The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy

  The swans stayed for a week or more after that, and now they would not wait for her to call to them before greeting her; every time she opened her door their silver-sweet, bell-like voices chimed to her from the lochan across the road. If Yeats had possessed the same strange powers as Morag, his nine and fifty swans would perhaps not have suddenly mounted, and his poem would not have been written.

  It was not through childlessness that Morag had turned to animals as do so many spinsters, for she had three sons. The eldest, Lachlan, was thirteen when I came to Camusfeàrna, and he had twin brothers of eleven, Ewan and Donald. The twins were eager, voluble, and helpful, by intention if not in every case in result, and after the first weeks, when the family had become friends, it was they who would carry my mail down from Druimfiaclach in the evenings after school, and at weekends do odd jobs for me about the house. They painted the outside walls of the house with Snowcem for me – or as much of the walls as their diminutive statures and a broken ladder could compass. They carried the heavy white powder down from Druimfiaclach in paper bags, and one day I suggested that they would find it easier to use my rucksack. They were delighted with the suggestion, and returned the following day with the whole rucksack full to the lip with loose Snowcem powder, and not only the main well of the rucksack but every zip-fastening pocket that the makers had designed for such personal possessions as toothbrushes and tobacco. That was nine years ago, and the two are grown-up and out in the world, but in wet weather that rucksack still exudes a detectable whitish paste at the seams.

  Gradually the MacKinnon household became my lifeline, my only link with the remote world of shops and post offices, of telegrams and anger, that I would so much have wished to dispense with altogether. It is not easy at any time to victual a house that has no road to it, and it becomes the more difficult when the nearest village with more than one shop is between thirty and forty miles distant by road. The mails themselves arrive at Druim-fiaclach, once a day, by a complicated mixture of sea and road transport from the railhead at the shopping village. From it they are carried by motor-launch to a tiny village five miles from Druimfiaclach, where originally a vast old Humber and now a Land Rover takes over and distributes them among the scattered dwellings of the neighbourhood. I am, therefore, reasonably certain of receiving one post a day if I plod up the hill to Druimfiaclach to fetch it (though occasionally it is too rough for the launch to put out, and it is not unknown, this being the West Highlands, for the whole mailbag to be sent to Skye through oversight or petulance), but I can only leave a reply to that post at Druimfiaclach the following night, for collection by the Land Rover on the morning after that; so that if I receive a letter on, for example, a Tuesday evening, it will be Friday before the sender gets my reply. Newspapers reach me on the evening of the day after they are published, if I go to Druimfiaclach to fetch them. Because of the height of the surrounding mountain massifs no radio will emit more than a furtive whisper; by pressing one’s ear to the set one may catch tantalizingly fragmentary snatches of news, too often of wars and rumours of wars, or of equally intrusive and unwelcome strains of rock ‘n’ roll, mouse-squeak reminders of far-off human frenzy, whose faintness underlines the isolation of Camusfeàrna more effectively than could utter silence.

  In practice, the exchange of letters often takes a full week, and the frustrations inherent in this situation have led the more impatient of my friends to the copious use of telegrams. The only way in which a telegram can be delivered, other than by the Land Rover carrying the mail to Druimfiaclach in the evenings, is by five steep and weary miles’ bicycling from the Post Office to Druimfiaclach, followed by a mile and a half of hill-track on foot. In all, ten miles bicycling and three miles walking. The village postmaster is a man of extreme rectitude and sense of duty; the first telegram I ever received at Camusfeàrna was when on a sweltering summer’s day, the hills shimmering in the heat haze and the fly-tormented cattle knee-deep in the motionless sea, he stood exhausted before my door bearing a message which read ‘Many happy returns of the day’. The mountains had travailed and brought forth a mouse; after that I persuaded him, with great difficulty, to exercise his own judgment as to whether or not a telegram was urgent, and to consign those that were not to the Land Rover for delivery to Druimfiaclach in the evening.

  Telegrams between the West Highlands and England are often liable to a little confusion in transit, to the production of what the services call ‘corrupt groups’. During my first stay at Camusfeàrna I realized that though the house had, as it were, dropped into my lap from heaven, I had no subsidiary rights; a diet composed largely of shellfish might, I thought, be suitably varied by rabbits, and I telegraphed to the owner of the estate to ask his permission. The telegram he received from me read: ‘May I please shoot at Robert and if so where?’

  The reply to this sadistic request being in the affirmative, I shot at Robert morning and evening, with a silenced .22 from the kitchen window, and he went far to solve the supply problem both for myself and for my dog Jonnie. Alas, Robert and all his brothers have now gone from Camusfeàrna, and except by living entirely from the sea it is difficult to approach self-subsistence.

  For a year or two there was goats’ milk, for Morag had, characteristically, given asylum to four goats left homeless by their owner’s demise; one of these, a dainty, frolicsome white sprite called Mairi Bhan, she presented to Camusfeàrna. It was but a token gesture, for the little nanny was unaware of any change in ownership, preferring the company of her co-concubines and her rancid, lecherous overlord. The herd, however, took to spending much of their time at Camusfeàrna, where they would pick their way delicately along the top of the croft wall to plunder and maim the old apple and plum trees by the bridge, necessitating strange high barriers that seem cryptic now, for the goats are long gone. Their cynical, predatory yellow eyes, bright with an ancient, egotistical wisdom, were ever alert for an open door, and more than once I came back to the house from an afternoon’s fishing to find the kitchen in chaos, my last loaves disappearing between agile rubbery lips, and Mairi Bhan posturing impudently on the table.

  In the end their predilection for Camusfeàrna was their undoing, for where a past occupier of the house had once grown a kitchen garden sprung rhubarb leaves in profusion; of these, one spring, they ate copiously, and all but the billy died. Never sweet to the nostrils or continent of habit, he became, deprived of his harem, so gross both in odour and in behaviour, that only the undeniable splendour of his appearance prevented my joining the ranks of his numerous enemies. He survived, a lonely satyr, a sad solitary symbol of thwarted virility, until the burden of his chastity became too great for him, and he wandered and perished.

  The goats were not the only invaders of the house, for in those days there was no fence surrounding it, and a door left ajar was taken as tacit invitation to the most improbable and unwelcome visitors. Once, on my return to the house after a few hours’ absence, I was warned of some crisis while as yet a quarter of a mile distant; a succession of mighty, hollow groans, interspersed with a sound as of one striking wooden boarding with a heavy mallet, conjured an image worse, if possible, than the bizarre reality. Halfway up the wooden stairway, where it turns at right angles to reach the small landing, an enormous, black, and strikingly pregnant cow was wedged fast between the two walls, unable to progress forward and fearful of the gradient in reverse. Her rear aspect, whose copious activity – whether under the stress of anxiety or from an intelligent desire to reduce her dimensions–covered the stairs below her with a positively Augean litter of dung, blocked both view and passage to any would-be rescuer; moreover she proved, despite her precarious foothold and elephantine fecundity, to be capable of kicking with a veritably faun-like flourish. It was, however, one of these moments of petulant aggression that brought, literally, her downfall; an attempt with both heels simultaneously collapsed her with a ponderous and pathetic rumble, and she lay on her great gravid belly with her legs trailing, mire-covered, down the
stairs. When at the end of nearly an hour’s haulage I had restored her to the outside world I feared for her calf, but I need not have worried. Not long afterwards I assisted at her delivery, not with forceps but with ropes attached to protruding hooves; the calf fell with a terrifying crash to a stone floor, and half an hour later was on his feet and suckling.

  With the goats cut short, as I have said, in their connubial prime, Camusfeàrna has ever since been dependent upon tinned milk. General supplies reach me by the same three-stage route as the mail, with the assistance of the friendly, haphazard cooperation to be found in remote places. I leave my order for the grocer, the ironmonger, or the chemist at Druimfiaclach in the evening; the Land Rover collects it in the morning and hands it to the skipper of the mail launch, who delivers it to the shops and brings the goods back – if, that is, they are to be obtained at the ‘shopping centre’. For though there are a surprising number of shops for what is really no more than a hamlet, there is also surprisingly little in them – the nearest place where such commonplace objects as, for example, a coat-hanger or a pair of blue jeans may be bought, is Inverness, nearly a hundred miles away on the opposite coast of Scotland, or Fort William, the same distance to the south. This is not due entirely to a somewhat characteristic lack of enterprise, but also to a Foolish Virgin attitude to the necessities of life that I had seen exemplified again and again during my ownership of the Island of Soay. It is only during my own time at Camusfeàrna that electricity has come to the district – though not to me – through the West of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board; before that all the houses were lit by paraffin lamps, and many of the people cooked by Primus stove. Yet, despite the notoriously capricious quality of the electric light in the north-west Highlands, every single shop in every single village immediately stopped stocking paraffin, methylated spirits, and candles. Last year, there was to my certain knowledge, no drop of methylated spirits for sale within a hundred miles. The friendly spirit of cooperation is, however, equal even to this situation: once I sent an SOS for methylated spirits to a distant village and received an odd-looking package in return. It did not look like methylated spirits, and I unwrapped it in puzzlement. Inside was a pencil note which I deciphered with difficulty: ‘Sorry no methylated spirits but am sending you two pounds of sausages instead.’

  3

  I had been at Camusfeàrna for eight years before I piped water to the house; before that it came from the burn in buckets. During the first years there was a stout stone-piered bridge across the burn, and under it one could draw water that had not been fouled by the cattle at their ford a little lower; then, in 1953, the bridge was swept away by a winter spate, and there was none built again for five years. In the summer there is no more than a foot or so of water among the stones, deepening to three or four feet when it runs amber-coloured and seemingly motionless between the alder banks, but wedged high among the branches are wads of debris that show the level of its torrential winter spates. When the gales blow in from the south-west and the burn comes roaring down in a foaming peaty cataract to meet the invading sea, the alders stand under water for half their height, and in the summer blackened trailers of dry seaweed dangle from branches ten feet and more above the stream.

  After the bridge had gone, the winter crossing of the burn to climb the hill to Druimfiaclach was always perilous, sometimes impossible. I stretched a rope between the alders from bank to bank, but it was slender support, for even when the water was no more than thigh deep the pure battering weight of it as it surged down from the waterfall would sweep one’s legs from the bottom and leave one clinging to the rope without foothold, feet trailing seaward.

  The purely natural changes that have taken place during my ten years at Camusfeàrna are astonishing. One is inclined to think of such a landscape as immutable without the intervention of man, yet in these few years the small alterations to the scene have been continuous and progressive. The burn has swept the soil from under its banks so that the alder roots show white and bare, and some of the trees have fallen; where there are none at the burn side the short green turf has been tunnelled under by the water so that it falls in and the stream’s bed becomes ever wider and shallower. Farther down towards the sea, where the burn bends round to encircle Camusfeàrna, the burrowing of a colony of sand martins in the sand cliff that is its landward bank has had the same effect, undermining the turf above so that it gives beneath the sheep’s feet and rolls down to the water’s edge. Below the sand martins’ burrows is now a steep slope of loose sand where ten years ago it was vertical. The sand dunes between the house and the sea form and re-form, so that their contour is never the same for two years, though the glaucous, rasping marram grass that grows on them imparts an air of static permanency. The whole structure of these dunes that now effectively block much of the beach from the house, and incidentally afford to it some shelter from the southerly gales, is in any case a thing of recent times, for I am told that when the present house was built fifty odd years ago the field stretched flat to the sea, and the seaward facing wall of the house was left windowless for that reason.

  The beach itself, wherever the rock does not shelve straight into the sea, is in constant change too; broad belts of shingle appear in the sand where there was no shingle before; soft stretches of quicksand come and go in a few weeks; sandbars as white as snowdrifts and jewelled with bright shells rise between the islands and vanish as though they had melted under the summer suns.

  Even the waterfall, to me perhaps the most enduring symbol of Camusfeàrna, has changed and goes on changing. When I am away from the place and think of it, it is of the waterfall that I think first. Its voice is in one’s ears day and night; one falls asleep to it, dreams with it and wakens to it; the note changes with the season, from the dull menacing roar of winter nights to the low crooning of the summer, and if I hold a shell to my ear it is not the sea’s murmur that comes to me but the sound of the Camusfeàrna waterfall. Above the bridge where I used to draw my water the burn rushes over stones and between boulders with the alders at its banks, and a wealth of primroses and wild hyacinths among the fern and mosses. In spring it is loud with bird song from the chaffinches that build their lichen nests in the forks of the alders, and abob with wagtails among the stones. This part of the burn is ‘pretty’ rather than beautiful, and it seems to come from nowhere, for the waterfall is hidden round a corner and the stream seems to emerge from a thirty foot wall of rock hung with honeysuckle and with rowan trees jutting from cracks and fissures. But looking up the burn from the foot of that rock the word ‘pretty’ becomes wholly inapplicable; the waterfall is of a beauty it would be hard to devise. It is not high, for the tall cataracts of eighty feet are some two hundred yards higher up its course; it emerges between boulders and sheer rock walls to drop some fifteen feet, over about the same breadth, from the twilight world of the deep narrow gorge it has carved through the hill face over thousands, perhaps millions, of years. It emerges frothing from that unseen darkness to fall like a tumbling cascade of brilliants into a deep rounded cauldron enclosed by rock walls on three sides, black water in whorled black rock, with the fleecy white spume ringing the blackness of the pool. Up above the black sides of the pot there are dark-green watery mosses growing deep and cushioned wherever there is a finger-hold for soil; the domed nest that the dippers build here every year is distinguishable from the other moss cushions by nothing but its symmetry. The sun reaches the waterfall for only a short time in the afternoon; it forms a rainbow over the leaping spray, and at the top of the fall between the boulders it gives to the smooth-flowing, unbroken water the look of spun green glass.

  For most of the year the waterfall has volume enough for a man to stand on a ledge between it and the rock and remain almost dry; between oneself and the sky it forms a rushing, deafening curtain of milky brilliance through which nothing but light is discernible. If one steps forward so that the weight of water batters full on head and shoulders it is of the massiveness only that one is co
nscious, and it would be impossible to say whether the water were cold or hot. Only when one steps from it again, and the flying icy drops tingle on the skin, does the sensation become one of snow water.

  It would seem that the waterfall could never change, yet year by year its form differs as a new boulder is swept down by the spates to lodge above its lip; or a tree falls from its precarious grip on the cliff faces above it and jams the doorway of its emergence; or a massive section of rock breaks away, split by the prising leverage of slow-growing tree roots.

  In spring and autumn the natural decoration surrounding the waterfall surpasses anything that artifice could achieve; in spring the green banks above the rock are set so thickly with primroses that blossom almost touches blossom, and the wild blue hyacinths spring from among them seemingly without leaf; in late summer and autumn the scarlet rowanberries flare from the ferned rock walls, bright against the falling white water and the darkness of the rock.