Uist Keeps Its Own Sense of Values

Reproduced in full is the second article written by Calum Maclean that appeared in The Scotsman:

 

Recording of folklore material is a matter of immediate urgency

 

In his second article on Uist, Calum I. Maclean concludes that although the Rocket Range is not going to spell disaster to the Gaelic language and traditions the recording of the wealth of folklore material among the islanders is a matter of immediate urgency.

 

After leaving Anthony Currie I had to trudge back over the rough track to the lovely new road to Loch Carnan pier. Actually, most of the material for the range was being landed from barges which came halfway down the South Ford. At the crossroads of Gerinish, I noticed, the new tar-macadam surface does not go one inch further than is necessary to serve the purposes of the range. New bridges, however, have been built on the road all the way to Lochboisdale.

 

General opinion in Uist seems to be that the Rocket Range is not going to affect things all that much, but the era of prosperity that some hoped would result is not going to come, and the crofters will have to fall back on their land and the seaweed and tweed industries. South Uist is prosperous, but it was prosperous before the Rocket Range came and in any case its strong sense of non-money values remains unchanged.

 

English advancing

English, however, has made quite alarming inroads during the last ten years. In the summer of 1950 a very intelligent and respected Benbecula man, Donald MacPhee of Nunton, maintained that Gaelic had not receded an inch during the period from 1920 to 1950. English has now become the language of the playground in at least one of the Uist schools.

 

Local opinion also has it that the range is not going to affect the Bornish and Daliburgh parishes so very much, but there is a certain amount of uneasiness about Army buildings springing up on the machair of Cille Pheadair south of Daliburgh.

 

One can be too pessimistic and imagine that the Rocket Range is going to spell disaster to the Gaelic language and traditions. Something will survive in spite of everything. The person who is reputed to have learned Angus MacLellan’s tales and stories best of all is a young lady who is now married out in Kenya. In one of the houses I visited there were two or three young children who listened with intense interest and appeared to absorb everything that the old grandfather had to tell.

 

One of the young Catholic curates organises Ceilidhean every month. To these the old people come to tell stories, sing songs and dance Hebridean dances, while adults and children of both the Protestant and Catholic communities, attend them regularly. There everything is in Gaelic. There is still the well-known Uist passion for piping and the tremendous respect for pipers.

 

Piping schools

Pipe Major John MacDonald, late of the Glasgow Police Pipe Band, is now back home in retirement and had already started to teach pupils, while another noted piper who emigrated to Canada many years ago is due to return home soon. There is widespread regret that so many promising young pipers have to leave Uist and find work in Glasgow and the south.

 

It will be a tragedy, however, if the Rocket Range and the outside influence that come in its train do change the character of the people of South Uist. As the charming young wife of the local surgeon, herself a stranger from Cumberland: “The great beauty of life in South Uist is that people always go about with laughing, smiling faces.”

 

As has been stated already, the sense of non-utilitarian values is very strong. That has not changed much for generations, as Donald MacIntyre of Loch Eynort, a great storyteller and the son of an even greater one, the late Alasdair Mòr MacIntyre illustrates.

 

Alasdair MacIntyre was a shepherd and lived in a remote place to the east side of Ben More. It was from him that old Angus MacLellan of Frobost learned most of his tales, and old Alasdair used to walk from the back of Ben More to Ormiclate to record tales for the late Dr Alasdair Carmichael over 70 years ago. Carmichael was immensely proud of one tale he recorded and Donald himself recorded the selfsame tale a fortnight ago.

 

It is the international tale about the Clever Peasant Girl. No. 94 in the Grimm Collection. It took about an hour to relate, but Donald MacIntyre maintained that in the telling he had nothing like his father’s mastery of ornate, artistic language.

 

Old Alasdair and Angus MacLellan’s father, Aonghas mac Eachainn, were close friends. One day Alasdair Mòr called at the MacLellan home on his way to Lochboisdale. “No one went to bed in their house that night. They all remained by the fire as the two old men went on storytelling,” said Donald.

 

“Next day old Angus and two or three of the boys went down to Loch Eynort to gather seaweed. They brought Alasdair Mòr with them, as it would shorten his way, and they put in at a place where there was a track that would bring him home. Aonghas mac Eachainn got out of the boat also and accompanied Alasdair to see him safely on the track. The two old men sat down on a hillock and began storytelling, while the boys kept the boat afloat on the ebbing tide. The boys continued keeping the boat afloat for a very long time and soon twilight was upon them.

 

“Go up,” said one of the boys to another, “and separate those two devils or the boat will soon be high and dry.” One of the boys went up and the two old men parted. When Aonghas mac Eachainn came down to the shore, the boys remonstrated with him for having wasted the day and for not having cut any seaweed. Old Aonghas mac Eachainn looked up at the sky: “It will be a fine day tomorrow. We will get plenty seaweed tomorrow.”

 

Urgent need

While the academic, scholastic types who regard the tradition bearers of South Uist as “mere guinea pigs” are much more of a menace to those courteous and generous people than any Army personnel that the Rocket Range may bring amongst them, there is no doubt that the recording of folklore material is a matter of immediate urgency, for the really outstanding sources will not be with us much longer and whatever they leave with a younger generation will be inferior both in quantity and quality to what they themselves have now.

 

The refusal of a former Secretary of State for Scotland to accede to the request of the Edinburgh University authorities for funds to record the folklore and material of South Uist has been deplored by publicists and scholars both in this country and abroad. It is quite possible that, if the request had been made to the governments of Norway, Sweden or Denmark, the response would have been much more satisfactory.

 

Reference:

Calum I. Maclean, ‘Uist Keeps Its Own Sense of Values’, The Scotsman (12 August 1959), p. 6

 

Image:

Angus MacLellan, Frobost, South Uist, photographed by Calum Maclean on the 24th of June 1959. Courtesy of the School of Scottish Studies Archives, University of Edinburgh

Cu Chulainn and the Rocket Range

Reproduced in full from The Scotsman is the first of two articles written by Calum Maclean about his experiences of collecting in South Uist:

Missiles may become obsolete but the storytellers of Uist are heirs to the ages

 Calum I. Maclean, of the School of Scottish Studies of Edinburgh University, has been visiting Uist, the island of the rocket range, where he has been recording the wealth of traditional tales, many of them going back to the roots of our cultural heritage, which has been handed down by word of mouth through the island generations. This is the first of two articles in which he describes his storytellers, recounts some of their tales, and comments of the effect of the range on the traditional culture of the islands.

I have just returned from Uist where I heard the first Corporal missile being fired from the machair of Gerinish and actually saw the second going up on the following day, the Corporal is already obsolete, but in Uist there is something which is still not obsolete, even after a thousand years.

On the 11th of June I saw Angus MacLellan of Frobost uncover his head in honour of Cu Chullain and then proceed to tell the heroic saga of Cu Chullain’s first feat, his exploits to take forcible possession of the Donn Ghuailleann, and his death after he had slain Fear Diad Mac Deafain.

While Fear Diad and Cu Chullain were at school learning the feats of arms they made a solemn compact never to oppose one another. Fear Diad is bribed to take the Brown Bull of Cuailnge away. The first day they spend hunting. On the following day Cu Chullain says, “What will be our sport today?” Fear Diad answers, “Our backs towards one another and the butts of our lances against each other.” “Nothing could be better,” answers Cu Chullain.

The next day Cu Chullain again asks what the sport will be. “Our face towards one another,” says Fear Diad, “and the points of our lances against one another and the take of our blood in the parting.” “Is it thus now?” asks Cu Chullain. “I did not think that that was the compact made between us when were at school.” “Ah well, it was not,” said Fear Diad, “but I am under oath to get either the Brown Bull or death.”

They fight and cast their lances at one another across a river. Their attendants recover the lances. Towards evening Cu Chullain hurls his lance and kills Fear Diad, while he himself falls with a mortal wound. As he lies shedding blood, he turns to his attendant and asks: “Do you see anything about the river here?” “Oh, I see nothing,” says the boy, “except that I see a dog drinking the blood down yonder.” “Go,” says Cu Chullain, “and bring me the lance.”

The boy goes for the lance, brings it to Cu Chullain who asks where the hound is; he casts at it and kills it. Cu Chullain’s eyes are now closing in death. “Have I slain the hound?” he asks. The boy answers that he has cut it in two. “Oh, that is true!” says Cu Chullain. “That (the killing of a hound) was my first feat and it was the last feat I had to perform. And now, it is all over with me, and whosoever wishes may now have the Brown Bull of Cuailnge.”

Ancient tale

The late Dr Alexander Carmichael, the collector of the famed Carmina Gadelica, recorded a different version of the above tale from Hector MacIsaac of Ceannlangabhat, Iochdar, South Uist and read it to a meeting of the Gaelic Society of Inverness on the 14th of November 1872. The discovery of a fragment of this ancient tale known at Tain Bo Cuailgne, the central tale of Cu Chullain cycle—the earliest known recensions of which are in the twelfth-century Book of the Dun Cow, the Book of Leinster, and the later Yellow Book of Lecan—caused quite a sensation for scholars had thought that it had long gone out of oral tradition. It was quite as remarkable as if an unrecorded version of the Iliad has been recovered in the Aegean in the last century or a fragment of the Saga of Beowulf in the current oral tradition of Northumberland.

Angus MacLellan of Frobost is 90 years of age. He belongs to a family of noted tradition bearers. Two of his sisters are still living, and at the ages of 93 and 87 are still full of songs and stories and still chant Ossianic lays dating back to the Viking times.

A daughter of the elder sister is Mrs Archie MacDonald of Gearraidh na h-Eilghe who has recorded over 200 folksongs. When her store looks like running out, she refers to her 93-year-old mother, who goes on remembering something new every day. A week ago she sang the lay about the Hag from Lochlann who came over to subdue Iceland and meet her death at the hands of the King of the Féinne, the valiant Fionn mac Cumhaill.

From her son-in-law, the inimitable Archie MacDonald himself, I recorded on the very same day one of the Fables of Aesop; but his lion and his fox were so, so characteristically Uist in expression.

I still remember the evening of the first meeting held in the school of Iochdar to protest against the establishment of the Rocket Range. It was towards the middle of August 1955. An old man came up through the middle of the hall and made a moving and impassioned speech in Gaelic. All his life he had struggled to make a livelihood on his croft in Iochdar and to bring up his family, but now his whole world seemed to be crashing about his ears. Later that evening he demanded angrily from the back of the hall that the motions before the meeting be stated in Gaelic before being put to the vote.

Ossianic lays

It was much later that I got to know his name, John MacQueen, but it was someone in Oban who told me that he sang Ossianic lays. I went to see him in his house about a fortnight ago. He was not a home but I awaited his arrival. He has aged a little since I first saw him, and now he walks with the aid of a stick.

In his boyhood he had been the person deputed to chant the Ossianic lays as parties of children went from house to house on Hogmanay and were given gifts of bread, sweets and apples. The lays were chanted before closed doors, it appears, and in recording the Lay of the Smithy, which tells about the one-legged Smith from Lochlann who enticed the heroes of the Féinne to his smithy in order to kill them, he incorporated the words, “Open the door for the Hogmanay man,” into the text.

He knows many songs and stories and composes songs himself. No one had ever recorded anything from him. When I was leaving he accompanied me, limping as he was, to the very limit of his croft. This is still the customary practice when one visits the crofters of Uist, but, in view of his age and obvious disability, I as real reason to feel honoured by his courtesy.

I proceeded northwards along the newly-surfaced road that runs through the Iochdar townships. I had a couple of miles to got but a small van overtook me and I was given a lift. There was another storyteller whom I had never met but who I thought might have stories, for a brother of his who died a number of years ago was a noted storyteller; their father had been the most famed Hebridean dancer in all Uist. Malcolm MacPherson or Calum an t-Saoir, as he is called, has a remarkable fund of international folktales with elements in them that have long reached the shores of Uist from India through Byzantium and Spain and up along the Atlantic coast.

He told a wonderfully humorous and slightly Rabelaisian version of the well-known tale about the fool who won the princess by making her laugh three times. Angus MacLellan of Frobost told the same tale, but there were remarkable differences between the two versions. They have been in Uist tradition for a very long time.

There is now a very fine road from the main one out eastwards from Iochdar to Loch Carnan, where the new pier has been built. I was taken by car as far as Loch Carnan School. From near the school there is a very rough track that leads to the houses on the headlands that jut into the South Ford. The track was strewn with rough stones in places but here and there it gave way to nothing but bog. I have over two miles to go before I reached the house of Anthony Currie, a direct descendant of the MacMhuirich family of bards and historians to the MacDonalds of Clanranald.

Anthony Currie evidently knows the MacMhuirich family traditions very well. Not only were they bards and historians but they knew a good deal about sorcery also. Anthony Currie is no 88. I had never met him before nor had any other folklorist contacted him either. This man has a wonderful command of Gaelic and an artistic turn of expression. He speaks of past events that suggests that he has lived in this and several proceeding centuries.

One story he did tell very vividly, and no other Uist storyteller has recorded it before, so far as I am aware. Young Ronald of Clanranald returned to Uist after the battle of Sheriffmuir. Reapers were cutting his corn one day. Ronald went among the reapers and noticed that one of them was working with his coat on. He went angrily up to him and told him to take off his coat; he was going to be disgraced by having it said that one of his workers worked with his coat on.

No shirt

“I shall not take off my coat,” said the man, a man from Iochdar. They argued for a time, and the man finally took off his coat. When he did so, Young Ronald of Clanranald saw that he had no shirt. “Put your coat back on,” said Clanranald. “I shall not,” said the man. They argued more fiercely than ever, finally the man let fire. “I shall not put my coat back on,” said he. “You did not ask me to put my coat on that day of Sheriffmuir when your heart was very low and I came between you and your assailant and death.”

“That is true!” said the astounded Clanranald, for he now recognised the Iochdar man for the first time. He brought him to his house and gave him not one but many shirts.

The last of the official MacMhuirich bards died in 1722 and the Clanranalds parted with Uist over a century ago, but here still is a member of the MacMhuirich family continuing a very long tradition. I had only a very short time in Anthony’s company. Fortunately for me, and immediate bond of sympathy arose, I had lost an arm and he had lost an eye. Anthony Currie must have an enormous fund of tradition. 

Reference:

Calum I. Maclean, ‘Cu Chullain and the Rocket Range’, The Scotsman (11 August 1959), p. 6

Image:

Angus MacLellan, Frobost, South, Uist, photographed by Dr Kenneth Robertson in December 1959. Courtesy of the School of Scottish Studies Archives

“The Highlands” is the authentic voice

Reproduced in full is a review from The Scotsman by Farquhar Macintosh of Calum Maclean’s The Highlands (1959):

 

At first sight this volume might appear to the casual observer as no more than another picture book about the Highlands. But closer scrutiny soon reveals that it is a picture book with a difference. Its author, Calum Maclean, is not another outsider with a little knowledge but an informed and intelligent native. This it is that makes the book distinctive and its publication an event.

 

Few areas have suffered so much as the Highlands at the hands of their interpreters. Travel writes like Pennant and MacCulloch could find little that was right, and the romantic writers who followed them could find little that was wrong. But the picture which they presented, of ruined homesteads and ruined castles, of picturesque but bracken-covered landscapes, of fairies in the glen and water-horses in the tarn, created an illusion difficult to dispel. Even if it were true, it would be wrong to conclude that the area which it purports to portray has no real, present-day significance. As Alastair M Dunnett has put it in his “Quest by Canoe”, “it would be as valid to assume form the ruined Parthenon that ancient Athens boasted nothing better than a roofless culture.”

 

Faithful picture

Formal historians have been scarcely more enlightened. Lacking a knowledge of Gaelic and a real understanding of the people who spoke it, they have helped to perpetuate the legend that “Highland” and “barbaric” are somehow synonymous; and even yet, as Mr Maclean asserts, this insinuation has not been entirely erased from the official text-books in the Scottish schools. Every reason, therefore, to welcome a book of this kind by a Gaelic-speaking Highlander equipped for the purpose.

 

True, it may have the odd omission and the occasional inaccuracy, but the overall picture is faithful and true. Here is one who speaks with authority and not as the scribes.

 

Mr Maclean, who was born on Raasay, is on the staff of the School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University, and he brings to his task the learning and training of a student of folk culture. His primary concern is, therefore, cultural: he concentrates not so much on people as on people, and on the traditions and way of life that they have come to foster and develop.

 

In an admirable introduction and in the chapters which follow, the reader gets an authentic account of the storied past, the uncertain present, and still more doubtful future. Here one may meet with so much that is absent from our modern city, with plain living and high thinking, and with that independence of mind and spirit whose replacement by a servile, standardised mass mentality Smuts once saw as the greatest human menace of our time.

 

The book in fact, is largely written in terms of individuals, the self-taught singers, players and story-tellers who, unable to stereotype their art by reading or writing, have ripened it in the memory and given it a wonderful spontaneity and a timeless appeal.

 

Religion also occupies an important place; and the economic background has indeed not been overlooked. In this respect indeed, the book is at once a condemnation and a challenge: a condemnation of past wrongs and present neglect, and a challenge to authority to act now ere it is too late. For one thing is certain: the Highland cannot, by their own efforts, fit into a complex industrial State; and the State has not hitherto cared enough to find a place for them.

 

Losing battle

It is not surprising, therefore, that the dominant impression one gets from this book is that the way of life which it describes is fighting a losing battle almost everywhere against the social and economic forces of the day. I agree with the author’s strictures on the system of education and about the need to give Gaelic a prominent place in the curriculum; but unless the economic problem is satisfactorily solved the culture is doomed.

 

Basically this means the rehabilitation of crofting agriculture, because on its preservation and promotion as a dignified and rewarding way of life depends the preservation of the language and the distinctive culture associated with it. But only good land will make good crofts, and until the present  Commission has been given power and resources to acquire and resettle the rich inland straths which saw wholesale evictions at the time of the Clearances it will not succeed in its task.

 

One is grateful to Mr Maclean and his publishers for this attractive volume, with its magnificent photographs, and one hopes it will reach the large public which it deserves. If it does it should help to bring to the Highlands a more enlightened visitor, who will respect their traditions and the susceptibilities of their people.

 

Reference:

Farquhar Macintosh, ‘“The Highlands” is the authentic voice’, The Scotsman (23 April 1959), p. 8

 

Image:

The “Forty-five” Monument at Glenfinnan by Noel Habgood reproduced from the first edition of The Highlands. The monument was erected in 1815 by Alexander MacDonald of Glenaladale to commemorate the Jacobite Rising of 1745