A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
INVENTORY OF MOSSES (CELLULAR CRYPTOGAMS) OF FASCARAY—COLLECTIVELY KNOWN AS FOG
Bryophyta:
Sphagnum acutifolium, Dill. Sphagnum cymbifolium, ehrh. Found near Loch Och, in Lusnaharra, Finnverinnity and Doonmara, growing on stone from abandoned, cleared crofts.
Weissia:
Pellucidum. Found on moist ground and stone in Calasay.
Pottiaceae:
Barbula. Usually grows on limestone walls in Killiebrae clachan but is also found on Lusnaharra Strand, growing in loose sand comprising pulverised seashells.
Flexicaule. Grows in crevices on rocky shoreline north of the Slochd caves.
Grimmiaceae:
Lycopodiopsida, club moss, garbhag. One of the fern allies, found in boggy sites by Mammor, or in sandy, acidic uplands including Balnasaig. Local associations with good fortune. Said to have protective qualities. Subject of an ancient Gaelic incantation, or ubag, given here with my reimagining below.
Zygodon viridissimus. Grows in semi-darkness in Clochd cave, along with Eurynchium pumilum, which is also found on the slippery rock at the side of Doonmara Falls and in the tributary of Cannioch River by Heuchaw.
Garbhag an t-slèibh air mo shiubhal,
Chan èirich domh beud no pudhar;
Cha mharbh garmaisg, cha dearg iubhar mi
Cha reub griannuisg no glaislig uidhir mi.
See me? See the club moss in ma haun?
Nae hairm can come tae me;
Nae fairies can slay me, nae neds can chib me,
Nae kelpies or bangsters can skelp me.
—Grigor McWatt, 1990, The Fascaray Compendium
4 December 2014
I’m distracted in my office by another email from Marco.
“Are you okay?” he asks. “I’m missing you both and wondering what we’re doing. Does it have to be like this? Is there really no way back?”
The door opens and I look up from my laptop. Margaret Mackenzie has arrived with cleaning equipment and a delegation. There is Kenny MacLeod from the pub, holding a mop, which he raises in mock salute; Eck Campbell, from the fish farm, pushing an industrial steam cleaner; Chic McIntosh carrying two ladders and a bucket; and Reza and Iqbal Shah, who’ve brought a vacuum, dusters and a broom.
They all get to work in the museum, insisting I stay at my desk.
“Och, you’ve got enough to sort through there,” says Margaret, nodding at my piles of papers.
I’m tempted to reread Marco’s email and toy with an answer but I resist and get back to work. Two hours later they call me in. The museum is as clean and light as a Scandinavian beach house. They’ve unwrapped the jukebox and moved it into the centre of the space and arranged all the display cabinets around it in two concentric circles. It looks magnificent. Now, all I’ve got to do is get the walls painted, hang some pictures and fill the cabinets. My eyes well and I laugh as Kenny MacLeod plugs in the jukebox, presses a button and Robin Hall and Jimmie Macgregor reprise their 55-year-old duet of “Hame tae Fascaray.”
Eck Campbell is going to paint the place tomorrow with Shonnie MacDonald and Donal MacEwan while I go over to Calasay to sort through McWatt’s collection of farm implements. Kenny and Chic insist on coming with me to help.
“A wee lassie like you can’t be shifting all that big stuff herself,” says Kenny.
I overlook the patronising tone and accept gratefully. Before they leave, Eck takes me aside.
“I’ve got something you might be interested in,” he says. “For the museum. Come round to my house tomorrow night when you get back from Calasay.”
I’m unused to all this goodwill—Agnes is in an equally merry mood when she returns from a playdate with Oonagh—and I find it oddly unsettling.
After supper she Skypes her father, who’s staying with Nonna Lucia in New Jersey. He doesn’t ask to speak to me.
In bed, just like old times, Agnes asks me to read her a story. She chooses The Treasure Seekers. My daughter, a digital native, my inhouse IT specialist, has become obsessed by this Edwardian morality tale of an impoverished but jolly family whose world is so different from her own; full of characterful siblings, a widowed father, a busy schedule of home-made low-tech fun undercut by a sobering strain of tragedy. She loves it but it brings me out in hives. I can’t refuse, especially after yesterday’s outburst. I take a deep breath. But then we’re both spared.
“Look!” she says, throwing back her blankets and pointing at the window. I turn to see a vast green veil of light swirling across the night sky.
The aurora borealis.
Awestruck, we watch the display in silence.
“Wow!” Agnes finally says, taking my hand.
She’s forgiven me. I got my girl back.
“That’s way, way better than any crummy fireworks party,” she says.
Vita Summa Brevis
They arenae lang, the lauchter an the greetin,
Loue an ettle an laith;
They’ve nae pairt in us efter,
The gemme’s a bogey. Life’s fleetin.
They arenae lang, the days o flooers an bevvy,
Oot o a dwaumin haar
Oor paith shines clear alang the levee,
An noo it’s derk, an noo it’s au revoir.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Ernest Dowson, 1997*
* * *
* Teuchter’s Chapbook, Smeddum Beuks, 1998.
Eventually de Uytberg’s indifference to the island took a more sinister turn. An eviction notice was served on one crofter, John-Joe MacDonald, in February 1997, two weeks after he failed to run to open a gate to let through the laird’s Land Rover, and in Lusnaharra crofters were shocked to receive a sizeable bill for the seaweed that they had, like their forebears since time immemorial, collected from the strand for free to fertilise their vegetable plots.
“The lairds would impose feudal dues for the oxygen we breathe, if they could get away with it,” wrote McWatt in the Compendium. “It seems de Uytberg has a Crusoe complex and would prefer it if the Isle of Fascaray were uninhabited.”
The Auchwinnie Scottish National Party candidate lobbied Westminster’s Scottish Office in March 1997 on behalf of John-Joe MacDonald and the Lusnaharra crofters. The official reply was that “this is a private matter between island tenants and their landlord and as such does not fall within the purview of the Secretary of State for Scotland,” a response which, wrote McWatt, “would have satisfied the Duchess of Sutherland as she prepared to clear the benighted Highlanders from their land in the nineteenth century.”
John-Joe MacDonald had no inclination to fight and left the island with his family to look for work in Aberdeen. “More than three decades ago, it seemed that fate and the elements were conspiring to snuff out the flickering spark of life in Jessie and Francie MacDonald’s baby son,” reflected McWatt. “Brave men and women battled sea, storm and cruel nature to save the newborn John-Joe. Now he is a fine man, with a family of his own to protect, and the caprice of a wealthy Englishman is casting him out of his island home.” Soon, John-Joe’s empty croft went the way of all the other empty crofts.
But, as McWatt wrote in the Pibroch, “It wasn’t all bad news this year.” In Westminster, the Conservatives were ousted and the new Labour government set in motion plans for a fresh referendum on Scottish devolution.
This time, no finagling of figures could dispute the result—74.3 per cent of Scottish voters backed the creation of a Scottish Parliament. In the 12 September issue of the Pibroch, McWatt was triumphant but still not entirely satisfied.
“So, Scotland is about to turn its back on shameful servitude and take its place once more among the nations of the world. This proposed Wee Pretendy Parliament is surely the first step towards full sovereignty. Now, what about independence for Fascaray?” he wrote.
Students of modern Scottish history still argue about the turning point, the moment when
Fascaray finally shrugged off its feudal past. The Land Raid of 1946 was pivotal, certainly, but after the raiders’ defeat in the Court of Session, when they were forced to leave the island, the spirit of the Fascaray Five slumbered for half a century as the island struggled on under what McWatt termed “the Sassenach yoke.”
The decline in fortunes of the Montfitchetts and their class, the discrediting of corporate power and the personal eccentricities of de Uytberg, undoubtedly also played a part in the political awakening of Fascaray. And, while some give credit for the island’s radical transformation entirely to McWatt, as the public face of the movement, it is generally agreed that one of the most significant events in the timeline of Fascaray’s “liberation” was what came to be known as the Battle of Fergus McKinnon’s Bonfire or, as McWatt named it, the War o the Muckle Midden.
“It was trash,” McWatt wrote later, “that permitted us to bid good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Islanders, used to fending for themselves and paying for the privilege, had disposed of their own domestic refuse since the days when their Mesolithic ancestors buried their food scraps in the caves of Slochd and Clochd. In the twentieth century, for as long as anyone could remember, garbage had been collected by island volunteers, shovelled onto fishing boats and buried at sea. But by the late 1990s, there were few available fishing boats and new EU rules forbade dumping in inshore waters. As a result, the islanders’ heaps of waste were growing alarmingly—“Soon those intrepid hikers in sturdy boots will be scaling our midden mountains with crampons and ropes,” wrote McWatt—and there was an infestation of rats in Lusnaharra and Finnverinnity.
A site at the base of the caves north of Lusnaharra Point was identified by islanders and, bypassing Izzy Wallop, Fergus McKinnon and Hamish McIntosh requested permission from the laird to use it as a community rubbish dump. He refused, via a one-line fax sent through to the post office. Locals had no choice but to burn their rubbish.
In May 1999, the veteran nationalist MP Winnie Ewing stood before the new assembly in Edinburgh and declared, “The Scottish Parliament, adjourned on the 25th day of March in the year 1707, is hereby reconvened.” McWatt celebrated the event in the Pibroch, writing, “after 292 years…better late than never. Though this is only the beginning of our march to self-determination and freedom.”
That summer, there was a quality of “festive defiance” to the regular blazes which lit up Fascaray, “like Norse funeral pyres,” wrote McWatt. But when the English factor arrived with Marina Chetwynd to prepare for de Uytberg’s visit and told the Fascaradians that there were to be no more bonfires, even the most quiescent islanders were roused to indignation.
Up at Calasay, McWatt—a scrupulous conservator who was also remote enough from the Big House to evade surveillance—continued to torch his small heaps of refuse. It was, though, the brazen bonfire of Fergus McKinnon which was said to have been the beacon that finally lit the new land reform movement in Fascaray. Within a week, Fergus McKinnon, along with his wife Maggie and their six children, received an eviction notice. The laird, the factor informed him, had identified McKinnon’s Lusnaharra croft, the house where he’d been born and raised, which his father Joseph had worked so hard to improve, as the ideal site for a community garbage dump.
“As Scotland looks ahead to a bold future of autonomy, Fascaray seems to be retreating once more to the servitude of the dark ages,” wrote McWatt in “Frae Mambeag Brae” in December 1999.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
I’ve met members of the laird class and their henchmen many times. That is the tragedy of life in Scotland: it is not possible to tramp the hills between the months of June and September without running into the hee-hawing English classes and their shooting parties.
The old Fascaradian joke often comes to mind:
Q: How many Englishmen can you fit in a shooting brake?
A: Twenty-one. You call one the laird and the other twenty will crawl up his bahookie.
It was some years ago that I had my most memorable encounter with one of the breed. I was with Dougal Mackenzie, the fine pub baritone, an indispensable farmers’ “orraman,” and one of the best poachers I ever knew. He could kill a stag and net a prize salmon in a single night and once famously carried an 18-stone stag, its fourteen-point antlers vast and unwieldy as the old Big House chandelier, a full mile, dodging the most vigilant factor and ghillies.
After a few stiffeners at our local howff we made our way into nearby woods. He was armed with his .22 and we soon found ourselves in possession of some handy birds for the pot.
By the time we made our way out of the clearing towards the clachan where Dougal lived with his wife and two children, we found our way blocked by a shooting brake driven by a scowling factor in cloth cap. In the back seat a wee fellow in saffron tweeds was smoking a pipe.
“Where are you going with those birds, my man,” said the wee fellow, whom I recognised as the infamous, Nazi-loving local Laird Montfitchett.
Before Dougal could reply I spoke for both of us.
“I am heading for the warmth of my friend’s hearth after a successful excursion in these woods. And, for the record, I am not your man. And neither is my friend.”
“These woods,” replied the wee man, levering himself out of his seat, “I’ll have you know, are my woods. As are these hills, this island and every creature in it. I take a very dim view of poachers.”
“And how,” I asked with what I like to think of as beguiling innocence, “did you come by these woods and hills?”
Unsure as to whether I was impudent or merely stupid he shook his head and answered: “I bought them of course, along with the rest of this island.”
“And how did you come by the money to buy Fascaray?”
He stabbed the end of his pipe towards me.
“I inherited it from my father, in the time-honoured fashion.”
“And how, could you tell me, did he come by it?”
He was beginning to lose patience.
“From his own father, my grandfather, of course.”
“And how—” I began. He cut me short.
“Look here,” he said, opening the car door and stepping out to give us the full benefit of his five-foot-four-inch stature. “The Montfitchett estates have been in my family for five hundred years.”
“And how did the Montfitchetts come by their wealth five hundred years ago?”
By now he’d concluded that my cheek had got the better of my idiocy.
“You may be unfamiliar with English history but the Montfitchetts were granted our title and lands for services to the king on the battlefield. They fought for it!” he said.
“So,” I said, taking off my jacket, “I’ll fight you for it…”
—Grigor McWatt, 17 December 1999, Auchwinnie Pibroch*
* * *
* Reprinted in Wittins: Mair Selected Columns and Essays of Grigor McWatt, Stravaigin Press, 2011.
5 December 2014
I spend the day with Kenny MacLeod and Chic McIntosh in the cart shed on Calasay going through McWatt’s collection. We start early and they insist on doing all the heavy lifting. I’m left with the light work of issuing orders, recording McWatt’s labels, identifying and relabelling where necessary, and making a start on the inventory. Any small pieces of interest can be added to the museum but we’ll leave the larger artefacts in situ and the board can make a decision about their future. They might keep it all here to add value to the An Tobar site when they decide what to do with it, or it might be transported to Am Fasgadh, the Highland Folk Museum, now in Newtonmore, created by Isobel Grant, my spinster nemesis.
Kenny and Chic are tireless and cheerful workers—sanguine about the fossilised rats uncovered in the cab of the old Balnasaig tractor—but they have distinctly opposing views on the value of the collection. Kenny describes himself as a “modern man,” and says “if it was down tae me I’d chuck the lot,�
�� whereas Chic who, like Marco, is prone to whistling, handles every object with reverence. “All that history!” he says, gently wiping a wooden head yoke as if it were a Michelangelo bronze. Chic, also like Marco, has all the traits of an incipient hoarder. I compile my inventory, gritting my teeth at his chirpy trilling and feeling a professionally improper sympathy for Kenny’s position.
It’s a long day. Chic has brought some portable lights and a generator so we can work on after dusk, or the gloamin as he calls it. Agnes is having a sleepover with Aaron and Oonagh at Finnverinnity House so I can stay as long as I need to. In the end we leave at 8:30 p.m., before the evening high tide kicks in, making our way back to Ruh and home on Kenny’s truck, driving across the strand through a foot of surging sea.
“You can’t go home to an empty house without some food in you,” says Kenny. He insists I come into the pub for a meal.
“On the house, like. And there’s a bit of a session planned with some of the local musicians.”
First I have to call round to Eck Campbell.
His wife Isa answers the door, wiping her hands on a dish towel.
“He’s just finished his tea,” she says.
“I can come back later. Or maybe tomorrow?”
“Not at all! Come away in out of the cold. He’s been looking forward to your visit, like a wee boy at Christmas!”
Kirsty, Eck and Isa’s youngest grandchild, is there and she joins us as we walk out through the back door and across the yard to a large shed. It’s almost as big as their cottage. Eck unlocks the double doors and pulls them open with a flourish.
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