Seasons on Harris Read Online Free Page B

lost’—but y’can always find a good breakfast! I’m even partial to a wee bit of warmed-up haggis myself sometimes. Very spicy.”(I hadn’t yet sampled this famous Scottish delight, partially because the idea of eating anything cooked in a pig’s bladder seemed odd to the point of off-putting—and also because of an English comedian’s description of the thing as resembling “a little castrated bagpipe”!)
    I wondered about the changes she mentioned, hoping she might be a little more optimistic than Hector in Ullapool.
    â€œWell, we’re losing a lot of the young ones, that’s always a big problem. But those that stay still work at the crofting and keep up the Gaelic.” She paused. “I miss the old ceilidhs most, I think, when we used to gather at a neighbor’s house to talk about local things and listen to the old tales by the seannaicheadh —an elder village storyteller. Now they’re a bit more organized—more of a show at the pubs with poems and songs and such. Not quite the same.”
    I asked about the famous Harris Tweed makers of the islands. “Oh, you’ll find plenty of them—more than four hundred still, I think—making it the old way in their own homes on the Hattersley looms. You can usually hear the shuttles clacking way back up the road.”
    Mary was right. I went looking for Marion Campbell, one of Harris’s most renowned weavers, who lived in the tiny village of Plocrapool (not the easiest place to find, as all the signposts are in Gaelic!) on thewild eastern side of the island, where the moors end dramatically in torn cliffs and little ragged coves. And I heard the urgent clatter of her loom echoing against the bare rocks long before I found her house, nestled in a hollow overlooking an islet-dotted bay. Through a dusty window of the weaving shed I saw an elderly woman with white hair working at an enormous wooden contraption.
    â€œAye, come in now and mind the bucket.”
    The bucket was on the earth floor crammed in between a full-size fishing dinghy, lobster pots, a black iron cauldron, cans of paint, and a pile of old clothes over the prow of the boat, just by a crackling peat fire that gave off a wonderful “peat-reek” aroma.
    â€œYou can always tell a real Harris Tweed,” Marion told me. “There’s always a bit of the peat-reek about it.”
    She was a small woman, sinewy and intense, and she worked her loom at an alarming pace. The shed shook as she whipped the shuttle backward and forward between the warp yarns with bobbins of blue weft. I watched the blue-green tweed cloth, precisely thirty-one inches wide, with “good straight edges and a tight weave,” grow visibly in length as her feet danced across the pedals of the loom and her left hand “beat up” the weft yarns, compacting them with her thick wooden weaver’s beam. Then her sharp eyes, always watching, spotted a broken warp yarn. “Och! I’ve been doing this for fifty-nine years and I still get broken ones!” She laughed and bounced off her bench, which was nothing more than a plank of wood wrapped in a bit of tartan cloth, to fix the errant thread. “And mind that other bucket.”
    I looked down and saw it brimming with bits of vegetation, the color of dead skin and about as attractive. “That’s crotal. Lichen—scraped from the rocks. For my dyes.” In the days before chemical dyes most spinners and weavers made their own from moorland plants and flowers—heather, bracken, irises, ragwort, marigolds—whatever was available.
    â€œI’m one of the last ones doing it now,” Marion told me. “By law all Harris Tweed has to be handwoven in the weaver’s own home on the islands here from Scottish virgin wool, but I’m doing it the really old way—dyeing my own fleeces, carding, making my own yarn, spinning,weaving—I even do my