On the Crofter's Trail by David Craig

Author:David Craig [Craig, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Emigration & Immigration, History, Europe, Great Britain, General
ISBN: 9780857905963
Google: 46-8BQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Birlinn
Published: 2013-05-13T04:09:33+00:00

Among shallow, rounded knolls a big ‘field’ was enclosed by a turf-and-boulder ring-dyke still plain to see two feet proud of the ground. The water supply was a burn now choked with weeds. As we turned back, the window-spaces in the houses framed the pier below, and away beyond it the ramparts of basalt on Treshnish Point, two miles from our next goal.

This was Crakaig, which floats on the map with no symbol to define what on earth it was, and its neighbour clachan Glacgugaraidh, ‘the hollow of the dark grazings’, which the map ignores. A man called Neil Paterson, who lived in a council house some distance away from the fudge-and-pottery centre of Dervaig, had told me about his father who had been born at Crakaig in 1860 and had gone to Reudle School: ‘he took a peat there every day.’ His mother’s people had been MacDougalls and sure enough, in the ground-floor plasterwork of the ruined school – a tall, narrow black building which loomed on the hill like a Cornish wheal-tower – a graffito scratched in perfect copperplate said ‘Robert MacDougall 4th May 1894’, next to some expert drawings of sailboats, one with graceful timbers shown in perspective. He would have come to school by the grassy track we now followed past peat bogs and ribs of rock. Presently the bog showed straight edges of old cuttings for fuel – a threshold through a turf-and-boulder dyke – a circular lochan with some palisaded edge to it – and then the houses of Crakaig, doorways five foot six inches high, stone lintels still in place. Quarter of a mile further on, Glacgugaraidh occupied a dell just above a 200 foot bluff that fell to the coastal plain. Peter had said that there had been a blacksmith here and a communal garden. The crags to seaward of the houses were guarded by dykes built right up to their ends, the grassy gullies were similarly dyked across to keep in the herds, and in the old vegetable garden a huge moribund rowan sprawled onto its knees and elbows like a mutant octopus made of grey-green fur: the magic tree, often planted near croft houses to ward off evil.

In such places the phrase that comes to mind is ‘cradle of civilisation’. This one had withered and died out, not cleared but failed – too exposed, too far from the overriding civilisation of harbour, church, shops, mainland ferries. One of its chief trades had been distilling. We scrambled down to sea level as the first sun for days glimpsed through and lit up a weave of russet bracken and olive grass as patterned as tweed. The straight lines were edges of fields where barley had been grown to make malt for the whisky. Somewhere nearby must be the cave where the vats, coil, and kegs had been hidden from the gaugers. Offshore the peculiar basalt islets of Lunga, Fladda, and the Dutchman’s Cap raised their exotic profiles. The excisemen would have lurked

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