The Lewis Man

TWENTY-FOUR

The drive south took Fin past Luskentyre and Scarista where he had gone the day before with George Gunn. He had been on the road nearly two hours when the bare green hills of South Harris rose up from the valley to dwarf the tiny settlements that clung tenaciously to the banks of the small lochs that flooded the gorges.

Beyond the single-storey white building with its pitched roofs that housed the Seallam visitor centre, cream- coloured cloud flowed down the sides of a conical hill like an erupting volcano. Unusually, the wind had dropped, and an unnatural still hung in the valley with the mist.

Dwarf pines crowded around the few houses that made up the village of Northton — An Taobh Tuath in the Gaelic. Yellow irises and the pink bloom of flowering azaleas lined the road, rare colour in a monotone landscape. A sign read: SEALLAM! Exhibitions, Genealogy, Teas/Coffees.

Fin parked in a gravel area on the far side of a stream that wound its way down between the hills, and he followed a rough path to the small wooden bridge that took him over it and across to the centre. A big man with a fuzz of white hair fringing an otherwise bald head introduced himself as Seallam’s consultant genealogist, Bill Lawson. He pushed enormous seventies teardrop glasses back up on to the bridge of a long nose and confessed to being the man whose hobby had become the obsession described by the Stornoway Gazette.

He was only too happy to show Fin the huge wall maps of North America and Australia that comprised a part of the centre’s public exhibition. Clusters of black-headed pins identified settlements of Hebridean families who had gone in search of new lives in California, the eastern seaboard of the United States, Nova Scotia, south-eastern Australia.

‘What exactly is it you’re looking for?’ he asked Fin.

‘It’s one particular family. The Macdonalds of Seilebost. Murdo and Peggy. They had a son called Tormod who drowned in a boating accident in 1958. They left their croft some time in the early sixties, and may have gone abroad. It’s now lying derelict.’

‘That should be simple enough,’ the genealogist said, and Fin followed him through to a small sales and reception area where shelves groaned with coffee-table tomes, and hard-cover tourist guides to the islands. Bill Lawson stooped to recover a volume from a pile of buff-coloured publications on the bottom shelf. ‘These are our croft histories of Harris,’ he said. ‘We do it by village and croft. Who lived there, when and where they went. Everything else changes, but the land itself stays in the same place.’ He flipped through the pages of the spiral- bound book. ‘Prior to civil registration in 1855 information was thin on the ground. What information was kept was all in a foreign language. English.’ He smiled. ‘So you got what the registrar thought the name should be. Wrong in many cases. And often they just weren’t interested. Same as the church records. Some ministers kept a faithful register. Others couldn’t be bothered. We’ve combined word-of-mouth with the official records kept since 1855, and when the two match up you can be pretty sure it’s accurate.’

‘So you think you can tell me what happened to the Macdonalds?’

He grinned. ‘Yes, I do. We have research on virtually every household in the Western Isles over the last two hundred years. More than 27,500 family trees.’

It took him about fifteen minutes searching through record books and his computer database to track down the croft and its history, and the ancestral lineage of all those who had lived on it and worked the land over generations.

‘Yes, here we are.’ He stabbed a finger at the pages of one of his books. ‘Murdo and Peggy Macdonald emigrated to Canada in 1962. New Glasgow, Nova Scotia.’

‘Were there any branches of the family who stayed on in the islands?’

‘Let me see …’ He ran his finger down a list of names. ‘There’s Peggy’s cousin, Marion. Married a Catholic lad just before the war. Donald Angus O’Henley.’ He chuckled. ‘I bet that caused a bit of a stir.’

‘And any surviving members of that family?’

But the old genealogist shook his head as he examined the records. ‘Looks like he was killed some time during the war. There were no children. She died in 1991.’

Fin breathed his frustration through his teeth. It seemed as if he had made his journey in vain. ‘I don’t suppose there would be any neighbours around who might still remember them?’

‘Well, you’d have to go down to Eriskay for that.’

‘Eriskay?’

‘Oh, aye. That’s where Donald Angus came from. And there’s no way a Catholic lad was ever going to settle down among the fun-hating Presbyterians of Harris.’ He laughed at his own joke. ‘When they got married she went to live with him on his family croft at Haunn on the Isle of Eriskay.’

The little ferry and fishing port of An t-Ob was renamed Leverburgh by William Hesketh Lever, later Lord Leverhulme, who bought the town, along with most of South Harris, just after the First World War.

Very little evidence remained now of the half a million pounds he had spent to develop it into a major fishing port, designed to supply the more than four hundred fish shops he had purchased throughout Britain. Piers were built, curing sheds, smoke houses. Plans had been made to blast a channel through to the inner loch, creating a harbour for up to two hundred boats.

But the best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley, and when Leverhulme died of pneumonia in 1924, the plans were abandoned and the estate sold off.

Now, a dwindling population of little over two thousand lived in a scattering of houses around the pier and concrete ramp built to accommodate the roll-on roll-off ferries that plied back and forth among the islands peppering the waters between South Harris and North Uist. Dreams of a major fishing port were lost irretrievably in the mist.

Fin pulled in behind two lines of vehicles that sat on the tarmac waiting for the ferry. Beyond piles of discarded creels, and grazing sheep, a line of green-clad houses ran between hills that folded one upon the other down towards the shore. The wind had died completely, and water like glass reflected rocks strewn with amber seaweed. Out in the Sound of Harris, the ferry emerged distantly from the grey, like a ghost drifting among the shadows of the islands: Ensay, Killegray, Langaigh, Grodhaigh.

He sat and watched as the ferry approached the harbour, hearing at last the thud, thud of its engines. It would take an hour, perhaps an hour and a half, to drive south through the Uists, across the barren moonscape that was Benbecula, to the Sound of Eriskay, and the island itself at the southern end of the archipelago, the last stop before Barra.

The leads that drew him there were tenuous. A cousin of the dead Tormod Macdonald’s mother who had moved to the island. The lazy beds of Eriskay, the feannagan of which Marsaili’s father had spoken. And then, there had been the church on the hill that he had described, with its view over the cemetery to the silver sands beyond. It could have been the church at Scarista, except that there was no boat in that church, and the sands it overlooked were golden, not silver. Somehow he trusted the old man’s scattered recollections, fragments of memory painting a picture not to be found on Harris, where the real Tormod Macdonald had lived and died. These were memories from another place, another time. Eriskay. Perhaps.

The warning sirens started up as the Loch Portain slipped into harbour, and began lowering her ramp to the concrete. A few cars and a handful of lorries spilled out from her belly, and the waiting lines of vehicles started down the slope one by one.

The one-hour crossing from Harris to Berneray drifted by like a dream. The ferry seemed almost to glide across the mirrored surface of the Sound, drifting past the spectral islets and rocks that emerged phantom-like from a silvered mist. Fin stood on the foredeck, grasping the rail, and watching clouds like brushstrokes leaving darker streaks against the palest of grey skies. He had rarely seen the islands in such splendid stillness, mysterious and ethereal, without the least sign that man had ever passed this way before.

Finally the dark outline of the island of Berneray loomed out of the gloom, and Fin returned to the car deck to disembark at the start of his long drive south. This disparate collection of islands, which had once been miscalled the Long Island, was now largely connected by a network of causeways bridging fords where once vehicles could only pass at low tide. Only between Harris and Berneray, and Eriskay and Barra, was it still necessary to cross by