Calum's Road by Roger Hutchinson

Author:Roger Hutchinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn
Published: 2011-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

* Calum was referring here to James Loch and Patrick Sellar, the Scottish commissioner and factor respectively of Lord Stafford’s immense Sutherlandshire estate in the 1810s. Loch and Sellar enforced the wholesale and frequently brutal removal of the estate’s tenants to make space for sheep-farming, and have been accused of seminal responsibility for the institutionalised clearances that affected the north and west of Scotland for much of the rest of the nineteenth century.

* The disproportion of the sacrifice is best illustrated by the fact that those twenty-three servicemen sacrificed between 1914 and 1918 represented 5 per cent of the total population of the Raasay archipelago. From the whole British population of 45 million, slightly more than 700,000 men were slain. That represented a fatal casualty percentage of 1.5 per cent. It was a hideous statistic, but it was only a quarter of the toll extracted from Raasay, Fladda and Rona.

* Lexie and Calum’s success with Nicotiana tabacum is less surprising in the light of the fact that Calum was an extremely skilled and productive agriculturalist. He devoted his own garden not only to fruit trees and root vegetables, but also to lettuce and other such native American species as tomatoes and courgettes. He personally disliked tomatoes and was not sure what to do with courgettes, until both were used by his wife in her celebrated variety of homemade chutney. Spare lettuces were offered to the cows, who rejected them.

* Like many a Highlander and Hebridean of his and other generations, Calum MacLeod refused to countenance burning coal. It was not only a question of coal costing money while peat was freely cut from the hill. ‘Dad hated coal,’ said his daughter. ‘Black dust, dense smoke, large fire-rakings – coal was no match for the fragrant peat smoke.’

* His daughter Julia remembered the apparatus as a ‘Lucas Freelight Windmill’. It seems likely that Calum bought one of the first small electrical-output wind turbines, which had become popular at homesteads in the American Midwest, and which simply used modified propellers, or vanes, to drive direct-current generators. By the middle of the 1920s one- to three-kilowatt wind generators had been developed by American companies such as Parris-Dunn and Jacobs Wind-electric. These systems were only installed at first to provide lighting for remote farms, and to charge batteries used to power crystal radio sets. Their use was later extended to an array of direct-current motor-driven appliances, including refrigerators, freezers, washing machines and power tools. But that would be rather too late for Calum – or more relevantly, in the case of washing machines and refrigerators, Lexie – MacLeod. They eventually settled for a paraffin fridge.

* Calum would later recall that his first wages from the post office were deducted to the tune of 7s 6d a week to pay off a £100 loan from the Fisheries Board, which he had borrowed to buy ‘lin falmair’, or hake nets, in the 1930s before prices tumbled and he abandoned fishing as a livelihood.

* The Closed, or

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