The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (17 page)

He has devoted his life to the exploration
, archiving and mapping of his
archipelago
, with a view to commending its protection to the wider world. He has mapped the locations and alignments of the healing wells of the Western Isles, their Norse mills, their blessing chapels. He has tracked down the benchmarks left by the Ordnance Survey during their work on the islands in the 1850s, walking the moor for miles in filthy weather to discover the incised stones. He has collected and curated scores of maps of the Outer Hebrides from the sixteenth century onwards.

Darwin is his hero, and there is much of Darwin’s restless curiosity, of his accretive and probing brain, in Finlay. Like Darwin, Finlay is only interested in everything. He told me once about how Darwin had constructed a sandy path which looped through the woods and fields around his house at Downe, in Kent. It was while walking this path daily that Darwin did much of his thinking, and he came to refer to it as the ‘
Sandwalk’ or ‘the thinking path’.
Sometimes he would pile a series of flints in a rough cairn at the start of the path, and knock one away with his walking stick after completing each circuit. He came to be able to anticipate, Finlay explained, a ‘three-flint problem’ or a ‘four-flint problem’, reliably quantifying the time it would take to solve an intellectual puzzle in terms of distance walked.

One of the many reasons I enjoy being with Finlay is his ability to read landscapes back into being, and to hold multiple eras of history in plain sight simultaneously. To each feature and place name he can attach a story – geological, folkloric, historical, gossipy. He moves easily between different knowledge systems and historical eras, in awareness of their discrepancies but stimulated by their overlaps and rhymes. Scatters of stones are summoned up and reconstituted in his descriptions into living crofts. He took me to a green knoll in Baile na Cille in mid-Lewis, and recalled for me the scene in 1827 when a Reverend Dr Macdonald had gathered 7,000 people around the knoll for a mass conversion to Calvinism. A crag-and-tail outcrop of gneiss in the moor drew him back into the
Holocene
and an explanation of how, after the glaciers had retreated from the Western Isles around 12,000 years ago, the peat began to deepen in the lees of the exposed rock-backs. To Finlay, geography and history are consubstantial. Placeless events are inconceivable, in that everything that happens must happen somewhere, and so history issues from geography in the same way that water issues from a spring: unpredictably but site-specifically.

One morning, a few days before I set out in search of Manus’s path, Finlay invited me to walk a beach near his home in Shawbost and to meet what he mysteriously called his ‘family’. The tide had recently gone out, and we walked across the wet sand leaving footprints precise as pastry-cuts. Gulls stomped and yapped. Finlay’s ‘family’ turned out to be a colony of limpets that lived on the underside of a boulder which he had christened Phobus (the name of one of Mars’s moons). He visited them almost every day, and had done so for a year, noting their relative positions on the boulder, their daily migrations and returns. He’d sketched and measured each limpet, and to each he had given a name. For months he’d been mapping the short journeys the limpets made across the surface of Phobus. He had become intrigued by their ability to find their way back to their ‘home’ positions on the rock, which they did with extraordinary diligence and accuracy, as if following an invisible path or trail.

This was perhaps the pre-eminent puzzle in limpet studies, Finlay said, smiling. Experiments had been done to try and discern how the homing instinct functioned in limpets. Researchers had set up physical barriers and chemical cordons on rocks to prevent limpets returning to their home positions by the same route as they had left it. Yet the limpets slowly moved around whatever impediment had been constructed, proving that not only could they navigate back to their home positions, but that they could do so without retracing their original track.

Limpets also practise a unique habitat adaptation, Finlay explained. The reason they stick so well to their rocks is that they create a seal between the rim of their shell and the surface of the rock to which they affix themselves. This seal prevents them from being pecked off their rocks by hungry gulls, or bashed off by waves; it also prevents them from drying out during low tide. ‘They create this seal,’ he said, ‘by very slightly rotating their shells back and forth repeatedly. In this way the rock grinds its own outline into the rim of the shell.’ Limpets abrade themselves to suit their chosen terrain, in an accelerated habituation to the specificities of place.

Place-learning and path-following are therefore the two remarkable skills of the limpet, Finlay said, and he did not need to add that these were among his own remarkable skills too.

With Finlay’s help, I managed to confirm more facts about Manus’s Stones and the man who had laid them. Manus had indeed lived as a crofter out on the south-western coast of Lewis. The Aird Bheag peninsula, whose steep sides ran straight into the Atlantic, had supported a small population of crofters for centuries and been constituted as a township shortly after the First World War. Manus had crofted there in the first half of the century, and in the 1920s he had marked out two paths along which he could leave his croft-home and return safely to it. One headed north-east from the Aird Bheag over the deep peat-lands south of a big estate house called Morsgail. The other headed north-west, then required a boat crossing of the often stormy mouth of Loch Hamnaway to Ceann Chùisil, then ran up and over a high pass, down beneath the north face of Griomabhal and along the mile-wide alley of stones to the west-coast village of Breanish. Fifteen miles on foot and by boat, and that just to reach a road-head: it was a hard life out on the Aird Bheag. The last crofter came in, reluctantly, from the peninsula in 1953.

In Stornoway, Finlay introduced me to Chrisella Ross, the great-great-niece of Manus. ‘It was a track he created to guide people,’ she told me of the path, ‘rather more than to guide himself, as he knew every stone and turn.’ She and her husband had walked the path, two decades earlier, from Mealasta up towards Griomabhal. ‘We picked the path up at the edge of the cloud cover that day,’ she said, ‘and then we stepped into the mist under the mountain and the rest of the world was lost.’ Chrisella had recently, barely, survived a battle with cancer. She was still recovering. If she was strong enough, she said, she would come to walk some of the path with me, to show me a little of the way before turning back.

Chrisella told me of another man who had walked it: Malky Maclean. ‘It’s a work of art, really,’ said Malky when I met him. ‘Like a Richard Long sculpture. When you’re up there you need to look for what shouldn’t be there: two or three pale stones aligned, the rock that has been displaced, that isn’t where the ice and gravity should have left it. That’s all Manus did, he just … recomposed the landscape a little.’ I remembered Ian’s advice about how to read the surface of the sea for danger:
You need to look for disturbances to the expected, be alert to unforeseen interactions.
I thought, too, of Edward Thomas training his eye to detect the ‘disturbances’ and imprints in the landscape which testified to the route of an almost-vanished path.

‘It’s ever so hard to find,’ Malky warned me, ‘for the whole area is filled with boulders, like great marbles. You’re walking through a glen of stones.’

Out on the west coast of Lewis, in the township of Bragar, Finlay took me to spend an afternoon with an archaeologist and cartographer named Anne Campbell, who knew the path and who was engaged in a deep-mapping of the Bragar moorland. The front of her house was bermed with piles of pale gneiss pebbles, through which thrust the spear-like leaves and orange blossoms of montbretia.

Anne opened the door. She had dark hair and her eyes were set slightly wide, which gave her a look of mild surprise, though it soon became clear to me that she took the world very calmly indeed. On two walls of her sitting room were pinned large maps. Notebooks were open on a desk, with pencil sketches of stone-scatters, objects, coordinates and notes scribbled around them. Tacked above the fireplace were pages from a field guide, showing birds arranged vertically on the page in silhouettes, wings outstretched, reminding me of an aircraft recognition book I had studied as a child.

A wide pair of windows gave east out onto the moor of Lewis, the Brindled Moor. On the opposite wall was a big dresser whose back was entirely a mirror that reflected the moor it faced, doubling the room’s space and giving it a feeling of transparency. On the mantelpiece and window ledges were dozens of found objects: bird’s eggs, bones, antlers and pebbles. A swan’s wishbone with no central join. A skua’s egg from the Shiants. A pure-white golden plover’s egg, fragile as a bubble. Dark-brown sea beans, floated in from the Caribbean, like little leather kidneys.

‘Whenever I’m out walking on the moor, well, I tend to bring things back,’ said Anne, waving a hand around the room. She pronounced ‘moor’ with the double ‘oo’ of zoo, and a roll of the final ‘r’. She sat in a chair with her legs tucked up under her, beneath a spider plant whose trailing arms nagged at her hair and tapped her on the shoulder, until finally, as if settling a bothersome child, she tucked its arms away so they couldn’t reach her. Behind the armchair, her sheepdog Bran yowled and scratched in his sleep.

‘Bran’s a busy sleeper’, she said.

Fixed to the wall just beside the window was a big map, a cartographical version of the view over the moor. It was a conical wedge, extending from its narrow point at Bragar and the coast, backwards and outwards into the main space of the moor. It indicated, Anne explained, the agreed extent of the township’s claim on the moor. I looked at the date: it was the 1853 Ordnance Survey map of the islands, carried out by British surveyors who had anglicized the Gaelic place names and diminished the density of toponyms on the landscape.

‘I’m using the OS version of Bragar as my base map,’ said Anne, ‘but I’m trying to enrich it. I’m adding names again, where the sappers took them away. The pencil scribbles you can see are my additions.’

‘Why are you close-mapping just the Bragar land?’ I asked Anne.

She shrugged as though to indicate that this was not, to her, a question.

‘It is the most interesting place in the world to me.’ She paused. ‘All I want, really, is to put stories to places and what joins them,’ she said. ‘So I spend most of my time walking shieling tracks, paths, and the streams and the walls that used to divide up the land. Then I talk to people and try to fix their memories to those particular places.’

Anne had been brought up in Bragar, and though she’d left the island to study archaeology on the mainland, she had been drawn back home. Her family had for several generations owned a shieling in the middle of the moor. They still gathered out there early each summer to spend several days cooking, walking and talking. When it wasn’t too cold, and not so dry that the heather was sharp, Anne liked to walk barefoot on the moor. ‘It takes about two weeks to get your feet toughened up so that it’s no discomfort. And then it’s bliss. You should try it when you’re out there. Take those big boots of yours off!’

Anne’s father had taught her the paths out to the shieling, and now she was walking further into the moor, noting and mapping its features. ‘My father would tell me their routes, as we walked out looking for sheep,’ she said. ‘A lot of the paths are becoming lost now, disappearing from memory and from the moor. There’s a stone track out by our shieling that has almost been sucked down into the peat, which my father made for the cattle to go to their water. It is still a beautiful thing.’

She had been making a series of walks with her friend and former partner, a man called Jon MacLeod. She and MacLeod had become fascinated by the trails that exist on the moor, each of them an archive of past habits and practices. So they began to create and record their own songlines, recording paths taken, events that occurred or were observed along the way. On a June day they walked between An Talamh Briste, Na Feadanan Gorma, Gleann Shuainagadail and Loch an Ois, and they saw along the way ‘
drifts of sparkling bog-cotton’,
‘scarlet damselflies’, ‘a long wind, carrying bird-calls’. They ‘crossed a greenshank’s territory’ and ‘disturbed a hind in long grass’, before stopping ‘at a shieling where an eagle had preened’. ‘I merely walked and recorded what I saw in each place,’ Anne said. ‘A merlin flying by, a dragonfly laying its wings out to dry.’ MacLeod delved further back, beyond the verifiable, making speculative reconstructions of atavistic memory maps ‘of those who traversed this landscape before and after the peat grew, naming features to navigate their way around, or to commemorate stories and people’.

‘I’ve walked back along Manus’s path from the Aird Bheag,’ she said. ‘If you miss it at the start it’s really difficult to pick it up but, once you’ve found it, it’s really hard to lose it.’ She took a map from a shelf, opened it like an accordion and spread it on a small table. She described the path, pointed out features and marks with her little finger. Way out in the deep space of the moor, she indicated a cluster of dots on the map.

‘You could sleep here, if you manage to get this far on the first day from Mealasta. There are beehive shielings there; fine structures of Pictish design, small domed buildings with turf roofs. No one really knows when they were built. They’re still intact. But you’ll have to look hard to find them; they seem like part of the landscape. Only the deer use them now.’

Shortly before I left, Anne told me that her elderly father was in hospital, lost in the wilderness of Alzheimer’s. ‘He surprised a recent visitor, though,’ she said, ‘by suddenly reciting by heart, and unprompted, one of the Bragar songs that he had known.’ The song was familiar ground, a track he could follow for a few minutes before he lost himself again.

Everywhere we went, people knew Finlay. They stopped their cars on the moor roads and scrolled down their windows to talk with him, or downed tools on peat-banks to raise hands of greeting. It was like travelling with the Queen. ‘It must take you a long time to get anywhere,’ I said.