PETER MACKAY is a writer, academic and broadcaster. He has a PhD from Trinity College, Dublin, and has written widely on contemporary Scottish and Irish literature, as well as Scottish Gaelic literature. Originally from the Isle of Lewis, he now lives in Edinburgh.
Beyond my mother’s house on the Isle of Lewis – the house I grew up in – the tarmac gives way to a peat road, holed and stony, which bends out of sight over a hill past the standing stones of Stein-a-Cleit, the remains of an Iron Age settlement or tomb: no one has definitively identified what it was. Past the stones are open moor and lochs for ten miles, an expanse uninhabited till the stretched-out settlements on the east of the island: miles of heather, bog, bog-cotton, the hint of deer, the insistent summer hum and haze of cleg and midgie. Apart from the transatlantic jets passing overhead – the stark skies are rarely without at least one fading tendril of jet-smoke – there are few signs of modernity.
But this is an utterly created landscape. Over millennia, the great forest of Lewis was burned, the peat stripped down metres; the land is now veined through by peat banks, with the traces of àirighean (the sheilings used in the transhumance of previous generations) and flattened, corroded hulks of metal, all that remain of the Hillman Imps, caravans and grocers’ vans dragged or driven last century to be left to rot there, while serving as a shelter during each summer’s peat-cutting. Occasionally, the blade of a tairisgeir will still cut through the skeleton of a bird, preserved in the peat, a boned cave or shell of air; very occasionally now, as the moor passes out of common or frequent use.
Lewis is a place of many languages – the names and nouns are relics and scorings of different cultures: Norse, Gaelic, Scottish, Anglo-Saxon. And it is a place of many departures: its seas and horizons are wide and wild, luxuriously seductive and then terrifying in their changeability.
It is now sixteen years since I lived on Lewis; I have been a confirmed urbanite in Glasgow, Barcelona, Dublin, Belfast and now Edinburgh, and doubt how much I am still part of the idealised trans-historical place of summer I have just described, and how much it is part of me.