Wednesday: cleaning day. I was dusting the shelves in our small children’s library upstairs when I jostled one of our picture albums. A photo fell out onto the carpet. It shows my mother, my two-year-old daughter Jenny and me when we visited her beloved husband David and her for two months on Scotland’s Isle of Skye in 1977.
Memories tumbled out, too...
They owned a centuries old two-bedroom croft house with two-foot-thick stone walls, needed to rebuff force 10+ gales on the island’s northernmost Trotternish Peninsula. Their handmade clocks sold briskly. It also served as a bed-and-breakfast when I wasn’t visiting. Hiker-tourists, many from Scandinavia, would hang their hats there for a night or two, and leave with full bellies and at least one wall clock.
Just a hundred yards away from their door stood our neighbor’s small croft house. Willie, a shepherd in his sixties when I first met him in 1977, had lived there all his life, and was quite a character. On a whim I went down to my kitchen to Google Earth the North Duntulm area of Skye, looked around, and sure enough, there was his extremely spare little home, now named Willie Mcleod’s Cottage, in his memory. It’s been totally redone and refitted, and serves as an attractive rental. Willie would be incredulous.
He seemed utterly impervious to awful weather. His ancient, ragged overcoat served as feeble protection during April blizzards, when nearly a hundred ewes would give birth, sometimes to twins. He never complained.
We helped, taking in the more fragile lambs to revive them in our kitchen’s gently warm oven during that busy time. Right away, Willie (and most sheep farmers) tightly rubberbanded three-quarters of their very long, woolly tails, cutting off the blood supply; eventually everything below the band would shrivel and fall away. Why do sheep owners do this? When ‘woollies’ eat and poop their hind ends would otherwise snare and retain an excess of that rejected stuff, which encourages maggots and intestinal worms, which fosters infections- and sometimes death. Tail-bobbing keeps flocks much healthier.
Willie’s babies weren’t in the least bothered by the procedure.
One sunny afternoon my mother crossed the meadow to give Willie a treat she’d made, and got a terrible fright. His ‘pet’ stud ram, brimming over with testosterone and boredom, took offence at her trespass and charged. Willie was up the hill checking on his ewes, so there was no immediate rescue. Realizing what was about to happen she dashed into his croft, slammed the door and yelled for help! The huge ram battered and banged at the semi-secured door, which eventually yielded. He ran straight in after her! Fortunately, Willie heard the crashes and her shouts and ran home to wrestle the fuming beast outside. Bracing cups of tea with lots of sugar helped mitigate her shock. In the end, she thought the whole episode was very funny.
Maybe. I thought that ram was a dangerous ‘friend.’ He minded tall, spare Willie most times, but still tended to butt him too hard when they ‘played,’ knocking him flat. (The beast would eye me and paw the ground as I hung out the wash, making me truly appreciate the wire fence that defined our border...)
I remember hiking to an ancient ruin with my mother one day. Duntulm Castle, situated dramatically on a huge basalt promontory directly above the pounding North Atlantic Ocean, was not far from our little cottage.
It was a spooky, forlorn place. Wind found its way through every crack in the giant stones, producing a weird, wailing sound every now and then. (It’s a rare day when there’s no wind at all on Skye.)
Built in the fourteenth century, the castle was inhabited until the middle of the seventeenth century by various powerful chieftains and lairds. As with any castle, it has its share of shocking stories. For example, in the sixteenth century a nursemaid set her infant charge down on one of the castle’s deep windowsills to reach for something; the baby rolled over, fell out, and was dashed against the rocks far below and swallowed up by the heaving ocean. As punishment the wretched maiden was put out to sea in a tiny boat and left to drift into oblivion.
I remember making my way down into the castle’s dank dungeon. The echo and thump of huge waves constantly battering the basalt cliffs below this still massive edifice was extremely unsettling. I couldn’t imagine being held captive in there, even briefly.
Eventually, in the mid-seventeenth century, the final owner decided to build another castle a bit more inland. Most of the stones for that new fortress were taken from Duntulm Castle. Today there is little left but wailing rocks and a hugely diminished, shattered façade that is starkly dramatic at sunset.
The Google site showed an additional modification: little stretches of picket fencing, white paint scoured away by wind, have been placed near potential entrance sites near the cliff’s edge. Looking slightly askew and inadequate, their design allows the constant wind to blow between the slats.
Inquisitive tourists who ignore the fragile barriers and venture too close to the crumbling castle and that sheer, magnificent 100-foot cliff, might simply disappear.
Funny how a single old photo can evoke such a flood of vivid memories...