The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy Read online

  The second of these tributes recalls the example of Sir Walter Scott, who through his writings in the first half of the 19th century brought Scotland, at that time neglected and dispirited, to the admiring attention of the whole world. Gavin Maxwell, on a smaller scale, through his writings in the second half of the 20th century, has brought the west coast of Scotland – ‘sky, shore, and silver sea’ – to the admiring attention of the people of today.

  Austin Chinn

  October 1999

  RING OF BRIGHT WATER

  He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water

  Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea,

  He has married me with a ring of light, the glitter

  Broadcast on the swift river.

  He has married me with the sun’s circle

  Too dazzling to see, traced in summer sky.

  He has crowned me with the wreath of white cloud

  That gathers on the snowy summit of the mountain,

  Ringed me round with the world-circling wind,

  Bound me to the whirlwind’s centre.

  He has married me with the orbit of the moon

  And with the boundless circle of the stars,

  With the orbits that measure years, months, days, and nights,

  Set the tides flowing,

  Command the winds to travel or be at rest.

  At the ring’s centre,

  Spirit, or angel troubling the still pool,

  Causality not in nature,

  Finger’s touch that summons at a point, a moment

  Stars and planets, life and light

  Or gathers cloud about an apex of cold,

  Transcendent touch of love summons my world to being.

  Foreword

  In writing this book about my home I have not given to the house its true name. This is from no desire to create mystery – indeed it will be easy enough for the curious to discover where I live – but because identification in print would seem in some sense a sacrifice, a betrayal of its remoteness and isolation, as if by doing so I were to bring nearer its enemies of industry and urban life. Camusfeàrna, I have called it, the Bay of the Alders, from the trees that grow along the burn side; but the name is of little consequence, for such bays and houses, empty and long disused, are scattered throughout the wild sea lochs of the Western Highlands and the Hebrides, and in the description of one the reader may perhaps find the likeness of others of which he has himself been fond, for these places are symbols. Symbols, for me and for many, of freedom, whether it be from the prison of over-dense communities and the close confines of human relationships, from the less complex incarceration of office walls and hours, or simply freedom from the prison of adult life and an escape into the forgotten world of childhood, of the individual or the race. For I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world; the evolution of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal, and as yet he must still, for security, look long at some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it.

  This book, then, is about my life in a lonely cottage on the north-west coast of Scotland, about animals that have shared it with me, and about others who are my only immediate neighbours in a landscape of rock and sea.

  Gavin Maxwell

  Camusfeàrna, October 195911/24/2008

  1

  I sit in a pitch-pine panelled kitchen-living room, with an otter asleep upon its back among the cushions on the sofa, forepaws in the air, and with the expression of tightly shut concentration that very small babies wear in sleep. On the stone slab beneath the chimney-piece are inscribed the words Non fatuum hue persecutus ignem – ‘It is no will-o’-the-wisp that I have followed here.’ Beyond the door is the sea, whose waves break on the beach no more than a stone’s throw distant, and encircling, mist-hung mountains. A little group of greylag geese sweep past the window and alight upon the small carpet of green turf; but for the soft, contented murmur of their voices and the sounds of the sea and the waterfall there is utter silence. This place has been my home now for ten years and more, and wherever the changes of my life may lead me in the future it will remain my spiritual home until I die, a house to which one returns not with the certainty of welcoming fellow human beings, nor with the expectation of comfort and ease, but to a long familiarity in which every lichen-covered rock and rowan tree show known and reassuring faces.

  I had not thought that I should ever come back to live in the West Highlands; when my earlier sojourn in the Hebrides had come to an end it had in retrospect seemed episodic, and its finish uncompromisingly final. The thought of return had savoured of a jilted lover pleading with an indifferent mistress upon whom he had no further claim; it seemed to me then that it was indeed a will-o’-the-wisp that I had followed, for I had yet to learn that happiness can neither be achieved nor held by endeavour.

  Immediately after the war’s end I bought the Island of Soay, some four thousand acres of relatively low-lying ‘black’ land cowering below the bare pinnacles and glacial corries of the Cuillin of Skye. There, seventeen miles by sea from the railway, I tried to found a new industry for the tiny and discontented population of the island, by catching and processing for oil the great basking sharks that appear in Hebridean waters during the summer months. I built a factory, bought boats and equipped them with harpoon guns, and became a harpoon gunner myself. For five years I worked in that landscape that before had been, for me, of a nebulous and cobwebby romance, and by the time it was all over and I was beaten I had in some way come to terms with the Highlands – or with myself, for perhaps in my own eyes I had earned the right to live among them.

  When the Soay venture was finished, the island and the boats sold, the factory demolished, and the population evacuated, I went to London and tried to earn my living as a portrait painter. One autumn I was staying with an Oxford contemporary who had bought an estate in the West Highlands, and in an idle moment after breakfast on a Sunday morning he said to me:

  ‘Do you want a foothold on the west coast, now that you have lost Soay? If you’re not too proud to live in a cottage, we’ve got an empty one, miles from anywhere. It’s right on the sea and there’s no road to it – Camusfeàrna, it’s called. There’s some islands, and an automatic lighthouse. There’s been no one there for a long time, and I’d never get any of the estate people to live in it now. If you’ll keep it up you’re welcome to it.’

  It was thus casually, ten years ago, that I was handed the keys of my home, and nowhere in all the West Highlands and islands have I seen any place of so intense or varied a beauty in so small a compass.

  The road, single-tracked for the past forty miles, and reaching in the high passes a gradient of one in three, runs southwards a mile or so inland of Camusfeàrna and some four hundred feet above it. At the point on the road which is directly above the house there is a single cottage at the roadside, Druimfiaclach, the home of my friends and nearest neighbours, the MacKinnons. Inland from Druimfiaclach the hills rise steeply but in rolling masses to a dominating peak of more than three thousand feet, snow-covered or snow-dusted for the greater part of the year. On the other side, to the westward, the Isle of Skye towers across a three-mile-wide sound, and farther to the south the stark bastions of Rhum and the couchant lion of Eigg block the sea horizon. The descent to Camusfeàrna is so steep that neither the house nor its islands and lighthouses are visible from the road above, and that paradise within a paradise remains, to the casual road-user, unguessed. Beyond Druimfiaclach the road seems, as it were, to become dispirited, as though already conscious of its dead end at sea-level six miles farther on, caught between the terrifying massif of mountain scree overhanging it and the dark gulf of sea loch below.

  Druimfiaclach is a tiny oasis in a wilderness of mountain and peat-bog, and it is a full four miles from the nearest roadside dwelling. An oasis, an eyrie; the windows of the house look westward over the Hebrides and over the Tyrian sunsets that
flare and fade behind their peaks, and when the sun has gone and the stars are bright the many lighthouses of the reefs and islands gleam and wink above the surf. In the westerly gales of winter the walls of Druimfiaclach rock and shudder, and heavy stones are roped to the corrugated iron roof to prevent it blowing away as other roofs here have gone before. The winds rage in from the Atlantic and the hail roars and batters on the windows and the iron roof, all hell let loose, but the house stands and the MacKinnons remain here as, nearby, the forefathers of them both remained for many generations.

  It seems strange to me now that there was a time when I did not know the MacKinnons, strange that the first time I came to live at Camusfeàrna I should have passed their house by a hundred yards and left my car by the roadside without greeting or acknowledgement of a dependence now long established. I remember seeing some small children staring from the house door; I cannot now recall my first meeting with their parents.

  I left my car at a fank, a dry-stone enclosure for dipping sheep, close to the burn side, and because I was unfamiliar with the ill-defined footpath that is the more usual route from the road to Camusfeàrna, I began to follow the course of the burn downward. The burn has its source far back in the hills, near to the very summit of the dominant peak; it has worn a fissure in the scarcely sloping mountain wall, and for the first thousand feet of its course it part flows, part falls, chill as snow-water even in summer, between tumbled boulders and small multi-coloured lichens. Up there, where it seems the only moving thing besides the eagles, the deer and the ptarmigan, it is called the Blue Burn, but at the foot of the outcrop, where it passes through a reedy lochan and enters a wide glacial glen it takes the name of its destination – Allt na Feàrna, the Alder Burn. Here in the glen the clear topaz-coloured water rushes and twitters between low oaks, birches and alders, at whose feet the deep-cushioned green moss is stippled with bright toadstools of scarlet and purple and yellow, and in summer swarms of electric-blue dragonflies flicker and hover in the glades.

  After some four miles the burn passes under the road at Druimfiaclach, a stone’s throw from the fank where I had left my car. It was early spring when I came to live at Camusfeàrna for the first time, and the grass at the burn side was gay with thick-clustering primroses and violets, though the snow was still heavy on the high peaks and lay like lace over the lower hills of Skye across the Sound. The air was fresh and sharp, and from east to west and north to south there was not a single cloud upon the cold clear blue; against it, the still-bare birch branches were purple in the sun and the dark-banded stems were as white as the distant snows. On the sunny slopes grazing Highland cattle made a foreground to a landscape whose vivid colours had found no place on Landseer’s palette. A rucksack bounced and jingled on my shoulders; I was coming to my new home.

  I was not quite alone, for in front of me trotted my dog Jonnie, a huge black-and-white springer spaniel whose father and grandfather before him had been my constant companions during an adolescence devoted largely to sport. We were brought up to shoot, and by the curious paradox that those who are fondest of animals become, in such an environment, most bloodthirsty at a certain stage of their development, shooting occupied much of my time and thoughts during my school and university years. Many people find an especial attachment for a dog whose companionship has bridged widely different phases in their lives, and so it was with Jonnie; he and his forebears had spanned my boyhood, maturity, and the war years, and though since then I had found little leisure nor much inclination for shooting, Jonnie adapted himself placidly to a new role, and I remember how during the shark fishery years he would, unprotesting, arrange himself to form a pillow for my head in the well of an open boat as it tossed and pitched in the waves.

  Now Jonnie’s plump white rump bounced and perked through the heather and bracken in front of me, as times without number at night I was in the future to follow its pale just-discernible beacon through the darkness from Druimfiaclach to Camusfeàrna.

  Presently the burn became narrower, and afforded no foothold at its steep banks, then it tilted sharply seaward between rock walls, and below me I could hear the roar of a high waterfall. I climbed out from the ravine and found myself on a bluff of heather and red bracken, looking down upon the sea and upon Camusfeàrna.

  The landscape and seascape that lay spread below me was of such beauty that I had no room for it all at once; my eye flickered from the house to the islands, from the white sands to the flat green pasture round the croft, from the wheeling gulls to the pale satin sea and on to the snow-topped Cuillins of Skye in the distance.

  Immediately below me the steep hillside of heather and ochre mountain grasses fell to a broad green field, almost an island, for the burn flanked it at the right and then curved round seaward in a glittering horseshoe. The sea took up where the burn left off and its foreshore formed the whole frontage of the field, running up nearest to me into a bay of rocks and sand. At the edge of this bay, a stone’s throw from the sea on one side and the burn on the other, the house of Camusfeàrna stood unfenced in green grass among grazing black-faced sheep. The field, except immediately opposite to the house, sloped gently upwards from the sea, and was divided from it by a ridge of sand dunes grown over with pale marram grass and tussocky sea-bents. There were rabbits scampering on the short turf round the house, and out over the dunes the bullet heads of two seals were black in the tide.

  Beyond the green field and the wide shingly outflow of the burn were the islands, the nearer ones no more than a couple of acres each, rough and rocky, with here and there a few stunted rowan trees and the sun red on patches of dead bracken. The islands formed a chain of perhaps half a mile in length, and ended in one as big as the rest put together, on whose seaward shore showed the turret of a lighthouse. Splashed among the chain of islands were small beaches of sand so white as to dazzle the eye. Beyond the islands was the shining enamelled sea, and beyond it again the rearing bulk of Skye, plum-coloured distances embroidered with threads and scrolls of snow.

  Even at a distance Camusfeàrna house wore that strange look that comes to dwellings after long disuse. It is indefinable, and it is not produced by obvious signs of neglect; Camusfeàrna had few slates missing from the roof and the windows were all intact, but the house wore that secretive expression that is in some way akin to a young girl’s face during her first pregnancy.

  As I went on down the steep slope two other buildings came into view tucked close under the skirt of the hill, a byre facing Camusfeàrna across the green turf, and an older, windowless, croft at the very sea’s edge, so close to the waves that I wondered how the house had survived. Later, I learned that the last occupants had been driven from it by a great storm which had brought the sea right into the house, so that they had been forced to make their escape by a window at the back.

  At the foot of the hill the burn flowed calmly between an avenue of single alders, though the sound of unseen waterfalls was loud in the rock ravine behind me. I crossed a solid wooden bridge with stone piers, and a moment later I turned the key in Camusfeàrna door for the first time.

  2

  There was not one stick of furniture in the house; there was no water and no lighting, and the air inside struck chill as a mortuary, but to me it was Xanadu. There was much more space in the house than I had expected. There were two rooms on the ground floor, a parlour and a living-kitchen, besides a little ‘back kitchen’ or scullery, and two rooms and a landing upstairs. The house was entirely lined with varnished pitch pine, in the manner of the turn of the century.

  I had brought with me on my back the essentials of living for a day at two while I prospected – a bedding roll, a Primus stove with a little fuel, candles, and some tinned food. I knew that something to sit upon would present no problems, for my five years’ shark hunting round these coasts had taught me that every west-facing beach is littered with fish-boxes. Stacks of fish-boxes arranged to form seats and tables were the mainstay of Camusfeàrna in those early days, and even
now, despite the present comfort of the house, they form the basis of much of its furniture, though artifice and padding have done much to disguise their origin.

  Ten years of going into retreat at Camusfeàrna have taught me, too, that if one waits long enough practically every imaginable household object will sooner or later turn up on the beaches within a mile of the house, and beachcombing retains for me now the same fascination and eager expectancy that it held then. After a westerly or south-westerly gale one may find almost anything. Fish-boxes – mostly stamped with the names of Mallaig, Buckie or Lossiemouth firms, but sometimes from France or Scandinavia – are too common to count, though they are still gathered, more from habit than from need. Fish baskets, big open two-handled baskets of withy, make firewood baskets and waste-paper baskets. Intact wooden tubs are a rarity, and I have found only three in my years here; it has amused me wryly to see cocktail bars in England whose proprietors have through whimsy put them to use as stools as I have by necessity.

  A Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson instinct is latent in most of us, perhaps from our childhood games of housebuilding, and since I came to Camusfeàrna ten years ago I find myself scanning every weird piece of flotsam or jetsam and considering what useful purpose it might be made to serve. As a beachcomber of long standing now I have been amazed to find that one of the commonest of all things among jetsam is the rubber hot-water bottle. They compete successfully – in the long straggling line of brown sea-wrack dizzy with jumping sand-hoppers – with odd shoes and empty boot polish and talcum powder tins, with the round corks that buoy lobster-pots and nets, even with the ubiquitous skulls of sheep and deer. A surprising number of the hot-water bottles are undamaged, and Camusfeàrna is by now overstocked with them, but from the damaged ones one may cut useful and highly functional table mats.