Uist Lady

I think of my old home in Andalucia in autumn, when figs come dropping slow. (Sorry Yeats) And almonds, walnuts, fat raisins, olives, mangos and avocados; and pigs are slaughtered in lemon groves. There are hot chestnuts for sale on the streets, and it’s the time to head for the hills and eat melting casseroles of hind and boar cooked in wood ovens.
The animals have been hunted and shot of course. Plenty of crazed hunting goes on in Spain, but when we lived there we liked to think that in terms of hunting birds, everyone missed because they were such rubbish shots.
They fared well with partridges though, luring them into their sights with the plaintive cries of one they keep caged. The birds live in their owner’s patios when they are not luring their kin to a bloody death. You hear them lamenting from their cages as you walk down practically any village street.
Autumn in Uist and the turnips, carrots and potatoes in the sandy, salty earth have reached perfection. But here the slaughter is of innocent wild birds by people who feel it’s worth driving hundreds of miles north and paying a lot of money to slay them mindlessly, as if the islands exist only for their pleasure.
Today the shooters park themselves round the loch where we live and let rip, spooking livestock. I’m not even sure if it’s safe for us to go out, so close are they to houses and to the track we walk almost daily.
I ask them if they have killed any of our innocent snipe. The boy with peridot eyes doesn’t know where to look or what to say. His mother jumps in with, “No, mores the pity.”
I wouldn’t mind if they shot deer, because we have too many and they are straying into our gardens bringing with them a plague of ticks bearing Lymes Disease.
I wouldn’t mind if they shot greylag geese, because thousands now overwinter here and destroy spring grass and gobble every grain in sight at harvest time. Full time scarers are employed to try and keep them away from crops.
By shooting those animals, the southern blood-lust which is such a status symbol would serve a useful purpose. But by going for snipe, woodcock and duck at Sandary, the shooters ensure that the loch stays barren of birds for some time to come. There were a couple of seasons when there was no shooting on our loch and our neighbour said he heard 60 bird species there in one day.
I shouted at the shooters across the loch to **** off, but they were busy barking at each other so loudly and excitedly I doubt if they heard me and if they had, I doubt if they would have cared.

UGH. We’ve got excess aluminium in our water. Uist folk used to drink lovely spring water, seasoned only with a little algae from the well or the odd beetle. People lived to a ripe old age then.
Forty or so years ago, running water in taps came along. At first, it appeared brown from the peat, wholesome, yes- but brown. And people weren’t too keen on that because it did things like turn the sheets brown and so on.
Bring on the chemicals, and things like aluminium to make our water sparkle. Now the EU dictates that our water should taste disgusting from an excess of treatment. We have got to the point of distilling ours through a machine which cleans all the guff out of 4 litres of tap water at a time. A dark brown stinking puddle is left at the bottom, and lately, I’ve noticed a crystal desposit too.
I’ve been trying to understand from Scottish Water exactly where the excess of aluminium is coming from, but the explanations remain cloudy.

These pallets of bottled water are now a common sight in the affected areas. I ask: what about all the empties? our skips won’t be able to cope. Have they thought of that?
Here is the latest article I wrote for the press about it:
NORTH UIST RESIDENTS face a further week on bottled water after excess levels of aluminium were found in their tap water.
Some 450 households are affected on the west side of the island, having been told on Wednesday to stop using tap water for drinking, preparing food and cleaning teeth.
Scottish Water says it is working round the clock to deal with the problem and has now commissioned equipment from Southern England to provide an additional treatment processing.
The equipment is due to arrive in North Uist on Monday (Oct 10) and will take several days to install.
The all-clear will only be given with the agreement of NHS Highland’s Public Health and Medicine consultant, Dr Ken Oates, and this is not expected to be before next Friday. (oct 14)
The problem is centred around the water treatment works at Bayhead.
Scottish Water says a recent serious water deterioration in raw water quality has meant that the treatment works has struggled to cope.
A spokesman said: “Raw water from the environment in places like the Western Isles can be very peaty and discoloured. Aluminium helps bind these peaty particles together, allowing us to remove them and the aluminium, leaving clear fresh water.
“On this occasion, the levels have been fluctuating and it’s because it’s proving difficult to make them settle we are taking the precautions.”
Residents say they were already aware of tanker loads of water from elsewhere on the island going up to Bayhead treatment works round the clock for some weeks.
Problems with low water pressure had also dogged the area well before Wednesday’s announcement, leaving householders unhappy with being kept in the dark for so long about the situation.
Scottish Water has now apologised to residents about the way information about the problem was disseminated, and the uneven distribution of bottled water supplies to households.
The spokesman said: “Earlier this week we were flushing poor quality water from the system to prevent it reaching the customers’ tap and this lowered the amount of water in our storage tanks, which could have resulted in low pressure or loss of supply for some customers. That is why bottled water was supplied at that time. I’m sorry if this wasn’t made clear to customers.”
He added: “ On Wednesday night, the deliveries took place at night in bad weather. In rural areas it can be difficult to identify all affected properties and I’m sorry if anyone was missed. We also sent out information to local media including radio and via our website, Facebook and Twitter to ensure the message was spread as widely and as quickly as possible. Our Customer Helpline is available 24 hours a day on 0845 601 8855 if anyone has any queries.”

Scottish Water has also moved to dampen concern among residents about the health implications of excess aluminium in the water.

The spokesman said: “It is important to stress that the water with elevated levels of aluminium has been flushed from our system to prevent it arriving at customers’ taps. The ‘do not drink or cook’ advice is purely a precaution.”

Scottish Water will hold drop-in sessions for the community will be held at Paible primary school, Bayhead between 4 and 7pm on Monday October 1O and Tuesday October 11, and in Carinish Hall on Tuesday (oct 11) between 1 and 2.30pm.

The utility will also continue to deliver bottled water direct to households and drop off pallets at Balranald Church, Carinish Old Church, Bayhead shop, Clachan Stores and Ardnasgruban post box, Grimsay.

WHEN the US gets a hurricane, it tends to swing by our way a few days later.
Hurricane Ophelia is with us now. If I was more up on Hamlet, I’d have some witty quote at this point. What I can say is alas, poor Uist.
Ophelia had half the ferries and planes cancelled yesterday. Imagine that, marooned in the Atlantic and unable to get off your island. The hurricane puffed her cheeks and blew a force 10 with horizontal rain in every which direction.
She eased up this morning, so I dashed out for a walk. My neighbour was out too, taking the opportunity to tend his garden, but we both saw the leaden clouds approaching and cut our chat short.
Sure enough the nearest, most mean-looking cloud started to dump on me. Through squinty eyes, I saw a large bird of prey flapping over the loch. I couldn’t tell what it was, only that it had a black bar across its wingtips. It was mobbed by a couple of smaller birds.
I trudged on hoping that Mr Mac had his binoculars trained on me and would dash into the car to come and rescue me. But he didn’t. His eyes were trained on the computer, I reckoned.
It wasn’t so bad. The rain died down to a smatter and with my back to the wind I was blown home on Ophelia’s skirts.
Mr Mac said: “I was watching you and I was going to come and get you but it improved.”
His definition of ‘improved’ is rather different from mine, evidently.

I spent last night fragrantly surrounded by lemon peel. Well, something had to be done about it. The night before, Mr Mac and I had been peacefully reading in bed when large spider scuttled across the bed clothes.
Shriek! I flicked it off with David Nicholl’s One Day (not enjoying it much, but it came right in handy at that point) and smashed it with a slipper. Of course I felt terrible afterwards.
I sought a green solution. Allegedly spiders hate the smell of lemons, hence the peel. Some of my friends have already poured scorn on this notion, miserable know-alls.
Arachnophobia is a dreadful affliction. I googled arachnophobia courses to see if I could learn to love the eight-legged hideous creatures and found I should have felt SORRY for the spider on the bed. Apparently it was a lonely male, who had BRAVELY ventured forth to seek a mate. My heart bleeds for it! ‘He doesn’t live long’ said the blurb. Too right! Thump! Gotcha!
The blurb went on about how we don’t like the way they scuttle. CORRECT! And then said we don’t like the way they always seem to be heading right for us. RIGHT! But apparently they’re not, they’re just frightened of something like the telly or a bright light. NO, THEY’RE NOT! They’re scuttling right for us to go up our trouser leg! Scientists, schmientists.
The blurb grudgingly agreed that from our days as primitive cave men we might be justified in fearing things that scuttle about in the dark, then said for £110 we could be cured of it by doing their arachnopobe’s course. But my piggy bank is rather too empty , except for a dead spider rattling around in the bottom of it, to head down to London Zoo to be cured.
I remember the spiders where Mr Mac and I used to live near Glasgow. Once one got into the in-tray in Mr Mac’s office. He heard it first, rootling about in his papers, lifting them up, then it appeared. The size of a dinner plate ! So we’re supposed to happily indulge MONSTERS whose nose is bothering them riffling about our in-trays, are we? Thump! Gotcha!
If you do the right thing with the glass and the bit of paper and put them outside, THEY COME BACK IN within a few days. You would too if someone put you out of your house! That’s my point. They should NOT be in MY house.
Spider’s revenge- I wonder if the lemon peel caused a bad dream I had about my father going gaga.
I told Mr Mac: “I dreamed Dad had gone gaga and was saying bizarre things.”
He said: “No change there then.”

Three Texel Cross rams have appeared in the field next to us, no doubt to fatten up ready for the forthcoming tupping season. ( An entertaining yet dismaying event on our calendar, see blogs passim)
Texel are a strange-looking wrinkle-snouted ovine that have gained in popularity on these islands in recent years.
This morning, I found two of them rubbing heads together affectionately. Then one, the biggest and a real brute of a thing, suddenly stuck his head up, as if to say ‘Hang on. I’m a ram. I’ve got HUGE bollocks. I shouldn’t be doing this.’
He developed a mean look on his already mean-looking face and lumbered a few feet backwards to square up to his rival, head down, ready to butt. CHAAAaarge! But halfway through the charge he seemed to forget that he was full of testosterone and instead ended up ambling forward and affectionately rubbing heads again.
The two of them continued to niggle each other with kicks, feeble charges, and ear-nibbling. They embroiled the third one in their pathetic attempts at machismo. He proved just as challenged in the ‘hooves at dawn’ department, and they all ended up rubbing heads and nibbling each other’s ears.
I’m not sure that this ‘wafty willie’ behaviour as Mr Mac calls it bodes well for tupping, but they may surprise me yet.
I took this pic from an upstairs window so apologies for the clothes pole being in the way.

Long time no blog. I’m better now. I had to take time out for exhaustion and am now getting back into the swing of things.
I’ve become chair of our local archaeology group, Access Archaeology. Please don’t misconstrue when I shorten it to AA.
We trooped off en masse last Saturday on a tour of just a few archaeological treasures on the island of Lewis.
Gales blew us all to Berneray for crossing to Leverburgh. Gales blew us all into the minbus. Gales and sheets of rain blew us northwest to Lewis’s Bernera peninsula- and then the sun came out and remained with us for the rest of the day.
Our first stop was a reconstructed Iron Age house in Bosta, at the tip of the peninsula. Check those views.


Once inside, none of us wanted to leave. Our guide Elizabeth had lit a peat fire in the hearth in the centre of the house. Fourteen us stood in the main chamber, plenty of room, and listened rapt to Elizabeth telling us the story of the house and what she had learned about Iron Age life by spending some much time in it as guide.

The house is in a style known as a jellybaby, one main chamber with a small chamber attached on the north side.
It has been exactly reconstructed from one that was found on the site some years ago in a group of at least five identical houses.
Archaeologists may theorise about this and that, but it takes someone to spend a lot of time there to gain insight into how the house was used.
One theory was that there was no central chimney in those days, and for the first two or three years, the reconstruction had no chimney. As Elizabeth found, the levels of smoke in the house were intolerable even with the door open and a few holes for light. As soon as a hole was put in the roof, the house became a pleasant, almost smoke-free zone. I’m sure our Iron Age counterparts would have worked that one out quickly.
A collection of pots of various shapes and sizes sat around the fire. Elizabeth told us she had gone about the local area looking for clay, and had fashioned the pots herself. We were enchanted.
She told us many things, jewels of insight into the life of our forebears. If anyone reading this can possibly get there next year, I recommend the effort. The house is now closed for the season.

We moved on to Calanais stones and visitor centre, where I took delivery of a dead sheep. A rather nice one, reared by the incomparable Sandy and Ali Granville of Tolsta Chulish, not far away. Crofting in the traditional way, they create exquisite, tender and tasty mutton from cast ewes set to graze for a peaceful, non-breeding year on the heather and grasslands in the area, including the little islands on the sea lochs around the Granville’s croft.
At this time of year, the Granvilles are busy delivering them around the country to discerning customers. Any guests to whom I’ve fed their mutton are in raptures- real meat, real taste, and so tender. And good for you, as science shows. Check the Granville’s site at www. HebrideanMutton.co.uk.
Back to the Calanais stones, which are supposed to have sunk down 1.5m under peat over about 1500 years. AA member George dismisses this theory. He points out: ‘The stones are on a piece of land which sticks up the way. How could peat grow on it? It’s more likely they sank.’
We move on to Carloway Broch, used in this way, people think:


It’s a stunning, impressive construction.
And quickly on to the Black House Village at Gearannan:

On the way back to the ferry we detour to have a look at this beehive cell – an ancient bothy perhaps, there is a fireplace and storage alcoves, and more mysteriously, two entrances. For agricultural use? Spiritual retreats? No-one really knows. And why the inside was speckled with bits of gaffer tape- well there’s the biggest mystery.

Work has begun to preserve North Uist’s Teampull Na Trionaid.
The 14th century building is showing its age rather badly. Thanks to a group of determined local people, specialist masonry contractors Laing have arrived to shore it up.
First clear the site:

Next week, limestone pointing will begin.
The clearing has thrown up some items of interest to Becky, our local archaeologist. Sandstone bits, some carved. There’s no sandstone on Uist, so these present a whole new set of questions about the Teampull site.

Here’s one of many articles I’ve written about the project:

Community efforts to conserve a monument of national importance in North Uist could be held up as ‘an inspiration and model’ for other community monument initiatives in the Western Isles, according to Historic Scotland.
The agency’s Northwest Inspector of Ancient Monuments, Dr John Raven spoke to delegates of the Hebridean Archaeological Forum which is meeting this week in the Uists, on a visit to the ruins of Teampull Na Trionaid (Trinity Temple) at Carinish, North Uist, a seminary and centre of pilgrimage thought to date back to the 13th century.
The scheduled ancient monument is second in importance in the islands to the ancient seminary in Howmore, South Uist, and is one of few churches in Scotland to have survived the Reformation.
The building, which was in use until the 17th century is now in a precarious state of decay and disrepair, prompting community members to form the Teampull Na Trionaid Conservation Association to seek funds of more than £200,000 to carry out essential work to slow down the building’s deterioration and create access tracks and interpretation panels.
The association has already had a comprehensive scheme of works drawn up for consolidating and lime-mortaring the walls, and is waiting to hear the results of an application to SRDP Rural Priorities programme for £194,000 to carry out the work.
Historic Scotland has voiced its strong support for the initiative from the start. Dr Raven said: “Over the last twenty years various monument consolidation initiatives have been set up in the islands which for various reasons did not get anywhere, so for the association to get this far is fantastic in itself. The next stage is to get the building consolidated, and when that happens, the association will be able to demonstrate that such initiatives are possible and how they can be realised.”
Dr Raven, who wrote his PhD on the ecclesiastical history of the Uists, added that last winter’s severe cold has affected the wall heads of the temple, causing them to lean even more precariously. He said: “It is more urgent than ever. The monument is almost being held up by the rubble around it.”
Teampull Na Trionaid Conservation Association secretary Margaret MacQuarrie said: “We have fantastic local support for the project.
“The Comhairle has said the project meets the aims of the Local Development Plan, and visits to the site are in demand by locals, community groups, schools and tourism groups including VisitScotland. We are waiting to hear the results of our funding application and hope that the work can begin next spring.”

We went to Harris to test out an underwater camera system for Comann Na Mara (CNM), Society of the Sea, of which Mr Mac is chairman.
He has long nurtured an ambition to see into the deep of Lochmaddy Bay- or rather, the shallow, as the bay is no more than about 30m at its deepest- as its pristine waters team with life in three different eco-systems. www.comann-na-mara.org.uk will explain it all to you.
A team of electronics wizards at Spectral Line Systems in Harris have been putting a system together for CNM whereby people will be able to take tours of the bay and see what’s down there through special HD 3D spectacles, so we went to Harris yesterday to check progress.

We boarded Alastair Dan’s boat at Scadabay on the east side of Harris and plunged the camera over the side in a few places.

Forests of dulse and kelp appeared clearly. Lots of dulse and kelp. But where were the fishes? Eventually we dropped down a pierced tin of sardines as bait.

The honk from it nearly knocked us out – but failed to impress passing fauna down below.
In short, we saw nothing. Alastair Dan regularly catches lythe, pollock and mackerel in those waters, and we know they are full of crabs and lobsters.
We didn’t keep the bait down there very long, but I’m convinced that had we left it, a swarm of whales, sharks and dolphins would soon have appeared. They’re all out there in the Minch, not far away.
We headed disconsolately ashore- but were soon revived by Alaistair Dan’s mother’s offering of tea, scones and cake.

I’ve returned to North Uist from a six month hard labour sentence on the mainland. Enough of that already.
Mr Mac developed an interesting habit while I was away- tea. For the past numberless decades, he has hated the stuff.
Asking him to make you a cup of tea would inevitably disappoint. After a lot of mumphing and racket in the kitchen, he would emerge with a tepid mug of something foul and brackish. I think he made it so disgusting so you would never ask him again.
However he has now discovered he likes mint tea, and a great range of fruit teas, and he partakes of these several times a day.
So for a picnic under the Uist sun yesterday, I opened a brand new box of Lidl’s finest mint tea bags for him and packed a few in the basket.
With the kind of gay abandon that comes with absolute confidence, I placed him in charge of tea duty for the picnic.
Added to which we have new flasks in manly brushed steel, with a press-to-pour feature, so he is quite happy be in charge of them.
Where are the tea bags? he asks. (Why do they never know where anything is?)
I tell him where they are.
He delves into the picnic basket. Rustle rustle rustle. Silence. The kind of silence which shrieks: I’ve seen something I don’t understand and I’m trying to make sense of it.
You’ve brought the wrong tea, he finally declares. This has got string like a tampax or something.
Mmm. Despite his new-found enthusiasm, it appears Mr Mac had yet to encounter the late twentieth century phenomenon of the stringed tea bag. (You see he’s always been a Twinings man)
Incredible, isn’t it.
He’s still coming to terms with the new advance but I can tell he feels a little queasy about the string. It reminds him too much of the other thing.

Sorry these are so late. Stuff happens and I am now on the mainland working for a while, and it’s a bit too complicated to blog as I’m working for a daily newspaper…
To console you here are somea long-awaited, much requested image of our Uist studs. Blue Chest and Yellow Chest posed for the above pic in a friendly manner. Or was it friendliness? They charged towards me more enthusiastically than the ewes they were meant to be serving! Maybe they thought I needed a Fanny Color! More likely they thought I had nuts. (That’s sheep food you naughty people)
Here’s Yellow Chest. What a fine fellow.

Here he is again, heading for some ladies WITH INTENT.

STOP RIGHT THERE, YELLOW CHEST! Can’t you see those ladies already have Fanny Colors?
(see blog passim)
I shall in time blog again…