The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (16 page)

As we rowed into the
geo
, we saw the
guga
men standing on the steep rock that slopes to the landing point. They had stopped their unloading and formed up in a group. They looked out at us, unsmiling. Their leader, Dodds, was in the centre. They knew the boat, and they knew Ian, but the implication was clear enough:
Keep away,
this is our day, our rock
. Ian waved a greeting, they nodded back and we left the
geo
.

So we ended our circumnavigation near the southerly cliffs where the rock jutted out like the prow of a ship. A guillemot glided above, its sharp black head reminding me that I had carried Dilworth’s kist with me and not needed it.

Suddenly Diyanne pointed. ‘Look there,’ she said, ‘a cross in the rock!’

And there was, too: a rough cross twenty feet or so high made of pinkish rock, set into the dark gneiss prow of the headland: geology as theology.

Then she called out again: ‘No, it’s not a cross, it’s a diving gannet.’ And it was, too; we all saw it to be so. The downstroke of the cross tapering to a point was the bird’s body and beak, and the cross-stroke was the bird’s wings. It was as if, like the bird in Ian’s story, a gannet had plunged down into the gneiss and crashed down through the rock to petrify right there on the prow of the island. Shock metamorphosis. I thought of a sentence I had read in a geological guide to the islands:
Garnets can sometimes be found within Lewisian gneiss
. I’d misread it first time through –
Gannets can sometimes be found
within Lewisian gneiss
– and now my error had come true.
*

Jubilee
had made it safely to the Rock, but she had to make it safely back as well – and the gales were coming. So we set our bearing to 180 degrees, and began the day-long journey due south to Port of Ness, back down the sea road.

Our wake showed cream and mint. Sula Sgeir retreated behind us, from mountain to eave to thumbprint. The sea smelt silver. The day grew and the air thinned until we could see Suilven, Foinaven, Arkle and the other Sutherland hills away to the east.

‘The water ahead might be a wee bit jabbly,’ said Ian as we came back into Port of Ness harbour that evening, and so it was: six- or seven-foot sharp peaks of wave where the cliff protruded, and then a big sloshing swell in the harbour itself. We ghosted in between the breakwaters in a manner that left me light-stomached and Ian exhilarated; David helming delicately, and Diyanne and I leaning out like twin figureheads from the bow, watching for depths and distances from the rock and the concrete, calling urgent nervous warnings – ‘To starboard a touch!’ ‘Just over to port!’
–
until we nosed alongside the high quay, and threw out plump pink fenders that were squeezed like hearts between hull and quay, and so came at last to a halt.

I climbed the rusty-runged ladder of the breakwater and staggered along the quay. That night I lay in bed in Stornoway with a dream sea still rolling over and through me and gannets flying across the ceiling, while the real gales rose as promised outside over the north, from Iceland all across to Norway.

Peat

An alley of stones — Cutting for sign — Route as rumour, route as folklore — Peat & gneiss — Manus’s Stones — Finlay MacLeod — Libation & fornication — Functional land art — Holding eras in plain sight — Geography & history as consubstantial — Phobus — Place-learning & path-following — Disturbances to the expected — Anne Campbell & Bran — A swan’s wishbone, a plover’s egg — Toponymy & close-mapping — Songlines for the moor — Night on the
beirgh
— Seal-serenade — Jupiter & Griomabhal — Discovery — Decisive cairns — Quartz crystals — Barefoot walking — Beehive & moraine —
Tapetum lucidum
: the bright carpet — Paths to Geocrab.

A rainless gale rushing out of the east, deer tracks in moor mud, a black sky, gannets showing white as flares above the sea. Dawn on the Atlantic coast of the Isle of Lewis. Thin light, cold and watery. Burly clouds at 1,000 feet, the day forming from the dark. I left the little peninsula on which I’d slept the night and set off uphill and inland, onto the peat and into the wind, following the deer paths that laced the moor. The peat thinned as I gained height and rock began to show through the heather: Lewisian gneiss, the most ancient surface rock in Europe – 3.1 billion years old, zebra-striped, scarred and smoothed by multiple glaciations. The
Pleistocene
felt only a few weeks gone, the ice just recently retreated. The land dipped and cupped until I was walking up a mile-wide alley of rock, covered with fallen boulders and balanced glacial
erratics
. Ahead of me a great grey peak called Griomabhal lifted into the cloud. Half of its north face could be seen; the flank of a destroyer. A raven on a boulder croaked
gorack
,
gorack
; another rowed itself in high circles above my head. A grouse exploded away from the heather a yard from my feet, a drag-queen slur of red above each eye.

The path for which I was searching led up the alley of rock and underneath Griomabhal’s face; these things I knew for certain. But I couldn’t find its line. What was it I had been told?
You need to look for what shouldn’t be there
. This path didn’t exist as continuous track: its route was indicated only by marker stones. But the terrain through which I was walking had hundreds of thousands of possible marker stones. Rock emerged from the moor in myriad forms: cannons and salmon, Levantine hats, bishops’ mitres, monks’ robes, mushrooms and fins. I
cut for sign
, making long zigzag sweeps, trying to pick up lines of stones. No success. I tried lying down flat to see if I could sight off an alignment. Nothing. It felt like an uncrackable riddle:
How do you find the stone in the alley of stones; the sign in the wilderness of signs?
I started to think that perhaps the path didn’t exist at all.

I had come off the Hebridean seas and onto the Hebridean moors to find and follow a part-lost path. News of the path had reached me not as a drawn line on a map, but as a series of contradictory rumours and recollections. The path ran south-east from west Lewis obliquely down into Harris, and was to be navigated by moving from beehive shieling to beehive shieling in a Pictish dot-to-dot. Incorrect – it ran in fact up the coast from a peninsula called the Aird Bheag, over a high
bealach
and down to the west coast at the cleared village of Mealasta. It was marked by single standing stones. No, it was marked by
ziggurat
cairns placed on top of large boulders. No, it was marked by
rùdhan
, three narrow, long stones placed on end and leaning together at their tips, a cairn type whose structure was derived from the Hebridean method of arranging freshly cut peat bricks in order to encourage faster drying by wind and sun. The path had first been made in the 1850s. No, it was no older than the 1920s. Its architect was a crofter who had taught himself Greek to a high level, and who had kept a journal during the 1950s recording the passage of British military vessels up that apparently uninhabited coast. No, he spoke only Gaelic – but a woman in Uig had a photograph of him …

Yes, this was a path that existed as folklore before it existed as terrain, and I tracked it as a story before I tracked it on foot, moving from lead to lead as though from cairn to cairn. Like a folk song, oral poem or one of Ian’s sea roads, its route altered subtly with each retelling.

The path’s elusive nature was appropriate to the terrain through which it ran. For the two main surface substances of the Western Isles – black peat and pale gneiss – are differently hostile to path-making. The peat swallows paths, and the gneiss refuses them. The gneiss, tough enough to have withstood millions of years of geological tumult, is almost impossible to mark by footfall. The peat, springy and spongy, gulps down the paths that run across it unless they are kept in regular use. So it is that many of the thousands of footpaths that seam the Western Isles don’t exist as continuous lines in the land, but instead as trails of intervisible cairns or standing stones.

Many of these stone trails indicate peat paths (leading to and from the worked peat-banks), crofting paths, and particularly shieling paths (leading from townships to the areas of the moor where each family kept its shieling, the stone-built shelter which would be used as a home during the summer grazing months). The journey to the shieling would be made by different family members at different times, and a key coming-of-age moment for a child was when he or she made the journey to the shieling alone. But bad weather could make navigation out there difficult, and the moor itself held the perils of bog and deep water. So it was that these routes became cairned onto the moor as guide-lines, designed to avoid
boglach
(general boggy areas),
blàr
(flat areas of the moor that can be very boggy) or, most dangerously,
breunlach
(sucking bog disguised by the alluringly bright green grass that covers it), and lead the walker safely to
tulach na h-àirigh
– the site of the shieling. Hansel and Gretel again: the stones that will guide you safely home. Instructions would accompany the departure for the path, a manual for use, stories for safe navigation:
Trust to the stones, keep them in sight,
don’t be tempted to walk lower down where the ground seems greener and flatter
,
for there it is also boggy and treacherous
. These practices have their parallels elsewhere in the country: in the line of white marker stones that used to run across Bodmin Moor from Watergate to Five Lanes, for instance, set there in the mid-1800s by a parson who wished to be able to traverse his trackless and often fog-bound parish without getting lost or enmired.

Most of the Hebridean footpaths are shown only on informal local maps, and in the memory maps that are carried in the minds of the people who walk them, their routes passed on by report and repute. But now that the shieling culture has almost vanished from the island, and now that peat-cutting is done primarily by machine, many of the paths are disappearing both from memory and from the land.

The path I wanted to find was imperceptible to the Ordnance Survey. It was known as
Clachan Mhànais
, ‘Manus’s Stones’, and its cairns had been laid by a crofter called Manus MacLennan. This much I came to know for certain, and I had been told of the path by Finlay MacLeod, who was the reason I had first come to the Outer Hebrides, years previously.

Finlay MacLeod – naturalist, novelist, broadcaster, oral historian, occasional selkie-singer and seal-summoner, and an eloquent speaker in both English and Gaelic – is known throughout the Western Isles and the Scottish
gaeltacht
as one of the most eloquent and combative presences of the Atlantic coast. Courteous but unyielding in dispute, he is a keen celebrant of the Outer Hebridean landscape and a fierce opponent of those he considers his fierce opponents. He loathes as hypocritical and life-stifling the Calvinism that has held Lewis in its grip for so long. In the autumn of 2009 he and his wife Norma gladly boarded the first ever Sunday-sailing of a ferry from Stornoway. The event had outraged the Sabbatarians on the island (of whom there were many) and delighted the secular modernizers (of whom there were fewer, Finlay being one). As the ferry pulled heretically away into the Minch, bound for Ullapool, there were prayers and protests on the quay and there was champagne onboard ship.

Short, nimble and bright-eyed, there is more than a hint of faery to Finlay. He has a crinkled smile and his shoulders shake when he laughs, which is often. He is consistently impious, though that doesn’t stop him from taking things seriously. The only Christianity of which he approves was that which flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on the island, a pre-Reformation worship in which pagan habits were mixed with Christian rites. ‘In these places, and in the name of Christ,’ he once told me with relish, as we stood in the ruins of a chapel on a remote headland, ‘ale was libated to the sea to increase the fertility of the seaweed and the fish, there was new-moon worship, there was dancing and there was fornication!’ He despises religious fundamentalism because it means, as he put it, ‘the extinction of metaphor’; he wants to celebrate the Book of Genesis as folk tale, not doctrine.

Finlay’s love for the landscape and histories of the Western Isles is intense but unsentimental. His filter for straining out romanticism is finely meshed. Born in Ness in the north of Lewis, he was brought up on a
croft
. As a child, he could hear the family cow moving about in the byre at the far end of the house. He used a bicycle pedal attached to a wheel-guard as the kettle rest on the peat fire which it was his task to tend. At seventeen, he joined the Merchant Navy and sailed to Australia and New Zealand. Later he was called up for national service and posted to an RAF base in Yorkshire. There, acutely homesick, he dreamt of the Western Isles. Within a month, he managed to arrange a reciprocal repatriation with a Yorkshireman who had been posted to the Isle of Lewis (where, acutely homesick, he had dreamt of Yorkshire).