Fifteen
I was still hungering for an orange when I got back to the bed and breakfast but Mrs. McLeod, the blue-eyed hostess, could not think where, in all of Gairloch, I could find such a thing. If ever I was to find an orange in western Scotland, I would think it would be here. Gairloch, because of its location, is one of the more visited towns on this barren coast. There are fine views out to Skye and the Torridon Mountains; there is angling and sea-angling, and golf, and there are even sandy beaches. The best of these is a great dune-backed sweep of beach called, not with a great deal of imagination, Big Sand. In a pub after dinner, I met an older gent with a white moustache and a plaid waistcoat who told me, in horror, about the Germans who come to the beach at Big Sand.
“And d’you know what they do?” the gentleman said.
“I do not,” I said.
“D’you know that on summer days, when it’s sunny, they ha’ been known ta strip aff their clothes and go stark naked upon the strand.”
“Oh my,” I said.
“But that’s na’ the worst of it,” he said, taking hold of my sweater with a shaky hand. “And I ha’ seen this myself.”
“What?”
“They SWIM.”
In the middle of June in Gairloch, as the summer solstice approaches, the light begins to show across the east around three-thirty in the morning. At noon the sun stands directly above your head, and then as the earth rolls slowly eastward it begins a long raking descent and sets in the evening at about eleven-thirty. Just north of here, above the Arctic Circle, after the twenty-first of June, it never dips below the western horizon, but rolls across the sea and slowly rises again.
All this is most excellent for creatures who love light. But it is not good for sleeping. Birds begin to sing at three in the morning, and by midsummer night in circumpolar regions the world around, parties can go on all night long. There’s plenty of time to sleep. You can say good night in November and sleep in near darkness until February 2nd, when the sun reappears and the days begin to lengthen.
The darkest of the various solar-based holidays, and yet in some ways the most hopeful, is the ominous winter solstice, the longest night of the year. All year long in ancient cultures the magicians, wizards, and astrologers would have watched the slow decline of the light that begins on the day of the summer solstice. In their world, living as they did within the bounds of their own culture and understanding, there was no absolute guarantee that on the day after the winter solstice, the sun would not continue in its disappearance, never to return. It was only by the hard work of propitiation, of sacrifice and appeasement that the sun’s return could be assured. The end of autumn was a dangerous time of year.
After the winter solstice, there followed a series of pagan holidays that are, somewhat ironically, best preserved in the celebrations of the Christian church, which subsumed so many local festivals as it spread around the globe. Twelve days after the winter solstice, there was a festival known as twelfth night, which involved, among other rituals, a “blessing” of fruit trees. In the north this was carried out by songs and music and the spilling of strong drink around the trees. Following this, on February 2nd, was the old Roman festival of Floralia, when the birds traditionally returned from migration, and then, at the end of February, the ancient festival of Saturnalia, which was celebrated on the Christian calendar as Mardis Gras and carnival. Next to arrive was the beginning of Lent and the progress toward the spring equinox, which is marked by Easter in the Christian calendar and Passover in the Jewish year. This was traditionally followed by Lady Day in Britain, when the sun enters Aries, and in pre-Islamic Afghanistan by a festival known as Nauroz, in which celebratory kites were flown and livestock was auctioned. Then Pentecost, in the Christian calendar, then Rogation Days, which marked the traditional blessing of the fields in ancient Rome, and then May Day, when the maypoles were once set up all across Europe and strewn with flowers, and on and on, one festival after another at each of the sun’s stations, until finally, at the opposite end of the year from winter, the happiest, universally brightest, and best celebration of all, midsummer night, the summer solstice.
In parts of Italy, no one would go to bed on this night. In Sweden, maypoles were set up, no one would sleep; there was dancing and singing and coupling. In France, and in fact all over Europe, bonfires were lit, the so-called fires of Saint John; in Spain these fires were allowed to burn low and people celebrated by firewalking. Midsummer night is, as we know from Shakespeare, a night of mixed identities, song, and sex, and mystery, when fairies walk abroad and the two kingdoms, the seen and the unseen, can intermix. But by dawn it is over; the masque ends, normalcy returns, and day by day, as the earth sweeps around the sun, night gains ground.
It was now June 7th, I had two weeks to get over to the western coast of Lewis where the stones of Callanish stood guard, so I bid farewell to nice Mrs. McLeod and rode down the Loch Torridon coast. I had been assured that the road was passable, and it perhaps would have been in a car, but after a few miles it broke down into a gravel road that was hard going, and halfway down the coast I suffered my requisite flat tire. It was about time, I hadn’t had one in three weeks. I wheeled the poor, limping Peugeot to an overlook and showed her the island of Skye, which we could see off beyond the loch. Not far now, I soothed her as I fixed the tire, hoping that this would be the last time.
That done I pedaled onward and southward, weaving in and along lochs and cutting over high hills, with splendid views out to Skye. By late afternoon I came to the Kyle of Lochalsh and caught the ferry for the short ride across the straights.
On the ferry ride I spotted a man in full regalia. He wore a Prince Charles jacket, a kilt of some greenish colored clan, a Glengarry cap with his clan badge affixed to the side, clan kilt hose, garters, and a squian dubh, the black knife sheath, fixed to his leg, and he had a dark otter or muskrat pelt sporran. He was first in line to debark as we approached the pier and was the first off the boat as we touched. I watched from my perch on an upper deck and saw him go striding up the hill without a break. About twenty minutes later as I rode along the high shores of the Kyle of Lochalsh and the Inner Sound, I passed him. He was mounting a hill at a vigorous pace, his kilt swinging from side to side as he strode along. He carried a small pack on his back, and wore the light shoes known as ghillie brogues, more suited for formal wear than hiking. But he was making good time, all told.
I whistled as I approached from behind to warn him, and greeted him as I pumped by, and once I crested the hill I left him far behind. I stopped at the next hill and looked back. Here he came, striding onward in an unceasing, determined march.
I hadn’t eaten all day and at Broadford I put in to a place called the Claymore, and had a lobster stew with boiled potatoes and green peas. As I was ordering, I looked out the window and saw the kilted man go by, still advancing in his unbroken pace. He was making better time than I was.
I was told that there were not many places to stay along the coast road past Scalpay, and was directed to the house of a woman who would take in boarders. It turned out to be another one of those lovely little spots that one tends to find accidentally, a white-washed croft with thick stone walls and upstairs bedrooms overlooking the tidal flats on the Bay South shore, run by a pleasant woman named Mrs. MacBrayne, who fussed over my bicycle and of course gave me hot tea.
After tea I went for a walk out on the flats to watch the oystercatchers and dunlins feed. When I got back there was a man in the house named Martin, possibly the husband of Mrs. MacBrayne, although he wasn’t introduced as such. Martin was familiar with the house though and offered me a snort of whiskey and sat me down at the dining room table to give me a lecture on the Common Market, the current political environment in Scotland, the role of the United States in international affairs, the Chinese situation, and other local matters. “It’s a world economy,” he said, “a one-world economy, and we must face it.”
Martin was from Broadford, I learned, and rarely left town.
Everywhere I had been on this trip people in rural areas, the farmers and local tradespeople, were very wary of this approaching world economy. I told him as much. I told him they all feared homogenization of both culture and food, especially the French peasants.
“I dinna like it either,” said Martin. “Look at our poor fish trade here, look at the condition of it,” he said. “But we’re stuck wi’ it.”
He poured me another dram.
“Ah hell wi’ it,” he said, belting down his whiskey. “Let’s go look at the sunset.” We walked out again over the flats under a fiery green sky.
The next morning the wind came up again, a stiff charger out of the northwest, just the direction into which I was headed. It was a clear, bright morning, with clouds rolling in and out of the high wild peaks of the mountains of the interior, and I began a long and difficult climb, against both the wind and the hills. Of the two, the wind was far worse. Hour after hour I pushed and pedaled and pumped up the coast, past Scalpay Island, up along Loch Ainort, with the hardest slog of all at the end of the loch where the wind funneled down through a cut in the hills.
Unlike the Highlands, which had been cool and misty, with periodic showers, the weather had changed at Inverness and I had been riding under clear skies all the way west, with only an occasional shower. Here on Skye the fine weather continued, but the light had changed. The air was sterling and sharp so that even distant, cloudy mountain peaks seemed close at hand and the sunlight seemed brighter and more translucent than anywhere I had been so far. It was a clear glass landscape, like looking through new black ice, and the light held all the way to Portree, where I found a place for the night.
The light was still clear even after the late sundown, with green sheets of fire rising up in the slopes above the town, and a clean blue black sky rolling up to the east over the isles of Raasay and Rona. On a walk after dinner in this green, half-lit world, as I was passing through the town square, I heard a distinctive echoing of clipped footsteps, and into the open plaza, still at a quick-paced stride, came the full-kilted Scotsman, his plaids rising and falling with each hearty step. He made directly for me.
“Didn’t I see you on the ferry?” he asked. To my surprise he had the broad flat accent of an American midwesterner.
I told him, yes, I had been on the ferry and had passed him on my bicycle. I couldn’t resist asking where he was from. “Certainly not Oban?” I said.
“Racine, Wisconsin,” he answered, curtly.
He was over for a little walk, he said, and would come every year at this time. His family had come to America from Lewis in February of 1842 and Scots have long memories, as he explained. He had spent the day in the mountains, and now was hunting for a place and having no luck. I told him where I was staying but he had already been there. It was now almost midnight, and true to Presbyterian form, things had shut down everywhere.
“Thanks,” he said, and strode off purposefully.
I was bound for the small town of Uig on the northwest coast and was disappointed to find that the wind was still blowing the next day, meaning another hard plod into its teeth. It was even worse than the day before, blowing harder, with long eight-mile level stretches and no pleasant downhill grades to coast and rest. At Uig I found a sheltered bed and breakfast run by an old couple from Glasgow. I also found a benign grove of deciduous trees with a little freshwater stream running down to the sea loch, and as soon as I was settled I went out again, headed for the greenwood and began climbing a little trail under the trees. Here the air was calm, although I could hear the wind howling overhead and buffeting the upper storey of the trees. I was tired from fighting headwinds, and for the first time went to bed before darkness had completely fallen, which in these parts was not that early, eleven-thirty or so.
I took the morning ferry across Little Minch to North Uist, and landed at Lochmaddy, surrounded all the while by wheeling gulls and lines of shags. Just as the vessel was pulling away from Uig, out onto the pier, apparently hoping to catch the boat, came the American Scotsman himself, looking none the worse for all his walking, and still moving at his high-paced longstride march. When it was clear that he had missed the boat, without hesitation he turned on his heel and marched back up the pier.
That night at a small hotel in Lochmaddy I had a whiskey and enjoyed a long warming meal, followed by coffee in a warm parlor with a coal stove. Here groups of outdoorsmen and women had gathered and I fell into conversation about a wildlife sanctuary I had heard of on South Uist, where there was said to be an aerie of golden eagles with young.
A pretty, sensible woman with crinkly ginger hair cornered me and, fixing me with an unblinking stare, commanded that I must go see them, if I was interested in birds.
“You should go there,” she said. “You can na come here and not go out to see them.”
“I will,” I said, not knowing whether I actually would.
“No, but you must,” she said.
“I know, I will.”
“Yes. Go then.”
Later she brought over her gentleman friend, a florid Scot in a Prince Charles jacket.
“Tell him to go out and see the eagles, Angus,” she said.
“Go lad, you’ll like it,” he said.
“I intend to.”
“It’s a bitter ground, there,” he said. “Like the end of the earth.”
Suddenly it did begin to sound interesting. I got directions, including a recommendation of a bed and breakfast within striking distance.
“What church are you?” Angus asked, seemingly out of the blue.
I stumbled at this one, but before I could answer Angus explained.
“Not Free Kirk, I take it, you not being from these parts. But be sure to stay put Saturday night, or make your way down to South Uist by Sunday. They won’t take you in, no matter what on Sunday up here in the north, you must get down to the Catholic island.”
Back at the bed and breakfast I had a talk with Johnny McLeod, the owner, about the wildlife sanctuary and the eagles. He too knew of it. “A desolate, glorious place,” he said. He also knew about the otters that you could see from time to time in the harbors. In fact he was partial to otters and had worked to help conserve them. He knew Gavin Maxwell, author of the otter book Ring of Bright Water, who had lived at Sandaig, not far from the ferry landing for Skye. Maxwell’s house had burned a few years back and then Maxwell died a year later. But the otters of the Hebrides were doing well, Johnny said. “You’ll see them up and down the west coast here, and over on Harris,” he said.
As luck would have it, the next day as I was crossing a causeway in the wind, I did see one out among the rocks. I also saw seals basking on the bars and sporting in the deeper coves.
At the hotel at Lochmaddy the night before, among the bird and wildlife people, I had, I’m afraid, instigated a fairly heated (for Hebrideans) discussion about seals. I had pointedly asked if people here thought seals “worshipped” the sun. This was not entirely out of context. I had been telling them about the lemurs of Madagascar, whom the local Madagascans believe are sun worshippers, and had held forth perhaps a little too long on the bears of North America. I told them how some Native American tribes there believe that bears worship the sun. Then I asked if they thought that seals worship as well.
“After all, you see them out basking, like turtles and shags,” I said.
“Seals do no’ worship the sun,” Angus said. “They’ve no god at all. They’re dumb animals, they just like to dry out from time to time.”
“No, he’s got a point though,” said a small dark-haired man, who seemed to have had his share of single malt. “After a fashion, they worship. They haul out in sun, and throw back their heads like.”
“They haul in fogs and rain, too, Jimmy,” someone else chimed in.
“Na, but more i’ the sun,” said Jimmy.
“Wha’ they got no god—neither sun, nor moon, nor Jesus Christ hisself, Jimmy, don’t be daft.”
Jimmy said something in Gaelic.
Angus said something back in Gaelic, and then someone said something else in Gaelic and then they all laughed, except for the ginger-haired companion of Angus.
“Keep civil, lads. There’s ladies present.”
“And visiting dignitaries to boot,” said Angus, winking toward me.
The standard cliché is that the Scots are an unfriendly, dour, and taciturn lot, but you could not prove that by me. From Edinburgh to Kintore, from Kintore to Inverness, all across the Highlands, and now out to the last bastion of taciturnity, the Hebrides, everyone I had met was not only friendly but generous and talkative. One man in the Highlands, in a small car, seeing me pushing my loaded bicycle up one of the mountains, offered me a lift, not considering the fact that there was no room for me and my bicycle as well. He apologized for not being able to assist me and drove on.
There was a big debate raging on the islands about whether to “cull” the seal population at this time. There wasn’t much argument here, however. These people in the hotel were all conservationists and against the cull, and to some degree, I noticed, against the fishermen who wanted the seals culled.
I had also asked them about Selkies. But they were a sophisticated lot and informed me that no one on these islands believed in the Selkies anymore.
The American travel writer Lawrence Millman, who passed through these parts a few years after I was there, collecting stories for a book, did report finding older people who believed in Selkies, however.
The Selkie legend takes many forms, but the basic story holds that the Selkies are seal people who occasionally take up residence on land. They are, in their human form, exceptionally beautiful, especially the females, who sometimes marry with local men and have children. In one tale from this region a man unknowingly marries a Selkie who gives him three beautiful children. The Selkie mother has a strange habit of disappearing from time to time, however. One day her husband follows her. She walks down to the coast to a hidden cove, takes out a full sealskin she has hidden, strips her human clothes, dons the sealskin, and swims off into the sea. In some versions the jealous husband hides the skin or destroys it, and the beautiful seal woman dies. In one sad ballad version, she disappears forever into the sea after she is discovered, taking all her children with her.
Although it seems unlikely (except perhaps for their purported sun worship), Selkies are by tradition celestial beings, driven out of Heaven for some minor sins that were not bad enough to land them in Hell.
While he was in North Uist, Millman encountered a man in a pub who pointed out a darker man, drinking with some others. “Do you see that fellow,” Millman’s informant said. “He’s a MacCodrum; all his people are seals.” Apparently the entire MacCodrum line is descended from Selkies. The old man told Millman that whenever a MacCodrum is buried, the wild seals follow the funeral procession, swimming just offshore, barking and moaning for their lost relative.
“That family will never eat seal, like other people in these parts,” the old man told Millman.
Try as I might, I could not collect any Selkie stories while I was there, nor yet confirm my oddball theory that seals, along with lemurs, turtles, snakes, bears, cats, and other beings that bask, worship the sun.
In the morning, even before I woke up, I could hear the wind again, rolling in like a battering ram from the northeast. This confirmed my plans to go downwind to Benbecula and on to South Uist to visit the wildlife sanctuary and the aerie of the golden eagles. That way I would also be on the Catholic island if I happened to find myself on the road on Sunday.
I left early and headed southwest across the brown moors and lochs and the long, rolling barrens. All along the road I began passing little bands of men and women cutting peat for the next winter’s fuel. They all looked healthy and happy and were dressed against the wind, the men in flat peaked caps and worn-out Harris tweeds, the women in flowered shirtwaist dresses and thick cardigan sweaters with kerchiefs tied tightly around their heads, and all of them, men and women alike, shod in high rubber Wellingtons. They looked up from their work as I swept past with the wind, and waved and shouted to see so marvelous a thing as a bicycle flying with the wind.
Lawrence Millman met an old man near here who had moved to Harris as a young man from the island of Scarp, where trees are unheard of. Millman had asked him if he was afraid when he first saw a tree on Harris. “Na,” he said, “I was na afraid a trees. I was terrified when I first saw a bicycle, though.”
Apparently the idea of a wheeled man scared him.
The cutters were stacking the peat in neat piles and I stopped at one point to chat them up about their work. Now, in June, they told me, was about the end of the cutting season. The crofters all have cutting banks on the common grazing lands of the townships, and they try to do all the work between May and June, which is the sunniest time of year in the Hebrides. Peat needs a spate of clear weather to dry out once it is cut from the bogs, and they stack it in little piles, like roundhouses, the peat slabs set vertically in a circle, damp side outward, and topped with a slab to hold the peats in place.
“Peat needs sun if it’s to burn,” one of the crofters said.
The place where the crofters were working was probably a lake seven thousand years ago, about the time that the glacier began retreating from this area. Slowly over the following eons, sphagnum moss, the dominant inhabitant of these acid bogs, began to creep over the waters from the soggy shores where it first took hold. Sphagnum moss is a self-perpetuating, self-promoting sort of plant that seems to have an almost everlasting life. The fresh green stems grow profusely on top of the old brown stems of the former growth and in this way the moss tends to pile up on top of itself. Year after year, generation after generation, it thickens and deepens and spreads and eventually covers whatever body of water it started to grow upon, absorbing the waters and compressing the dead stems into the soggy, brown, spongelike material called peat.
Like all green plants, the chlorophyll of the leaves absorbs the energy of the sun and stores it in the stems and cells of the plant as potential energy. The sphagnum on this bog on the lonely moors of Benbecula may have been laid down long before the pagan worshippers and sun cults of Callanish set up their stones. It may have been growing in that remote period when aurochs, the wild ox ancestor of today’s cattle, and the great-horned Scottish elk roamed these parts. But nonetheless, after it is cut and stacked and dried, once ignited, that potential energy is released and the heat of the sun, absorbed so many thousands of years ago, will warm again. Peat gives off a poor, smoky, weak heat, but in this treeless expanse, where the winter wind cuts like a chisel, it’s all the crofters have.
Sphagnum moss is an ambitious plant. Given moisture enough it will climb trees. It will cover wet rocks. It grows out over still waters and forms soggy, bouncy islands, and if anything falls onto it, or into it, the peat will cover it and preserve it in its acid, brown depths. It buried the famous sun chariot of Trundholm bog nearly three thousand years ago. It buried and preserved the bodies of Celtic princes and Celtic criminals and sacrificed human beings who were strangled and tossed to the bogs. It even attempted to bury the standing stones of Callanish. When the circle of stones was first identified on Lewis in 1857, they had to be excavated from peat to reveal their full height.
“Wherr’ye be gayne ain tha’ becycle a’ yurrn, lad?” one of the older peat cutters called out as I made to leave.
I could barely understand him. Although everyone speaks English in the Hebrides, the native tongue is Scots Gaelic and the accent of the Western Isles is thick. But I caught his drift.
“To the wildlife sanctuary,” I said.
“Ha’ care th’aigles don’ carry y’off,” he said. “They’re fond’ a’ young lambs.”
I’m not sure what the old man meant.
It was a great pleasure riding with the wind for once. On straight flat roads I had gotten in the habit of pedaling along no handed, and was even able to execute easy curves by leaning from side to side, riding with my hands on my hips. Here the narrow, winding road was perfect, and I sailed along with the sun ahead of me and the wind at my back, stretching my arms and flying over the moors, sometimes curving to and fro and weaving across the road like a gull. But at the end of Benbecula, the joy ride came to an end. The wind shifted to the west and I had to turn into the teeth of it, bending low, keeping my head down and shifting gears ever downward. Within a half hour I was worn out and had to stop for a little picnic lunch overlooking a small loch. After lunch I crossed over the tidal flats on the causeway that connects Benbecula with South Uist and then turned to the southwest, with the wind again, riding along stretches of machair, the grassy plains on the west coasts of the Hebrides. In some places here, electric wires ran beside the road and they whined and moaned ominously in the wind, sometimes rising to a high eerie wail.
Eventually I came to a turnoff for a gravel road that led out to the reserve, but it gave out after a few hundred yards and became a rutted track, too rough for a bicycle, so I left it and hiked on across the rolling moors, under the screaming wind. There had not been a single car on the hard-topped road that morning, not so much as a sign of tire tracks on the gravel road, and no footprints other than those of sheep and red deer on the track. It was a lonely barren ground, stretching off to the gray water, with hollows and sucking fens, and the empty groan of the wind. Just where the track narrowed to a path, I saw the body of a large ram that had got himself caught in a barbed-wire fence and died there in the wind, one leg up on the wire, his eyes emptied by ravens and his great curling godlike horns making a mockery of his former power.
For an hour I walked southeast toward the aerie, across the low hills, and farther and farther into this strathy, rolling land. There were bogs and ponds becoming bogs, and bogs becoming drylands, and lochs piercing the shores, and shorelines trying to reclaim the sea, and all of which I had to circumvent, backtracking and forging onward to the south. The wind was howling ominously; overhead in the sky, great charging horseherds of clouds began to obscure the sun, making the wind all the colder, and sometimes I had to duck down in the shelter of the hollows to rest from the incessant battering on the open ground. In time I came upon a little horseshoe-shaped cairn, a low wall of rocks that could have been the remains of a sheep pound, or, for all I knew, the barrow of some long dead Celtic prince. The high end of the wall blocked the wind, and the open end faced south, out over the loch, so I went in and lay back against the stones to watch the sky.
The gray herd of the cloud cover was moving fast, and there was a warm island of blue sky forming in the breaks and moving eastward. I watched, anticipating that moment when the patch of blue would meet the sun. Slowly, it sailed on, then it sank, and then it rose again and then, like a fire blast it opened and the full force of the late spring sun struck my face. At that very moment, there was a great outcry and gabbling from the gulls and the graylag geese that had gathered in the loch. Into the rift of blue flew a huge flat-winged bird. It was a golden eagle, the lord of the skies, the ancient emblem of the Greek sky god Zeus.
I left South Uist the next day and rode back up to Lochmaddy, where I spent the night in the hotel. The following day I caught the ferry that skirts the east coast of South Harris and puts in at Tarbert and from here began a slog into the wind, across the moorlands of Lewis toward my final destination, the small town of Callanish. Here, just outside the village, I located an isolated croft that provided bed and breakfast and settled in to wait for the solstice. It was a cozy little house, sheltered from the incessant wind, with two small upstairs rooms and thick whitewashed walls. The croft appeared to be under the leadership of an energetic matriarch who wore her Wellingtons inside the house and fed her family and guests on shortbread and tea, fish stews, and lobster, with no variation.
The standing stones of Callanish are located in and around the tiny village on the west coast, and are now under the charge of the state. The place has become the most famous prehistoric site in Scotland, and like Castlerigg, in the Lake District, it is set in a dramatic location. The circle stands on a rise beyond the town and is visible over a wide area from both land and sea. Even after the advent of Christianity in these islands, local people used to gather at the stones around May Day for reasons lost even to those who attended the ceremonies. The Free Kirk, the strict Presbyterian Church of the northern islands of the Hebrides, long opposed the tradition. In the early years of Christian settlement, the stones were more or less stubs in the landscape. Their full size, the drama of the site, and the overall layout were not brought to light until 1857, when outsiders took an interest and excavated the stones from the peat.
The actual stones consist of local Lewisian gneiss and are set in a ring that encloses a huge monolith at the center. In the middle of the ring are the remains of a chambered cairn, whose existence became apparent when the peat was cleared and may be a later addition to the circle of stones. Running north from the stone circle are two parallel lines of nineteen stones forming an avenue, and lines of four stones head off to the other three quarters. If you observe the layout of the site from the air, or map the stones on paper, it becomes apparent that the whole arrangement takes the exact shape of a Celtic cross, which is an interesting anomaly—Callanish, which is generally presumed to be a solar temple, predates Christianity by at least a thousand years. So which came first, the solar cross or the Christian cross, or was the cross a solar symbol all along?
Much research has been done over the last eighty years on the astronomical orientations of Callanish. Early scholars believed that the northern avenue was positioned to indicate the rising of the star Capella, about 1800 B.C., when the temple was first constructed. The shorter rows of stone match the setting and rising sun, as it would have appeared at about the same period. There is also a possibility that two stones outside the circle, lying to the northeast and southwest, mark the northernmost and southernmost points of the moon in its annual coursing. More recently, researchers have come to believe that this is a far more complex celestial observatory, and that the southern line of stones together with the large monolith in the center of the circle is a north-south meridian line, designed to mark the pole around which the stars revolve and to indicate the highest position of the sun on any given date.
Local legends of the origins and purposes of the stones abound. There is one story of a being called the “Shining One” who emerges from the loch at midsummer dawn and walks up the avenue of standing stones to the cairn. When Millman was at Callanish interviewing oldsters of the Western Isles, one man told him in all sincerity that the stones were living beings, and like any living thing, were fond of drinking (as was, perhaps, Millman’s informant). Periodically at night, he said, they would go down to the loch to refresh themselves.
“One night I was out there,” the old man told Millman, “and the stones were na’ there. Down by the water’s edge, they were, taking a drink.”
I spent the next day resting from the wind, having tea and shortbread and taking little bicycle excursions north and south among the many lochs to look for birds. I thought about riding up to the main town of Stornaway to see if I could find a restaurant that would not serve fish stew, but the wind was in the wrong quarter and still blowing hard, and I had no stomach for any more of the hard work of the road. The weather held clear, although cool, and the forecast for the midsummer dawn was good.
On the evening of the solstice, after dinner, around eleven o’clock, I wandered out to the site again. Now I was not alone. Several people, some of them obviously local, some obviously strangers to this place, had come out and were sitting on the ground, facing west, watching the skies. There was a black cloud lying along the western horizon, like a dark, sleeping dragon, its slightly upturned pointed nose resting on the northern horizon line and its riffled, jagged back already glowing in gold. The sun was still above the cloud, and still to the south of the standing stones, and there was heated discussion as to whether it would be obscured in its descent by this dragon-cloud. From my point of view, it looked as if the sun would drop into the sea well to the south of the short avenue of stones, but I was assured that, as it sank, it would be sweeping northward along the sea rim and drop down near the avenue line.
One fellow in a tan windbreaker and a deerstalker cap was especially keen on celestial observations at this site and was setting up a quadrant. He was intensely mathematical in his observations and had charts and graphs and record books of the rising dates of various stars from ancient times onward, and was calculating the solar angle and the like, checking his chronometer every minute or two and marking the time and the angles.
Others were not concerned with the science, but with the holiness of the place. One man wore a silver Celtic cross on a chain around his neck, and there was a small group in Druid hoods and robes, and two long-haired couples in beads and loose, Indian clothing were sitting some distance off from the site, honoring the temple by smoking a sacred herb that they ritually passed among themselves with ceremonial formality.
As the sun drew nearer its descent, the collected few grew quieter, and then quieter still, and by the time the sun reached the horizon, they spoke only in whispers, if at all. I drew apart and moved back to the east slightly to get a good view of the whole scene—the temple, the people, the loch beyond, the small island lying just beyond the loch to the southwest, and the great blue arc of the sky, the black dragon-cloud, and this honored god, the sun, who was now moving almost imperceptibly along the line of the sea, as if unwilling to let go his handhold of day.
The great fiery horses of the solar orb, those who fed on the fields of ambrosia by night, could not be seen, nor could we see the golden, resplendent chariot of Helios. The sunhorse of Trundholm bog was not visible, nor the barge of Ra, nor the Vedic charioteers, nor Sula, nor Sol, nor Surya. But they must have all been there that evening, hard at work, slowly reining in the horses, steering the chariot of the sun ever downward at a decreasing angle into the western sea. Their work for the day was almost over.
Just to the north, as if in reaction to the sun’s mighty presence, the dragon-cloud began raising his head and twisting himself into unlikely shapes, transforming himself, as dragons will, into various configurations. Now he was a tower, then he became a hill, and then, as if in surrender, he began to break apart, and moved upward to join the golden, fretted sky, which by now was charged with greens and reds and rays of blue and orange in those places where the cloud had spread out.
And then, in a hushed silence, almost humbled, the great god sun, the source of all life on earth, dropped with his horses into the sea. First his light touched the sea rim, the ball of flame moved downward and distorted into an ellipse, and, as we watched, the ellipse spread out and became a glowing pool of molten gold.
A minute later it was gone.