A JOURNEY TO THE WESTERN ISLES

1.

It was about eight on a warm June evening in Oxford, when I struggled back into my college, carrying my kit, after a long afternoon playing cricket, and what seemed an even longer walk home from the ground. The porter saw me coming in the college gate and called out that I had a message. “Your mother phoned to say she’ll be by to pick you up in about thirty minutes. She said you need to pack a bag, find something respectable to wear, and meet her here at the gate.” Half an hour later, more or less cleaned up and clutching a bag, I saw her pull up, motion me inside, and off we went.

She told me my great uncle John had died at his home on the island of North Uist, in the Outer Hebrides. My father, who was then stationed in Canada, had called to say he wanted me to attend the funeral, which would be held the following day up on the island. Uncle John was our clan chief, and Dad was anxious that I go to represent “our side of the family.”

My mother floored her old Renault 16. It used to amuse me that my father, who had flown Spitfires during the War, was a slow and deliberate driver, while my mother, the daughter of a doctor, and deeply religious, drove like the proverbial bat out of hell. We raced to the station. The last train north had already left. She kept driving, at breakneck speed, chasing it through the night and eventually caught it at Stafford, where I jumped aboard. At six in the morning the train pulled into Glasgow, and an hour later I caught another train out to Greenock, where I was told the chairman of the clan society lived. The idea was that I might be able to hitch a ride in a small plane he planned to charter to the island that morning. Somehow it all worked out. I found his house, knocked on the door and introduced myself.

I must have looked a sight, this tall stranger at his door, after a couple of hours sleep, snatched on the train, and another long walk across town to his home. But he took it all in his stride. In no time I was looking down out of the window of this little plane at the blue, blue ocean and the islands below as we made our way over the water.

Despite the short notice and inaccessible location, hundreds came to honor Uncle John’s memory. The local mission church was just a tiny, nondescript one room building, and so we were all asked to sit on the hillside outside, in a scene that was straight out of the Gospels. All that was missing were the loaves and fishes. There were three Presbyterian ministers present to address us: one Church of Scotland, one Free Church and one English-speaking minister, for the relatives who’d lost “the old tongue” and had come over from the mainland. People like me.

The English speaker extemporized a long, rambling, utterly beautiful poem-prayer. “We give thanks to thee, O Lord, for the life of Dr. John, and for the island, that he loved so dearly, and which gave him so much pleasure, and for every bird and animal, every fragrant flower on the machair and every blade of grass on the island, which is filled with thy beauty and gives witness to thy glory.”

This was certainly not what I had expected. Funerals were supposed to be gloomy affairs in my experience, and the local Calvinist churches were especially gloomy and depressing at the best of times, threatening hellfire and damnation if we desecrated the Sabbath by wearing colorful clothing, playing outside or going down to the beach. The last thing I expected from a Presbyterian minister, at a funeral, was a poetical outpouring of ecstatic joy. Something else was happening here.

Looking out from that hillside across the sun-drenched machair, while the other ministers made their own long and no doubt equally glorious speeches in Gaelic, I remember thinking how insanely beautiful it all was. No wonder Uncle John loved it so much.

For the first time in my life, I was able to see the land and sea, that stretched out before me, as sacred in themselves.

Why would the islanders need a great stone church or cathedral, like the ones I was used to, when the world outside is a more majestic cathedral than they could hope to construct?

This world of nature was more spiritual, more thoroughly infused

with the presence of God, than any man-made construction.

It was wrong to try to contain God inside a stone building or limit our communication to an hour on Sunday, mediated through the offices of a priest. If there’s a God, our connection should go on everywhere, and always.

If you put God in a box,

even an elegant stone box,

you are only trying to limit

the inherently limitless.

Unboxed, She is free

to spread Herself

over the land and sea,

for all time,

for all things.

Unboxed, we are free.

2.

Both the Ancient Greeks and the Celts had an idea of a kind of island paradise which existed across the water to the far west, a mythical garden with apples of immortality and eternal youth. The Greek name, Garden of the Hesperides, means garden of the daughters of Evening, with evening being the west, as the orient, or rising sun, means the east. The Celts talk about Tir na nOg, the Land of Eternal Youth, and about the “Otherworld,” which is the parallel dimension of fairie and magic, and later of angels, saints and demons. In landing you straight onto the islands by plane just now, I did you a disservice. In order best to appreciate the “otherness”, the magical feel of the islands, you should travel there more slowly, by land and by boat.

Slowness is not just the rate

at which one passes from point A to point B.

It is a moral principle,

a destination in itself.

It helps to practice before you arrive.

In Island of Dreams, the English author Dan Boothby describes the distance, both physical and metaphorical, between the England of his youth and the small lighthouse island off Kyle of Lochalsh, where he lived for a couple of years, tending the memory of Gavin Maxwell. And yet, compared with the Outer Isles, his toe has scarcely been dipped in otherness. His little paradise has an extensive wildlife and flora which would be an impossible dream further west. He’s in the borderlands, in a liminal space between one world and the next, not yet crossing over. And driving back over the new bridge from Skye, crossing over onto the mainland, over his head, as it were, one has a sense of re-entering occupied territory, a diminishing sense of freedom, like entering the mountains of Mordor. The horizons are closer. The air is different.

And so, the islands are a metaphorical “Otherworld,” a land of magic, a different dimension. And yet, of course, the islands are also very real. They are poetry and they are prose.

The Outer Hebrides go by various names in Gaelic and English. They are officially known as the Western Isles, na h-Eileanan Siar, since they lie to the north and west of the Scottish mainland and of the Inner Hebrides, and to distinguish them from the Northern Isles, Orkney and Shetland, which are both north and east of the Hebrides. Although an archipelago comprising several islands big and small, they form a long line from Barra and its satellites in the south to the Butt of Lewis in the north, giving rise to the name an t-Eilean Fada, the Long Island. They are also known as Innse Gall, the islands of the Foreigners, and the Land of the Sidhe, the fairies.

The islands resist attempts to traverse them in a straight line, and this is particularly true of North Uist, the surface of which has more water than land. As you look down from the summit of Eaval or Crogaire Mor, you see a patchwork of sea lochs and freshwater lochs. All this means that to walk a mile as the crow flies you might have to travel five miles on land,

moving back and forth

around the patches of water,

like a weaver working his loom.

It’s like the winding single-track roads which curve around the islands, offering such limited visibility to the front (far more to the left and right).

They are not a hindrance.

They’re an opportunity,

a centering prayer, a mantra.

In Greek and Latin writers, the islands are referred to as the Ebudes/Ebudae or Hebudai. It is assumed by most scholars that the word Hebrides is a corruption of Ebudes, just as Iona is of Hi, although some would prefer to see a connection with the ancient goddess, Bride. (The answer, as it is to many questions in the islands, may not be either but both.) WJ Watson, the great professor of Celtic at Edinburgh, maintained that the Outer Hebrides were known separately as Dumna or Domon, the reference being to the word for deep, possibly to a titular Goddess of the Deep. In early references to the “British Isles”, Ierne (Hibernia/Ireland) and Albion (Britain proper, including what are now Scotland and Wales), the Outer Hebrides are sometimes classified with Ierne not Albion. Again, they seem to resist simple, binary, classification. The earliest recorded inhabitants, according to Irish writings, were the Fomorians, a race of giants (perhaps, fer mor- big man, or fer mara/moire – man of the sea), and the islands were a haven for pirates.

The early inhabitants, however piratical, had a sophisticated culture, as can be seen from the stone circles all over the Western and Northern islands. The best known, at Callanish in Lewis, is around 5,000 years old, as is the Clach an Truiseil some 20 miles to the north. Originally part of a circle which would have dwarfed Stonehenge, the stone at 19 feet is the tallest in Scotland. It is also thought to mark the site of the last battle on the island, between the Morrisons and MacAulays.

A distinctive feature of early “Celtic” private architecture is the crannog, a stone house built on an artificial island in a lake, which had excellent defensive qualities. These occur throughout Ireland and Scotland, but the earliest recorded is on Loch Olabhat in North Uist.

The stone circles and crannogs

are some two thousand years older

than the fall of Troy

and the beginnings of Greek civilization,

at the other end of Europe.

That’s the same distance in time

as from the birth of Jesus to today.

3.

Christianity came to the Hebrides in the sixth century and has never left. The Celtic saints ventured out from their monasteries in places like Iona in search of "deserts" in the no man's land between the worlds of land and sea. There are still a number of islands or settlements with names like Pabbay (priests' isle). If you fly into the Uists you will land at the airport in Balivanich, in Benbecula. Balivanich (baile a' mhanaich) means village of the monks. There is probably a higher percentage of churchgoers in the islands today than in any other part of the United Kingdom. To some this is just more evidence that the islands are a backwater, a relic of the past. It is all a matter of perspective.

We are all prisoners of our assumptions, all with a tendency to believe that we are the normal ones, the ones who don’t speak with an accent, the center of the universe. And it is natural for most of us to think of the Outer Hebrides as remote, hard to get to and out of the way. The Roman poet Catullus talks about his willingness to travel anywhere to get away from his cruel girlfriend, even, in a rhetorical flourish, to visit the "ultimosque Britannos," since for Romans, Britain in general was at the far limit of their empire and their known world. Even the Hebridean band Runrig has a song called Edge of the World, about the islands of Saint Kilda.

But, as I said, this is all a matter of perspective. The Romans, who were notoriously bad sailors, were the first to think of accessibility in terms of roads across the land, as we do today. For most ancients, however, the quickest and safest form of travel was by sea, or by river, and the remote, uncivilized and dangerous areas were all inland, where robbers and wild beasts lurked in thick forests. The Phoenicians founded their great colonies, like Carthage and Cadiz, by the sea. The Greeks did the same thing with their colonies, like Marseilles, Nice, Naples, Syracuse and Byzantium, and they were always reluctant to venture very far inland from these bases. Almost all trade was water-borne and especially sea-borne.

For the ancients, therefore, the Hebrides were much more in the center of the civilized world than were the dangerous and inaccessible places inland.

The roads that mattered were the sea roads.

Iona today seems like a remote outpost,

like all the other Hebridean islands,

but in Saint Columba’s day it was

the omphalos, the Celtic Delphi,

the beating heart of the Celtic faith.

Sometimes we must travel west

To re-orient ourselves.

4.

A three-year study by the Office of National Statistics published in 2016 found that the people of the Western Isles were the happiest in Britain, followed by those in Orkney. For those who assume that warmer weather and the conveniences of modern urban society are essential components of a happy life, this must represent something of a surprise. The causes of this happiness must lie deeper, rooted in the peculiar culture of the community.

Culture is contained in, and transmitted through, language. The Outer Hebrides are the only part of Scotland where Gaelic remains the official language. It has survived despite the best efforts of the Church of Scotland, which called it the language of superstition, and of the schools: in living memory children could still be punished for speaking it, even in the playgrounds.

The church had a mission to save

us, as it did the indigenous

children harvested

into residential schools in Canada,

plucked from their roots, cauterized.

They wanted to save us

from our own culture, our history,

our happiness.

In the 16th Century James VI commissioned the Fife Adventurers to colonize the Western Isles, to impose his vision of civilization on the area. When that failed, he ordered the first Marquis of Huntly “to extirpate within a year the barbarous peoples of the Isles.” We would call that genocide today. When he became King of England too, he sent out adventurers to colonize the Americas.

The King James Bible.

Barbarous.

In the name of God.

It is all too easy for dominant cultures to assume that minority cultures and languages are dying, if not already dead. Progress, in fact, demands they hurry up and die. In the 18th Century, the author of the English Dictionary, Dr. Samuel Johnson, though he understood not a word of Gaelic, dismissed this ancient tongue as “the rude speech of a barbarous people, who had few thoughts to express.” That prejudice has been shared by many in the “civilized” south of Scotland, who resent any funds belatedly spent on its protection or restoration.

Collectors of folklore, who did understand the language, like James Macpherson in the 18th century and Alexander Carmichael a hundred years later, both found fame mining the rich memories of the Uibhisteachs, the people of Uist. Carmichael for a while lived next door to my great great grandparents, both of whom contributed pieces to his Carmina Gadelica. Later he became an advocate for land reform in the Highlands, trying to stem the flow of emigration, and spoke eloquently of the special attachment of the Gael to the land. By his time, the Clearances had been going on for a hundred years.

Today, we live in more enlightened times: crofters have the right to buy their own land and Gaelic is the only language used on road signs. But more and more of the young are choosing to speak English, with a view to taking their place in the dominant culture down south.

The threat to the culture today is less malign but, ironically, more serious: increased contact with the outside world is the problem, just as it has been for native populations everywhere. When I first stayed on the island as a child, there was still no electricity. Today, there is a television in every home. On top of that, thanks to the Skye bridge and the ease of modern travel, direct intrusions by curious and well-meaning outsiders in love with what makes the people different, have steadily eroded that difference. The observer effect. The erosion seems inexorable and irreversible, as the impact of water and weather on the shore.

Peninsulas with populations

become tidal islands

and islands, permanent.

Soon sandbanks

are mere memories

under the water.

I attended schools in England, which epitomized the dominant culture. There, like Dr. Johnson, ignoring the indigenous cultures of our own land, we were made to study Greek and Latin, the dominant cultures of the past, chosen in an effort to buttress our own collective dominance, our civilization. Even so, I remember huge buses at Eton disgorging Japanese tourists, who wandered freely into boys’ rooms, taking pictures of us in our “penguin suits,” our antique uniform of white tie and tails, seemingly unaware that we were not actors, that the school was still a school, and that we had lives of our own. I remember how it felt, that we were animals in a zoo. There was an inkling even then that this dominance was not permanent.

Recently I attended a lecture by a Native scholar in Santa Fe, New Mexico, about the restoration and return of historic Native pottery from museums around the country to the Pueblos from which they were removed a hundred years ago.

But where will you put the pieces?

one of the curators had asked.

What plans have you to build

a suitable museum

to hold the collection?

“We are the museum,”

came the reply.

5.

Wisdom and poetry often grow out of openness to the peripheral, not shining a powerful beam on the subject. Remember the curving, meandering single-track roads on the islands? As long as you are a trusting soul, it is always better to be a passenger, able to turn your head to the left and right, than to be the driver, condemned to stare the short distance directly ahead, like a Roman or an Englishman.

Wisdom and poetry have a tendency to grow out of silence not speech. Some years ago, I came across the hand-written text of a talk my grandfather, Shakes, had given over the radio back in the early 1950s, on the subject of Sunday closings. Should shops, restaurants and cinemas be allowed to open on Sundays? Though speaking to an audience which was overwhelmingly English, he invoked the Sabbath Observance of his Presbyterian youth. To my generation this was nothing but an inconvenience, but Shakes spoke eloquently of its benefits.

We are active all week long,

rushing to work, working,

rushing home.

We need a day to slow down,

to practice openness, to reflect.

To be passive, to read.

To make no progress towards our goals.

To journey to the Isles.

What the Romans called otium, translated both as peace and leisure, with a suggestion of laziness, can help to thin the membrane between this noisome (and noisy) world and the next. It is in this way that the Sabbath – and the islands - can still be holy for many people, who are not conventionally religious.

My grandmother Allison used to despair of the islanders’ apparent laziness, their lack of ambition, their contentment, and their willingness to accept what things as they are. They would spare no thought for the morrow. If the ferry breaks down, ach well, there’s nothing we can do about it. The islander does not make appointments or predictions other than for the purpose of making some misguided incomer happy, even if just for the moment. If they tell you, I’ll deliver that carpet tomorrow, then that’s because it’s what you want to hear, but they know anything might come up between now and then, and the statement is not seen as imposing any actual obligation on the speaker. In the same way, when Shakes first stood for Parliament, for the Western Isles, everyone told him they would be voting for him, because they knew that was what he wanted to hear. He was a good man, one of their own, and they wanted him to be happy. As he suspected, most of them still ended up voting for the same party they had always voted for.

We are taught that change is progress,

improvement. In the islands people live

both in the moment and at the same time

in a way that is timeless. They accept

what the universe brings them

with equanimity, and without expectation.

Even today, the temperament of the islander

is close to saintliness,

to the temperament of a mystic.

No wonder the incomer

sometimes is

driven to despair.

6.

One traditional name for the Outer Hebrides is the islands of the Sidhe, the Fairies, and even after the arrival of Presbyterianism the people of the islands continued to believe in these strange creatures, who might best be described as the tutelary spirits of the land. My great great uncle Alasdair (or Alexander), a published Gaelic poet, was supposed to have held regular conversations with the fairies. My great aunt Dorothy always made sure we would knock a hole in the shell of our boiled eggs when we came to stay, so that the bad fairies couldn't use them as boats to row across and attack the good fairies on their mound in the loch.

There are fairy mounds everywhere in the islands and they feature frequently and respectfully in Alastair McIntosh's book, Poacher's Pilgrimage, An Island Journey. At one point, as he was working on the book, we asked each other directly if we believed in fairies. We were each, I think, a little embarrassed and not sure how to answer the question. As odd as it sounds, there is a sense in which an awareness of their reality is a mark of being fully connected with the land and with our ancestors. Indeed, some have tried to rationalize them as the spirits of the dead, and their mounds as old burial chambers. In an island, where families tend to stay in place, and not to come and go as they do in cities, there is a strong sense of community with the dead. Calum MacDonald of Runrig captures this in the song, Flower of the West, about his native North Uist:

And I step the naked heath

Where the breathing of the vanished

Lies in acres round my feet…

In modern psychic terms, McIntosh suggests the fairies may represent the powers of the imagination, almost the feminine, non-rational aspect of who we are, which we ignore or suppress at our peril, and which would have made the clash with uber-rational, uber-masculine Calvinism inevitable. To preserve their integrity, their wholeness, their health, the islanders almost have to balance their belief in one with their belief in the other. The imagination might sound like an abstraction, but the powers themselves are real.

Gaelic literature is full of stories about mortals who went willingly or unwillingly into these fairy mounds, returning after many years to find that only a day or a year had passed on earth. Time and space operate differently in the Otherworld. In the same way they had no trouble saying that Saint Brigid, who was born around 451, had been the midwife for the Virgin Mary at the birth of Jesus some four and a half centuries before.

The old folk didn’t live and think

within the narrow limits

of a simple, linear

conception of time.

Time, like the seasons,

they saw as a circle

or a series of concentric circles,

like the inside of a shell,

Eternity as a pattern

that turns back onto itself,

with no beginning and no end,

like the knot work patterns in Celtic art.

They understood parallel universes

long before such ideas were posited

by philosophers and writers

of science

fiction.

Mortals could cross over into the Otherworld, and vice versa, most easily in what were called thin places and thin times. Thus, the entrance to a fairy mound might be the classic kind of thin place, and Halloween or Samhain the most famous of thin times: these were times and places where the membrane between one world and the other was particularly porous. It made perfect sense to the early Christians to take over established pagan festivals at thin times and give them a place in the Christian liturgical calendar. Thus, Samhain became All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween, the Saturnalia became Christmas, and Easter became, well, Easter.

In the same way, Celtic saints deliberately sought out thin places, which had been sacred to their pagan ancestors, for their own cells and shrines. Saint Columba was particularly drawn to groves of sacred oaks, founding monasteries at Derry and Durrow, as did Brigid at Kildare, which means church of the oak tree. They also looked for peninsulas or small islands off bigger ones, like Iona off the end of Mull.

These were also liminal places,

sitting between the world of water

and the world of land,

between This and the Other,

between prose and poetry,

between what was known

and understood.

7.

Celtic saints set their currachs

on the water, not knowing

where they’d be carried

by the Spirit in the form

of wind and current.

Where Dr. Johnson was a tourist,

Brendan was a pilgrim.

Johnson paddled in shallow waters;

an immram is a voyage into the Deep.

The Voyage of Bran (Immram Brain), composed around 700 CE, describes a mythical journey to the Otherworld in a combination of Gaelic prose and poetry. The Voyage of St. Brendan the Navigator, composed perhaps 150 years later, follows it so closely that it is now hard to tell whether Brendan actually reached America or, as the writer seems to assume, his was another shamanistic spirit voyage. In the 1970s, Tim Severin proved that such a journey in a 6th Century currach would at least have been possible, but the value for the writers of these immrama or echtrae seems to have been principally spiritual and allegorical.

Otherworld travel may have survived in what in Gaelic is called an da shealladh, the two sights, or in English, usually, Second Sight. This is where a person sees something which is, was or will be happening at the same or some other place while fully conscious in this world. In an example given by the American Margaret Fay Shaw in her collection of folk songs from South Uist, two sailors come into a big hall for a party and they are seen with seaweed round their necks, anticipating their imminent death from drowning. What this story indicates is that it is usually associated with bad news, even death, and that having the sight is regarded more as a curse than a blessing.

Rational, educated, modern folk, of course, reflexively dismiss the possibility of what they cannot see or verify. In the islands it has always been accepted simply as a fact of life. Let me give a couple of examples from my own family.

My grandmother, Allison, was a highly rational and modern young lady, the daughter of an eminent Presbyterian minister, Moderator Elect of the Church of Scotland when he died. Allison came first in her class in Logic at Edinburgh University and was one of the first women to be called to the bar in London, in other words, to qualify as a practicing litigation attorney.

She told me of the time in the First World War, during the Battle of Loos in 1915, when Shakes was visited at the front by his older brother, Sandy, one evening. Sandy had come to say goodbye because he knew he would be killed the next day and wanted Shakes to take care of his affairs. Now, Sandy was not a skittish individual. He was a former two-year captain of the rugby team at Watsons and had an unusual reputation for bravery: his men liked to stand as close to him as possible, thinking he was immune to gunfire. Sure enough, though, he was found the next day, amid a pile of bodies, killed by a grenade, with a Viking Axe in his hand.

I asked her what her explanation for this was. Did he really know he’d be killed? And if so, why? "Oh, that was the Second Sight," she said. "A lot of people from the islands had it." She never doubted its existence; she just seemed to regard its possession as a sign of being not quite civilized.

She also said she knew, as soon as she saw him, that she would marry Shakes, because she had seen him already in her dreams. It was the University Rag Week, and she was enthroned on a float in a grand procession, when she spotted Shakes standing in the crowd. She ordered the float to stop right there, so that she could be introduced to her future husband. Allison’s mother came from the islands. Perhaps she was not so civilized herself.

My cousin Iain, who succeeded Uncle John as Chief, worked as a doctor, a GP, in the south of England. There were times, he said, when he knew all about a patient’s life and ailments, before they even stepped through the door.

My father knew when his younger brothers died, without anyone having told him. Godfrey had been ill for years in St Thomas's Hospital in London, while my Dad was living in Bermuda. One morning he felt something terrible had happened. He immediately telephoned the hospital. The receptionist said that no, they had no new information about Godfrey. Dad persisted and asked them to call the ward just to make sure. They called and found that Godfrey had indeed just passed away.

The other time he was on holiday in the Lake District when he became extremely agitated, convinced that something awful had happened. Unable to relax and enjoy the magnificent scenery, he drove frantically around until he found a phone. His worst fears were confirmed, as he learned that his brother Ranald, a country parson, had been killed by a large truck, while cycling home from visiting parishioners. Dad may not have believed in God, but he certainly believed the Second Sight.

In theory the two are quite distinct. In fact, it used to be felt that Second Sight was either a gift of the fairies or of the devil, something that would and should disappear from Scottish life once the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, with its proper attachment to the rational, had a firm enough grip over the country. The famous Brahan Seer, Coinneach Odhar from Lewis, is said to have acquired the gift after falling asleep on a fairie mound, and he used a circular, hollow “fairie” stone, through which to see his visions. He was violently put to death by the Countess of Seaforth, after he saw that her husband was being unfaithful in Paris. To her there was nothing God-given about his gift.

It was always possible to accuse people who made unpalatable predictions of being in league with the devil. Witchcraft trials had been all too common in Scotland, after the publication of a bestselling handbook on the subject, Malleus Maleficarum, by King James VI and I. It is something of a miracle that such trials do not seem to have been a feature of life in the islands, where so many of these old ideas were still given credence. The most famous exponent of the Sight after the legendary Brahan Seer, was the Seer of Petty, the Reverend John Morrison, son of another Reverend John Morrison, from the isle of Lewis, but, as a minister, someone whose personal life and affiliation were unimpeachable. This alone may have bought islanders afflicted with the sight some credibility and even safety. His gift at least was not from the devil.

And, speaking of the unimpeachable, if you read the Life of Saint Columba by Adamnan, you will see that the majority of the "miracles" ascribed to the Saint are examples of the Second Sight. It seems to have been something of a party trick for the saint, who would often tell his fellow monks about future visitors to the island a day or so before their boat arrived. Martin Martin records a similar phenomenon on the island of Rona in the early eighteenth century. His informant was the Presbyterian minister of Barvas in Lewis, Daniel Morrison: “Upon my landing (says he) the Natives receiv’d me very affectionately, and address’d me with their usual Salutation to a Stranger: God save you, Pilgrim, you are heartily welcome here; for we have had repeated Apparitions of your Person among us (after the manner of the Second Sight) and we heartily congratulate your Arrival in this our remote Country.”

Some twenty-five years ago, I wrote an article on Second Sight for a now defunct website. At the end I wondered aloud why the gift did not seem to have followed the Gaels into exile in Canada and New Zealand, for instance. No sooner had the article appeared than I was deluged with emails, first thanking me for taking the "forbidden" subject seriously, and then confessing that it had indeed followed them, but that their families had warned children never to admit it, for fear of being ostracized as primitive, delusional or mad. People wrote to say that they still possessed the gift but were afraid to speak of it.

Nevertheless, it seems as if it does not tend to survive the alienation of modern city life for very long. I am reminded of Alastair McIntosh's urgent appeal for us to restore the bonds of community and between people and the earth. This was the driving insight behind his first book, Soil and Soul. My father, who had the Sight, was often left to look after his younger brothers by his parents, while they attended dinners and political meetings. Perhaps it is not surprising that he should develop an almost telepathic connection with them. I was sent to boarding schools to learn the modes of dispassionate dislocation, which our society deemed an essential foundation for success. As far as I know, I do not have the Sight.

When we are no longer so close to our brothers,

why should we feel their departure?

Losing the Sight

is a warning that something is wrong.

Maybe it’s found in the Isles

more often than anywhere else

for the same reason that people

are happier there.

The special attachment of the Gael

to the land, quantum

entanglement…

The key is being connected.

And such connections explain

why the islands remain

so liminal, so thin.

***

Sometimes we must travel west…

Just as a currach’s skin

is carefully cured

before it’s set upon the main,

so the young must learn

from elder kin

how to journey safely lest

they let the water in.

Then let the journey begin.