Island on the Edge Read online

  I counted, I think, fourteen lochs of varying size and depth. During summer many of them are filled with glorious white-orange water lilies and flowering bogbean as beautifully ornate as any lake in some great country estate.

  On the wilder western coastline, breakers rarely cease even on the balmiest of days. Here I found fulmars, herring gulls, black-backs, gannets and common gulls competing for space with arctic skuas, shags, guillemots, razorbills and the occasional storm petrel. Sea eagles are not uncommon on any part of the island along with hen harriers and buzzards and the awe-inspiring golden eagle. Seals, otters, dolphins, porpoises, basking sharks and whales are prevalent too. Once I saw killer whales or orcas just off the south shore between Soay and Rum. What a very memorable moment that was!

  So the island’s natural history was laid out for me to discover. But I also began to find clues to the human history. On the more exposed side of the harbour there were the remains of Gavin Maxwell’s old shark factory with its sad remnants of a rust-red steam engine, uprooted rail tracks and scattered machinery parts. The harbour ended in a narrow gravel beach, where a broken down sluice gate, a silted-up dry-dock, a small drystone jetty and the skeletal remains of two ancient boats lay under a canopy of willow and birch.

  For the first few weeks I would return to ‘my side’ of Soay, the more sheltered southeastern bay, Camus nan Gall, the Bay of Strangers, where everyone lived, without realising I was walking past the house of the man who could reveal the island’s hidden history. But towards the end of May I met my nearest neighbour, Laurance Reed, a retired Tory MP. He had been abroad for a few weeks but he lived in Leac Mhor, just down the track from Glenfield House. English like myself, he inherited the house in 1973 from his mother who had bought it in 1961 as a holiday home after seeing it advertised in The Lady, complete with furniture, for £750. For a while Laurance, who then represented Bolton East, used it as a holiday home too but in 1977 he sold his flat in Bolton and came to live here permanently. He spent his time creating a garden out of rocky wilderness and writing the history of the island, The Soay of Our Forefathers.

  Laurance was a useful source of other information. He could tell you what materials made good emergency patches for the roof: brown paper, canvas or hessian liberally coated in tar, he considered the best. He had maintained Leac Mhor well, repairing interior walls and floors and patching the roof. The property had no plumbing for either toilet or bath and there was only one cold tap, which was in the kitchen. Water came from a rainwater storage tank just under the roof and ‘the commode’ was kept in a lean-to along with his garden tools. It was, definitely a bachelor’s home, but very neat, clean and pleasant. He was anxious about the house being a fire hazard, which all the houses were of course, so got rid of the Rayburn in the kitchen, and relied on mobile gas heaters instead. Overall, it was a very attractive property along the same design as my own, but still in its original state and in good order. I might also note that Laurance was a formidable Scrabble player. On one occasion he went right through my rotting kitchen floor, chair and all, and it did not distract him from placing a triple score word to win the game.

  What really set Leac Mhor apart was the garden. It had once just been a quarter of an acre of stones and scrub with the ruins of old barns and blackhouses on it. Laurance had fenced it off from livestock and rabbits and must have carried tons of topsoil for plants to grow. He tidied the ruins and turned them into features. There were rock gardens, flowerbeds, roses, honeysuckle and clematis. He created little paths of chipped stones, and plots for vegetables nestling inside the ruins. He loved to show people around it, and it was a pleasure to be shown. It was as if an English cottage garden had been plonked down in the middle of a barren moor. It glowed with colour through the summer, and not a weed to be seen.

  Not long after our meeting, Laurance very kindly gave me a copy of his book and signed it in my presence. One of just a few hundred self-published copies, it is still used today as reference for factual guidance if somebody new to the island asks about the history.

  Here, then, as briefly as possible, is what I learned about the history of Soay.

  There is evidence of sporadic small settlements scattered about the island going back thousands of years. On the far northwest coast of Soay looking toward Canna and the Outer Hebrides are the remains of ancient, prehistoric stone dwellings and there are also the remains of buildings further inland from later periods. Vikings probably used Soay as a strategic vantage point – a Viking fort lies just over a mile away to the north on the Skye side of Soay Sound. Arrows and stone tools have been discovered on the island and a few ancient burial sites, or ‘kists’. However, up until the late eighteenth century Soay had never maintained a permanent population, unlike Muck, Eigg, Rum and Canna whose histories trace at least a thousand years of continuous occupation. The land on Soay was always too poor.

  ‘Soay’ is merely a Norse word meaning ‘Sheep Island’ and (Googlers should be aware) there are several other small islands scattered throughout the Hebrides also called Soay – it’s probably a generic name for islands only good enough for grazing. The most well known Soay is that of St Kilda – where the famous Soay sheep come from – and that often causes confusion. As I understand it, the Soay sheep of St Kilda are the only remaining indigenous sheep in Britain. St Kilda’s Soay is actually a large stack which was cut off from the main island at the end of the last ice age. As the ice receded, the sheep on the stack were left stranded but managed to survive on the tough vegetation and seaweed. Their isolation has kept them free from cross-breeding with sheep brought over from Europe and the Middle East by various migrating peoples over the centuries.

  The Soay that I moved to was once an extension of a large farm at Glenbrittle on Skye, and had been owned by the MacLeods of Dunvegan since the thirteenth century. They used the island as summer pasture for sheep and cattle and there are still the remains of a drystone sheep fank (sheep fold) at the head of the north harbour, today used as a holding place for ferrying sheep across the sound. In the MacLeods’ day there would have been perhaps only a family or two living here to tend the livestock. At one time, the only access to Soay from Skye was across the sound, via a rough track from Glenbrittle. There is a flat rock on the Skye shoreline called The Flag that sits beneath the louring Cuillin Mountains directly opposite Soay harbour. If someone wanted a boat to take them over to the island, a fire was lit on the Skye side of the sound to attract the attention of the appointed Soay ferryman (the Camerons were the heritable ferrymen in those days). There was no proper tarmac road to Elgol until around the mid twentieth century and no jetty until the early 1980s.

  When the clearances began in the late 1770s, Soay must have been one of the few islands where people were cleared to. Several families of the Minginish district were removed from Skye to Soay. The island was not considered to be good land, it was mostly heather, bog, rock and small coppices of trees of little commercial value. Yet these people not only survived but also eventually flourished, for a short time anyway – a testament to their incredible toughness and ingenuity. How would we compare with them today, if landed onto a virtually uninhabited island with just a few tools, the bare essentials in food supplies and scant household belongings? Very poorly, I think.

  Over time, two or three separate small settlements were built and then abandoned as folk left for the New World or elsewhere. The last village Rhu Dhu on the southern part of the bay remained longest. Then, once the Crofters’ Act was passed in 1886, tenants had legal rights to their crofts and this meant it was worthwhile building a decent house. Now no one could throw them off the land at a moment’s notice. By the 1890s, new improved properties, replacing traditional thatched blackhouses were built along the southeastern bay. Blackhouses were so-named because they did not have chimneys. The sweet-smelling peat smoke escaped through a hole in the roof. There was already a school (built around 1878) and a salt/fish storehouse (1849) in the north harbour, which would be revamped in 1946 by
Gavin Maxwell as part of his shark fishing enterprise. The Mission House, which would be renamed Soay House, was built in 1890 initially for the ministers who came to address the islanders’ spiritual and ceremonial needs. For a time, around the beginning of World War One, the MacLeods rented out Soay to a Mr Meikle as a shooting estate, and he used the Mission House as his lodge, making some additional improvements of his own. These communal properties show that the island population appears to have been stable and functioning at one time.

  However I can’t help feeling there seems to have been a collective sense of dislocation. These were people who had been forced from their original homesteads and taken to a strange land not of their choosing. This state of mind seems to have permeated down through the generations. Unlike the other Small Isles, there is no graveyard or true church on Soay (there is even a mausoleum on Rum), which, in my view, conveys an idea of non-connection, a lack of security or belonging. The original Soay folk were always buried at their ancestral home on Skye. It is almost as if the eventual evacuation of the ‘settled’ inhabitants in 1953 were inevitable. The islanders had never felt they belonged on Soay. Life was hard, and the younger folk would always leave to make a better life for themselves. Of course, this is just my interpretation, and the same could be said of all the surrounding isles and of Skye itself, at that time.

  At any rate, on 20 June 1953 the last residents of Soay (perhaps as many as thirty of them) were evacuated to new homes and crofts on the Isle of Mull, never again to return.

  When I say the last residents I am not being strictly accurate. Let’s rewind to the 1940s.

  Back in 1946, Gavin Maxwell had purchased the island from the MacLeods, separating Soay from the MacLeod Estate forever. Tex Geddes had been gunner in the venture known as Island of Soay Shark Fisheries Ltd and both he and his wife Jeanne knew the island well and were attracted by its unique qualities. After the shark fishery went into liquidation in 1948, Jeanne and Tex bought Soay from the trustees of the defunct enterprise in 1951. The couple moved to Soay with their young son Duncan shortly afterwards, unaware that the islanders had been petitioning the government to be relocated.

  So about a year after Tex and Jeanne had moved to Soay as resident landlords, all the crofting families departed leaving empty houses and crofts. Crofting law in those days stipulated that the landlord was obliged to pay any tenant who left his croft compensation for improvements to the land. A croft-house back then (and it still applies in some cases today) was wedded to the croft and treated as ‘improvement’. Many people confuse the word ‘croft’ with ‘house’ if not familiar with the various terms. In some ways a house was part of the croft (land) and the term ‘divorced from the land’ is an apt way of describing how a croft house can be legally separated from the croft in crofting law. Once a property is ‘divorced’ it is then called a ‘feu’ – ‘freehold’ is the nearest definition in English law.

  Imagine, if you can, that you are the owner of a small island covering approximately 2,635 acres. On this island are eight to ten occupied croft properties, each family requiring money to compensate them toward their new life. In normal circumstances a new tenant would come forward and pay an agreed figure to take on the vacant croft. The landlord would be repaid the money that he had laid out to the leaving crofter. The land court or Crofter’s Commission would arbitrate with landlord and tenants over a fair price.

  There was no precedence for an entire island population requiring compensation from one private individual and there would be no new tenants to reoccupy the vacant crofts. The government of the time had closed its books on Soay; it was a dead island as far as they were concerned. Tex and Jeanne were expected to foot the entire bill. They were not wealthy millionaires and they had paid comparatively little for the island even for those days. The trustees of the shark fishery (it was no longer in Gavin Maxwell’s control) may well have been aware of the looming evacuation and financial consequences and were only too pleased to sell the island as quickly as possible. Tex and Jeanne Geddes had no intention of leaving Soay and were determined to stay. They were presented with a bill to compensate the vacating tenants, which they were unable meet. Jeanne (who had officially bought the island) was declared bankrupt.

  The problem was partly solved by the croft houses being ‘divorced’ from the crofts and sold off as holiday cottages. Another possible option was to rent out some of the crofts to new tenants, despite the government line on non-resettlement. One such family was the Combers. Mrs Comber went on to write fairly well-known books at a later time under the pseudonym of Lillian Beckwith. They were quirky, often irreverent sketches of Highland life. This particular scheme turned out to be fraught with strife as various strong personalities vied with each other over island affairs, and it came to an unsuccessful end.

  Finally, Jeanne and Tex sold the landlordship to the Gilbertson family who had already bought one of the houses as a holiday cottage. The sale managed to pay off the last of the debt. This enabled Tex and Jeanne to take on the crofts as tenants (in those days you couldn’t be a crofter and a landlord), gradually taking on the remaining vacant crofts on the south part of the island. Years later crofting law changed again, and crofters had the right to buy their crofts thereby becoming landlord/crofters. The multiple little crofts were merged into a single, large croft named South Soay Farm and once again Tex and Jeanne Geddes became owners, at least in the main part, of Soay.

  Meanwhile, the landlordship of Soay had passed to Dr Michael Gilbertson, and then by the early 1980s to Dr Nicholas Martin who is still landlord at the time of writing this. ‘Ownership’ is a tenuous word where Soay is concerned, as no one individual owns Soay in its entirety even today. Something that may become clearer as the book proceeds.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Close encounters

  It was about three weeks after my arrival that I finally got to meet Tex Geddes, and in a way that was thanks to Taffy. I was still vague about who was who and where they lived. Passing Soay House, which nestled beneath a steep cliff covered in birch and rhododendron, I’d met and chatted a few times with Jeanne Geddes, but had not yet seen her husband. I had noted with interest when I finally received a copy of the deeds and plans of my property that the land all around my small boundary had Tex Geddes written over it. I still thought he was some sort of fanatical American who had bought a piece of his Scottish heritage but lived far away across the ‘big pond’. My confusion was not helped by the fact that all the islanders, including Tex’s wife and his son Duncan, called him Old Chap. I had not realised that they were one and the same person.

  One day, I was taking Taffy for a walk on his lead along the track heading toward the harbour. Taffy was over sixteen years old and getting a little frail but he was an urban dog through and through, so he had to be on a lead despite his age. The sight of a sheep triggered some warped genetic memory in him, and he became a frenzied geriatric fiend. I had only gone a few hundred metres from my house when I saw two people coming up the path towards me. One was a tall, slim, blonde girl of about my own age and the other a thin, upright old man with a clipped grey-red beard, wearing a tweed hat and with a pipe in his mouth. There were two border collies trotting alongside them. They waited till I came level, and we exchanged polite hellos. Tex saw my dog was on a lead and said, ‘You can let the dog off if you want, lass.’

  I’m pretty sure that if the dog had not been on a lead he would have been sure to say, ‘Keep your cur under control.’ I later learnt first impressions were crucial to Tex’s long-term judgement of character. By pure luck, I passed the first hurdle. It also helped that I was female and under the age of thirty, always a distinct asset where Tex was concered. I explained that my dog was not safe to be let off, as he wasn’t used to sheep. ‘We can sort that out,’ Tex said. ‘ We’ll just have to introduce him to Blackie, that’ll cure him in no time.’

  Blackie was a pet black-faced ewe. She had been rescued as a lamb by a local man called Wee Lachie from Elgol. He fo
und her half frozen on the hill near the village early one spring. He did not know who owned her but he knew who would look after her: Jeanne kept goats and their milk is perfectly suited for lambs. Blackie grew into a massive, rumbustious ewe, much bigger than the Cheviot and Shetland sheep predominant on Soay. She was a good mother, lived to a ripe old age and produced healthy lambs year after year. (To this day, over twenty years later, you can still tell her progeny by their ears and noses; if they are spotted with black, they will be one of her millionth-great-great-grand-lambs.) Blackie feared nothing, neither man nor beast, and later became a nuisance caller, especially if she knew I wasn’t at home. Once she discovered there was food inside, she would ‘ram raid’ her way in by battering open the front or back door with her head and then she’d eat all my vegetables – apart from onions or aubergines. As often as not I would come home to find the house in chaos, furniture overturned, wee and poo spread throughout and a contented, replete ewe cudding in my bathroom. The year she had twins, I returned home to find the usual uproar downstairs, augmented by a peculiar squeaking noise upstairs. On investigation I found two lambs bouncing on my bed. I learned to lock the doors whenever I went out.

  The day after our meeting the phone rang. It was Tex inviting me to Soay House with the dog for his ‘curing’. When I arrived I saw that Blackie was being kept close by with a bucket of concentrates. As soon as Taffy saw her woolly white body so tantalisingly near, he started straining at the leash trembling with excitement.

  ‘Let him go,’ said Tex. ‘She’ll do the rest.’