A SUMMER CAMP IN LEWIS

By A. W. A. Matheson

Dusk had already turned to darkness as the Loch Ness quietly nosed her way towards the Stornoway pier late one evening in August, 1947. In spite of the lateness of the hour, however, the pier was ablaze with light and crowded with what seemed to be the entire population of the town, assembled to watch the arrival of the mailboat. Stornoway was full of visitors, every hotel was booked to the limit and no further room could be found for incoming travellers. Let the intending visitor to the Isles be warned to book accom­modation well in advance unless he wishes to spend the first night rather miserably as we did – two people and a dog with camping gear and luggage packed into a Morris 8 parked on an unknown road, enveloped in grey sea mist and with no idea of what lay around us.

When daylight came at last we set off across Lewis in the crisp morning air towards the west coast. An excellent tar macadam road wound its way for miles across desolate peat bogs and brown rolling moors, which drained into innumerable small lochans – lochans which shone in the bright sunshine like the fragments of a great mirror. Between these lochans, dotted about the moor, were the summer shielings. A shieling is a small hut with drystone walls and a turf roof and it is here that the crofters still come each summer to seek fresh pastures for their cattle.

Soon the good road lay behind us and we were bumping and rattling in a cloud of dust along a road devoid of surface. That cloud of fine white dust trailing behind us like a plume, seeped through every crevice of the car, and soon everything inside took on a greyish tinge. We passed many townships, each with its tiny crofts scattered in straggling lines of small concrete, stone, or turf houses, and possessing numerous small patches of oats, potatoes and pasture, with the rolling hummocky moors on one side and the Atlantic Ocean gleaming beyond the broken coast line on the other.

Eventually, after passing through Carloway without finding any suitable site for camping, we left the “main road” and continued along a cart track which appeared to drop down towards the sea. Leaving the wide spread peat banks and the piles of peat stacked at the roadside awaiting transport, the road led down a narrow valley, shut in by grey rocky hills reminiscent of the fells of the higher Yorkshire Dales.

At last a cluster of crofts was reached, just five in all, and beyond lay the glistening sea. This was Dalmore; Dalmore, where for many days we were to hear the great Atlantic rollers breaking with a boom and a roar on the golden sand of the little beach beyond the dunes. The beach shimmered in the heat and as each turquoise and emerald wave curved and broke, a curtain of white spray drifted off the top of it. On each side this lonely Hebridean beach was shut in by tower­ing grey cliffs which rose sheer from out of the water and re­-echoed to the crash and thunder of the breaking seas. Great white gannets with their black-tipped wings fished just off the shore, dropping like plummets into the sea after their prey. Oyster-catchers, with their immaculate black and white plumage and long brilliantly coloured stilt-like legs, ran along the foam edge calling in alarm at the sight of our dog. Many varieties of gulls frequented the shore, guillemots perched on a sentinel rock out at sea, and flights of graceful tern frequently passed across the bay. Great northern divers were regular visitors to our small bay and from the headland we saw a rolling school of porpoises and once a lone whale.

Beyond our tents the machair or dune grass was a riot of wild flowers, yellow bedstraw, rest harrow, scabious, gentian, red and white clover and a host of others, and over all shone the sun for three weeks, day after day, until we could see the small patches of oats ripen and change colour, the potato tops wither and droop and the wells dry up.

Our nearest neighbours lived in “a black house.” This was a much larger edition of the summer shielings we had seen. The dry stone walls were six feet thick at the base and tapered upwards. Deep set windows were let into these walls, which were surmounted by a roof of turf and straw held down with ropes heavily weighted with large stones. Inside the peat fire smoked, some of the smoke found its way through a hole in the roof, but most of it swirled around the earthen-floored living room until our unaccustomed eyes smarted.

The smell of the peat reek pervades the whole island and be­ comes part of one’s memory of the place and recalls the outstanding kindness and generosity of the Islesfolk them­selves.

We have met with many kindnesses on camping holidays, but never have we been made to feel so much at home as we were at Dalmore. Every household went out of its way to make us welcome. We were inundated with offers of potatoes, milk, eggs and anything else they had which they thought we might need. Whenever a fisherman returned home the choicest selection of his catch was invariably offered to us. One little old lady would come toddling down the track, a creel on her back, her knitting needles clicking busily and in her basket there would be perhaps potatoes newly lifted from the ground, perhaps a basin of crowdie and cream, or perhaps a young chicken dressed ready for the pot, and always there would be an invitation to supper. For all these things they would accept no payment of any kind. They said that as long as we remained amongst them, we were their guests and brushed aside all suggestions of payment with the phrase “and you are very welcome.” The Gaelic only is spoken in this little community, but whenever we were present the conversation was always in English, even though the old people found it very difficult to express themselves and occasionally had to appeal to a son or a daughter.

These people fish a little and tend their crofts. They shoe their own horses, tend their cattle and sheep, cut their scanty crops of corn with a scythe and gather it into sheaves by hand, labouring long and hard for a meagre return. During the last few years, however, the weaving industry has been given a new impetus and to-day every croft has its loom. Gone are the days when the home-grown wool was dyed and spun at home. Now a lorry brings the dyed yarn already spun on to bobbins. They weave the tweed on mechanical looms, operated by a foot treadle, and the cloth is collected and sent to the Stornoway mills to be finished. This industry is keeping most of the younger people at home, as they can earn a reasonable living at the weaving. Consequently, the townships are alive with young folk.

There are many more things I could tell you about ” Lews,” of the beautiful mountains of Harris, of black lochs (starred with water lilies) nestling in hollows of the hills, of the sheen-white sands of Uig, of the wild rock-torn Butt of Lewis with its lighthouse, of places with grand Norse names, Bragar and Shawbost, Barvas and Grinnavat, of golden beaches strewn with shells, and showing no tracks but those of sea-birds, of the dancing Northern Lights overhead at night; but for me all ” Lews ” is centred in Dalmore, that enchanted place of turquoise seas, golden sands, wild desolate crying of gulls over the old burial ground, the peat reek and above all, the friendliness of the people who live there.