Calum's Road

by Roger Hutchinson

  It had taken a lifetime, but an official at council headquarters in Inverness had finally spelled out the words ‘to revitalise the economy of the northern end of Raasay’.

  In February 1982 the Scottish Development Department approved a grant of £101,612 to Highland Regional Council towards improving and surfacing the road between Brochel Castle and Arnish. The road squad began, as Calum MacLeod had himself begun two decades earlier, at Brochel. They were constrained by the fact that their heavy machinery could do yet further damage to the Arnish crofter’s piece of land art, and by the fear that if they did venture out onto it, they might not get back again: ‘there are no turning areas sufficient for vehicles to manoeuvre and turn round and it is doubtful whether the track in its present condition would stand up to the passage of contruction vehicles’.

  The road was finished, more or less, by the end of 1982. Between Brochel Castle and a turning place a hundred yards above Calum and Lexie MacLeod’s crofthouse in South Arnish there lay at the end of that year almost two miles of smooth and navigable road. It was a single-track highway, of course, but it had twenty passing places to permit the safe transit of northbound and southbound traffic. There were already plans to install sheep and cattle grids instead of gates to keep different townships’ stock separate, all of which were located, purchased, installed and maintained by Calum MacLeod.

  It was a road. ‘People have lost much of the work that Calum had done,’ said John Nicolson in unconscious echo of Magnus Magnusson and the artist Campbell Sandilands, ‘because when the council started on the road to get it ready for tarring, they covered everything over.’

  But it was a road. ‘He was chuffed to bits,’ said his daughter. ‘He had a road to his house. My mum wasn’t well, she had rheumatoid and osteo-arthritis and she was very crippled – at one point she was wheelchair bound – and the road got her in and out of Arnish and off to her hospital appointments. It made a tremendous difference in that way.

  ‘It also helped with getting his peats home. The last peat bank he was cutting was at the side of the road almost as far as the deer fence. He used to cut peat there to stop the peat level rising above the road. He only had one problem. When the road reached the peat bank, peat began to go missing, and he suddenly realised that all of his peat was going to be away beyond Brochel if he didn’t do something about it. So he went up there with a whole pile of plastic sacks and his lunch bag, filled the sacks with peat, and then some kind person drove them home.’

  It was a road upon which people could drive without palpitations. ‘I go in the summer when the family are here,’ said Jessie Nicolson. ‘Och, the road doesn’t bother me now – it’s tarmacked. It’s lovely in the summertime with the family.’

  ‘People from outwith this area,’ said John Nicolson, ‘and even people from within this area, look back on it now and say what an extraordinary achievement. But in fact it didn’t seem that extraordinary to Calum. It was a job that needed doing, and because no-one else was going to do it, he did it.

  ‘That would be about it. Nobody else would dare to do it except himself. Not even us, and we were only then in our thirties, would ever have dreamed of building that road – never mind a man that was sixty. When you look at it carefully it becomes even more remarkable. Here was somebody who left school at fourteen, and you could say he was more or less self-taught. You can only wonder, what if that man had gone to university? But what he did . . . it’s brilliant!’

  In October 1982 a journalist telephoned Calum MacLeod to ask for his opinions of the tarmacking of the final stages of his road. ‘I am very pleased indeed,’ said Calum. ‘They have done a very good job.’ He chuckled. ‘It’ll be like an autobahn when they’ve finished. Mind you, they have not had to change an inch of the lines. I had an Australian science master over here this year and he said that, considering the terrain, the lines of the road were the finest example of scientific engineering he had seen!’

  On 8 December 1982 Calum MacLeod wrote a letter from Arnish to Ian Boag, the divisional engineer with the council’s road department in Skye. ‘Naturally I am delighted’, he said, ‘with the magnificent improvement done to the Brochel/Arnish road and wish to express my sincerest gratitude and thanks to you and all your staff for work that cannot be expressed in words.

  ‘It may interest you to know that recently, a visitor from Cape Town told me that it is a marvellous feat in roadmaking, and highly praised your staff engaged thereon, for their quality.’

  * If this scheme had gone ahead, Calum himself could not have missed the irony. Its chief sponsor was the county council which he had accused in print of ‘neglect and maladministration’. Its chief facilitator would have been the EEC, which he would later accuse of ‘chaos and malpractice’.

  * ‘Bitmac’ is the proper, road engineers’ name for tarmac. Tarmacadam is technically known as ‘bituminous macadam’, or ‘bitmac’ for short.

  The Last Man Out of Arnish

  Calum MacLeod – man, road-builder and writer – could be described as quintessentially Gaelic, the flag-bearer of past generations, not folding to bureaucracy but building a road with heroic determination.

  Campbell Sandilands, art student, 1984

  Calum MacLeod never really stopped working on his road. Once it had been improved, surfaced and adopted from Brochel to the turning and parking place at his croft in South Arnish, he began extending it to his very back door: a job which he not only completed but also paid to have tarred. And there was always some kind of maintenance; always cattle-grids to clear and paint; drains and culverts to clean.

  But he had, both before and after 1982, another life. His reading and especially his writing, which had always been important to Calum, took on an extra dimension in his later years. For as long as his letters and articles to the newspapers had always been in his second language, English, he had never been able to achieve full expression. Only once the need had passed to propagandise for his cause in a tongue that Inverness councillors would understand could he relax back into Gaelic.*

  He began to contribute regular articles to the Gaelic quarterly magazine Gairm. He began to write Gaelic histories of his people. And once again, sixty years after the Celtic Society of New York medal had been mailed to Arnish, he began to win literary prizes. In 1978 he entered an essay titled ‘An Gaidheal Gaisgeil’ (‘The Heroic Gael’) in an annual competition organised by the Gaelic Books Council in Glasgow. It won third prize.

  He worked harder. He began to prepare a long essay which he would call ‘Faìsachadh An-Iochdmhor Ratharsair’, or ‘The Cruel Clearances of Raasay’. ‘My father didn’t have any Highers,’ said Julia MacLeod Allan, ‘but my mother had her Higher Gaelic and Latin, so my mother used to help my father quite a bit. He was sometimes sticky with the Gaelic grammar. The main Gaelic book was the Bible, and once you could read the Bible end-toend in Gaelic, you were fluent enough in Gaelic. But it all affected his style. I know that in “The Cruel Clearances of Raasay” some of the Gaelic is in Biblical style. He used to say to my mother, “How do you put this?” and “How do you put that, Lexie?” He used to write in the front room in Arnish. The table in that room was covered with references, books, letters to and from America, New Zealand, Australia . . . a huge network of correspondents, an enormous network, often of distant relatives abroad. So he had all that to keep up as well.’

  In 1984 Calum explained how he had researched and written ‘Faìsachadh An-Iochdmhor Ratharsair’ in South Arnish. ‘I had to contact Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and USA authorities,’ he said. ‘For instance, I had to get lists of emigrants on sailing ships. How these poor people fared, some drowned, others murdered, and others went insane on seeing the wildernesses to which they were sent, while those that went to Canada had to endure winters there clothed in rags and old sacks. I was shocked to learn the naked truth of which only a mere fraction has ever been published . . . Some dupes maintain that these Clearances did good to the Highlands, but that is downright igno
rance of the horrors and cruelty involved [which were] typical of the revolting Spanish Inquisition, and hardly believable to have existed in a nation at least nominally Christian, or civilised.’

  In 1982 – which was altogether an extremely satisfactory year for Calum MacLeod – ‘Fasachadh Andiochdmhor Ratharsaigh’ won joint first prize in the Gaelic Books Council’s competition, and Calum received a cheque for £75.

  The accolades were only beginning. In the New Year’s Honours List of 1983 Calum was awarded the British Empire Medal. This merit was officially given to him as a reward for his decades of ‘community service’ both to the post office and to the Northern Lighthouse Board, decades which stretched from his time as a deckhand on the Rona lighthouse tender in the 1920s to his retirement in July 1975, when the Rona light was automated. Letters of congratulations – more than sixty of them – flooded into Arnish from the rest of Britain, from the USA, Canada and Australia. Calum MacLeod, wearing his full lighthouse dress uniform, was officially invested with the British Empire Medal by the lord lieutenant of Ross and Cromarty, Admiral Sir John Hayes, at a ceremony in southern Raasay in April 1983. Apologies for their unavoidable absence were received and noted from Queen Elizabeth II, from Mr Russell Johnston MP, and from the convener of the Highland Regional Council, Mr Ian Campbell of Sligachan in Skye.

  Mr Alastair Henry of the Department of Agriculture took the opportunity to comment on the ‘extremely good order’ of Calum MacLeod’s croft. A cousin of Calum’s from Brisbane in Australia travelled to be in attendance. In his presentation speech Admiral Hayes remarked that he had been a shipmate of Calum’s late brother Ronald on board the aircraft carrier HMS Indomitable during the Second World War. Calum himself would muse that he was not the first member of his family to receive a medal. ‘My cousin was the famous Captain Donald MacRae,’ he said afterwards, ‘the Sydney harbourmaster who was decorated twice before his death in 1962. He led an Australian contingent in the Dardanelles [during the First World War], and was said to be the last man out of Gallipoli, with a captured Turkish machine gun under his arm! His mother was born and brought up on what is now my very own holding in Arnish, and until his death Donald MacRae had more Gaelic than English.’

  If Captain Donald MacRae’s medal-winning feats had been clearly defined in the bloodbath of Gallipoli, his cousin Calum’s was a masked award. Calum MacLeod’s great achievement by 1983 was acknowledged to be the creation of his road, not his service to the Northern Lighthouse Board. But to have confirmed an emblem of twenty years’ active agitprop against local and central government as sound reason to be offered the British Empire Medal might have set an embarrassing precedent. The citation said that he became Malcolm MacLeod, BEM, for maintaining supplies to the Rona light, and latterly for working as local assistant keeper there for eight years. But the whole world knew that he had become Malcolm MacLeod, BEM, for building Calum’s road. Following the presentation ceremony in the Isle of Raasay Hotel on the afternoon of Saturday 23 April 1983 the entire official contingent drove north, and made its way in stately convoy along the finished road between Brochel and Arnish. ‘They were very charmed with it,’ said Calum MacLeod. ‘But I never thought I’d end up with a British Empire Medal.’ The establishment had, in a roundabout way, apologised.

  And as the whole world could now make its way to Calum’s door, the whole world did. ‘The most I ever served in the house in Arnish’, said Julia MacLeod Allan, ‘was seventeen people. Mum and Dad, my husband and myself and our family, and ten others! We started off with chicken and potatoes, and I think peas and sweetcorn. Then – “Oh, dear, we’re going to have to open a tin of ham . . . put some pineapple in as well” . . . and we kept taking out more plates and taking out more food, but we managed to feed seventeen people and it all started off with one chicken. It was one of these things Arnish was very good at!’

  When, in 1984, the future artist and calligrapher Campbell Sandilands visited Arnish to prepare his dissertation for Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art he found his subject ‘compiling a book on “The Great Men of Raasay”, which consists of a series of short biographies on the “Sons of Raasay”, who were all acquaintances of Calum during their lifetimes, and who plied their trades as policemen, soldiers, sailors, postmen and crofters.

  ‘Calum MacLeod – man, road-builder and writer – could be described as quintessentially Gaelic, the flag-bearer of past generations, not folding to bureaucracy but building a road with heroic determination in spite of what the critics said, in spite of the bureaucrats . . . he is a man who writes passionately of his own people, seeing each individual in his own right. Because of his own extraordinary achievements he has won the distinction of becoming a hero in his own lifetime.’

  The parable was almost complete. In 1986 the celebrated climber, naturalist, explorer, broadcaster and writer Tom Weir spent a day in South Arnish. ‘The man I was eager to speak to’, Weir would record, ‘was the road-builder extraordinary, Calum MacLeod, but it took me three visits to his croft at Arnish before I found him at home, as he was so busy with his sheep.’

  He remained, as Tom Weir discovered, fully active in his seventies. ‘The coastguard used to phone’, said Julia MacLeod Allan, ‘with a report of a sheep on a cliff – “Could you check if this is real or is it just a hoax call?” – so he would be traipsing off down to the shores of Umachan or Kyle Rona to check these things. Or people would phone him to ask him to get in touch with somebody taking a holiday in one of the old houses on Fladda – as if Fladda was next door – because after the phone box was taken away we had the only telephone in the north end.’

  ‘At 74 years of age,’ wrote Tom Weir, ‘and after 47 years in the lighthouse service, he is a good advertisement for Raasay. He is a natural scholar and historian, though his only schooling was at Torran which he left at 14. He married the school’s last teacher whose pupils had reached the stage where they could be counted on one hand.

  ‘Talking about depopulation of the roadless north end, he told me: “When I began on the road there were seven families at this end. When I finished it 10 years later there were only ourselves. I hope the road will bring people here to settle again. A retired couple have already done so, and I think it would be a good thing if Raasay people who have worked away from the island, and who want to come back to retire, were given a small holding and the right to build a house.”

  ‘He told me about his own life: at 16 working as a deck boy on the attendance boat serving Rona lighthouse, eventually becoming its master, and then becoming a lighthouse keeper on Rona, a rock station at which he did duty for a month on and a month off.*

  ‘ “It makes me proud when I see vehicles now where before you couldn’t take a handbarrow. I counted 20 cars going past when I was working at the sheep yesterday, and I’ve seen 17 in the carpark.” ’

  Tom Weir and his wife spent six hours talking to Calum and Lexie MacLeod, and their daughter Julia, and Julia’s children, in Arnish in the summer of 1986. They were shown Calum’s ‘vast collection of photographs, some of people evicted from the island.

  ‘He corresponds’, wrote Weir, ‘with around 28 families in Australia, New Zealand, Cape Town, the USA and Canada, descendants of people cleared from Raasay between 1851 and 1854. Since the road was built, many visitors from abroad, descended from evicted islanders, have called on him.’

  A year and a half after Tom Weir’s visit, on Tuesday 26 January 1988, Calum MacLeod finished his midday meal and went outside to continue working. ‘He’d had his lunch,’ said his daughter, ‘and went out of the door, but he didn’t come back in for his mid-afternoon cuppa.

  ‘My mother thought he was busy doing something, or had met somebody and would be chatting. Then she realised that it was getting dark and wondered, “Where is he? The cows have to be fed.” She took her Zimmer frame or her walking sticks and went outside, and all the cows were at the end of the house looking through the gate. She wondered what the cows were doing there, and she looked furthe
r round to find my father there, just at the end of our house. He was in his wheelbarrow, with Coll, the white collie, on watch.

  ‘I think he had sat down on the wheelbarrow because he felt unwell. We assume it was a heart attack. The family was prone to them. It probably was a heart attack – cholesterol, all these things we hear about now.

  ‘Father contemplated what would happen to him without my mother, but I don’t think my mother ever in her wildest thoughts imagined that he would go first. My father was that well and my mother was not. He would find her lying on the floor, and that used to frighten my father. She wasn’t allowed to go upstairs if he was outside.

  ‘But at the end of the day, she was the one who had to go out and find him. It was miraculous that he was only at the end of the house and not out on one of his walks on the hills.’

  Due to the death of a bull, nobody would ever know exactly what had killed Calum MacLeod. Nine months before his death, in April 1987, three men from the small island of Vatersay in the Outer Hebrides transported an Aberdeen Angus bull belonging to the Department of Agriculture to their grazings to inseminate their forty cattle. The men took the bull to Vatersay in what was then both the traditional and the only feasible manner. They towed it, swimming, from a rope attached to the stern of a rowing boat across the 300 yards of sea between Vatersay and its larger neighbouring island of Barra.

  The bull drowned. The three men were subsequently charged under the Protection of Animals (Scotland) Act. They appeared at Lochmaddy Sheriff Court in North Uist to answer those charges on Wednesday 27 January 1988. The area’s procurator fiscal was obliged to be in North Uist on that day, the day after the death of Calum MacLeod of South Arnish in Raasay, in order to prosecute the charges. He did so unsuccessfully: the three Vatersay men were found Not Guilty.