Calum's Road

by Roger Hutchinson

  The arduous clearance of foliage by pick and shovel and wheelbarrow could not be limited to the roadway itself. ‘It ought never to be forgotten’, Thomas Aitken had written, ‘that in order to have the surface of a road perfect, it must be kept completely dry . . . It is absolutely necessary to remove trees from the sides of the road . . . Not less than 20 per cent of the expense of repairing roads is incurred by the trees . . . keeping the road wet.’

  This was the type of work, the first fifth of a mile of hard labour, that Basil Reckitt observed personally in April of 1966, noting in his journal that ‘Calum MacLeod has been working on it for the last six months.’ Calum had been toiling, then, through a period of what seemed to be a terminal crisis in the human affairs of northern Raasay. In 1964 the Oban Times sent a photographer to the north end of Raasay, perhaps to record some rare surviving fragment of traditional Hebridean life. The newspaper later printed a selection of picturesque snaps and captions. ‘Calum MacLeod, Arnish, the postman for North Raasay, approaching Fladda’ was the caption beneath a landscape shot of Calum, complete with Wellington boots and postman’s cap, a hefty, bulging canvas bag hanging from his right shoulder, strolling down the track towards the tidal narrows between Raasay and Fladda. The trim houses of Fladda are in the immediate distance, and Calum is, of course, walking along an extremely broad, flat and well-maintained stretch of coastal pathway: the pathway that he had built with his brother Charles thirteen years earlier.

  Another photograph was captioned ‘Provisions arrive off the lighthouse relief boat. The picture shows Fladda people and families home on holiday.’ And there they stand, in a cheerful group close to the shore, facing piles of promising parcels: Katie MacKenzie (née Gillies), home from Gairloch on the mainland; James MacKenzie; Katie Gillies; Mary Gillies; Bella MacLeod; and Cathie MacAskill (née MacLeod), over from Struan in Skye. And in the middle of them, smiling indulgently, stands ‘Calum MacLeod, postman and captain of the lighthouse boat but wearing lighthouse service cap’.

  There were others photos: of Fladda men shearing sheep up by Kyle Rona, of the ladies of Fladda carrying their goods in wicker creels on their backs from the lighthouse boat up the hill to home, of husbands and wives and dogs on the hillside and outside their front door.

  Shortly afterwards, at the end of the year, a small news item appeared in the Oban Times. ‘With the closing of 1964’, it read, ‘a chapter in the history of the small islet of Fladda on the northwest coast of Raasay has come to an end . . . A few weeks ago, Mr and Mrs John Gillies moved from their home on the islet to Inverarish at the south end of Raasay.

  ‘John Gillies, better known as “Iain Handy”, is a well-known character in these parts and was often referred to as the “King of Fladda”, having lived there for 50 years.

  ‘Until last autumn three families lived on Fladda which is joined to the mainland of Raasay at low tide but is a mile by footpath to the next habitation (Torran and Arnish) and a further three miles [sic] by the same footpath from the end of the road leading to the south end of Raasay where the only shop on the island is – twelve miles from Fladda.

  ‘Including Torran and Arnish a total of six families live at the north end of Raasay which at the time of the First World War supported nearly forty.

  ‘But isolation has proved too much . . . it will not be very long before Fladda becomes deserted, and Torran and Arnish as well.’

  The Oban Times was correct in its first two predictions. In 1965 the last families left Fladda. They and their parents and their grandparents had spent more than eighty years pleading for such basic services as a footbridge and a roadway. By the middle of the 1960s it was clear that the authorities had no intention of beginning to supply them with such commonplace late twentieth-century amenities as electricity and running water. So they left for the modern world, in the south end of Raasay and beyond. The official census for Fladda in 1961 registered seven males and five females as resident in the island. In 1971, and thereafter, the Fladda census was returned as ‘Nil’.

  The house-of-cards effect on what remained of the rest of the north of Raasay was just as the Oban Times had suggested. ‘Oh, it was terrible, it was terrible – awful when they left Fladda,’ said Jessie Nicolson of Torran. ‘You missed them, because you knew there was nobody going to visit you, and you weren’t going to see anybody – in a small-knit community like that, you do miss them. And we did miss them, very much so. Very much so.’

  Very quickly, almost all the remaining humanity of this small place left it for one destination or another. In 1966 Calum MacLeod’s father, Donald, died. Donald MacLeod’s mortal remains were taken out of Loch Arnish by his son Calum on the lighthouse boat. ‘My father could hire the lighthouse boat for personal use – all he had to do was contact Edinburgh and they usually said “yes”,’ said Julia MacLeod Allan. ‘On the day of my grandfather’s funeral, my father had to go and get the lighthouse boat from Fladda and bring it round. They took the coffin down to the boat and set it on the boat and sailed it down to the south end. The men went to the cemetery, but women did not go. That is not the case now, but it was a tradition. The women went straight home.’

  In the following year, 1967, Calum’s mother Julia, his sister Bella and his brother Charles went to live at Portree in Skye. On 15 July 1967 the post office at Torran, a symbol of national recognition and identity which had stood on that remote shore since 1898, was shut down as Murdo and Jessie Nicolson and their family left for the mainland. With the post office closure went Calum MacLeod’s part-time job as postman. In the same year the home anchorage of the Rona lighthouse relief boat was moved from Raasay to Portree. With the children, and apparently all prospect of future children, gone Torran School, which had first opened in 1839, was closed for good, and with it went Lexie MacLeod’s job.

  Suddenly – in the space of two years – there was nobody left in northern Raasay, Fladda and Eilean Tighe but the 56-year-old Calum and Lexie MacLeod of South Arnish. Adding insult to injury, the telephone manager from Aberdeen stepped in that autumn to remove the public telephone box at Arnish, ‘as there would only be one householder remaining in the district, who had made application for a private telephone service’. ‘My father only applied for a home telephone’, said his daughter, ‘after learning of the plan to remove the kiosk.’

  It should have been endgame, and some thought that it was. They did not know Calum MacLeod. He raged against the dying of the light. His fury, which was far from evident to any casual acquaintance, found a number of expressions. ‘Is it any wonder Scots emigrate?’ he asked the correspondence columns of the Stornoway Gazette in April 1967, five years after Julia’s departure for Portree and in the year of the depopulation of Torran and the closure of Torran School.

  ‘The decline and fall of the system of education they prided in, and which was unsurpassed in excellency anywhere in the world, began with the closure and downgrading of the local one and two teacher schools, wherein was a high degree of individual tuition and responsibility. Unlike what we have now, seven teachers to one subject in four sessions, and staff changing like the Guards at Buckingham Palace, and children away from parental care at twelve years of age, devastating the Highlands and Islands.’

  Three years later, in the last weeks of Harold Wilson’s second Labour Government, Calum would give his enemy a political face. The detailed personal analysis of the decline and fall of northern Raasay – which was never named as such in his essay, but which was surely the spectral ‘crofting community’ at the heart of his thesis – laid the blame at the door of one particular creed. ‘Socialism’, he wrote to the Stornoway Gazette in May 1970, was responsible for ‘remote authoritarian units that have no consideration for, and are mainly very ignorant of, local factors essential to benefit those concerned.

  ‘During the last two decades, this system was pursued by its advocates in education, police, postal and transport facilities in rural areas and islands. The whole north-western seaboard of Britain – from
Shetland in the north to Arran and Bute, including the Hebrides – were subjected to the downgrade system.

  ‘First, rural schools were closed and pupils transported to or boarded at central schools in villages or towns as far as 100 miles from home. This was done amidst protests by parents whose families were broken up, and had the most devastating effect on small crofting communities, in most cases leading to total extinction. The Socialist Scottish Secretary makes much ado about the decline in emigration, but the bare truth is that in rural areas there are no Scots left to emigrate. To have under thirteen pupils in a rural school was “unrealistic”, therefore it must be closed and the crofting community thereby destroyed . . .

  ‘In this county alone about 70 rural schools were closed, with parents driven out of their homes to villages or cities. These transactions were going on under the very noses of the Crofters Commission and the Highland Development Board, and for all the help rendered by those bodies to crofters to prevent the tyranny, both would be as well dumped into the Moray Firth, along with their expensive offices around their necks.

  ‘Next, the policing of rural areas as subjected to “centralisation” and amalgamated with those of county town, and policemen in crofting villages replaced by mobile units operated from elsewhere, which can never command the same respect. Besides, it meant the loss of another family to each locality – that had already lost their schoolteacher by the same system of administration.

  ‘The Postal Service was the next to be “centralised”. In rural areas offices were either closed or downgraded, and senior officers removed elsewhere. Thus another family was lost to the crofting community – a third family turned out of the area by the authorities, who undoubtedly foster depopulation without any worthwhile saving or gain, which is most destructive to the economy of these localities. Undoubtedly the Socialist “pet” has proved a devastating curse to the Highlands and Islands.’*

  Like many another mild-mannered, naturally courteous and relatively shy man, Calum MacLeod was able to channel his anger into the written word. Unlike most others, he was also able to assuage it by building a road. The quick evaporation of the last populations of Fladda and northern Raasay between 1964 and 1967 radically altered the purpose of the road. It would no longer assist in preserving his community. ‘We were sorry that he didn’t start a year or two earlier,’ said Jessie Nicolson. ‘Say, three or four years earlier – maybe we would have never left Torran, I don’t know . . . it was coming too late to save the community.’

  But if a road could no longer be used for the preservation of a population, it could encourage a revival. And there still was a population: a small one admittedly, of just two middle-aged people, but not to be despised for that. And at the very end of the day, of a life, or of a community, there was a statement to be made. It might, and would, be scorned as a pointless gesture, a Parthian shot, a quixotic tilt, a Pyrrhic victory. But any gesture, any shot or tilt, any victory was better than none at all.

  Calum would not give up. He paused once, but only to clarify a point of law. Calum realised that the mineral rights to the island of Raasay belonged neither to himself nor – as was usual – to his crofting landlord, the Department of Agriculture. The mineral rights, which sixty years earlier had so excited the ironmasters William Baird & Co., had apparently been sold, along with Raasay House and several of the island’s other important amenities, to a famously obstructive absentee speculator from Cooden in Sussex named Dr John Green. The very rocks which Calum MacLeod was blasting into shape in order to force an orderly route to the north end of Raasay were apparently, therefore, the property of a man (yet another man) whose only interest in the island was commercial. Luckily, said Calum, ‘we discovered a loophole in the laws and were able to continue’.

  ‘He was building the road because it would be of use to the people and it was of use to himself,’ said Jessie Nicolson. ‘So that he could get around and his wife could get out, you know. To my knowledge he never thought of giving up on it. And knowing Calum, Calum would not give up on it.’

  ‘I don’t think he ever considered giving it up,’ said his daughter, Julia. ‘His determination wouldn’t let him think anything but, “I’m going to do this.” He thought that the road would help with the repopulation of the north end. I think he’s on the record as saying that – that it could bring work. Fish-farming, strangely enough, was something that he mentioned. And eventually, a fish farm came to the north of Raasay. I’m not sure how he would have felt about the actual fish farm – but he was broad-minded enough to accept that it was the price for progress.’

  ‘Lexie wasn’t well,’ said John Nicolson. ‘She had poor feet. Now, I heard Calum saying this myself:

  ‘ “Well, a bhalaich, the road, a bhalaich. I’ll no finish, a bhalaich, until that road, a bhalaich, is at the back of the house and I can get my wife away in a car.”

  ‘He put that in front of himself, and he did carry on until he finished.’

  In 1967 Calum MacLeod gained his lighthouse keeper’s certificate and his job with the Northern Lighthouse Board was upgraded. He became the local assistant keeper on the Rona light.* He would keep this responsibility until the Rona lighthouse was automated in 1975. It required him to work for four weeks in Rona followed by two weeks at home. During that fortnight at home this man, who was then aged between fifty-six and sixty-four years, would complete his crofting chores: his animal husbandry – he had at one time as many as eighty sheep and fourteen cattle – his vegetable garden, his crops and his peat-cutting. He would also continue to build the motor road between Brochel Castle and Arnish.

  In the latter, signature task he was not left entirely alone. His landlord, the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries for Scotland (DAFS), agreed to assist with the blasting necessary both to create aggregate and gravel for the road’s foundations and rough surfacing, and to clear throughways through certain patches of granite that could not be removed by hand with a pickaxe. The Engineering Department of the Department of Agriculture provided a compressor, explosives, a driller and a blaster. DAFS then subcontracted – and paid – the local county roads department in Portree to second men from their labour force, men from both Skye and southern Raasay, to blow up those parts of northern Raasay which Calum required blowing up. The whole exercise cost the Department of Agriculture £1,900. It would prove to be the only outside investment made until Calum MacLeod had completed routing, digging and laying his road.

  ‘When you saw Calum when he was working on the road’, said John Nicolson, ‘that’s all that was on his mind. He would ask your opinion of things, and then he would tell you, “The big rock that’s more or less at the fank there at Tarbert – enough gravel there, boy, to cover the road, a bhalaich, from Castle to Fladda.”

  ‘That was the type of thing he was seeing. He was foreseeing where he was going to get everything. The boys that used to go over to do the boring and the blasting for him, once every six weeks or so, they were saying to themselves, “Och, that will keep him going for two or three months.” But by the time they went back, there was nothing – not a stone was to be seen. It was all in place in the road. You can see his stonework still. It was terrific altogether. It seems practically impossible to do.’

  ‘There were two separate lots of blasting in the first phase,’ said Julia MacLeod Allan. ‘The first lot of blasting was beyond the south march cattle grid near to Brochel. That had to be blasted out and I remember passing the big compressor blasting that rock. At one blasting where the diversion goes eastwards a hillock was blown up into the air – and it was hollow inside! And there was a pinnacle up at Tarbert, a spear of rock. They used to call it Cailleach an Tairbeart, the Old Woman of Tarbert. It was a tall pinnacle, vaguely reminiscent of that landmark in Skye, the Old Man of Storr. It was just above the road, but later the road had to go through between two rocks and it would be too narrow, so she had to go! That’s one bit that I regret, that I don’t have a photograph to remind me of that pinnacle.’ />
  When the county men had gone and taken the blasting equipment with them, Calum was once more on his own. ‘For years he went off in the morning,’ his wife Lexie would say, ‘with his piece [lunch] in his bag, and I wouldn’t see him again until dark. He was determined to build that road.’

  ‘Oh, there was marvellous talent, you know,’ said Jessie Nicolson. ‘The work he put in there is unbelievable, and with no modern equipment – just the barrow and the pick and the shovel. It was marvellous. And the way he built it up there at Tarbert, his stonework is something to be admired. It’s amazing when you take it all in.’

  It was all the more amazing and admirable because Calum MacLeod worked throughout his fifties and sixties in some of the most challenging weather conditions in western Europe. It is known that in January 1975, when Calum had almost finished, he experienced the wettest calendar month in Skye and Raasay since 1928, and that fourteen of those thirty-one days were assaulted by winds ranging from strong to gale-force. As for the earlier stages of his labours, it is known that the whole of 1967 was also exceptionally wet, but that by way of compensation the whole of 1968 was exceptionally dry. All of that is known in large part thanks to an acquaintance of Calum MacLeod.

  Towards the end of the 1930s Calum first encountered Donald Archie Maclean, then a young man doing brief service as a relief teacher at Torran School. Maclean stood in for Miss Alexandrina Macdonald while the permanent teacher took sick leave in November and December 1938, and while he was in northern Raasay he lodged with the MacLeod family in South Arnish.

  D. A. Maclean had been born in 1908 in North Uist in the Outer Hebrides. After qualifying as a teacher he taught for nine years in his home island. During that period, in about 1931, D. A. Maclean first became interested in recording and chronicling the Hebridean weather; ‘I started keeping notes,’ he would say, ‘based on fairly primitive equipment, just an ordinary bottle and filler to measure rainfall.’