‘Riverwitch’ is a collaborative project with my wife Sharon Blackie, writing on her Substack  The Art of Enchantment. It’s the re-understanding of a prose duet we wrote for each other back in 2014, both grieving and celebrating our dislocation from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides to Donegal in north-west Ireland. It offers a story-within-a-story as, ten years on, we try to make sense of the ways in which places claim us, mark us – and then, when it’s time, cast us loose. We are taking  turns every Wednesday to revisit one of the original posts and add new reflections and insights.

The previous post in this series was Sharon’s ‘The shedding of skins, and moments of grace’, which she posted last week. Read it here. You can also find more of the background to this project here.

May 2014

Sharon thinks I do not believe in fairies. Nor in the mischievous godlets of the vegetable patch or the salty nymphs who gurgle and burp contentedly under the piles of shore-drift seaweed.

But I do believe in them. They were my invisible childhood guardians and I never knew a time when they were not there. It is just that we made a deal. In return for their guiding presence in the far outer rim of my peripheral vision I agreed not to turn my eyes directly towards them. They would tolerate my presence, mostly, just as long as I never spoke of them. They loathe the sticky slime of adjectives and convulse at the impropriety of an action’s attribution. I keep my side of the bargain.

So none of the characters and events in the following narrative are based on, or intended to imply the existence of, any minor deity, sprite or water-horse on the island of Lewis or in the surrounding waters. For the avoidance of doubt, that clause may be taken to include the non-existence of blue or bluey-green maritime daemons on the Shiant archipelago off the east coast of the main island.

If any day is the specific day when I cease to have a home in Lewis, it is this burning blue day in early May when the weather, completely out of character, has taken time off. True, I’ll probably have to make a couple of return trips over the coming months to fix the roof or try to soothe the gale-gouged pebbledash with a tin of lighthouse white. Purchases have already fallen through. Prospective buyers have come and gawped and fled screaming, finally understanding an extremity that estate agents were powerless to convey. But when I return I will just be a tradesman and the proud old walls will have no idea who I am. So without a doubt, this is the day.

By the time I am ready to depart it is already gone noon. I don’t have a wheel to my name. My bicycle long since succumbed to the salt-laden air. Last week my car choked to death when the computer over-fuelled the catalytic converter. Nasty way to go. The mechanic, not of the digital age, mentioned gremlins. I pretended not to hear. Gremlins are covered by the clause.

A winding, often single-track road of forty miles lies between me and the island’s ferry port in Stornoway. I have my ancient dark green rucksack. It has seen it all before. The front door is locked and the silence within presses its nose to the glass. Some early bluebottles buzz in the last of the fading warmth of occupation. A few dreams refused to come down from the ceiling in the living room. I tried my best to shoo them out of the window before I left. They will have to take their chances with the cobwebs.

When we came here almost four years ago the snipe drummed us aboard with the ticker-tape ribbons of their virtuoso vertical dives.1 The sky fell around us in lucid quavering strips and the performance continued long into the endless twilight that serves for night in a northern mid summer.

But the snipe are not drumming as I walk the shameful tatters of retreat up the road and out of the village. As well as the glorious tailfeather flutter of their drumming, they have an everyday call produced in the throat.2 I have seen it classified as an alarm call. I think it is more multi-purpose than that. It sounds like the slow agony of a rusted and eccentric bicycle wheel being peddled laboriously to nowhere. Eeek -eee---eek-eee---eek… For mile after mile, past the intimacy of Mangurstadh’s sandy refuge and the majesty of Tràigh Uig at low tide, a succession of birds harry and heckle. Better the stinging strike of a herring gull’s beak than the mordant mockery of snipe.

In Stornoway there is no room at the inn. And god knows, I do not deserve a manger. A cruise ship, you see, has disgorged its stomach contents into the gaping beaks of all the posh hotels of this little fishing port. Not that I would have stayed in such a place. Things are, shall we just say, a bit tight. But all the overflow from the grander establishments on the seafront has ripple-filled the town down to the humblest B&B. Still, there is a valuable lesson here. Finally, I am forced to understand trickle-down economics.

Through the castle grounds and out onto the headland with me, gore-tex bivvy bag and all. Surely here there will be a breeze. Please forgive me my sins and let there be a breeze.

There is no breeze. Those of you who know the Scottish uplands and islands already know what this means. The great leveller. The scourge of the noble and the base alike. The true ruler of these lands. Blotting out the starlight, the midges eat me alive or else the rustling of the midge net on my eyelashes makes me wish that they would finish the job.

About three in the morning the weather finally stirs from its unusually long nap and potters about the Minch, sweeping away all the stars that the night has left scattered about. The holes in the clouds are darned and a decent south-westerly is warming in the oven. I could sleep now. But the boat leaves a little after five. The thought of missing it and being stranded here is more dreadful than treachery.

The boat reeks of bunker oil and stinks of some long-ago sea creatures rotting in the bilges. Passengers divide into their customary tribes for the three-hour crossing – those who close their eyes or focus them tightly on televisions or coffee cups, and those of us who maintain the watch. The insiders and those on deck. I sit my infeasibly large rucksack upright on the bench next to me, as if it were an elderly companion on a day trip, and begin the vigil. Some of the watchers yearn for a shimmer of dolphin. Others are intent on extracting an ounce-weight glimpse of a minke whale’s discreet dorsal fin from the endless ore of swirl and chop. For me it is shearwaters. The giant silent swifts of the open ocean, dipping their calligrapher’s wingtip onto the wavetops. The lines they compose are read only by the sea, which applauds and erases them all in one cycle of swell.

Is that you, my loves, far out on the misty horizon? I cannot make them out at this range, hiding behind the net curtains of salt spray. Finally one bird mounts a gust, punching high up into the clear air. For a fleeting, eternal moment it hangs weightless, then pivots in its own wingspan and hurtles away downwind.  

On the quayside in Ullapool I can barely stand. This must be what astronauts feel when they step back on earth after a long time in space. The mainland is so unexpectedly heavy.

Out to the west, just over the horizon, there is an island. On a map you will find the stalwart bulk of Lewis, the winking-eye roguery that is Harris, the sandy-haired beauty of the Uists. But that island of my dreams, like the secretive Hy Brasil itself, is not on any map I know of.

October 2024

Sorry. That piece was longer than usual. If I were writing it today I might find some way to compress it further. So I’ll just add this one strange addendum. In case you still have a couple of minutes.

Ironically, having left my car to the indefinite timescales of a rural one-man garage, I went through a sort of metaphorical carwash after landing at Ullapool. One of those big automatic facilities with rotating hard brushes and soft flim-flams, detergent and rinse. First a crowded coach to Inverness. Then three trains and two missed connections to the port of Stranraer. A night in an above-the-bar pub guestroom with accompanying plumbing. The blinding chrome glitz of the Belfast ferry pretending to be on a Mediterranean cruise. A coach to Letterkenny which crossed from Northern Ireland into the Republic without a second glance at the road signs changing from miles to kilometres. All trace of contamination washed off me. Scrubbed clean. Born again. Exhausted.

Then the old country bus to Falcarragh. My journey had begun in the besieged heartland of Scottish Gaelic and would end in the last stronghold of Ulster Gaelic. Originally two sibling dialects, they are classified as two languages these days, the experts will tell you, divorced after centuries of war and deep grievances of religion. When you listen to the two forms side by side, one of the first things which jumps out at you is the completely different sound when they convey a negative statement - that something is not the case, an action was not performed or a event will not occur.

The equivalent of our word not comes at the start of a Gaelic sentence and so demands the ear’s attention. In Scotland that word is ‘Chan …’, where the ‘ch’ is the lovely throaty sound you hear when a Scottish person says ‘loch’. In Ireland the word is ‘Ní …’ sounding like the English ‘knee’. On the fluid horizon of the linguistic soundscape these are two clear, distinctive rocky holdfasts, ‘Chan’ flying the Scottish flag, ‘Ní’ the Irish. Or so the language-learners’ textbooks, of which I had by that time read plenty, would have you believe.

Somewhere between Letterkenny and Dunfanaghy I fell asleep. The bus quietly insinuated itself into the Gaelic-speaking area of Donegal. I half woke and found two old men sitting in the seats directly in front of me. One of them asked the other, in Gaelic, if it were Mícheál who would be building the new barn. Evidently his companion did not hold Mícheál in high esteem as a builder. ‘Chan é, chan é,’ came the emphatic reply. ‘No, it is not. No.’ My world tilted off the level. In a moment of sleep-fuddled panic I had missed my stop and magically arrived back in Scotland. I must have taken the wrong bus, the wrong boat. And yet, the road signs were in kilometres and the post boxes were Irish green.

To those who study the minute interweaving of Gaelic dialects, as I myself do now at the University of Edinburgh, the existence of ‘Chan’ in the speech of the older generations in north-west Donegal is quite well documented. There are other secretive variations in the everyday language of the people which point to the seamless interlacing of Gaelic all along the north coast of Ireland and up through Scotland’s western seaboard.  But it would take me a year of respectful persistence before I was invited into the back kitchens and the old cow byres of Donegal, where I would hear the shibboleth of ‘Chan’ spoken again. To have heard it on a bus, the moment I arrived in the Gaelic-speaking part of the county, was, well, lucky. It was almost as if those two old men had been envoys, sent out to greet me on the road and reassure me that I was not, even after my long journey, so very far from home. But no. They were just farmers from Ballyboe. Even if they were not, they would be covered by the clause.