‘No land barer; and yet the moor was filled with untapped memory and story, locked away like the carbon stored within the peat…’
Very pleased to have a new piece of writing feature on Paul Scraton’s online blog Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. It has come out of wider work stemming from my recent residency on Lewis with Island Darkroom, and explores the legacy of the island through its impact on the work of poet Iain Crichton Smith. Click on the image above to read.
Following threads across the moor down to Bernera, I was escorted by a white-tailed Eagle for a few miles as she soared along the high ridge of granite tors above the road. At Bhòstaigh where Donald MacAulay described in his poem ‘Air Tràigh Bhòstaigh’ (On Bosta Beach) how ‘the people lie – in their history’ I slid down boggy slopes to the reconstructed Iron Age Round House and was startled by a head of Highland Cattle hunkered down against the wind in their stone shelter above the burial ground. The waves were terrifying, the wind relentless, spray sent fuming up above Little Bernera’s bulk on the horizon. I listened for the ‘Time and Tide’ bell but could hear only the wind. I left the beach and chased my thoughts across the moor to Carloway, met with a crofter – an Incomer – who has made this island home.
Poem quote taken from Donald MacAulay, ‘Air Tràigh Bhòstaigh’, Deilbh is Faileasan (Images and Reflections), (Stornoway, Acair Books, 2008).
I’m very fortunate to be hosted by The Island Dark Room as part of their Winter Residencies Programme, giving me focussed time and space for research and writing centred on Lewis. Today, I followed the single track road from Achmore northeast toward Stornoway, chasing the ghost of Lewis poet Iain Crichton Smith. The wind was up, the sort of wind that snatches a car door from your hands and makes the rafters moan, and the clouds were heavy with the threat of rain. I passed cold grey lochans alive with waves, and peatbanks signalled by plastic bags and upturned wheelbarrows strewn along their length, lonely shielings perched high on the moor.
I found the ghost of Crichton Smith at Bayble where he had lived with his widow mother, dreaming to leave but once left, never able to recapture it:
It’s the island that goes away, not we who leave it. Like an unbearable thought it sinks beyond assiduous reasoning light and wringing hands, or, as a flower roots deep into the ground, it works its darkness into the gay winds that blow about us in a later spirit. Iain Crichton Smith, ‘The Departing Island’ from Three Regional Voices, 1968, in Mathew McGuire (Ed.), Iain Crichton Smith, New Collected Poems, (1992, repr. Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2011), V 13-18, p.65
Groundings 