, underground houses and the like; it must have been an important settlement in prehistoric times.

The chambered cairn is now known as Coire na Feinne, the Cauldron of the Feinne – the followers of the Gaelic folk-hero Fionn mac Cumhail – but of course it is far, far older than the Feinne. There are seven stones in a circle – Na Seachd Sagairtean, the seven priests, they were called locally – and a great flat stone on the top. Captain Otter of the Naval Survey took a huge skull out of the cairn and it is still in a museum in Edinburgh.

Horgabost is now the home of Donald MacDonald – Domhnall Sham – one of the best traditional singers on Harris today. Domhnall’s parents were among the settlers who came back to the machair after the First World War, and brought its land back into cultivation, after years of sheep monoculture, followed by more years of neglect as a part of the deer forest. Even today, with the turn-down in the crofting economy, there are still cattle kept in Horgabost, and a different area of machair is ploughed each year as a communal potato plot.

As well as a singer, Domhnall is a bard in his own right.

Nuair bhios mi san Aird

aig Ord Bhairneach Mhic Leoid

Chan eil sealladh cho alainn

an cearn san Roinn-Eorp

A’ ghrian ‘s i gam fhagail

’s i dearrsadh mar or,

Dol sios air Aird Mhanais

’s air Gaisgeir nan ron

When I am on the headland / at MacLeod’s limpet-stone. / There is not such a beautiful place / in this quarter of Europe. / The departing sun / gleaming like gold / going down over Aird Mhanais / and Gaisgeir of the seals.

4. Horgabost

Horgabost was among the first townships in Harris to be cleared for sheep, as early as 1810, and the first farmer here was an Alexander Torrie from Argyll. You can still see the ruins of Faing an Thorraidh – Torrie’s sheep-pens – on the hill above the village, and until the village was re-settled in 1935, the people round about and on Tarasaigh island always called it Torraidh.

Horgabost and Tarasaigh are linked by one of the classical stories of Harris. There was a battle on Tarasaigh in 1544 – part of the troubles in the downfall of the Lordship of the Isles. The Morrisons of Ness in Lewis were the brieves or judges of the Lordship, and they had invaded Harris, led by Eoghann, or Hugh, the son and heir of the brieve. First they raided Huisinis, where only one man escaped and took word of the raid to MacLeod of Bearnaraigh. The Morrisons had in the meantime raided Tarasaigh, and it was there that MacLeod found them, feasting after victory. Mac-Iain, writing in the Celtic Magazine in 1879, tells the rest of the story.

Arriving at the village of Tarnsay, MacLeod found the Morrisons regaling themselves after having massacred every soul on the island, and listening for a moment at the window of the house in which the Morrisons were feasting, MacLeod heard one of them remark that something very wonderful was wrong with him; ‘For,’ he said ‘although I can chew my food as well as ever, I cannot swallow anything.’ ‘And that is a great pity,’ said Berneray loud enough to be heard by the revellers, ‘for soon you will neither be able to chew or swallow!’ In a second the speaker inside was a corpse by Berneray’s well-directed arrow. This was the signal for a general attack . . . Finding that their case was desperate, the Morrisons retreated, shouting at the top of their voices ‘Gu sgeir, gu sgeir, a bhallachaibh Leodhais’ – to the rock, to the rock, ye lads of Lewis. The rock was a small one in the vicinity of the place where the fight took place, and although it can be reached dry-shod at low water, the sea surrounded it at full flood. The rock received that day the name of the Sgeir Bhuailte, or smitten-rock, which it bears to the present time, and when any great disturbance of the sand takes place by the storm, large numbers of men’s bones may yet be seen around the smitten-rock.

The solitary Morrison who escaped with his life was Eoghann himself – which he did by jumping into the sea, and swimming across the sound to the mainland of Harris. He landed on a rock on Traigh Thorgobost, which rock has been called Sgeir Eoghainn, or Ewen’s rock, ever since.11

The version of the story current in Horgabost today adds that as Ewen came ashore he remarked ‘Faodaidh mi nis’ an da shaigheid a tha na mo thoin a shlaodadh a mach!’ – I have time now to remove the two arrows stuck in my back-side!12

Na Buirgh (The Borves)

There were three villages here at one time: Borgh Mhor, Borgh Mheadhanach and Borgh Bheag – Big, Middle and Little Borves – but they were all cleared out to make room for a sheep-farm in 1839. Donald Stewart of Losgaintir had the farms on either side, and he refused to renew his lease unless he got Na Buirgh as well. Stewart was too good a tenant to lose, so the crofters had to go. But they proved unwilling, and the estate took fright. According to the factor’s report ‘a conspiracy for resisting the law existed in all this quarter of the West Highlands, which, if not at once checked, would lead to consequences no lover of order would care to think about’.13 So the army was sent for, as reported in the Inverness Courier of July 1839.

On Saturday, Lieutenant M’Neill with his party of soldiers returned to Glasgow from the Island of Harris, after an absence of nine days. He has been successful in the object of his mission, and, we are glad to learn, without violence. They reached Harris at 7 o’clock on the morning of Tuesday last, the 23rd, and were enabled to leave it at 6 the same evening. All the cottars or small farmers implicated in the deforcement were requested to assemble at the village, and from the body five men, who had been most active in the illegal proceedings, were selected and carried prisoners to Portree. The visit of the military excited the deepest alarm among the poor islanders, who were heard to express in Gaelic their terror that the scene of Glencoe was about to be acted over again.14

‘Thus’, according to the factor ‘terminated an outbreak which, but for the prompt measures of the Government in sending in the military, would have thrown the whole of the West Highlands into confusion for many years’15 – so severe an outbreak that it could be dealt with by calling the people to a meeting and selecting five of them to take to jail!

Alec Mor in Direcleit used to hear about the ‘battle’ from his neighbour Ceit Ruadh (Red Kate) up in Cadha. Her father was Donald Urquhart, who had come to Harris as a shepherd from Gairloch, and was working at the time in Sgarasta, which had already been cleared for sheep. Ceit was only eight years old at the time, but she had come along with her father to see what was happening, and the captain of the soldiers had asked her to hold his horse while he spoke to the Borgh people; what a magnificent horse it was, not like the carthorses she was used to – and she got a halfpenny for holding its reins! All the rest of her family went off to Australia, but Ceit married in Harris and stayed here till she died – and even as an old woman she would still tell the story of the halfpenny she got for holding the war-horse at Borgh.