15

ON A CALM DAY, when the swell is not running too high, you can stand at the door of the Shiant house, and in the binoculars see the nearest roofed buildings. There are two of them, one above the other, stepping up the hillside away from a beach of big, white stones. The place, called Molinginish, is twelve miles to the west on the Harris shore. The entire settlement of about eight houses, the others still ruined, now belongs to a Stornoway lawyer, Simon Fraser. There is no road there and he uses it as a weekend and holiday place, walking in from the small village of Rhenigadale a couple of miles away. He is now the Shiants’ nearest neighbour.

One lovely quiet evening, with the Minch as still as a metal plate, I took Freyja over there, motoring on the outboard and with a pod of dolphins part of the way for company. Simon Fraser had seen me coming, met me in his own boat just out from the shore, tethered Freyja on his mooring and invited me into the huge empty barn of a house, perhaps four times bigger than the house on the Shiants, for a glass of whisky. He is a tall, powerful, successful and confident man, an influential figure in the Western Isles, involved in many dimensions of its political and commercial life. In the half-dark by the fire, surrounded by his handsome sons and their beautiful, silent girlfriends, and walking around the crumbly paths of the settlement, scratching past the thorn trees that have sprouted between them, we talked – it felt a little strange, as if we were men in a club, although I was still in my survival suit from the boat and we were here, so far away from the world – about the others who had lived in our two places before us.

They were intimately connected. The family of Campbells who lived on the Shiants from 1862 until 1901 originally came from Molinginish and eventually returned there. For four decades, the journey I had just made would have been one of the central threads of the Shiants’ life and it was through those Molinginish Campbells that the Shiants had one last, full and intensely female flowering before they were finally abandoned.

In 1857, the islands had a new tenant, a man called Mitchell Scobie. It may have been Scobie who wanted to reintroduce a shepherd to the islands. Fishermen had long been in the habit of stealing sheep from the Shiants. The Stewarts had told Teignmouth about it; there are stories from the late nineteenth century of guilty fishermen leaving a few pennies inside the skin of a stolen sheep on the beach between Eilean an Tighe and Garbh Eilean; Malcolm MacSween would later complain to Compton Mackenzie about it; and Hughie MacSween once saw a fishing boat put a dinghy out and head for the shore – ‘I’m sure they were intending to grab something’ – before catching sight of him and rapidly turning tail. Scobie may have wanted simply to protect his stock and reduce his losses. But there might, I think, have been another reason. Donald Campbell of Molinginish and his wife Catherine Morrison may have been desperate to go out to the islands.

Early in the nineteenth century, the Campbells had been cleared off the township of Telishnish, on the shores of West Loch Tarbert on the Atlantic side of Harris. They drove their flocks overland while others of the family sailed their boats round by the Sound of Harris, and up to this stony place on a harsh shore. It was neither worse nor better than any number of places to which the cleared families moved on the shores of the Minch. ‘They have a terrible sea to fish on,’ James Hogg had said of the Hebrideans, ‘and a terrible shore to land on.’ That is true of Molinginish, where the ebb tide and contrary wind whip up a white mass of disturbed water in the bay and where arable soil is as scarce as on Mars. Here the women and children were sheltered by the shore while the men fished Loch Seaforth for herring.

The Campbells were a dynamic and fertile family. Donald had six brothers and four sisters. One of those brothers, Blond Norman, had eight children with whom he emigrated to Manitoba; one of the sisters, Little Mary, married a Morrison, had ten children and left for Quebec. The size of the Campbell flocks were famous throughout the island, and they kept goats and cattle too. Any girl marrying into this hotbed of fertility and energy might well have been in danger of submergence.

In the mid-1850s, Donald was about thirty and Catherine Morrison, from somewhere in Lochs, in her early twenties. They were married in about 1857. Two years later, their first children, Roderick and Marion, were born. They were twins and within a year they were dead.

In the autumn of 2000, on a long walk through the glens of Pairc, thinking about the Campbells, wondering why they should have come to live on the islands, when the current at the time was running so strongly against remote island life, I met, by chance, a woman whose life had also been dominated by the death of her son, when a baby, several decades before. She was old now, living on a croft from which no other light could be seen. Would I help her? she asked from the doorway as I was walking past. There was a tup in the far field, she said, and he was ‘always after the ladies’. Could I move it into another field where it wouldn’t be bothering them the whole time? She gave me a bucket full of sheep nuts to entice the animal into another enclosure.

I found the tup looking excitedly over his fence at the ladies, shook the bucket at him and he trotted after me. I then had tea in the scoured and empty kitchen of the croft.

‘Where do you stay?’ she said. ‘Coit do’n bein sibh?’, ‘Where do you belong to?’

‘In England.’

‘Where there is no God,’ she said, with resignation.

‘How do you know?’

‘I hear it on the radio.’

Her husband had died. He was a tall man, as tall as me, and he died ten years before. At his peak he weighed eighteen stone, but that went down to twelve before he died. So was she alone now?

‘No, I’ve got a daughter. I lost a son when I was eight months pregnant. She’s asleep through there.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘You may be sorry,’ she said, ‘but you’re not listening.’

‘What do you mean?’ The question opened the door to a monologue filled with the language of the pulpit.

‘You’re not listening to God. I knew God for the first time when I was just married. God was speaking to me and I wasn’t listening. I wouldn’t know him. I would not know him. God was saying, “The little man, he’s not yours, he’s mine, and I’m going to take him to me because he doesn’t belong to you.” And everything He was telling me, everything He said, that is what happened. The little man, Norman we called him, he lived just two hours and then he died. And that was right. Everyone needs to learn that God is high and you are low and that’s God’s way of teaching. That is what He did for me.’

I scarcely knew what to say. ‘That’s a cruel way of doing it,’ I said.

‘It’s not cruel. Because that’s what taught me. And still there is a place for him, for Norman, in this house now. If he’d lived, he’d be forty-six now and I wouldn’t have had to send you for that tup.’

The family had endured a hard life. The husband had worked on the roads and she had done the farm. ‘I was milking two cows for the house. There wasn’t anything else. It was what we needed. He’d be doing the sheep and the lambs.’

She returned to her subject. ‘You don’t know God,’ she said again. ‘You don’t know that He is high and you are low. And I will tell you this. The little man came back to me, little Norman came back to me, in a white raiment held in front of Him and I am going there to join him. All I must remember is to put nothing below me. Humility. I am low and He is high. That is what I must remember and I will join him there in Heaven. That is what God taught me. He taught me that by taking the little man. How old are you now?’

‘Forty-three.’

‘Ah well, by the time you’re fifty, you’ll be starting to think about it. Our minds are too small to understand, to know what the air is made of or what water is made of. We don’t know because our minds are too small to comprehend it. And everywhere the Lord – you know what I mean by the Lord? – the Lord is a silent listener at every conversation. You can’t understand that. You can’t understand how the Lord can be everywhere at the same time. Our minds are too small to comprehend it.’

It is usual for outsiders to ridicule the fundamentalist Presbyterianism of Lewis and Harris and it is sometimes difficult not to laugh, out of surprise and embarrassment, if nothing else. I have attended a sermon in Lewis which began: ‘Some of you here might think you are on this earth to enjoy yourselves. You are not. You are here to suffer …’ Almost the only possible reaction is to shift a little in your seat and smile awkwardly beneath the unequivocal glare of the Almighty.

That is scarcely enough. This deeply conservative religion, with its sharp delineations between good and evil, its unequivocal sense of the reality of Hell and the goodness of God, whatever hurt and injury the world He created might impose on His followers, emerged as the people of the Hebrides and the Highlands went through the catastrophic social and economic crises of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At a time when nearly all worldly sustenance was either stripped from them or was falling away under the influence of huge economic and political forces, the radical ministers of the Church were among the very few who stood by the people. As God’s world killed the children, through famine, poverty or disease, God Himself, mysteriously and unknowably good, remained all-powerful, the only refuge and guarantee against a lost eternity.

The churches here, in other words, are a bastion against erosion. They are defensive structures, a form of retreat from the modern and an insulation against the wickedness of the new. However much they have argued and divided over the years, the churches hold on to their congregations because they give a kind of nourishment and support which the material world has often failed to provide.

After speaking to the lonely and troubled widow in her croft, and thinking of Catherine and Donald Campbell at Molinginish after the death of their twins in 1860, I wondered if the Campbells’ move to the Shiants two years later was not also motivated by some desire for a retreat, to the insulation of island life, away from the damage which the world could work and incidentally away from the crowding presence of the other Campbells. The Shiants may have seemed to Catherine Morrison like a refuge.

For whatever reason, they went to the Shiants and for forty years the family became identified with the islands. Donald was known as Domhnall Mor nan Eilean, ‘Big Donald of the Islands’. He was said to have been ‘a big strong man, hard-working and a thorough gentleman.’ Catherine was the more austere and dominant figure, controlling the lives of her children. Soon enough, and certainly within five or six years of their coming to the Shiants, three of them had been born: John or Iain, who turned into a blond, powerfully built giant, a tremendous worker, who was also deaf and dumb. Hughie MacSween thinks it was John who cut the steps up the rocks from the beach on to Garbh Eilean. He had two sisters, Mòr or Marion, and Catriona or Catherine. And they were to become famous throughout Lewis and Harris.

The house they were occupying was, I think, not on the site of the present one, but just to the north of it and just south of the old graveyard.

It was later used by lobstermen from Scalpay and remained roofed at least until 1928 when, at the invitation of Hilda Matheson, Compton Mackenzie gave a slightly woozy-eyed talk about the islands on the BBC:

You see that diminutive hut thatched with reeds, mind your head, the door is only four feet high. You had better sit down at once, or the smoke will make your eyes smart. It’s rather dark inside because the only light comes from the hole in the thatch which is letting out the smoke. Gradually, however, your eyes get used to the dimness and you find yourself in a dwelling place that has grown as it were out of the island like one of its flowers. It is as genuine a product of environment as Robinson Crusoe’s residence. It makes you a little impatient even of a tent. Every bit of wood used in the construction has been washed ashore on the island beaches – even the planks covered with rushes on which you are going to sleep. You might disdain your quarters at first, but after you’ve climbed all over the islands you will be glad enough to lie down and sleep with the firelight flickering on the sooty thatch, watching the blue cloud of smoke above your head and pearl-grey Hebridean night through the only aperture.

There, for the first ten years or so of their Shiant life, the Campbells lived. They grew ‘potatoes, barley and oats, cabbages and etc.’ as Calum MacSween told Compton Mackenzie, and cut peats on the heights of Garbh Eilean ‘but as to how he managed to come down from Garbh Eilean to House Island with a bag of peats on his back is a conundrum.’

Life soon improved. In 1870, the tenancy of Pairc and the Shiants changed again. The new tenant was Patrick Sellar, son of the infamous Patrick Sellar who was tried (and acquitted) for his cruelties in the Sutherland Clearances. This Sellar, who had mainland farms as well, would be pilloried by a string of witnesses from Pairc in front of the Napier Commission in 1883, but at least he did something good for the Campbells. He built them a new house, with two rooms and two garrets, a fireplace in each end and two large windows looking out to the Galtas and Molinginish on the Harris shore. It was in this house and its predecessor nearby that the Campbells sheltered the crew of the Neda when it was wrecked on the south-west tip of Eilean an Tighe in February 1876. All visitors to the Campbells speak of Donald’s charm and courtesy. With generosity and warmth, he and Catherine looked after the shipwrecked sailors, and in particular the child that had been swept into the surf.

In June 1879, the naturalist John Harvie-Brown came out to the Shiants, hitching a lift on HMS Vigilant, a fisheries protection vessel. Harvie-Brown, thirty-five, enormously rich, charming, bearded, a bachelor, slightly asthmatic and a little fat, profoundly and invigoratingly fascinated by all aspects of the natural world, gives a sudden sight of the Campbells at home. With him was his friend, Matthew Heddle, Professor of Chemistry at St Andrews, the pioneer of mineralogy in Scotland, who was now fifty-one. Donald Campbell was now about fifty-three, Catherine forty-six, their son John nineteen and daughters Mòr and Catriona seventeen and fifteen respectively. On board the Vigilant, the two gentlemen, as Harvie-Brown wrote in his diary:

reached the bay below the shepherd’s house & landed. None of the Shepherds’ family spoke English except the two daughters who spoke a little. The family consists of two daughters both uncommonly handsome girls. My fancy was the younger & I think sweeter-tempered and merrier of the two – Bella – Profr. Heddles fancy was the tall graceful dark haired black-eyed Spanish looking belle who would have graced any ball room. She certainly is one of the very loveliest women I ever beheld. Then there is a deaf & dumb son who afterwards assisted us and acted as our guide – a fine looking, strong fair haired giant, a little bonny girl – a younger sister – and the father & mother.

The little girl was in fact Donald’s niece, Mary Campbell, daughter of Donald’s brother Kenneth. She was here, extraordinary as this has always seemed to me, as servant to her uncle and cousins. She was about six years old. There is no need to imagine any sort of Dickensian cruelty but the idea of a maidservant on the Shiants in the 1870s – and she remained with them here until the 1890s – suddenly reorientates any primitivist picture you might have had. These beautiful girls, in a well-run household, in a modern house, with extensive vegetable plots around the bay, a professional father – he was away ‘at the clipping’ on one of Sellar’s mainland farms at the time of Harvie-Brown’s visit – with a capable and consistent concern for the well-being of others: this is not at all like Compton Mackenzie’s peat-smoked vision of naturalness. This was modern civilisation alive and healthy on the Shiants. Life here was better than in the cramped and highly stressed conditions of either Molinginish or Scalpay, where by the 1870s five hundred people, cleared off good land in the north-west of Harris and the island of Pabbay, had been crushed on to an island which before the 1840s had supported two families.

The deaf-and-dumb boy guided Harvie-Brown on his ecstatic trip around the islands. ‘Puffins breeding here and filling the air and covering the sea with their hosts. Compared with other rock stations of the Puffin I would fancy that the Shiants far surpass any other,’ he wrote excitedly.

The gentlemen left the next day, ‘after bestowing our little presents all round, and were rewarded by the bright smiles and thanks of this most interesting and kind family. Before leaving the Shore, I received a small collection of eggs of the various birds which are found breeding here, originally collected by the shepherds family for food.’

The beautiful Mòr and Catriona were, increasingly, trouble for their mother. Among the attractions for the Lemreway boys who drowned here in 1881 may well have been the prospect of spending an evening with the two uncommonly handsome Shiant daughters. Three years later, another yacht, the Stella, owned by Mr JT Marsden of Lancaster, called in at the Shiants. There must have been many other visiting yachtsmen but Marsden was known to Harvie-Brown, and a page from the Stella’s log is preserved among Harvie-Brown’s papers. Marsden had a party of sporting London doctors on board: AK Gale, a surgeon from Fulham, Dr Atkinson from Kensington (known as ‘Professor’) and Dr RJ Reece from Bart’s Hospital in Smithfield.

July 23rd 1884

Shooting and fishing is now the order of the day – puffins, Guillemots, razorbills, Kittiwakes &c falling to the gun … Not waiting until the anchor was dropped, [an] eager party consisting of Reece, Gale, Professor, Skipper, and Bobby [cabin boy] lowered the dinghy and rowed ashore, intent upon slaying many wild fowl and armed with guns, rifles, & revolver in a most formidable manner.

From information received from the book of sailing directions, we were under the impression that the islands (3 in number, but one is inaccessible), were not inhabited except by sheep: what then was our surprise to come upon first, a boat hauled high and dry upon the narrow neck of gravel connecting the two most southerly islands. It was much cracked and dried by the sun, and perfectly unseaworthy and bore the appearance of having been out of the water a considerable time. Leaving this, and turning a corner of the rocks, we came upon a calf and a cottage and proved it to be used exclusively for cattle. Further on we came upon yet another cottage, and approaching it, we were met on the threshold by a colly dog who showed his teeth in anything but a friendly manner. The dog was followed by an ancient Gael [Donald was about fifty-eight] who kept us in conversation of a limited description (owing to his ignorance of English and ours of Gaelic). Evidently this delay was to enable his family to put their interior in order, for presently we were invited to enter by the Gael’s wife [now about fifty-one] and two blooming daughters [twenty-one and nineteen] (the latter, by the way, the best looking lassies we have yet seen in Scotland). Milk was set before us. After a short chat of rather limited description, the party separated …

The ancient Gael was taken on board by the Skipper and treated to whisky and various cakes of tobacco, which made him almost dance for joy. Professor afterwards came on board and after rummaging several silk handkerchiefs from his locker went ashore again and presented them to one of the damsels aforesaid. She seemed inclined to hug him but was evidently controlled by the presence of her mother who never for a moment left her.

Nothing could be clearer: fierce attraction between the young English doctors on the hunt and these extraordinary island girls, their father’s universal good will and good cheer, and in the background Catherine’s anxious, overseeing, patrolling severity. One can only imagine the scene after the doctors have left, the silk handkerchiefs the object of Catherine’s contempt and of the unfavoured sister’s silent envy.

Harvie-Brown returned a couple of years later, this time on his own yacht, which he had called the Shiantelle, and with a photographer, William Norrie of 28 Cross St, Fraserburgh. They had come, Harvie-Brown wrote in his journal, ‘in order to get a photo taken’. On 24 June, there is this note: ‘Fog, fog, fog as we lay at anchor at the Shiants. With line caught Dab, landed and Mr Norrie took several photos of the Campbell family – the shepherds on the Shiants. Mr & Mrs C, their deaf and dumb son and daughters, a nice group.’

I have searched the world for those photographs. Harvie-Brown deposited his collection with what are now the National Museums of Scotland. Norrie’s glass plates are likely to have been among the papers given to the museum but the curators cannot find them. There is some confusion between departments and accounts of a few ‘clearings-out’ of their holdings in the Thirties and Fifties. The Shiants photographs may have been thrown away then. There are some Norrie photographs in the Geological Museum in London, but any picture of the last Shiant Islanders is not among them. William Norrie himself died in South Africa, pursuing minerals, but there seems to be no trace there. The family then moved to America and William Norrie does have a grandson alive in Idaho, but the Idahoan Norrie has been ill and no one with an interest in the photographer has yet had access to what he holds. It seems as if those precious images, captured on a foggy June day in 1887, have disappeared.

Before Norrie and Harvie-Brown left, they gave the Campbells some presents and received others in return: ‘2 pairs of lovely stockings, a basket of eggs and a bottle of fine milk.’ Those are the objects by which to judge the Campbell’s life: knitting by the fire, chickens on the midden, the house cow, milk in a bottle, an exchange of presents, a sense of generosity, civility, beauty, industry and grace.

By then, though, the catastrophe which Catherine Campbell must have been dreading for years had already struck. Every winter, lobstermen came over to the Shiants from Scalpay to set their creels in the incomparably rich waters around the islands. Even into the twentieth century, there were so many lobsters around the Shiants that one boat from Scalpay in the 1920s caught sixty dozen in the space of a single week. I have spoken to a member of its crew, Bullet Cunningham. (‘Why is he called Bullet?’ I asked a neighbour. ‘Because standing in his way was never thought to be that good an idea.’) He can remember hauling up a creel at the Shiants with six fully grown marketable lobsters inside. ‘Six of them snapping like there was no tomorrow.’

The nineteenth-century Scalpaymen were here for income and food. They took their lives in their hands in search of it. Only two years before the visit, a boatload of four young Scalpay fishermen, two of them Morrisons, had disappeared at the mouth of Loch Bhrollúm. Their eighteen-foot open boat had been overwhelmed in a sudden surge. Donald MacSween told me about it when describing the ‘bad corners’ of the Minch:

There’s a rock there, not so wide a channel as between Mianish and Sgeir Mianish on the Shiants, and the rock is not so high but you can just squeeze yourself in there and the theory is that they went in there, that day, a rough day, a bad day, and the backwash just caught them. There was another boat that got in that day ahead of them but they didn’t get in and they only found the pieces of the boat, nothing more, not the men. That was a Morrison boat and there was another boat disappeared not long after. They didn’t known where because they had gone for a week’s fishing and they didn’t come back, and no one knew where it was they were drowned but they think it might have been there, because that is a bad place, a bad corner.

The mother of the Morrison boys searched the shore for weeks, looking for their bodies, but found only a cap and the tiller of the boat. Glamorous, charming, brave, healthy, strong, witty, sexy men: is it any wonder that Mòr and Catriona Campbell fell for them?

When William Norrie was photographing his ‘nice group’ by the house, Mòr, the elder, then about twenty-three, was already pregnant with a child, a girl, called Catherine or Kate, who was born later that year. The father was a young fisherman, John Morrison of Scalpay. Two years later, her younger sister Catriona followed suit and gave birth to a boy, Donald. Her lover, unrelated to the other, was another young Scalpay Morrison, Donald, a fisherman. Neither man married his girl.

You can still hear a faint echo of the talk in Scalpay at the boys’ conquests. It’s ribald enough. High on the south-east side of Eilean an Tighe, at the top of the sea cliffs, not far from the peregrines’ nest, there is a rock formation, of the sort to which people like to give names. A couple of boulders have fallen and jammed into a cleft. From the sea, as you come round the point of Mianish, it looks like the silhouette of a man with his head slightly bowed and his penis stuck out in front of him. I have heard that Malcolm Macleod, the Stornoway boatman, likes to call it ‘Adam Nicolson finding relief’. The name for it on Scalpay remains, a little chillingly: Iomall Tòn Catriona, ‘Catriona’s arse’.

Not that Mòr or Catriona would have been that unwilling. Songs collected by Margaret Fay Shaw in South Uist in the 1930s are quite clear that a kind of excited sexual naughtiness was common currency among Hebridean girls. ‘Brown John,’ one love song begins, ‘catch me, Brown John, hug me, / Brown John, catch me, before I make for the wood. / If you do not catch me, someone else will.’

Another is more explicit still, an invitation to rape, sung to Margaret Fay Shaw by Màiri MacRae of Glendale, then perhaps in her sixties. It might well have been a song the Campbell girls knew.

Did you see the modest maiden
whom young Neil ravished
on the top of a mountain on a sunny day…

Alas, oh King! that I was not his.
I would not shout out
or cry out loud,
though the bosom of my dress were torn.

Mòr and Catriona kept their little children with them on the Shiants and the Morrison boys never married them. The Campbell girls, who would have graced any ballroom, remained spinsters all their lives. Illegitimacy was not unheard of but it was a source of shame. I have spoken to an old woman on Lewis about her own illegitimacy. She knows of her own half-sister, a teacher on Lewis, and has seen her and even spoken to her, but the teacher doesn’t know that they share a father, and the illegitimate daughter ‘will not trouble her with it.’ She had never talked to her own mother about it either. ‘I didn’t want to drag it up again, not just to hear the story. What was the point of that?’ And at the end of every sentence, as I asked her about this, she would say ‘That’s it’, with a closing sigh.

Those, I guess, might have been Catherine Campbell’s words too, an exhausted resignation, perhaps accompanied by an intensifying of control, perhaps a deepening of the anger. The women themselves were considered at fault. I have heard a story in Scalpay, scarcely repeatable, and certainly not with names attached, of a married man who was in the bar in Tarbert, being ribbed about his inability to father any children. ‘It’s not me,’ he said. ‘It’s the wife.’ The others doubted him and he walked out of the bar to prove it. He went to his wife’s sister, a woman ‘of easy virtue’. She duly became pregnant, had the child, his honour was saved and she was banished for the rest of her life to a house on the edge of the moor, away from the heart and warmth of the village, ‘a terrible fate’, as it is rightly considered on Scalpay today.

Not that the Morrisons disowned their children. Both Mòr’s daughter Kate and Catriona’s son Donald were accepted as Morrisons by their families and treated as such, although again I have heard people say on Scalpay that Kate, when she was an older and still beautiful woman, known as Kate of the Island (she had never left the Shiants until she was fourteen), would always be coming around to see her Morrison relatives, insisting, too much it was felt, on their blood relation, as if her island conception and birth somehow cut her off from a sense of belonging.

These beautiful and sexy girls out in the middle of the Minch, surrounded and besieged by the man’s world of boats and danger at sea, exercised a powerful pull on the male imagination of Harris and Lewis. Stories still circulate there – and I don’t give them much credence myself, in the light of Donald’s character – of incest in the family, and of Kate and Donald as the products of incestuous union. Others tell with some relish of the girls rowing themselves across the Minch to visit their boyfriends on the opposite shore. It was what, I suppose, every man there longed for. Tommy Macrae, the keeper at Eishken, even told me that one of the Shiant Islanders, no name, had a lover in Crossbost, fifteen miles from the islands. It was, he said, just near enough for the boat to be carried up there on one tide, for a single kiss to be snatched from the girl, before the Shiant Islander, whoever he was, had to turn again for home on the ebb. Tommy Macrae also told me, with a face as straight as a die, that a sea monster had landed on the Shiants when the Campbells were there and had impregnated one of their cows, that a calf had been born, that it had ‘been carried ashore’ at Lemreway in Lewis and that every cow now to be found in Lemreway is a descendant of that calf.

My father, in one of those cross-generational meetings that seem to collapse the passage of time, met Mòr Campbell in Tarbert in July 1946. Calum MacSween introduced them. ‘She is eighty-six years old, can neither read nor write, and speaks no English,’ my father’s diary says. There was not much beauty now. ‘She lives in a one-roomed poor-house, crouching over a peat fire, or sitting at a distaff.’ Her mother, she told him through MacSween, had not allowed her to visit Harris until she was nineteen, in the early 1880s. When there, ‘she was very homesick for the Shiants and cried all day until she was taken back. When we got up to go, she laid a skinny hand on my knee and tears came into her bleary old eyes. She clearly loves the Shiants very much.’

One small object survives from the Campbell life of the 1890s. It was found by the naturalist and historian Mary Harman, author of a classic work on St Kilda, who was on the Shiants researching a book on other smaller, outlying Hebrides. Tucked into the stones of the kailyard next to the eighteenth-century house on Eilean an Tighe, she found the wooden hull of a small boat model.

It is a finely carved and subtly formed thing, cut out of a single block of deal, and beneath its lichened surface are the remains of one or two coats of paint, a fleck here and there, the black boot-strap at the water-line, the green hull above it, red below. I took the boat to Simon Stephens, the Curator of Ship Models at the National Maritime Museum. He knew immediately:

It’s a Zulu, vertical stem, raking stern, double-ended. That is a classic Scottish Fishing Zulu. Invented on the east coast, 1878, something like that. When was the Anglo-Zulu war? 1879 was it? And what did Zulu mean? Something classy, modern and outlandish I suppose. This one’s been through the wars. ‘Weathered’ shall we say? But you can see what it is. It’s the work of a fisherman or whatever, someone who understood the boat.

This is the last of the Shiants’ list of tutelary objects: the torc, the hermit’s pillow stone, the medieval brooch, the decorated cragganware, the stone tools, the scrimshawed plate, the kelp irons, the boat nails from the house roof and now this. Who made it? It might well have been one of the Scalpay lobstermen. Donald Morrison himself, Catriona’s lover, may have carved it for their son Donald. All the Scalpay boys used to have their toy boats and all except this one have now disappeared. But there is another possibility. The deaf and dumb John, in his thirties by the 1890s, was well known for his skill in woodworking. It is possible that the Zulu was made by the silent and indulgent uncle for his small nephew, to play with on winter evenings or in the summer when the family was up at the grazings on Eilean an Tighe, keeping the flock from wandering down to the vegetable patch and arable rigs around the bay, filling his boring hours with this wonderful modern toy. Perhaps that was why it ended up in the wall of the kailyard. Young Donald just pushed it one day between the stones, leaving it there – he was twelve in 1901 – and never came back.

At Easter that year, his grandmother Catherine died. She was about sixty-eight, by all accounts exhausted and saddened by the turn her life had taken, with her family – a disabled son, still referred to on Lewis as the balabhan, the dummy, two fallen daughters and their bastard children – held in a vice around her. Schooling had been compulsory for all five- to thirteen-year-olds since the passing of the Education (Scotland) Act in 1872 but no Shiant Islander had been near a school. They were not allowed away. Nevertheless, Catherine was undoubtedly loved and revered by her son John. He made a coffin for her out of driftwood, so perfectly, I was told by DR Morrison, historian and poet on Scalpay, that ‘when the undertaker from Tarbert, Robert Morrison the joiner, was asked to prepare her for burial, all that was necessary was what they call the braid, the cloth for the body, and the handles for the coffin. Everything else, even just with the driftwood he had, John had made flawlessly.’

There are other signs, though, that Catherine’s death was a form of release. As soon as she died, the family lit a fire on the beach next to the house, a place in which a flame is clearly visible from Molinginish, where their Campbell cousins were still living. Catriona’s grandson, Donald Morrison lives in Tarbert. His father Donald was the owner of the toy boat and I have now returned it to him. He knew little of the life on the Shiants but had heard from his father about the urgency of their departure from the islands.

The timing could not have been worse. It was Easter – it must have been Good Friday – and all the people were away from Molinginish and Rhenigadale at Tarbert, at the Easter Communion. They were there for several days and there was no one on the shore in Molinginish to see the fire they were making on the beach. And so for days they had to wait there on the islands keeping the fire burning. It was only when they were coming back from the communion, walking on the path that comes over the hill to Rhenigadale and Molinginish, that they saw the light in the Shiants. It was then that they roused people on the shore and took a boat from Rhenigadale out to the islands and found that the lady had died.

Catherine’s family left with her body in the perfect driftwood coffin and never returned. The urgency of their departure is strange. Donald Morrison did not hear any explanation for it from his father. Why should they have been in such a hurry to get away? Why did all of them leave on Catherine’s death, when none of them had left in the previous forty years? The only explanation I can give is that she had been keeping them there. She had refused to go back to the Campbell enclave at Molinginish and had wanted to preserve the moat of the Minch between her family and the world. Her death released them and they returned to the other Campbells at Molinginish. There are buildings on the hillside there, pointed out to me by Simon Fraser, still known as the houses of Donald, John and Kate of the Islands. Donald died in Molinginish in 1910. John, the deaf and dumb giant, died there in 1937. Catriona had another illegitimate son Roderick and died in Tarbert in 1945. Young Kate worked for a gamekeeper on the Eishken estate at Mulhagery, just opposite on the Pairc shore. Every evening as she gazed out at the islands, which she had not left until she was fourteen, she is said to have wept at the loss of her home. Later on, as Mòr told my father in 1946, she went to keep house for ‘an old gentleman in Edinburgh’. Young Donald became a merchant seaman. Mary Campbell, old Donald’s niece, is said on Scalpay to have run away with a gamekeeper in Pairc. The memories of the Shiants slowly faded away and since Easter 1901, no one has lived there.

Catherine’s body was taken by boat and then along the rough moorland road to the graveyard at Luskentyre on the Atlantic shore. It would be difficult to think of a more beautiful place in which to be buried. The bodies of the cleared reclaim some of the good land in death. The bay is the colour of the Bahamas and the rollers curl in off the Atlantic. The sand blown in by the winter storms is spread between the graves like a covering of snow and the fine machair grasses poke their tips above it. The stones of the most recent graves are big, black slabs, with the names of people from the villages of the east side, Rhenigadale, Scalpay, Urgha, Tarbert, Geocrab, Flodabay, carved on them, but the most poignant of all these memorials are the earliest, scattered around a low hummock to one side of the cemetery. They are poverty itself, a flake or two of pink-veined gneiss, picked from the surrounding moor, neither polished nor engraved, but marks of a kind, articulate for their inarticulateness. Nowadays a thicket of roses is encroaching on this oldest part of the Luskentyre burying ground. Somewhere within it, where the wrens jump from one thorny stem to another, landing from time to time on the little stones, the body of Catherine Campbell is concealed.