by Dan Boothby
DAN BOOTHBY
ISLAND OF DREAMS
A Personal History of a Remarkable Place
PICADOR
Kyleakin Lighthouse Island
FOR MY FAMILY
and in memoriam
OLWEN DAFYDD
(1968–2014)
First Skyeman, at bar, in August: ‘Aye, Donald, it’s been raining since July.’
Second Skyeman, after deep thought: ‘Just so, just so. Which July?’
From Hamish’s Mountain Walk, 1978
(with apologies to Hamish Brown)
O come wi’ me where the sea-birds fly
Remote and far by the Isle of Skye –
Away wi’ the winds a-sailing!
Where dreams are the gifts availing –
From ‘Come with Me’, Pittendrigh MacGillivray, 1923
Prosecuting Counsel: ‘Do you wish to comment on the statement you have signed?’
The Fool [hanging by his foot from a rope]: ‘All is true, milord, as remembered.’
From Truth or Consequences, P. F. Standhope, 1914
It was the poet Cowper who said that God made the country and man made the town, and no more appropriate words were ever written; for the country at all seasons of the year is like a big fascinating storybook, with no two pages alike – a book so large, that you can go on reading and turning over the pages every day of your life, and the deeper you get into it, the more beautiful and wonderful it becomes.
From Wild Nature Wooed and Won, Pike and Tuck, 1909
Contents
Maps
Prologue The Dreamer
One Summer Daze, 2005
Two Hidden Rooms
Three Staying On
Four Staying In
Five Quicksands, Scottish History and a Thrupenny Bit
Six Second Summer
Seven The Fall
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Select Bibliography
Prologue
THE DREAMER
When I was fifteen years old, on a half-term break from boarding school, I came across a book, mis-shelved in the natural history section of the local library, entitled Raven Seek Thy Brother.
Perhaps it was the ‘Raven’ in the title that prompted me to pull down the book. I admired ravens and the rest of the crow family, although I had reservations about the magpie, for it is an opportunist thief and a cad. But on the whole, corvids are the brightest, longest-lived and most inquisitive of all British birds. Even the ugliest – the rook, with its baggy trousers and crone’s nose – has a certain raggedy-arsed charm.
The spine of the book was black gloss, with the title, publisher and author’s name picked out in bold white capitals. It caught the eye. On the front cover, the author’s name and the title – also in bold white capitals on black – topped and tailed an illustration of a white house with a slate-grey roof standing in isolation in a field of rough grass. The window frames and front door were a pale Mediterranean blue. A rosebush climbed up the front of the house, a low wooden fence encircled it. There was a small lean-to shed. Tools had been left lying on the grass. There was a ladder, a water butt, a wooden garden gate. The door of the house was ajar.
Behind the house were mountains, sheep grazing, a rocky outcrop on a sandy beach, a patch of sea. The sky was a menacing grey, but amidst the murk was a sliver of pale blue and there, in that shard of brightness above the lonely house, a raven flew.
I opened the book and flicked through its pages. It had been published in 1968 – some sixteen years before I found it – and was the last in a trilogy about the house and its environs, which the author called Camusfeàrna, the Gaelic for ‘the Bay of Alders’. The house, an old lighthouse keepers’ cottage, stood on the extreme edge of the western seaboard of the Highlands of Scotland and apart from a small ‘but ’n’ ben’ cottage adjacent, the nearest habitation was a mile and a half away over a hill. Close-by, and just offshore, was a mini archipelago. Black and white photographs accompanied the text: a sitting room cluttered with books and pictures and otters, creels hanging from the ceiling and tins of food stacked on shelves like Scott’s hut in the Antarctic; the surrounding hills, a broken-down Willys jeep on the track above the house; lighthouses and islands backed by snow-capped mountains; boats and dogs; Icelandic ponies and whaling stations and frozen waterfalls; photographs of boys the same age as I was, playing with otters.
The endpapers were pen-and-ink sketches of an otter swimming, turning somersaults, flowing. The inside flap of the dust jacket had a short biography of the author, Gavin Maxwell, and a photograph of him – a middle-aged man, asleep in a rickety armchair with an otter on his lap.
I closed the book and caressed its glossy cover as I continued my tour of the library, trawling for other books – other worlds – to escape into. My brother, sisters and I had been brought up to all intents and purposes fatherless, and for the first four years of my life we had lived with our mother in a gypsy caravan by the side of various roads. Eventually we had moved on to a commune in Norfolk and then a series of isolated houses surrounded by flat arable farmland and potholed tracks. I was growing up with most of my mind sunk into books and, at fifteen, although I had no idea of what I wanted to be, I devoured books about travelling the world, sailing in small boats, living in out-of-the-way places, natural history, and writers’ lives. I read few novels; I was after facts. But at that age, among much else, I had yet to discover that all writing, even non-fiction and autobiography, is a blend of the blandly real and well-judged lies.
After reading Raven Seek Thy Brother over a night and a day, I asked my family and friends if they knew anything about Gavin Maxwell. They had heard of Ring of Bright Water, his first book about his Highland home, but knew nothing else about the man. Scotland had never been on our map as a holiday destination – it was too distant and too hilly for trips out with the horse and wagon. In those days, which seem so far away now, before internet search engines and online encyclopaedias, there were no quick answers and a researcher had only the library, the telephone and the letter. I went back to school when half-term ended and in the school library found The Otters’ Tale – a book Maxwell had put together for children in 1962. It is a large-format book, an abridgement of, and in parts an expansion on, Ring of Bright Water, and it contains a great many photographs: mainly of the otters Mij, Edal and Teko, but also of Camusfeàrna, of Maxwell himself, and of the boys Jimmy Watt and Terry Nutkins, who had lived with Maxwell and looked after the otters. I went through the photographs in The Otters’ Tale time and again, scrutinizing the backgrounds with a magnifying glass to see what extra details I could glean from them.
Later that year flu swept through the classrooms and dormitories of my school, and I found myself washed up on the languid atoll of the school sickbay. Away from the grind of boarding-school life, my fellow refugees and I lazed in our beds while nurses in blue pinafores came round at intervals to dole out paracetamol and orange juice and meals on trays. And in the sickbay bookcase I discovered a copy of Ring of Bright Water, which I rush-read before being cast back into the surf of school. Lyrical and jocular, Ring of Bright Water is for the most part a bright, light book about beginnings, but it didn’t resonate with my teenage self as Raven Seek Thy Brother had. Raven Seek Thy Brother is an altogether darker book – about the end of a dream. Maxwell called it a true sequel to Ring of Bright Water, and in it he ascribed blame to a curse laid upon a rowan tree at Camusfeàrna for turning everything sour.
When school ended, I bought with my pocket money a paperback of The Rocks Remain, the second of the Camusfeàrna trilogy, in which Maxwell continued the story of life at Camusfeàrna, though much of the book is taken up with Maxwell’s travels, his marriage, and his w
inter sojourns abroad.
Reading about Maxwell’s adventures, I hankered after the life he described in the books: the romance of mountain, sea and rock, vivid colour and violent sky. The remoteness and beauty of Camusfeàrna evoked a yearning in me, so opposite was it from the flat, tamed, featureless and often muddy land where I lived. A shy, solitary child, my dreaming head was always stuck in a story, where I’d meet interesting characters – or characters I thought to be more like me than the people around me; where I had company, where life made sense and all the strands tied up neatly in the end. And I was a ‘commune kid’. We weren’t exactly legion. There was a stigma attached to being brought up different, laid on us by ‘the straights’ – normal people. I had a choice: accept my status and brazen it out, or retreat from those that might hurt me. I’d watched my brother get bruised at his school for taking the first option and so I chose the latter, and retreated into books.
I wanted to be in Gavin Maxwell’s stories. I wanted the life I imagined those boys had. I wanted danger and adventure: to experience wild storms at sea and bouncing trips aboard rickety Land Rovers along rough mountain roads. I wanted to live in a house where otters and deerhounds stretched out to sleep by the fire and where erudite, sophisticated house guests came visiting from abroad. I wanted it all but could only get it in books. And so I read, and dreamed, and projected; for the present was merely to be endured, until life could become more exciting.
Raven Seek Thy Brother is a brooding book, full of self-pity, foreboding and loss; a requiem to a lost idyll; and it grabbed me and haunted me and pulled me headlong into obsession: with the man who wrote it and the world he so powerfully described. In its epilogue Maxwell wrote, ‘In the small hours of 20 January 1968, fire swept through Camusfeàrna, gutting the house and destroying everything that was in it.’ One of his otters, Edal, died in the fire, Maxwell lost practically everything he owned, and shortly afterwards he moved to the cottage on Kyleakin Lighthouse Island. In the other books about his Highland home, Maxwell had made a good job of disguising the location of Camusfeàrna, but after the fire, when it couldn’t matter any more, he told us where it was. In the foreword to Raven Seek Thy Brother, he wrote:
With the necessarily precise placing of the two lighthouses of Ornsay and Kyleakin it will be obvious to any interested reader that Camusfeàrna is Sandaig, by Sandaig Lighthouse, on the mainland of Scotland some five miles south of Glenelg village.
I got out the family atlas and tracked down Glenelg, Sandaig, and the lighthouse islands of Ornsay and Kyleakin, and that summer of 1985 – the summer of Live Aid – in a house surrounded by flat fields, I dreamt up a journey to mountains.
One
SUMMER DAZE, 2005
You drive up from the South and reach Glasgow and think you’re near but you’re not even close. You drive on, through the shabby-grand, second-city streets and out into a landscape untamed and open. You edge the car around Loch Lomond – skirting those bonnie banks – and catch flashes of quicksilver and blue through fir trees and crash barriers and over low stone walls. On, on, four hours of gunning the engine further on; over Rannoch Moor and down through haunted Glen Coe, past the lump of Ben Nevis (if you are lucky and it’s a fine cloudless day) and through Fort William; over the Spean River and the Caledonian Canal, past the Cluanie Inn and the Five Sisters of Kintail, until by Eilean Donan Castle in Dornie you glimpse it. There, at last, at the mouth of Loch Alsh, sitting beneath the sleek, grey stretch of the Skye Bridge. The tiny lighthouse island. The windows of the cottage wink, the Cuillin Mountains rise massive and disinterested behind. Another forty minutes and you’ll be home. You swing the car around the end of the loch and on down the hill into Kyle. Only half a mile to go now, past the railway station, past the slipway where the Skye ferries used to dock, past the old tollbooth and up the incline of the approach road. You slow, pull into the lay-by beside the gate in the otter-wall and switch off the engine. Because you’ve arrived.
To an American or anyone from a ‘big country’ the distances involved would appear minuscule, but to a Briton, who believes his country to be of a manageable size, seven hundred miles is a very long way indeed. I had driven for fourteen hours and by the time I was on the final furlong up onto the Skye Bridge my car was coughing and kicking like a sick horse. I was amazed, frankly, that the car, bought for less than a song from a ferret of a man in a pub in West Wales (‘I’ve found just the thing you’re looking for, mate. I’ll fix it up for you’), had made it at all. I got out of the car and the damp clean odour of the Highlands and the silence hit me like a dose of salts. It was already late on this June summer evening but this far north the sky was still bright. I walked, stiff from the extreme drive, up onto the span of the bridge to look down on my new home. I was above the island up there, above even the lighthouse; a speck of humanity thirty metres above the sea. To the south-east lay Loch Alsh and the two villages – Kyle of Lochalsh on the mainland and Kyleakin on the Isle of Skye. Behind me and to the north-west, the Inner Sound led out to the open sea.
I’d been mailed a set of keys, a hand-drawn map of the island, and instructions. I slotted a key into the lock on the gate, bumped my shoulder to rain-swollen wood and lurched through onto a pathway of pale grit. A rowan – the witches’ tree of the Hebrides, its berries still green – loitered nearby. I squeaked the gate shut and crunched to a crossroads where another rowan – this one dead and rotting – clutched a crow’s nest leaking wisps of wool. The massive bulk of the Skye Bridge leered over the island behind me like a bramble tendril, one end rooted on the mainland, the other on Skye. I walked on past a small stone building standing on a honeysuckle-strewn bluff and came to the lighthouse cottage.
I tried another of the keys in a half-windowed door in the gable end and found myself in a room that smelt of mould and long disuse. There was a wardrobe, a sofa-bed, a TV on a chest of drawers, a table and an armchair. A galley kitchen. A seven-foot-high fridge-freezer towered in a corner. Everything in the room had seen better days. The floor had been raised and there was a step down by a doorway onto a square of the original stone floor, patterned with sweat stains from rising damp. The door opened to a lobby and a shower cubicle. Coats and knitted scarves and a hi-vis puffer jacket hung on pegs in the lobby above a pair of paint-spattered yellow sea boots and a chaos of cleaning equipment. A poster of an otter was pinned to one of the off-white walls. Another door opened to the front of the cottage. Like a house-sitter, I had that sweet desire to peer and pry and poke around, but the door to the rest of the house was locked and I hadn’t been given the key.
The fridge-freezer in my room clicked and began to hum loudly. I went back into the room where I would be living and looked through the half-windowed door to the path and the brown and grey mountains beyond and for the first time in my life felt what it must be like: that heady rush of home-ownership.
The sun was setting as I strolled with a very light step back up the path to the car. The western sky over the Inner Sound was aflame and a rusty cloud shaped like an angel was heading north on light airs. I ferried my belongings to my room, then went to sit on a rain-warped bench at the front of the cottage to take in the view. The summer solstice – the longest day of the year – was a week behind me and all around me was everything I’d dreamed of: mountains, boats, islands, the sea, and Gavin Maxwell’s old haunts. I was entering the myth that had gripped me all those years ago as a boy.
The beginning of the Maxwell myth goes like this:
A man in his forties, a writer, a painter, a naturalist – a poet – spends part of each year living in a remote lighthouse keepers’ cottage on the western seaboard of the Scottish Highlands. ‘Camusfeàrna’, he calls this place, and he has been coming here since he was first offered the lonely house on its isolated promontory after the Second World War by an old friend from university days. The nearest village is five miles away, by rough footpath up mountainside and down unmetalled road, though it is a little closer by sea. The writer retreats t
o the house, alone but for his beloved dog, Jonnie, to write and to explore the wild surrounding land and sea where life is harsh and elemental. Then Jonnie dies, leaving the writer feeling bereft and doubly alone. He grieves, and casts around for another companion to keep him company in his solitude – an animal – for other humans, with their complications and demands, have only ever brought the man sadness.
He has a book to write, and in 1956 accompanies Wilfred Thesiger – that craggy-faced, hard-as-nails explorer of the Arabian Sands – to the marshlands of Southern Iraq to gather material for what will become A Reed Shaken by the Wind. Some of the Marsh Arabs keep otters as pets and, during his last days in Iraq, the writer is handed an otter cub. He takes the cub with him to London, where he keeps a studio flat. The cub, Mijbil, grows and proves to be an amusing, intelligent and loving pet, though always fiercely independent, always part wild, and too boisterous for the cramped London flat. The writer – charmed, and no longer lonely – takes the otter to his Highland home, where Mijbil delights in the surroundings, swimming free in the burn and the sea. And the writer delights in the antics of Mij – a wild creature that has accepted him as its friend and holds so much more fascination than a faithful, obedient dog. Mij is unique, and what’s more he is of a subspecies of otter previously unknown to science. Mijbil’s genus is named by the scientific community after the man who discovered it. Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli: ‘Maxwell’s Otter’.
Idylls are merely episodes. Mij is a constant distraction. The writer must work and travel. He asks a friend, the poet Kathleen Raine, to look after Mij at Camusfeàrna while he returns to London and the writing desk. Raine is as enamoured of the Highlands and as charmed by Mij as the writer. And Raine harbours a deep love for the writer. To be allowed into the sanctity of his home, for her, is a balm. She writes poetry to him, she leaves love tokens for him to find, she loves the otter as she loves him.
