Seasons on Harris Read Online Free Page A

milkwort, seapink, sorrel, and centaury. Each strip, usually no more than six acres in all, had its own steep-gabled crofter’s cottage set close to the narrow road, which wound around the boulders and burns. Behind each of the cottages lurked the sturdy remnants of older homes, the notorious “black houses,” or tigh dubh. Some were mere walls of crudely shaped bedrock, four feet thick in places; others were still intact as if the family had only recently moved out. They were roofed in thick thatch made from barley stalks or marram grass, held inplace by a grid of ropes, weighted down with large rocks. Windows were tiny, set deep in the walls, and door openings were supported by lintel stones over two feet thick. Nearby were dark brown piles of peats, the cruachs, enough to heat a house for a whole year.
    Looking at these black houses, which until recently formed the communal living space for families and their livestock, you feel pulled back in time to the prehistoric origins of island life, long before the invasions of the Norsemen from Scandinavia, long before the emergence of the Celtic clans of the MacAulays, MacRaes, and the ever-dominant MacLeods. All around the islands are remnants of ancient cultures in the form of brochs (lookout towers), Bronze Age burial mounds, stone circles and the famous standing stones of Callanish on Lewis, thought to have been a key ceremonial center for island tribes well before 2000 BC . The ponderous tigh dubh houses seem very much of this heritage and I experienced a strange sense of coming home again to something half remembered, deep deep down, far below the fripperies and facades of everyday “modern” life. Something that sent shivers to my toes.
    Lord Seaforth, one of the islands’ numerous wealthy “utopian benefactors” during the last couple of centuries, was anxious to improve “the miserable conditions under which these poor scraps of humanity live” and ordered that “at the very least a chimney should be present and a partition erected between man and beast in these dark hovels.” But apparently many of the crofters were quite content to share their living space with their own livestock. And they were also content to allow the smoke to find its own way through the thatch from the open hearthstone fire in the center of the earthen floor. Once every few years, when the thatch was replaced, they would use peat soot–encrusted stalks, along with seaweed gathered from the shores, as fertilizer for their tiny mounded strips of “lazybed” vegetable and grain plots (feannagan).
    But despite such conditions, the crofters were known for their longevity and prolific families. Dr. Samuel Johnson, accompanied on an island tour by the ever-faithful Boswell in 1773, put it down to island breakfasts. “If an epicure could remove himself by a wish,” Dr. Johnson remarked, “he would surely breakfast in Scotland.” I concur wholeheartedly. My first real Scottish breakfast came at the Scarista House Hotel overlooking the Sound of Taransay on Harris and included such traditional delights as fresh oatmeal porridge, smoked herring kippers, peat-smoked bacon, black pudding, white pudding, just-picked mushrooms and tomatoes, free-range eggs, oatcakes, bannock cakes, scones, honey, crowdie (a delicious rich cream cheese), cream, home-churned butter—everything, in fact, except the once-customary tumbler of island whisky, “to kindle the fire for the day.”
    â€œOh, the breakfasts are still ver’ fine,” agreed Mary MacDonald, post-mistress of Scarista village, when I later sat by her blazing peat fire drinking tea and nibbling her homemade buttery shortbread. “The world’s getting smaller everywhere,” she told me, her eyes sparkly, dreamy. “Things are changin’ here too—we talk in Gaelic about ‘an saoghal a dh’fhalbh’ —‘the world we have