Celtic Idyll - Part II: Barra in the Western Isles

After Ireland I had the opportunity to go to the Western Isles of Scotland, the Outer Hebrides. This involved a long drive up the length of England, across Glasgow and through the mists and drizzle of the glens to Oban, where the Caledonian-McBrayne ferry awaited. The journey from Oban to Castlebay, the only town on the island of Barra, takes eight hours and the ship crosses one of the roughest seas in the world. Some passengers learned the hard way that if you lean over the side of the boat to be sick you must remember to do so downwind or you will get it all back in your face. And with that truly disgusting thought we disembarked, white-faced and queasy, at Castlebay and set off along the single-track road around the island, bound for Eoligarry.
Night began to fall. This was not a particular problem as there was no traffic on this two-metre-wide road. However, there were rabbits. Rabbits by the hundred, seemingly by the thousand. Inevitably, some of them finished up beneath the wheels of the car, flopping around in agony, hopelessly crippled. They were dazzled by the headlights, and there was little I could do to avoid them. Instead, I did what I could to put them out of their misery.
Eventually, we arrived at the windswept village of Eoligarry, perched on the broad sweep of a hill that ended in the crashing waves of the Minch, a lively piece of the North Sea. Eoligarry was hardly even a village, merely a collection of twenty crofts, Scottish farmhouses, each decently spaced out from the others. Our neighbours obligingly furnished us with the front door key and we went into our croft, a sturdy, stone, whitewashed building that huddled low into the granite hills as a protection against the raging of the elements, for the weather can be relentlessly harsh in the Outer Hebrides.
Our lodgings were adequately comfortable and the garden swept grandly down to a beach of white sand derived from low granite cliffs that had been nibbled and etched away by the predatory sea. An indication of how indefatigable this was could be seen in the quantity of flotsam and driftwood that washed up on the shore, heavily bleached and scoured by the water.
Although modest in its dimensions and far out on the periphery of the United Kingdom, Eoligarry was still famous as a result of what had happened there in 1941. A ship-load of Scotch whisky, bound for America in the hope of earning foreign exchange for the war effort, sank in shallow water in the bay in front of it. Before the Customs and Excise men could get to work, the local fishermen went out, deep in the night, and started unloading the cargo. The Scottish novelist Sir Compton McKenzie wrote a book about the event and Pinewood Studios of London made a film. However, whereas in the book and film the ending is happy--gloriously happy, given the effects of the whisky--in reality things were not so wonderful. Two local fishermen died of alcoholic poisoning, a surfeit of Scotch, and others were arrested and given prison sentences for possession of a regulated commodity, or some such pompous nonsense. Worse, far worse than death or prison, some locals were so drunk that they went to work on the Sabbath, which in the 1940s was regarded as a Cardinal Sin. They were too sozzled to know what day of the week it was.
After much striding across the heather, standing in the wind silhouetted against the sunset on craggy headlands, and meticulous beach-combing, I managed to strike up an acquaintance with a local fisherman, who invited me to come out with him in his boat. The Hebridians speak with a soft, lisping accent, sometimes in Scottish Gaelic, sometimes in an English that to the untutored ear sounds just the same, but they are people of few words, true islanders. (The Shetlanders, with impressive irony, refer to England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland more loquaciously as "that other small group of offshore islands".)
We chugged across a stretch of the Minch, which was, mercifully if uncharacteristically, as calm as a reed-pool. At intervals we met shoals of fish, which were hauled over the side, glistening silver and flapping their tail-fins. Our fisherman friend pulled out his clasp knife and ripped out their guts, which he tossed overboard, but they never hit the water, as they were immediately scooped up by the flocks of eagle-eyed seagulls that were following the boat.
When we finally returned to the shore he asked us "Will ye no come in for a wee dram?" Though I personally loathe whisky, we felt we had to accept. With infinite generosity he produced a set of glass tumblers and filled them precisely to the brim with whisky from a bottle that had a label printed entirely in Gaelic. With our host and his fishermen friends we sat around in his front parlour, in a circle, gazing into our tumblers of whisky, and we made conversation, Hebrides style: one fisherman sighed and said "Aye!". After what seemed an eternity, another sighed and said "Aye!", and when, after eons had passed, most of them had said "Aye!", conversation was deemed to have been made. We took a large fish home and cooked it in the oven, but although it was very fresh, it was pretty tasteless, being a Saithe, a variety generally fed to cats.
A few days later we went to visit a harp-maker. We had been taking tea and Scottish shortbread with his sister, an elderly spinster who had one of those balanced, but appraisive Hebridean voices that was redolent of Scottish common sense. Once one had contacts, society on Barra was easy to break into as there were only three clans (or extended families) to account for the island's entire population of about 300 souls.
The harp-maker ushered us into his front parlour, sat us down with cups of tea and showed us some of the Celtic harps that he had made. They were indeed very beautiful. Then he asked "Would ye no like to he-e-ar the pipes?" We had been forewarned that his daughter, a strapping 14-year old in a tartan dress, was a master of the Scottish bagpipes. So naturally we said 'yes', expecting him to call her down to perform in front of us (she was upstairs doing her school homework). Instead, he opened the door to the stairs (in the Celtic manner, the stairwell was enclosed in a sort of cupboard), and shouted up "Nellie, give us a skirl" (to the uninitiated, 'skirl' is the Scottish word for 'blast', or something like that). We heard the characteristic groan as she inflated the windbag, and then the ornaments on the mantlepiece, the pictures on the wall, and sundry items of furniture started rattling as the hurricane-force sound of a Highland reel came from an upstairs bedroom. The Scottish bagpipes were devised as an instrument of war, calculated to send the enemy into paroxysms of fear. Nellie's performance was a classic example of how well the proponents of this curious instrument succeeded.
One evening towards the end of our stay on Barra there was a Coellidh, a music festival, in one of the local village halls. We turned up in good time and there was an elderly Scotsman standing at the door to welcome us with much good cheer. The good cheer came out of a half-empty whisky bottle, with which he repeatedly saluted us, splashing the golden liquid around each time he raised the bottle. He was a curious-looking individual, kitted out in an old brown raincoat that was buttoned up from top to bottom. Either he was wearing a kilt underneath it or he had simply forgotten to put his trousers on. We shall never know.
The music was pleasant, but perhaps not as melodic and impassioned as its Irish equivalent. But the piece de resistance, right at the end of the programme, was a medley of Scottish bagpipe music played by our very own 14-year-old Nellie. She did a sterling job, and our friend in the raincoat was suddenly inspired to a frenzy of Hebridean fervour. He leapt onto one of the village hall's seats and, still waving the bottle and splashing whisky, did an impromptu highland fling, the energetic dance of northern Scotland. His arms flailed until the bottle went flying and smashed noisily against the wall of the Village Hall. All this was rather imprudent of him as the music was interrupted by a loud ripping noise when he fell through the canvas bottom of the chair. At the end of the medley I am not sure whether the audience were applauding Nellie for her piping or our friend with the bottle for his sudden descent to ground level.
So we left Barra with happy memories and turbulent stomachs, as the eight-hour journey across the Minches was once again lively. The following New Year's Eve--Hogmanay, as it is known in Scotland--the captain of the Caledonian-McBrayne ferry to Barra managed to sink it in the vicinity of Castlebay. He was charged with being drunk in charge of a ship full of drunk passengers. There was much tut-tutting and wringing of hands in official circles and on the BBC. But that is how it is in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. "Aye!"