Book extract: For the Safety of All – A Story of Scotland's Lighthouses

Butt of Lewis Lighthouse, Na h-Eileanan Siar 

The view from the Butt – the gleam from the lighthouse once cast its glow on the crofthouses and croftland, moorland and machair, sand and shore from its stance on Rubha Robhanais, illuminating the waves of lazy beds as well as those found on the surface of the sea.

We are extremely pleased to be publishing this extract from For the Safety of All: A Story of Scotland’s Lighthouses. In this new book, Donald S Murray explores Scotland’s lighthouses through history, storytelling and the voices of the lighthouse keepers.

By Donald S Murray

Frequently, during my childhood and teenage years in Ness, on the northern tip of the Isle of Lewis, there were reminders of the depth of darkness that existed for centuries around the coastline of this country. 

At night or early evening, a storm might rattle windows, a gust of wind puff above chimney tops. The lights across the house would falter and flicker before disappearing. After that, there would be a scramble for matches and candles, a torch if there was one to be found. A Tilley lamp would be lit, taking a moment or two to ignite and burn before its warm glow added intricacies of light and shade to a room which seconds earlier had been illuminated only by the flame of a peat fire. It was as if we had stepped back in history, into the period before electricity had come to our homes, the ages swirling into reverse for a moment or two. 

And that change was most apparent when we peered out of the window at the rest of the village and the broad stretch of the moor. Apart from the spin and eddy of the Butt of Lewis lighthouse, the stillness of the red light above the Decca Station and the rare sweep of a set of car headlights, all was in darkness. We could imagine the householders performing the same rituals we did – scuttling through the kitchen cabinet or chest of drawers for matches, looking in the understairs cupboard among sheets and blankets for the lamp – before they restored muted light to their homes. This was what might have been seen in these houses if a passer-by had peeked in. The faint glimmer of firelight. The subdued flame of a Tilley lamp. Or perhaps even more dim and pale than any of these lanterns – a wick dipped in the oil of a seabird, seal or whale. An unsteady flicker casting more shade than light into the room. 

The scale of this darkness was one of the factors that made travel around the British Isles difficult for centuries. Difficult enough on land, this was especially the case when boats were the main mode of transport. Until the expansion of road and rail, after all, the seas and waterways were Scotland’s main highways. The seasons intensified travel problems, especially during late autumn and winter. In many ways, the sailors and travellers of these early times lived the opposite kind of lives to the modern city dweller. The latter’s constant use of electric light, whether found in the streets they walk and drive through or within their homes, prevents them seeing the moon and stars above their heads. For those who made journeys either on shore or at sea in the past, there were sometimes contrary issues. The need to observe and navigate by the stars made them focus overhead, leading – occasionally – to failure to see the rocks and skerries that loomed out of the ocean, the unpredictable nature of both depths and shoreline. 

And then there was the unreliable character of light before the arrival of the lighthouse to these shores, a process that began in earnest around the commencement of the nineteenth century. Sometimes, when a storm buffeted their boat, the glow of fire on the coastline meant safety and security for sailors, a harbour where a vessel could be tied up and fastened until that night’s tempest passed. However, there were occasions when their need for shelter and protection made mariners too easily deceived. Allegedly wreckers on the coastline of these islands took advantage of their desperation, ushering them to a shore where the consignment of goods aboard would be plundered, their lives lost. Fires would be lit, and signals flashed, but their boats were ushered only in the direction of danger. Over the course of the nineteenth century and later, the Stevenson family and the Northern Lighthouse Board put an end to these practices. Their lighthouses were charted and mapped. If anything flickered elsewhere, as it sometimes had in the past, it would most likely be a trick or a ruse, a deadly trap. 

There were other hazards in the northern edge of the world in summer. During this season, those of us who live in places like the north of Scotland have the sun as an almost constant companion. Its presence, in some shape or form, rarely leaves the sky, creating a continual twilight, blurring at most to a shade of ochre in the sky. The persistent lack of rhythm of light and dark has its effect on people, making some edgy and ill-at-ease. Insomnia abounds: attention wanders. Storm-clouds and dangers on the horizon can fail to be seen. Mist, particularly on Scotland’s east coast, prone to haar, can obscure and conceal the risks ahead. 

It was this – their awareness of the constant threat of terrors posed by both human actions and seaborne life – that made men begin to build lighthouses, a way of making the existence of both ship and crew more secure and safe. 

***

Donald S Murray grew up under the gleam of Butt of Lewis lighthouse, and lighthouses have remained a continual presence in his life. He is the author of non-fiction, fiction and poetry, with a particular focus on Scotland’s islands.  His books include the acclaimed As the Women Lay Dreaming, In a Veil of Mist, The Dark Stuff: Stories from the Peatlands and The Guga Hunters.

For the Safety of All is out now, published by Historic Environment Scotland.

Return to Lewis

By Ian Grosz:

It had been fifteen years since I had last sailed on the Lewis ferry. The largest of the islands of the Outer Hebrides, Lewis is separated from the mainland of Scotland by an often stormy stretch of sea known as the Minch, the crossing twice that of Dover to Calais. This distance, and its Celtic, Gaelic heritage, has maintained Lewis’s mystique in the imagination. Romanticised through the ages but found often lacking by its visiting authors, a series of historic writers from Johnson’s infamous eighteenth-century post-Union A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, to Louis MacNeice’s I Crossed the Minch in 1937, have been less than kind about the islands.[1]

MacNeice, a Belfast born, Oxford educated poet, playwright, BBC producer, writer and critic, declares in the opening to his travelogue of the journey he took through the Hebrides, that ‘I doubt that I shall visit the Western Islands again.’ Filled with the memories of childhood visits to Connemara and the vicarious childhood memories of his father’s own Connemara childhood, MacNeice experienced an ‘out-of-placeness’ that came as a surprise on an island where he hoped to find something of his own ‘Celtic soul.’ 

‘What is shocking is to find an island invaded by the vices of the mainland,’ he says, his sentimental view of what life should be there, knocked off-kilter to find a crofter industrialise the weaving of Harris Tweeds, capitalising on the work and skills of his own community. Islands, no matter how romantic, are never as isolated and changeless as we might imagine. I sit at a window table and look out to Ullapool’s slowly shrinking harbourside cottages, and the mist and drizzle beginning to shroud the hills. The Summer Isles slip by to starboard and the boat passes quietly into the strangeness of the sea-swell and the mist, the horizon indistinct, a thin grey line between sea and sky. 

*

Driving off the boat and into the town, the years that have passed since I lived here suddenly contract to meet me. Nothing at first appears to have changed: like I have never left and am simply returning from a visit to the mainland, but I stop at a new supermarket to pick up some supplies before driving to Achmore where I will be staying ten miles south of Stornoway. The supermarket is full of teenagers on their lunchtime break from school, their universal Americanised accents shaped more by social media and Netflix than by the islands. At the checkout, the lady putting my shopping through the till is English.

The first morning I wake to find it wet and windy: the kind of wind that makes the rafters moan and snatches a car door from your hands. After breakfast I take a drive down the single-track road to Stornoway through the moor, chasing the ghost of Lewis poet Iain Crichton Smith. Crichton Smith had grown up in Lewis during the Second World War, learning English as a second language in school and leaving the islands to attend University in Aberdeen, before becoming a school teacher which he remained until he retired in Oban on the west coast of Scotland to write full-time in 1977. He was one of few island poets to find success writing in both English and Gaelic, and although he never returned to live on the island of his youth, it remained a fundamental part of his identity as both poet and person. 

Passing cold grey lochans alive with waves, and peatbanks signalled by rows of tattered plastic bags and upturned wheelbarrows scattered along their length; lonely looking, makeshift shielings sitting high on the moor, I pull over and look out across its undulating expanse, feeling its apparent emptiness in the pit of my stomach. I am reminded of Crichton Smith’s description of the setting for his childhood home. ‘My house lay between the sea and the moor,’ he tells us; ‘the moor which was often red with heather, on which one would find larks’ nests, where one would gather blaeberries: the moor scarred with peatbanks, spongy underfoot: blown across by the wind (for there is no land barer than Lewis).’[2]

No land barer; and yet the moor was filled with untapped memory and story, locked away like the carbon stored within the peat. I wondered how the moor appeared to the local crofters on their way home from the town. The moor’s monochrome appearance to me, a result of the lack of colour that can be painted by the brush of emotional attachment, but even Crichton Smith had articulated this chromatic sameness: ‘The sky of Lewis above the stones, the sea, the bleak landscape almost without distraction of colour.’ Today it seemed a fitting description. I put the van into gear and continue on, following the long and empty road toward Stornoway. I arrive at the town by the land-fill site, gulls crowding greedily overhead, before the road gives way to familiar looking streets and houses that almost erase the time since I lived here completely. I stop at the supermarket again, picking up some last-minute supplies I’d forgotten yesterday. The people inside are warm and friendly, chatty and open. I have not heard any Gaelic spoken yet. 

I am making my way to the village where Crichton Smith had been raised under the regime of his strict Presbyterian mother, ever terrified of her sons falling ill after losing her husband to tuberculosis when the future poet was still only an infant. The church figured heavily in Crichton Smith’s early life and the Sabbath strictly observed. Even the village’s name has a darkly biblical resonance. Bayble, or Pabail, like most of the island’s place names has a Norse rather than Gaelic origin, and is derived from Papa- býli meaning ‘dwelling of the priests’, possibly named so when the Norsemen who first settled here found the Culdee already inhabiting the fertile peninsula where the settlement is situated. It lies on the headland east of Stornoway, on the other side of `The Braigh’ (pronounced Bry): a narrow sea-battered spit of land connecting the eastern arm of Lewis – known locally as ‘Point’ but officially as The Eye Peninsula, or An Rubha – with the main island.

After crossing the Braigh, I head east a mile or two and then turn right down a long, minor road following the sign for Upper Bayble. The village is divided into two parts: upper and lower, its houses, some empty and dilapidated, scattered like pebbles either side of the single-track road that cuts a line between the moor on one side, and steep cliffs that meet the sea on the other. I try to imagine growing up here under the watchful religious gaze of the widow, the town of Stornoway with its little harbour and its few shops the highlight of my week; school and literature my escapism and my chance of escape; a wider world invisible beyond the horizon, seeping in only through the radio and the stories of returning servicemen and whalers. I would have wanted to leave too, and yet Crichton Smith never really escaped. He looked for it ever after, finding it always just beyond his grasp. 

It’s the island that goes away, not we who leave it.
Like an unbearable thought it sinks beyond
assiduous reasoning light and wringing hands,
or, as a flower roots deep into the ground,
it works its darkness into the gay winds
that blow about us in a later spirit. [3]

This haunting Crichton Smith conveys – the ghost memory of the island of his imagination – is expressed in much of his poetry: a lament for an island not only diminishing in personal memory but its language and culture slowly being lost, slowly sinking beyond the horizon of the collective past. 

I drive down to the pier where I sit and watch the waves jostling each other into the small bay, and wonder how many times Crichton Smith may have come here to do the same, dreaming of the wider horizons that lay beyond the Minch; the view of the headland, and the moor beyond the row of small houses lining the cliff-tops, as familiar to him growing up here, as the tightly-packed terraced houses of the street where I grew up in the northwest of England, and a knowing deep-down that to thrive meant to leave. In that way we are similar, but the difference is that I did not have to leave my language behind, and without a language that you grow inside of, that fundamentally connects you to home but that you see in slow decline, you will struggle to know who you are no matter how many times you return. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in the northeast of Scotland. His writing features in the forthcoming book Four Rivers Deep, a collaborative deep mapping project that explores the rivers Don and Dee in northeast Scotland and the Swan and Canning rivers in southwest Australia, due for publication by UWA Press in 2022. Ian is currently working on a narrative nonfiction project exploring the ways in which landscapes help shape a sense of place and identity. He has a website at https://groundings.co.uk

Notes:
[1] Louis MacNeice, I Crossed the Minch, (1938, Longmans, Green & Co, repr. Edinburgh, Polygon, Birlinn Ltd, 2007).
[2]  Iain Crichton Smith quotes taken from Iain Crichton Smith, Towards the Human, Selected Essays, (Loanhead, Midlothian, MacDonald, 1986)
[3]  Iain Crichton Smith, ‘The Departing Island’ from Three Regional Voices, 1968, in Mathew McGuire (Ed.), Iain Crichton Smith, New Collected Poems, (1992, repr. Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2011), V 13-18, p.65 

Uist

Photo: Jack Bush

By Emma Jones:

On the ferry our bikes are all tied up with string to keep them stable. I am not a seafarer and do not know the knots. I twist and wind the rope and hope that it will be enough to keep my bike from toppling over. My bike is heavy, all loaded up, front and back and frame bag. We are two weeks into our trip and my packing is becoming untidy, clothing shed and then not put away properly, instead glove fingers peeking, a shirt tied unceremoniously, one arm flapping in the breeze. 

These two weeks are felt in the body too. My legs are tired, calves stretched and thighs hot, lower back burning. Hair stuck down to my scalp. Clothes streaked with mud and sheep shit and sweat. In the mornings wriggling about inside the tent I keep myself curled up so as not to touch the sides and let the dew in. A whole home folded up and wrapped tight. Kneeling my weight down onto my roll mat I feel the air being pushed out of it and something gives way in this act of deflating, like I am letting all of that is pent up inside of me out too, shaking myself out in the wet morning light. When we leave, all that’s left behind from the night before is an indistinct shape in the flattened grass.

Climbing up to the deck we sit on the little plastic seats and feel the salt and wind sting. It's another grey day where I do not cast a shadow, as if a part of me is missing, as if I have nothing to project. I watch the diving birds fold their wings and turn themselves into one long beak and barely upset the water. I watch the ferry engine churn everything behind it up into white foam. I look for land, and look, and look, and then, finally, it’s Uist that rises from the sea. 

I am politely told by a man we meet on the ferry that I am pronouncing Uist wrong. It should, in fact, be an oo sound and then the ee and a short sharp st. Not Ooohisst but Oooooeest. More like a whistling sound, he says. I try it on, but struggle with its call. Each small town and road sign is noted in Gaelic, the collection of letters and accents unfamiliar to me, a language that is, in part, an act of civic reclamation. English was enforced here, first among the clan chiefs, and then the schoolchildren. I read these signs as a form of taking back. As a way to think about place but also the body. Does language impact and change the shape of the tongue? Until the body forgets what it used to speak with ease? My own struggles to take the shape of this place in. I cannot speak it, despite the sign telling me Failte gu Uibhist a Deas.  

Uist isn't one place exactly, but a collection of six islands, stippling the coast of West Scotland. A collection that seems unsteadily attached to the water beneath, as if at any moment it could shudder and give way, become unmoored and break up even further. Each island is connected via causeway, with rocks buffeting each side. Whenever we cycle over them the tide seems to be perpetually out, revealing white sand or fecund matter and the faint smell of something rotting. It is very open and the wind is against us. I try to keep close behind Jack, use his body as a type of shelter. He is a stronger rider than me, pushing us forward while I hang back. We’re both tired and not talking in that gentle familiar way that comes from being in each other's company a lot. And so, I am mainly left alone, just my body and my thoughts.

Photo: Jack Bush

Perhaps it is the proximity to the sea, and the grey nothing of the day, that makes it hard to feel as if I am doing anything but moving through, floating through, passing through. I feel strangely unplaced here. Letting the road dictate my movements but not taking anything further in. Only the asphalt beneath me. Swift and sharp pushes over small rises, dipping into another collection of houses, feeling the cars passing with a metallic reverb. We plan to travel from south to north over the course of the day, and it is distance that keeps me occupied. I keep tracking how far it is I have travelled, how far there is still to go. I am chasing the miles, wanting my body to become a blur. 

I am trying to act as if it's impossible for this place to be felt. As if cycling isn't a series of impressions in which place and body meet. But each turn of the pedal feels like another chance to look again. A cliché about wheels turning, a place that beckons as a type of rotation. Calls out, fades, calls out again. 

It is not as if this place is empty. When we pause at a Co-Op car park to eat lunch a car pulls up and I watch a man in a heavy green quilted jacket walk up to the curb to kick and scrape his boots. Signs of industry and labour are everywhere. There are sprawling farms with jagged half fence posts and abandoned rust-toothed machinery. Fishing nets all tangled up in a dense weave. So too, are signs of this industry fading as the permanent population of these islands steadily decreases. Former homes reduced to an outline of bricks and gaping doors and windows. In one field we watch a short-eared owl quartering dreamily just above the grass, silent on its daytime hunt for the squinting voles.

In North Uist, the final island of the day and where we plan to spend the night, the landscape changes into earthy peatland. There are small incisions from where it has been cut out in blocks. There aren’t many trees here and so the peat is burnt for fuel. The local population knows how to take from this landscape and use it up. While riding, I am trying to do the same. It is not a moving through, but an attempt to take in. We stop for dinner and I try Lobster for the first time, a local catch, and am surprised when it is served cold. I dig my little trident under the shell, pull out white flesh. 

A woman in the pub asks if we are staying and I wonder how many people she sees each evening with bags on their bikes, or else, all wrapped up in the metal shell of a camper van. How many of them, like me, will be trying to remember and gather up as much as possible before the next place sits on the tongue. There is more of Uist than I am able to tell but still, I am here, trying to find a way through. 

In the late spring it doesn’t get dark here until after 10pm. Toward the end of the day the sun starts to break through the clouds and soon everything is turned soft with a peachy hue. On the way down to the beach where we plan to camp there’s an old graveyard between the sea and the machair. There are old graves mixed with the new. And beneath the graves are the bodies of the people who lived here, the ground finally pushing into their bones, in a way that it will never do for me.

***

Emma Jones is a non-fiction writer and Curatorial Assistant, Photography at Tate. They hold an MA in Writing from Royal Holloway, London. As an arts writer and curator, Emma has been published in Source Magazine and contributed to the recent publication Photography: A Feminist History (Octopus Publishing). Contact her on twitter: @perceptivehow

The Cuckoo's Place

By Rebecca Welshman:

I follow an overgrown track alongside the dark recesses of a Sitka spruce plantation. Although sunshine rarely penetrates these shadow-wrought trunks, a feathered visitor has taken up a perch among the topmost boughs to sing. The sound carries through the air, stands out above everything else. I heard my first cuckoo in Henfield, Sussex where I spent my childhood. The scrubby streams and unkempt meadows surrounding the village at that time were the cuckoo’s ideal habitat. In East Sussex the arrival of the cuckoo has long been associated with a specific place. At the annual cuckoo fair in Heathfield each April a cuckoo was released from a wicker basket to mark the start of spring – a tradition with origins at least as far back as 1315 when the fair was given a charter. In the mid nineteenth century an elderly woman was still known to visit the vicinity at dawn to “turn out the cuckoo”. Today the fair is still held, and pigeons are released from a basket instead by “Dame Heffle”. As a herald of spring, the cuckoo symbolises the return of the light; the life-renewing emergence from the dark dormancy of winter. 

But for many years the cuckoo fell silent in my life. Over a period of ten years, as I moved to Liverpool, to Somerset, then Cumbria, I heard only one. The last place I heard it was in Shropshire, three years ago: a faint distant call, holding memories of fields and woods. Now, in Dumfries and Galloway the cuckoo’s song is once again part of spring. The very real reason for this of course is that cuckoo populations have declined in England, and increased in Scotland. The valley where the male cuckoo has taken up residence lies at the edge of the Ae Forest, a sheep-grazed island within an area of industrial forestry that stretches for miles in all directions. Its gently sloping sides are planted with sitka spruce, with some recently clear felled areas. Its floor is a broad soft tussocky expanse bisected by Garpol Water, a shallow fast flowing burn that has its origins in the Lowther Hills. Many thousands of years ago this would have been a river basin. Domed heads of islands still pepper the landscape, and amongst them are scattered the last remaining native tree species of the valley – birch, rowan, and oak. Although the ordnance survey map draws a clear yellow line along this part of the hillside, the forest has no real boundary on the ground. Miniature spruce grow wherever they happen to put down their resilient roots, in walls, on mounds, or amongst the gritty broken tarmac of forest roads. At the forest edge-lands any sense of ownership dissolves. 

A maverick of the bird world, the word “cuckoo” is synonymous with “strange”, and “eccentric”, suggesting its lack of conformity, a lone existence. While the bird is celebrated as an emblem of British springtime, it has also been maligned as a trickster and thief. Their true breeding habits were strongly disputed until the 1920s when ornithologist Edgar Chance made the film “The Home-Wrecker”, which showed the cuckoo laying her eggs in other birds’ nests. One of only two avian brood parasite species, fledgling cuckoos manoeuvre the eggs of their host bird parents out of the nest to make room for themselves. While these behaviours may seem treacherous or cruel, it is not our place to judge them by human standards.  Cuckoos feel the pull of spring time in the British Isles as much, or deeper, than we do. Their actions are hard-wired into them, set deep in their psyche after centuries of repetition. The instinct that drives them to return here each April to breed is detectable in their haunting two-tone call, which carries a beguiling air of mystery, compels me to listen, taps into my own instinct to pause whatever I am doing. 

This remote Dumfriesshire valley, now the cuckoo’s summer home before it returns to Africa, was once a contested area. A twelfth century castle mound still guards the rough track leading into it, and the rectangular outline of a much earlier earthwork is just visible amongst the green bog grasses beside the burn.  An ancient way visible on nineteenth century maps once threaded the valley from west to east and connected the distant hills with the infrastructure surrounding the Romans and Reivers route a few miles to the south. Deep within the valley can be found the remains of a circular monument with an entrance stone still standing. Remnants of cairns lie scattered around. A single aged oak tree growing from an islanded knoll watches over. Its branching trunks, dead at the ends, are angular and defiant, like antlers against the skyline. 

Scrub and heath – types of terrain that do not lend themselves to cultivation – are some of the cuckoo’s favourite places. As such the bird has long been associated with borderlands and heaths that once lay at the edges of medieval land units. The historic place name Yekheth in Acton parish, near Nantwich, derives from the Old English “gaecc” meaning “cuckoo”. It is a high point in the landscape, as is the neighbouring Wrenbury Heath a few miles to the south. In Irish folklore the cuckoo is attached to landscapes with historic human presence. The field of the mythical battle Moytura, in which the forces of light fought against the forces of darkness, has the highest concentration of megalithic monuments in Europe. A high point once known as “Cuckoo Hill” is marked by Eochaidh’s cairn. According to the writer and folklorist Padraic Colum, in his play Moytura, this spot was once known as “the cuckoo’s starting place”. That this bird of summer haunts the cold stones of an ancient tomb again reaffirms its association with the tensions between light and dark. The cuckoo, which embodies the light and dispels the shadows, has penetrated the human psyche at a deep level. It is no wonder that people all over the country still stop to remark upon hearing its first call.

Here at the edge of the Ae Forest the cuckoo’s mellow wood-note rings with piercing clarity. I draw closer, thinking that at any moment my footfalls and presence will disturb him, but still he calls. At the top of the hill I turn right onto the Southern Upland Way which leads away from the forest into the valley. As I leave him behind his echoing calls gradually grow more distant, and even though I know I cannot see him, I still turn back to look. This wizard of the woods has me under his spell. 

***

Rebecca is an author and researcher who lives in Dumfries and Galloway with her family, and numerous animals. Her publications include edited collections of the works of Victorian naturalist Richard Jefferies, and essays about literature, language, and the natural world. Her writing can be found at: rebeccawelshman.wordpress.com/blog and https://liverpool.academia.edu/RebeccaWelshman

A Hidden Glen

By Ian Grosz:

We returned to a cottage we’d first rented twenty years before. Hardly anything had changed. There were a few modern scatter cushions on the same old armchair; a new washing machine and sink unit, but it was the same bowed, pinewood ceiling and the same, thick stone walls; the heavy lintel above the fireplace; the same broken clock and faded landscape pictures on the walls; the same, old map of the glen hanging by the stairs up to the mezzanine bedroom. On the shelf beneath the sash and case window looking out to the pines that line the rushing burn coming down from the hills, was a guest comments book still with our entries from twenty years previous. We sat there, reading messages from ourselves from another lifetime. 

The cottage was once the laundry for the main house of an estate belonging to the Ogilvy family, hidden away down Glen Prosen with the evocative name of Balnaboth. Like most Highland estates, with farming and shooting no longer bringing in the revenues they once had, many of the properties had been given over to holiday lets. Even the house itself was now on Airbnb; but when we had first come here the family still lived in one of the two main wings. Their dogs would come to the cottage and scratch at the glass panes of the door to take us for a walk in the mornings: an eager west highland terrier named Una and a low flying, long-haired dachshund whose backside was always tangled up with pine twigs and fir cones.  They’d take us on a tour of the grounds, chasing the resident peacocks and barking at the squirrels. The dogs are long-since gone, but the scratches from their morning wake-up call on the glass of the door are still there, revealing themselves when caught in the low autumn light filtering through the trees. 

There was a thick mist when we arrived, the estate’s trees materialising out of the landscape as we followed the long, single-track road that winds its way up the glen from Kirriemuir, a small country town of red sandstone and the birthplace of the Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie. Barrie had returned frequently to spend some of his holidays away from London in the glens, and was buried in the town’s cemetery. Arriving at the cottage we settled our things; the years rolling back with that curious feeling of never having left. We jammed our weeks’ worth of food into the small fridge and, remembering the dogs, we took a stroll around the grounds to re-familiarise ourselves; the mist clinging to our clothes as we walked back down the track, past the now empty main house with its bright orange-yellow wash of lime rendering and its accumulated memories.

There has been some form of house at Balnaboth since the thirteenth-century, its original name stemming from Baile nam Bochd – the Stead of the Poor – but in its present form is thought to date from 1815 when Donald Ogilvy made a series of improvements, conjoining and adding to earlier buildings after taking over from his father Walter, whose Jacobite brother was exiled in France after the defeat of 1746. Barrie spent time at the house on his retreats from London literary life, meeting here with his ill-fated friend Robert Falcon Scott and later, the Scottish politician Ramsay MacDonald. MacDonald was the first Labour Prime Minister, leading a minority labour government for a short term in 1924 and again at the turn of the decade. He later headed a coalition government with a conservative majority during the early thirties, leading to his dismissal from the Labour party.

It is odd to think of a socialist being entertained at the tucked-away grand houses of the landed gentry, with associations that included the writer and high society hostess Lady Londonderry, wife of conservative cabinet minister Viscount Castlereagh, Secretary of State for the Air during the nineteen-thirties. He was central to pushing through the iconic Spitfire and Hurricane fighter aircraft to replace an outdated fleet in preparation for the war everyone knew was coming, but he had openly antisemitic leanings and known sympathies for a burgeoning Nazi Germany and was forced out of the cabinet in 1935. He died after a series of strokes in 1949, still with a porcelain figurine of an SS flag-bearer on the mantlepiece of his smoking room: a gift from Hermann Göring. 

MacDonald was demonised as something of a traitor due to these associations and in his role with the coalition government during the Great Depression; the government having pursued a policy that protected the currency over maintaining assistance to the poor and unemployed. He was seen to have put his career before his principals in aligning with the Tories, but in his own eyes was putting his personal politics aside for the national good at a time of crisis, holding the country together through a dark period in history. He was a founding member of the Labour Party, with a strong reform agenda, and for the time, held some radical socialist views that looked to redress the inequalities of British society. I wonder how much he might have confided in his friend Barrie in the years leading up to the difficult period of the Depression. 

Born out of wedlock to a farm labourer and housemaid at a farm in Lossiemouth and into a culture of strict nineteenth-century Presbyterianism, he got off to an inauspicious start. The prejudices of his religion would set tongues wagging, but the class system and the inequality of the British state was a very real barrier, there to keep folk in their place and the ruling classes in theirs. His parents never married and he was brought up in the Free Church, but became a teaching assistant, enabling him eventually to move to Bristol to take up a position with a philanthropic clergyman. He later moved to London where, after a period of unemployment, he took up a position as a clerk and deepened his interest and involvement in socialism. 

In 1887, he witnessed the ‘Bloody Sunday’ of Trafalgar Square, when marchers protesting against unemployment and coercion in Ireland clashed with the British Army, inspiring a later career as a freelance journalist that began with an article in The Pall Mall Gazette entitled ‘Remember Trafalgar Square: Tory Terrorism in 1887’. Throughout the late eighteen-hundreds he continued to educate himself at The Birkbeck Institute, now the University of London, and in 1888 took employment as private secretary to Thomas Lough, a wealthy tea-merchant and a radical Anglo-Irish politician, opening doors for MacDonald that would secure his own, later political career. 

In MacDonald’s early courting of celebrity and his frequenting of the grand houses of the Tory heirs, I saw perhaps more than a move to influence and maybe a lingering deference to the upper classes; a need in him to prove his ascendancy; to gain approval and validity from those in the very establishment he wished to reform. He was a supporter for Home Rule in Scotland, declaring in a paper published in 1921 that ‘the Anglification of Scotland has been proceeding apace to the damage of its education, its music, its literature, its genius, and the generation that is growing up under this influence is uprooted from its past.’ Wandering around the old estate grounds a hundred years on, his legacy felt increasingly present. 

We crossed a low wooden bridge spanning the burn, which was full and fast and courses its peaty way down from the hills like a torrent of frothy Coca-Cola. Following a muddy path through mixed woodland up a short rise into open ground again, we arrived at the old glass house that lies in ruin on a slope overlooking the burn, its timber frame mostly collapsed into its lower brickwork. A few panes of glass were still in place, but its interior was overgrown with tall ferns; a young tree reaching up through its roofless frame. An old wheelbarrow lay at rest under the shade of a nearby fir tree, as though the gardener who had once tended to the vegetables had simply downed tools and walked away. 

A sense of time and time’s passing was all around us; a sense of decay, and yet it was a comforting sort of sadness held within the crumbling walls of the garden and in the collapsed frame of the Victorian glass house. It felt deliberate, almost staged in its picturesqueness, as if arranged for the sentimental eye of the romantic; the grounds slowly but surely giving way to nature and its landowners democratising a once private estate. I felt it was part of the appeal of the place, this fading grandeur; a reminder of the inevitable certainty of time and change. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in the northeast of Scotland. Drawing largely from the landscape, he is published across a range of magazines and journals both in print and online. His writing features in the forthcoming book Four Rivers Deep, a collaborative deep mapping project that explores the rivers Don and Dee in northeast Scotland and the Swan and Canning rivers in southwest Australia, due for publication by UWA Press in January 2022. Ian is currently working on a personal, narrative nonfiction book-project exploring the ways in which landscapes shape a sense of place and identity. 

On Barra Hill

By Ian Grosz:

Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.  
– Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory.

I have lived in northeast Scotland now for many years. It is home, and yet always seems to remain at arm’s length; never quite a place in which I feel I truly belong. I grew up in the northwest of England and spent my early childhood playing in the back alleys of the tightly packed terraced housing of our town; on family days out to Southport and Blackpool; and soggy summer camping holidays in the Lake District. Later we moved to the suburbs where I roamed the playing fields and neighbouring farmland with my friends, taking our BMX bikes far beyond where we were allowed. We knew every patch of ground within a ten-mile radius as intimately as our own homes; named trees and hiding places; invented our own legends and hauntings. Our places lived within us: every track and shortcut; every park and empty house; every field, brook, hill, dip and hollow. No map could be as richly textured as those that we embodied in the landscapes of our young lives. 

Perhaps the need to somehow make a deeper connection with where I live now – to understand and fully realise that connection – is through the lack of this intimate knowing of place that comes from childhood, and born of the experience of being an outsider in a place that I consider to be home. It is home, but I know deep down that I am not from here, not of the place. My connections to it come from circumstance, and my roots go back for only as long as I have lived here; no further. 

Rising up above the village where I live, is Barra Hill; its flattened dome presiding over the immediate landscape.  I have walked the hill many times; have become familiar with its landmarks filled with their hidden histories. In an attempt to get under the skin of the place, I’ve explored these histories; delved into the time held by the hill. 

Close by is the fourteenth-century battle site of Robert the Bruce and his rival John Comyn, part of a bitter fight for the Scottish Crown which led to the formation of a medieval independent Scotland. ‘The Bruce’, as he was known, is said to have directed the proceedings of this battle from a chair-shaped boulder once sited somewhere on the hill’s slopes. This is known as Bruce’s seat, and now sits by the roundabout on the road leading out of the village, complete with a small plaque: a site of half-forgotten story and remembrance; but still reminding us of the long and troubled history between the two nations. 

Earthen walls on the hill’s summit form part of an old fort, built in three phases from the late Bronze Age through the Iron Age. Neolithic stone circles ring the hill’s flanks, while remnant undulations from medieval rig and furrow cultivation give its upper slopes the appearance of a crumpled, grassy carpet. On its far side, an old church houses a seventh-century Pictish symbol stone. The hill tells the story of this small corner of northeast Scotland stretching back to the last Ice Age, but holds much more personal histories too. 

I set off early not long after sunrise to make my way up to the hill through a short section of woodland at its base. Gorse laced with spiders’ webs glisten with dew. Cow parsley and nettles fill the woodland floor and a wren darts amongst the brambles that line the path. The trees of the woods seem to hold the morning: imbue it with a spirit of place and time as I walk beneath their high, heavy branches. A small burn gurgles contentedly through a narrow gulley, running down toward the village where it empties into the larger Meadow Burn. The name of the village – Oldmeldrum - is likely drawn from this burn and the prominent flattened dome of the hill. 

Meldrum is an anglicised conflation of the old Irish meall-droma and the old Scots Gaelic mealldruim, both of which mean ridge of the hill. The ‘Old’ is likely to have a phonetic, elided origin in the Gaelic ‘Alt’ which means the burn, or stream, possibly referencing the Meadow Burn running from the hill toward the edge of the modern village before draining into the nearby River Ury.  Alt Mealldroma therefore appears to be a geographic signifier for the beginnings of what became the modern-day settlement, its literal translation a direct reference to the burn of the ridge of the hill. Learning of this brings the village and its context within the landscape closer to a truer understanding. But it also signals my outsideness, my Englishness: reminds me that the people who named this place so long ago were somehow foreign to me; or rather, coming from a place outside of it, I am in some way foreign to this landscape.

The air is still cold as I emerge onto the open hillside, my breath billowing out ahead of me before being swept back and away across the fields, dispersing quickly to invisibility. My eyes seek out a line of trees along a ridge leading to the hill’s summit, silhouetted now against the skyline. I have always been drawn to these trees. Their rootedness reinforces my own sense of place here, brings me closer to a sense of belonging. 

Their silhouettes have seemed familiar since moving here over a decade ago, take me back to my childhood in the northwest of England. They remind me of trees my eye sought out on the bus journey home from school as a boy; a secret marker in the landscape between the school and home known only to me, I imagined; something I held within me that brought me home ahead of the bus. Seeing them after the regimentation and continual tussle of the school day was a signal that home was drawing near. Recognising them in the trees along the ridge leading to the hill now, fills me with nostalgia; a sense of both reassurance and loss. I am simultaneously here and there: where I live now and where I have come from; transported by the ghosting of trees from my childhood.

Finally reaching the summit, there is a definite sense of trespass as I enter the old enclosure, as if the ghosts of Pictish warriors still guard against intrusion. The slope of the hill falls away steeply on its western side, down to the old battle site of Bruce and Comyn, now peaceful looking fields filled with ripening crops. The village is visible below, with its old centre dating back to the seventeenth-century; the new houses at its outskirts and the small, modern industrial estate slowly growing at its southern borders. Silent cars make their way around the village by-pass and a passenger-jet traverses the sky in a wide circuit for the airport to the south, as if in slow motion. 

A group of swifts have begun darting and swooping across the open enclosure around me, catching midges and flies on the wing. The orchestra of their flight is a language without words, communicating with a deeper sense within me. It is something that is in me rather than in them; something within me that I recognise in them. It seems connected to the landscape; to the trees along the ridge; the morning light now brightening the fields. Everything around me feels perfectly a part of this place, bound up with the language of the swifts. I am just as much part of this landscape as the swifts are now; as much as the people who once occupied this fort; part of the endless narrative thread of life woven through the land and time, and yet I remain somehow outside of its slow unravelling. 

***

Notes: Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, (1995, repr. London, Harper Press, 2004), p. 7

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity. 

A Return to Den Wood

A companion piece to Winter in Den Wood, published here on Elsewhere in January 2021.

By Ian Grosz: 

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers – Herman Hesse

In late May I returned to Den Wood. I had last been here in the winter when the trees had been bare and seemingly lifeless. The small tunnel of twisted, comingling branches at the entrance to the wood was now almost a full leafy canopy, but it had been a cold and wet May, and the wood was late in its blooming; the ferns not yet unfurled and many buds yet unbudded; the growth of the wood almost a month behind its usual blossoming. The gorse was in full flower though, and there was a greater variety of birdlife amongst the trees: bluetits and yellow hammers; finches and robins as well as the ground birds I’d seen before: the blackbirds and thrushes. The lower sections of the wood were full with song and I felt my mind begin to slow with each step, the earthiness of the air in my lungs as I walked in the marbled light of the first warm days we’d seen since the onset of spring. 

I had felt tense when I arrived. Both my wife and I had been bad tempered that morning, and I was still carrying the frustration and mild anger of our irritability. We’d been locked down together in our small home since I had lost my job the year before. We all need our own space from time-to-time, especially when under the added strain of uncertainty. Arriving at the woods, that space for me immediately opened up, but it can still be difficult to let go of our often, self-imposed time constraints; let life flow a little more freely. I walked too quickly along the path, headed for the grove of wych elms I’d last seen bare and ghoulish in the winter; headed single-mindedly to my intended destination with my camera as though I had some urgent appointment. I crossed the low bridge above the stream and forced myself to pause there, letting the trickling sounds of its meditative flow settle me a moment.

I’d been diagnosed with anxiety disorder the previous summer, and I had become more aware of its insidious nature; the way it can overtake me without my realising it; make me feel as though everything is urgent; everything time-critical and to be done quickly. As a pilot, a sense of time pressure and sometimes urgency had been an occupational hazard that had crept into the rest of my life, invading everything I did with its insistency. It had become so great I couldn’t go shopping or load the dishwasher without my chest tightening and my pulse quickening. Everything I did, I did furiously. Finally, I had developed vertigo, and my flying life was over. Now I needed to force myself to slow down; to let life flow a little just like this stream, and I stood on the bridge and allowed the sounds of the water to fill my consciousness.  It did the trick, because I now ambled up to the elms, taking my time and taking photographs along the way, noticing details; letting the green light of the wood bathe me in its soothing balm. 

It is now a well-known scientific fact that being amongst trees is good for us. Studies have shown that a walk in the woods reduces levels of cortisol and other harmful hormones in the body; lowers blood pressure and even boosts the body’s immune system through the release of phytoncides in aromatic compounds. A study carried out in Japan in 2016 on elderly patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, found that ‘forest bathing’ significantly reduced the production of chemicals that add to inflammation and stress. The exact mechanisms at play seem unclear, but perhaps it’s the way we simply slow down when in natural environments; allow our bodies and minds the space they crave.

I had seen the potential for life in the bare elms of the winter; the promise of the spring to come and the message it held for both my own situation and the world in the midst of a pandemic. Now they had made a healing canopy of patchwork green high overhead, the thin trace of blue sky and clouds appearing as though threaded through their branches; earth and sky connected by their reaching presence.  I stood beneath them for a long time, just breathing them in, and the stresses in my body, out.

Finally leaving the grove, I sat on a low knoll amongst beech and hazel trees.  Self-consciously at first, I closed my eyes to listen to the birdsong; the susurration of the leaves; and to better feel the earth under me. I stopped looking at myself from the outside in, and allowed myself to be. Dare I say it, for a moment perhaps, I felt almost part of things; connected by the trees around me. My heart rate slowed considerably; I know that. For once, I had let go of time; and time it seems, for a moment at least, had let go of me. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity.