Essay - A walk with my uncle

Last Updated on 14 May 2010 Written by Administrator

A short essay which appeared in the "I was a Beautiful Day" playscript. It is about a walk I took with my uncle around the Butt of Lewis... among other things.

A WALK BY THE CLIFFS WITH MY UNCLE

I remember a walk I took with my uncle around the curve of cliffs at the north of Ness, the village I come from. The very north of it is called Rubha Robhanis, a word mixture of Gaelic and Norse, both words meaning the same thing – headland.

We got out of the car at the lighthouse, noticing a busload of people milling around the lighthouse base. We tagged along and smiling knowingly we made it up to the top of the lighthouse. And there it was, the village lying flat like a map beneath us. I remember it now quite calmly, even though the memory of plastering myself like a whelk against the lighthouse glass has faded. It was a little blowy, and the lighthouse is perched on a high cliff, which is gradually being disappeared.

We carried on with our walk, up past the memory cross where a man once ‘went with the cliff’ as they say. Each year the cross has to be moved inland further and further. At various times when I was young, I would remember the Coastguard helicopter appearing and scanning the seacliffs. The sea would stream out in strange currents from the beaches, sometimes taking people unawares.

We then came to Luchraban, which they call pigmy-isle. Small people used to live there, I had been told once. I looked at that person strangely ever since.

The tide was out, so it was possible to cross over. My uncle hopped down, although I couldn’t see it, couldn’t see a way over to the little tidal island. But with much clutching at sea-pink and a final rush over the top I made it onto the small green, pink sward. Two monk’s cells and a chapel were buried in the top. It was unexpected to say the least, you could barely make them out from the ‘mainland’, but here they were, beautiful stonework and snug as anything. I wondered what on earth these people did, hanging off this cliff. Peregrine monks on their little sea island, taking inspiration from the Middle East ascetics. Hiding from Vikings and eating mushrooms. Must have been cold, I thought.

A little further up the coast we clambered down to a massive natural arch called Toll a’ Roidh where the Vikings reputedly tried to pull the island back to Scandinavia. I used to quite like the idea that the Vikings liked the place so much, they wanted to take it home with them. But they didn’t manage of course. The fact that a sea-faring people like the Vikings would be so daft, was put to the back of our minds.

From there we looked out over Traigh Shanndaidh. This was the beach Saint Ronan left from, on the back of a sea-monster, to find his own little monkish spot in the world. This story I particularly liked. Ronan established a church on the edge of the village, but he found the people of the place rather wicked. How so? I thought to myself. This was before casinos and happy hours. Still, the holy man found it a trial. He particularly found it hard to cope with the arguments of the quarrelsome women of the village. So he prayed to be delivered from the place, stipulating that he didn’t care where he ended up. Just get me away from these bloody women, he quite possibly addedto that night’s particular prayer. Stupidly, it turns out.

He was picked up on Traigh Shanndaidh by a “cianarain-cnò” (Seven great whales, feast for a cianarain-cnò”), and transported across the waves to the island  of Ronaidh, about forty miles north. There, his monkish presence disturbed the beasts that had probably very happily been dwelling there. Nonetheless, they were evil little blighters and were thus forced into the sea, leaving nothing but their scratch marks behind them. And so, after much to-ing and fro-ing, Ronan had the place to himself. As estate agents would say, he most certainly had a “northerly aspect.”Ronan was later joined by his sister, only to leave sharpish on her brother commenting on what a nice pair of pins she had.

As well as the crazy Vikings and the miniature rock dwelling monks, I was very fond of Saint Ronan. He seemed to me a passionate fellow. Maybe a little… hasty… but nonetheless he didn’t stand for any nonsense. It would be unfair to say that the men of the area often have similar feelings to Ronan, and escape to the Social Club to put some space between themselves and the wickedly quarrelsome women of the parish.

I don’t know when I started hearing these stories first. Maybe they were just in the air. One thing it did was realign how you thought about the place, the sheer traffic of the place, the fact that you weren’t, in fact, remote. It was a veritable motorway! The Vikings landed on this beach! Monks on the run! And here were their stories set in the stone of the land, and set in the language of the people. A place-name for each to remind us. Toll a’ Ròidh. Luchraban. Traigh Shanndaidh.

My knowledge of place-names is of course terribly eroded. Place-names require people to remember them. And for this they need relevance, a relevance which activities such as work provide. That’s why the moorland that stretches outwards from the back of the village is littered with place-names. By a stroke of luck, I once sat down with a man from the village called Eve who remembered all of them. He reeled them off, but I did wish that I could have walked along the coast with him to learn them properly.

The people of the area didn’t rely on maps to find their way. They relied on these place-names, which created a frame of reference for them. A kind of  virtual village, the interconnected pathways of place-names was their GPS to tell them where they were. It hinted at the relationship between words and the places they signify. Imbedded in these names were stories. Historical story DNA buried yet retrievable. This way of looking at the world around you, this prose map,  is entirely different to the technical map. When you take into account the stories behind the place-names it can make a normal map look a little bare.

My first cousin in New Zealand, also called Iain, revealed to me that he loved maps. He would sit in his shed and trace imaginary journeys on these maps. When I met him last he had bought a computer programme which let him fly over the topography in any direction he wanted. This delighted him more than any number of pancakes. My uncle has a great collection of maps and has written a book on the mapping of the Western Isles. So maybe there is a rogue cartographic gene in the family. Or maybe, living on an island, once is aware of where the edge is.

I don’t want to give the impression that the place is inward looking, even though it is well detailed and mapped. The other stories I am left with from my youth (other than what happened in the village) are of places such as Beunos Aires, Montreal and New Zealand. A large number of the men of a certain age in the village were in the Merchant Navy. A couple of islanders sailed with Shackleton. One fellow mistakenly asked for a lift home in Sydney harbour and spent two years eating penguins in Antarctica – it was the ship Discovery he asked for a lift.

I once got the chance to film a documentary in the Polynesian Island of Tonga. Filming a girl who was going with the group, I prepared to explain it all to an older fellow sitting in front of the fire, just so he would have an idea of the great distances his

girl was going! So he would have an idea where on earth this Tonga was! Before I managed to lay it out for him however, he took his pipe out of his mouth and said. “Yes, Tonga. A nice place. I was there three times. Delivering copra.” I learnt that day that a pipe and slippers meant nothing. I have had untold experiences like this. A woman’s blank stare after being told that three men in the room (my two uncles and father) had all been to her home island of Pitcairn.(Of Mutiny on the Bounty fame.)

One of my uncles ended up in New Zealand. He was on a ship in the Panama Canal on the way home, when he got to talking to another man from Ness on an outward passage. The man’s father had died and so they agreed to swap passages. And so, my uncle headed back out to New Zealand, where he met a woman and settled down, only occasionally walking the harbour and shouting at ships “any Lewismen on board!”

But talking to him, even after so many years away from Ness, he still remembers the place minutely. He remembers the houses, he remembers people, he can wander at will from place to place, as if he has never spent a moment away from it. And so people carry on remembering the old stories and creating new ones. All in all, it is rather a privilege to be from there, and very handy for someone who from time to time writes a story. Yes indeed.

END.