The Bones Should Wash Away

An essay reflecting on the dangers of preserving the past, strange connections and parallels between events over large time spans, and the place of a personal tragedy within the narrative. Having left as a young child when my family moved to the mainland, I returned for a year after finishing school. A great deal of time was spent walking around the village and helping with crofting duties, and I found the experience to be defining.

Winter on the Isle of Lewis is hard. Gales blow hard and brutal. Rain flies sideways; into your eyes, your cheeks, your mouth. It does not fall. There’s no good sunshine for months, coupled with near constant wind, rain, but no snow. Above freezing, but just. Dreich, drab. Dramatic and extreme. I used to run on the windiest of days. Around the village, in the dark. Soles barely grazing the tarmac before I was swept high, arms reaching down from the storm, gripping tight, bruising, dropping me down and throwing me on. Repeating pace after relentless pace. Country music in the ears, and Runrig. Returning, uphill, into the brutal northerly. Pounding fists now in the face, reaching into my frozen gob. My paces would stutter, and I knew the fight was on. Backward progress now, but to stop, to walk, to breathe; surrender. Do not cut the corner. Avoid lying to yourself, and never when wrestling with the hurricane god. The final hundred metres I knew to be euphoric. Not to be undermined. An island storm is an opportunity. To feel the atmosphere, and to perceive what is beyond. To feel small, to be nothing, to push and push and attain… what? In these circumstances I have best felt that wonderful insignificance, and built the will to push through despite the crowding futility of every strained step. 

So it was back then. Years ago, before I was born, when my mother was nearer to the age I now am, and my grandpa similarly close to the age she now is. Then the gale blew, too. As it will continue to blow, until it has blown away all the heather, all the dirt, the gravel, the hard bedrock of Lewisian Gneiss that crops out bare through the stretched coastal soil, or sits buried beneath the fattened slop of inland peat. Some day it will all be gone, if not by wind but by the sea, the great Atlantic that batters and batters, bruises and beats the island, swallowing it sip by sip, then by gulp, the by spit and again by sip. It has always been so. My grandpa walked down to the shore, down to view the disturbed beast taking bites out of the village.  The shore road cuts  through the long, thin acres of communistically divided crofting land, each croft with its share of the good and the bad, each crofter shaping that by his labour or his sloth into his vision of the good and of the bad. Then sheep would be starting only just to be let loose on the fertile, painstakingly, back-breakingly made crop-producing soils. Out of the moor, onto the croft. Now it is standard. That is crofting; let the animals graze, collect the subsides. I do not know who to blame, and I do not even know if it is bad. I know it does not feel good, to see the land rot and waste, and the people of the land watch it and sit motionless, and rot, and waste. My grandpa would have passed ramshackle fences and bare tattie rigs. Remains of the second village, perched on the edge, looking down in shared defeat on the first village. The new village, is the survivor. Eve-less, two-storey houses with grey, harled walls still belch smoke from the same peat that fed the fires of the blackhouses that lie in ruined piles in the gardens of each new house. 

Waves have threatened the village for centuries. Little by little, the beach has moved inland, great stone boulders tossed like pebbles onto machair grass and sand over the course of numberless storms. It is not unusual to find another stone wall exposed, observe as foundations of yet another medieval home were broken and cast sideways. Something unique, placed, constructed becoming another random, water-thrown beach boulder. My Grandpa ran to the shore as something unusual had happened. Not the normal erosion. A special discovery. The bones of the missionaries awaited him. Stone caskets, perhaps once deeply buried, certainly once carefully placed by god-fearing, murder-tainted hands, had been exposed. Their contents were then bared by the sea to the open air. For a brief time, a few hours perhaps, the bones of the missionaries were resurrected, the air in which they died flowing through their chests once more, the wind in which they had sailed touching their bones, the remnants of the village in which they had died greeting them for one final farewell. They washed away in pieces, their graves disintegrating slowly, their skeletons sacrificed piece by piece. My grandfather knew to what it was he bore witness. He knew then the confirmation of a tale laid bare, evidenced, confirmed, and the weight of watching that evidence depart, unrecorded, known to only the few. 

Not always was this the way. Modern man holds an obsession with gravity. We are chained not only to the present, but to past lives, deaths, midden pits, fireplaces. To much is studied and preserved, and what is preserved is often impersonal. It is not memorialised in the collective memory of a community.  The past is paused. In so doing, the present is removed from history. In a sense, we live  in a suspended time. Phantoms of lives lived, of gestures discarded, of rotten corpses, are pickled and jarred. These tellings are lived, they are edited, they are honest. We no longer partake in this cup. We do not share the bread, nor drink the wine. This present is not respected. It is not for lasting. It may be that it does not deserve permanence, to be built into the layers and layers of sedimentary past. There will be no fourth village further still from the shore. Who will look back on our ruins, pick through piled stonework and marvel at the past, our present? Our waste is poison, our houses temporary muck. What legacy will be left? Crumbled concrete, rusted wrecks, and potholed tarmac roads. What is now the value of moving, of preserving, of surviving, of making anew in the embrace of a past that is ours and that is living?

These men were murdered just a few hundred years ago. A Viking execution, set in a time as close to our own as to theirs. The name of the murderer is known, but I myself have forgotten it. It is a name anyone who knows our islands would know, albeit attached to different men in different times. Whether by bow and arrow, or by strike of blunt cudgel, the method can be disputed. But it did happen, and it did happen there, in the village. Their bodies were entombed in shallow stone graves, in a style indistinguishable from the prehistoric burial places littering the Scottish landscape. The continuity is curious. Norsemen once pillaged in foreign parts, attacking foreign men and foreign priests. Once, that place was Lewis. The coast was plundered, churches burnt, and slaves taken. Then it was settled, the local population amalgamating into a new, hybrid people. The settlers were Christian converts. Priests would not now be targeted; they were innocents. And there the invasions stopped. No more settlement. Not until the Fife Adventurers attempted their own early-modern plantation efforts was such a scheme attempted once more. Strange it is, then, to place an event such as the killing of the Ness missionaries in such relatively recent times. 

My grandfather’s surname traces its origins to Mael Ruba, the Red Priest of Applecross. The Ulsterman, a pioneer of the Celtic Church in Pictish times, sailed the western seaboard of Northern Britain. The Red Priest established monasteries up and down the coast, on islands and remote peninsulas. He preached to the Picts, with great success. His life bore many similarities to that of his more famous contemporary, Saint Columba. His heirs came to be Earls of Ross, ruling over vast swathes of the north. And, in time, a descendant of his, my great-great grandfather, made his name as a painter in the impressionist style. He began life as a crofter. Today, his paintings can be found occupying a large section of the National Gallery in Edinburgh. In this display can be seen a masterpiece: ‘The Coming of Saint Columba’. An imagined scene, it shows as what the title suggests. The Ness missionaries, in my mind’s eye, arrived in a scene just the same. Not to pagans, or to unoccupied island moor, but the similarities run deep. The outcome in medieval, Christian times was far more brutal than Columba’s arrival. Blood was spilt. That place was polluted with blood. It owed a debt, and perhaps that debt has now been paid.

My grandpa watched those bones wash away into the sea. He was a last witness of a tale. A rare, true horror in that place of quiet suffering. He stood on those rocks, wind battering his face, waves crashing and words spoken inaudible. Port Arnol, flanked by the cliffs of Arnol to the north and of Bragar to the south, to the east by the shallow, shore-side loch with the man-made Crannog island, and to the west by ocean, St Kilda, and the  New World, would be the place where my Grandpa would die, drowning, desperately, hopelessly trying to save his youngest child, his son, from the same fate. From his vantage point, Baragar cemetery, his own resting place, would have been just beyond his view. His death visible, his burial just beyond reach. One tragedy can lead so simply to another.

Witnesses have no immunity from horror. No matter our efforts, history will not be paused. His grave itself is now cracked, right from the headstone, and the cliffs below are subsiding. The sea will take his bones, as it took the bones of the missionaries, the Holy Men of Ness. In centuries to come, men of Bragar may gather and watch as he tumbles down the cliffs. They may see his headstone, and they might just know his story. If so, they too will play their part in the living of history, in the closing of a tragedy, of the consignment of an unwritten history to the myth-making of man’s memory.