Seasons on Harris Read Online Free

system, burnt down towns and villages and made the Highlands a wasteland. Oh aye it was a bad, bad time all right—and so t’was for the next hundred years an’ more. Too many people trying to live on tiny bits of poor land—all outcasts of the great lairdic feasts—then all those terrible famines—the potato famines—the collapse o’ the island kelp industry—they burnt seaweed y’know to produce alkali in Napoleon’s time. Valuable stuff then. And all these great ‘clearances’ in the 1800s when the big feudal-system lairds got together an’ kicked s’many people off the land—burnt their cottages down, even smashed their precious quernstones they used for grinding their grain—and bundled them off to Canada and Australia and suchlike places—and moved the sheep in. Now I think there are only ten islands—maybe less—with any people at all. Croftin’s a hard life. Always has been—but now it’s dyin’.”
    I thanked Hector for his succinct—if depressing—summary of Scottish history and ordered drinks for both of us.
    â€œWell—cheers t’ you for that,” he said, and began again. “But you know, in spite of it all, life goes on. Y’remember that old sayin’: ‘The happiest people are those with the fewest needs. ’An’ for a long while there it was best t’keep y’needs simple! But things are changin’—we’ve even got oil up here now—lots of that lovely North Sea stuff—and our own parliament too. Some think it’s not powerful enough, though. Our famous Scottish comedian—Billy Connolly—calls it ‘a wee pretendy parliament’! But the poor islands hav’na done so well. Sometimes you wonder how much bad luck th’ can take. A’ mean look at what happened jus’recent—’specially that Chernobyl thing—y’know the nuclear power station mess in Russia. They had to destroy the sheep on Harris ’cause of fallout. And that BCCI bank that went bust and took all theWestern Isles money with it—twenty odd million pounds. Every penny they had. And then the herring—that’s pretty much finished with all those Spanish an’ Japanese an’ English trawlers overfishin’—an’ the salmon farms, they’re having problems with fallin’ prices an’, would y’believe—even the tweed itself—the great cloth of Harris and Lewis—that seems t’be dying out now too…”
    A frisky three-hour ferry ride from Ullapool brought me—a little shaken by the turbulent journey and Hector’s dour revelations—to Stornoway, capital of the 130-mile-long Outer Hebrides chain. This small town of 8,600 people is the hub of activity on the main island of Lewis, and the epitome of all the best and worst of island life. Fine churches, big Victorian houses, lively industries, new hotels, even a mock castle and a colorful fishing fleet mingle with bars, pool rooms, fish and chip shops, and, according to one local church newspaper, “palaces of illicit pleasures whose value to the community is highly questionable”—referring to the town’s two rather modest discos.
    Stornoway was obviously a place deserving leisurely investigation, but my mind was set first on island exploration as I drove off across the bleak, hairy humpiness of the moors and peat bogs looking for the tweed makers in the heart of Harris. Then—on a whim—I paused for a while to climb Clisham, and that’s how I got stuck in the storm.
    But as the weather cleared, I came down slowly from the wind-blasted tops and could see, far below, the thin crofting strips on the fertile machair land, fringing the coastal cliffs.
    They say the milk of cows grazed on the machair in the spring and summer is scented by the abundance of its wildflowers—primroses, sea spurrey, campion,