Sea Room

by Adam Nicolson

  Ith aran, sniamh muran,

  Is bi thu am bliadhn mar bha thu’n uraidh.

  Eat bread and twist bent,

  And this year you shall be as you were last.

  The housewife is spinning, a daughter is carding, another daughter is teazing, while a third daughter, supposed to be working, is away in the background conversing in low whispers with the son of a neighbouring crofter. Neighbour wives and neighbour daughters are knitting, sewing, or embroidering. The conversation is general: the local news, the weather, the price of cattle, these leading up to higher themes – the clearing of the glens (a sore subject), the war, the parliament, the effects of the sun upon the earth and the moon upon the tides. The speaker is eagerly listened to, and is urged to tell more. But he pleads that he came to hear and not to speak, saying:-

  A chiad sgial air fear an taighe,

  Sgial gu la air an aoidh.

  The first story from the host,

  Story till day from the guest.

  The stranger asks the houseman to tell a story, and after a pause the man complies. The tale is full of incident, action, and pathos. It is told simply yet graphically, and at times dramatically – compelling the undivided attention of the listener. At the pathetic scenes and distressful events the bosoms of the women may be seen to heave and their silent tears to fall. Truth overcomes craft, skill conquers strength, and bravery is rewarded. Occasionally a momentary excitement occurs when heat and sleep overpower a boy and he tumbles down among the people below, to be trounced out and sent home. When the story is ended it is discussed and commented upon, and the different characters praised or blamed according to their merits and the views of the critics.

  If not late, proverbs, riddles, conundrums, and songs follow. Some of the tales, however, are long, occupying a night or even several nights in recital. ‘Sgeul Coise Cein’, the story of the foot of Cian, for example, was in twenty-four parts, each part occupying a night in telling.

  That beautiful nineteenth-century account of a disappearing culture, its warmth and coherence, its sense of shared life, of a vital communality, is of course what many Victorians longed for and pined after, from Disraeli to Ruskin and Marx. But if Carmichael describes it with love, he does so in a way that animates the Shiants. If anyone ever visits the ruined blackhouse here, those are the words he should have in mind.

  The air of approaching crisis steepens after the middle of the century. The Seaforths, like many Highland landlords, were short of money. Rents had not been keeping pace with expenditure and the tacksmen, to whom the best parts of the estate were let out, were not attuned to the realities of the new financial world. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the old Seaforth tacks, the Shiants among them, were relet for higher rents to new men. The islands were now let to the highest bidder. In 1766, the Shiants were let out to Donald MacNeill for £7 10s (a steep increase from about £4 9s in the 1720s). In 1773 they were let to George Gillanders, Seaforth’s own Chamberlain of Lewis, for £9 and in 1776 to a Kenneth Morrison for £10 15s. Just how this increased rent – more than double in fifty years – was raised from the Shiants is not clear, nor is it known what happened to the departing tacksman himself. Many left for the New World, and the tacksman here, named like all of them after the territory he held, a man known as ‘Shiant’, might have been among them.

  In the wake of his departure, there are signs of real strain and breakdown of long-established customs. It was a process witnessed by Dr Johnson in Skye in 1773, and to his romantic Jacobite Tory sympathies, it looked like a social and cultural disaster. ‘If the Tacksmen be banished,’ Johnson asked,

  who will be left to impart knowledge, or impress civility? Hope and emulation will be utterly extinguished; and as all must obey the call of immediate necessity, nothing that requires extensive views, or provides for distant consequences will ever be performed. As the mind must govern the hands, so in every society the man of intelligence must direct the man of labour. If the Tacksmen be taken away, the Hebrides must in their present state be given up to grossness and ignorance.

  Signs of that cultural breakdown became apparent on the Shiants. On 26 September 1769, Dr John Mackenzie, Seaforth’s commissioner at Brahan Castle near Dingwall on the east coast, wrote to George Gillanders, the estate chamberlain on Lewis. They were friends. Mackenzie’s brother had been Gillanders’s predecessor and Mackenzie had got Gillanders the job:

  D[ea]r George,

  It is now some time since I wrote to you or heard from you and I dare say you’le very soon be thinking of coming to the main land and I hope with the rents in your possession which I can assure you are much wanted by the owner and all his conections.

  Immediately upon receiving yours about the wreck of a ship upon the rocks of Shant I wrote to Lord Stonefield and Mr Davidson [Edinburgh judge and lawyer respectively] requiring their advice for your direction in prosecuting those guilty of plundering the ship but unluckily they were both out of Town at some distance so that it must be some time before we can get any advice of theirs on the subject. I doubt not however that you have taken all the care possible in taking a precognition [a series of witness statements] so as to fix guilt upon the barbarous actors of the Robbery and if you have got that done I dare say your commission as substitute admiral [a power to act on behalf of the crown in anything to do with the sea] will enable you to prosecute the delinquents either on the spot or by sending them prisoners to be tryed by some other Court of Justice, in short no pains must be spared in bringing them to punishment and I beg you may come sufficiently prepared for that purpose.

  Here the letter is torn, but it resumes:

  …as we never had more need of Cash. my Compts to Peggy and to the rest of your family. I hope she keeps her health

  I am your etc

  John Mackenzie

  Unfortunately neither Gillanders’s earlier letter to Mackenzie nor anything describing the outcome of the case seems to have survived, but evidence of stress crowds in. The growing population and the shortage of land was leading to breakdown of family relations. On Lewis, children were turning their parents out of the shared home, setting them ‘loose upon the world and a begging, and will not give them any sort of subsistence’, as Gillanders described it in March 1768. His solution – and he is a sympathetic figure: a modern manager trying to deal with an intractable situation – was not to allow any tenant of the estate to take in their son and daughter when married nor to subdivide their properties in any way, on pain of eviction.

  Gillanders was busy with the kelp business. Since the late seventeenth century it had been known that the seaweed, whose alkalinity had always been used to sweeten the islands’ acid soils, could be burnt and the sticky soup that resulted would solidify into a solid mass which was easily transported, and from which both soda and potash could be extracted. As these chemicals were vital in the making of soap and glass, and were needed to bleach linen, there was a prospect here, for the landlords, of good money.

  The long, dirty and exhausting extraction process would be undertaken in June and August. The kelp was piled into large, often stone-lined trenches. Pat Foster identified one on the north shore of Garbh Eilean, a slightly ramshackle arrangement of stones almost indistinguishable from the mass of other fallen rock in the area.

  It is next to the bay where the kelp still grows thick and dense, with tiny beadlet anemones clinging to the dark brown blades and where, at low water springs on a sunny day, the mass of weed winks and glitters like a plate of eels in the stirring of the swell. Just here, in William Daniell’s prints, from sketches made as late as 1815, a skein of smoke drifts from the kiln towards the horizon, and small boats are gathered to take the burnt residue to the Lewis shore.

  The kelp was burned for four to eight hours, the fire kept going with heather and hay. The women would often have the job of watching it, adjusting the heat to keep it alive all day without wasting the precious fuel. The men with long-handled iron spikes or hooks would stir the heavy mass t
o ensure an even burning of the weed. Not a single one of these ‘kelp irons’ had ever been discovered, but we found a pair in the excavation of the blackhouse.

  One is a heavy iron spike, two feet long, with a socket at one end into which the shaft of a long wooden handle could be fitted. The other is sharply hooked, pointed at one end and with mineralised wood clinging to it, remnants of a handle which would once have been much longer. A ring is rusted to the spike, but no one yet has been able to explain its purpose. After the mass of kelp had been thoroughly melted, the pyre would be covered with turf and stones to prevent it getting wet and then left overnight. The following morning the spikes could be used again to break the glassy agglomeration into lumps that could be carried to the boats.

  Why these useful tools should have been left here is a curiosity. And I have been unable to find any documents relating to Shiant kelp. Thick lumps of paper survive in the Seaforth records detailing the arrangements which Gillanders was making for his proprietor, sending surveyors out to estimate the volume of the seaweed in different parts of the Lewis shore, arranging for ships to be piloted into the tricky sea-lochs on both east and west coasts of the island, sending Lewis kelpers to work on the Seaforth estates in Kintail, paying for the kelp which was to be sold in Liverpool, Whitby and Dublin with oatmeal, bearmeal (the flour of bere barley) and by remission of rent.

  Huge amounts were made – 89 tons 9½ cwt from the parish of Lochs alone, baked and delivered to the waiting ships in the summer of 1770. There are receipts from the captains preserved in the Edinburgh records, still tied together with a piece of brown wool and thumb marks on the paper from what must have been a filthy cargo. But no mention of the Shiants. The only possibility is the strangely large quantity of kelp collected from Donald McKenzie at Valamus just across the Sound in Pairc, 6 tons 12 cwt for 1770 alone. Other shoreside settlements rarely produced more than a ton each. The Valamus return may include kelp transshipped from the Shiants.

  The kelp business is another note in the Shiants’ death knell. As the kelp went into the heritable proprietor’s kilns, it could not be applied to the fields. A desperate shortage of fertility was inevitable; hunger accompanied the work. James Hunter, the historian of crofting, quotes William MacGillivray from the 1830s. The conditions would have been similar here half a century earlier:

  If one figures to himself a man, and one or more of his children, engaged from morning to night in cutting, drying, and otherwise preparing the sea weeds … in a remote island; often for hours together wet to his knees and elbows; living upon oatmeal and water with occasionally fish, limpets, and crabs; sleeping on the damp floor of a wretched hut; and with no other fuel than twigs or heath; he will perceive that this manufacture is none of the most agreeable.

  ‘The meagre looks and feeble bodies of the belaboured creatures,’ the Reverend Buchanan wrote, ‘without the necessary hours of sleep, and all over in dirty ragged clothes, would melt any but a tyrant into compassion.’ It is from MacGillivray’s account that one word glares out: limpets. They are here by the Eilean an Tighe house in abundance. Limpets, about a quarter of a million of them, are piled in and over the walls of the ruined barn. There must have piles like this all over the Hebrides. Dr Johnson saw them: ‘They heap sea shells upon the dunghill, which in time moulder into a fertilising substance.’ We dug at them for day after day. Using the same maths as before, but imagining a bigger family, perhaps eight of them, this second limpet deposit represents about fifteen hundred limpet meals, or fifteen years of hunger. The figures can only be approximate, but the size of the limpet pile is articulate enough, fifteen feet long, six wide and four high, a ziggurat of strain and sorrow.

  As we excavated the limpet midden, you would come across clusters of shells that had clearly been dumped there in a single throw, the shells still nested into each other, chucked from the pot onto the heap. The thickness of the pile diminished from east to west: whoever had taken the meat out of the limpets had done so in the house, had walked out of the door, around the east end on the roughly paved platform, and chucked the contents over the ruined barn wall. Here and there was a clot of fishbones, or in one place five puffin heads still lumped together from a single stew. Elsewhere, the heap was widely and deeply disturbed: dogs, chickens and perhaps children had picked it over and stirred it up even as it accumulated. Many of the bones seem to have been drilled for the marrow and others look chewed, either by men or by dogs. Drilling for marrow is a sign of hunger, of squeezing out every last drop. The archaeologists could find no layering, no diagnostic stratigraphy, in the heap. The limpets were muddled together with every other bone. But the meaning was clear: life on the edge.

  The picture is graphic enough: the landlord requires a higher return from his estate as a whole; at the same time the number of people on the Shiants rises; the islands are let to new men at higher rents and the place is squeezed agriculturally, both to pay that rent and to feed those people; it is a desperate time and from the 1760s onwards the population drops through emigration; kelp manufacture turns the islands towards the production of a global commodity; that lasts for a few years and then the population collapses, leaving a single family tending the cattle. The map-makers working for the Ordnance Survey in 1851 noted a few ruins and heard from their informant Neil Nicolson of Stemreway that ‘the islands were formerly occupied by Five families (about Eighty years ago) who it is said procured a comfortable subsistence by their produce, and the fish which is found in great abundance around their Coasts.’ That gives a date of about 1770 for the crucial departure. Why do they leave? Because kelpers can be brought in seasonally and the rent is more easily paid by abandoning any attempt at arable farming here and turning the place into a giant pasture. A single employed family is needed where a community had existed before.

  By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the entire way of life which places like the Shiants had supported was looking out of date, unenlightened and doomed. The economist, James Anderson, follower of Adam Smith, friend of Pitt’s, in his An Account of the present state of the Hebrides, published in 1785, voiced the Establishment view.

  In the Hebrides, unless it be at Stornoway in Lewis, and Bowmore in Islay, there is not perhaps a place without the Mull of Cantire, where there are a dozen of houses together: – very few indeed are found but in scattered hamlets only.

  We ought not to be surprised at the poverty of the people in those regions, nor at the indolence imputed to them. They are indeed industrious; but that industry is unavailing. – They make great exertions, but these exertions tend not to remove their poverty. Is it a wonder if, in these circumstances, they should sometimes think of moving to happier abodes?

  In consequence of this general system of dispersion that prevails in all those regions, the proprietors find their lands overstocked with people who are mere cumberers of the soil, eat up its produce, and prevent its improvement, without being able to afford a rent nearly adequate to that which should be afforded for the same produce, were their fields under proper management.

  All the strain that is evident in the Shiants, the cutting of new fields out of the unproductive moor, the pressure of the increasing rents, the crowding of people in the houses, the desperation of those who had to survive on limpets, the robbing of the wreck, the back-breaking strain of gathering and burning the kelp for benefits which seemed to accrue more to the landlord than to those who were doing the work, all of that is reduced to the grim phrase: ‘mere cumberers of the soil’. Even now, at this distance, can anyone not feel indignant at the description? I feel like taking the shade of James Anderson (living in Edinburgh, dying in Essex, existing, I guess, somewhere in Purgatory), showing him the limpet pile and asking him what he might make of that. Did he not grasp the reality of what that pile represented, nor imagine what that life might have been like?

  No one now would tolerate living on the Shiants. People had come to understand the virtues of concentration, of agglomeration, of the division of labou
r, and none of those things were possible stuck out on the Shiants, where a man was forced to be his own ploughman, labourer, tanner, mason, shipmaster and butcher. The emptying of places like the Shiants was the product of a profound change in the nature of economic life, in which the local is subsumed in a much larger system. Nowadays, it would be called globalisation.

  The Shiants died. There are the faintest traces in people’s memories of who these departing Shiant Islanders might have been. Hughie MacSween, who had heard it from his uncle Malcolm or Calum MacSween, thought a man called Hector, Eachann, had lived at the south end of Eilean an Tighe. And, even more remotely, a whisper on the ether, a woman in Toronto, Allana Maclean, has posted on the Internet her own family tradition that her great-great-grandparents, Donald MacDonald and Janet McKinnon, or more possibly the parents of one or other of these, at some time in the last decades of the eighteenth century left the Shiants for Skye. But that tells you little. They are nothing more than names attached to absences.

  The Shiantachs left not because people like James Anderson willed it – there is no evidence of a Shiant clearance in the classic sense – but because life was no longer tenable there, largely because the expectations of land and its productivity had risen. Human life on the Shiants had been founded on cyclicality, a kind of stasis in which each year, with luck, would be no worse than the one before. That is the meaning of the saying recorded by Alexander Carmichael: ‘Eat bread and twist bent, / And this year you shall be as you were last.’

  But the idea of working capital, trade, expansion of markets; above all of growth, and an expectation of growth, of increasing demands, increasing expenditure, increasing comfort and increasing wealth, cannot be accommodated in such a system. For the capitalist, every year is a failure unless it is an improvement on the one before. For a while, places like the Shiants reacted. The population increased, the attempts were made to get a commercial crop of kelp, but the ceiling was soon reached and the new life could not be sustained here. The Shiants now became, for the first time, a back room, a place in which animals could be grazed, and where people were perhaps needed to look after them, but not really a scene for human habitation. The new society had to retreat from places in which the old had felt at home. Insularity was now a symptom of backwardness and isolation a kind of failure.