THE CROFTER'S TALE

William Dalrymple travels

to the Hebrides in search of second sight

STROND lies exposed on the long, grey, barren coastline of southern Harris, in the Outer Hebrides. It isn't much of a place: a cluster of crofts and steadings, announced by black piles of rough-cut peat and backing on to a series of volcanic skerries. Through the low fog you can see sheep nibbling at bog asphodels in the heather; the wind whistles through the tasselweed and scurvygrass; there are no trees.

Two weeks ago, I found myself tramping around the village in black, driving rain, trying to search out a 'seer': a woman with the traditional Celtic gift of second sight. In Edinburgh I had been told that there was one such woman surviving in the village; in a fit of rashness, I had found the place on a map, packed my bags and set off into the rain.

None of the old croft widows knew anything about the woman. They shrugged their shoulders and directed me to Kenny MacSween at the Stores; if anyone knew

anything about a seer, they said, it would be Kenny.

'I couldn't take your time for just a minute?' I asked.

'I've got plenty of time,' he replied gloomily. 'The one who made time made plenty of it.'

Kenny MacSween had a soft, sad, sand- blasted Highland face: luminous blue eyes, and a shiny, balding head, whose last remaining hairs were brylcreemed back to maximise their impact. He chewed Extra Strong Mints, chain-smoked Embassy Re- gals and directed us into his van. He was going to deliver groceries up the road; we could talk to him while he was doing his rounds.

'The woman you want is dead,' he said at last, 'Aye, she's been dead a while now.' He paused: 'Over a hundred years.'

'A h. '

'It will be an old tale now for it was my grandfather who was telling it to me,' he 'Nothing every happens in Pompeii, my friend.' said at length. 'Her name wag Jessie Macleod, and she had an unwanted gift. Some are of the opinion it was an evil spirit. This is where she lived.'

He pulled the van to a halt and pointed through the drizzle to a small moss-covered ruin on the machair, just above the shore.

'Does anyone here have the sight to- day?'

'No,' he said. 'Or if they do, they keep quiet about it. It's no a good thing to have. But you can usually tell, anyway.'

'How?'

'They usually vomit.'

'Are you sure?'

'Oh aye. They were usually sick. When they had a vision their stomach would turn. They knew they were seeing something others could not see.'

'And what did they see?'

'As far as I can gather it was always a message of doom that they saw. Death and doom. Never good news.'

'Never?'

'No, no. Just doom.'

He shook his head mournfully, then slunk out to deliver a box of provisions to a croft. When he returned he carried on.

'This Jessie,' he said. 'She used to work in the Stores when they belonged to Alastair MacLeod. In those days the shop was open to all hours. It was like a ceilidh — everyone would come in and sit around and talk. One night Jack Mackenzie walked in while Jessie was behind the bar. As Jack went over to the counter, Jessie collapsed in a heap on the floor. No one said anything, but they all knew for sure it was the sight that was upon her.'

`So what happened?'

'Och, the usual story. Three days after, Jack went out with the lobster creels. The boat got caught in a gale and sank, within sight of Jessie's shop. All four boys on board were drowned. Aye, they all perished.'

He shook his head sagely.

'After the drowning my grandfather asked Jessie what she had seen that night.

She said that as Jack walked up she had seen a wall of water crashing over him. That was when she was sick. Aye, she was a real seer was Jessie.'

I had only recently developed an interest in the second sight. One morning in early

August I had arrived at breakfast to find a large brown paper parcel. Inside, hidden beneath layers of cardboard lagging, there lay a large book, bound in old blue

buckram. It was a dog-eared copy of Martin Martin's A Description of the West- ern Islands of Scotland, first published in 1695, and now almost impossible to obtain. I had ordered the book months previously in a specialist Edinburgh bookshop, and had long since forgotten all about it.

Martin Martin's book was the goad that prompted Johnson and Boswell to make their famous tour of the Highlands. In the National Library in Edinburgh there sur- vives a copy of the first edition with the following handwritten inscription: This very book accompanied Mr. Samuel Johnson and me in our tour of the Hebrides in 1773. Mr. Johnson told me he had read Martin when young. . . . His book is a very imperfect performance, and he is erroneous as to many particulars. . . yet as it is the only book upon the subject, it is very well known. I cannot but have kindness for him, notwith- standing his defects. James Boswell, 16 April 1774.

Few modern scholars would be so catty about Martin's book. At the time when he was writing, the Outer Hebrides were more distant, even to the inhabitants of Edinburgh, than Outer Mongolia is today. And it was not just the land that was obscure: a Hebridean drink like whisky was unheard of in the south, so that even a century later Dr Johnson could try a dram 'for experiment' and find it, to his surprise, 'preferable to any English malt brandy.'

Much of Martin's book is given over to workmanlike descriptions of Hebridean landscape, agriculture, diet and so on, but it is when he writes about customs and superstitions that he comes into his own. As described by Martin, the superstitions of the Hebrides are often indistinguishable from those of the ancient Britons as described by Tacitus or Caesar: on one of the isles off Lewis, for example, the sailors still propitiated the sea gods by brewing malt ale at Hallowtide, then wading into the sea and throwing a cupful into the waves, chanting an incantation as they did so.

Most remarkable of all is Martin's record of the survival of the taish or second sight. In Caesar's time 'seers' (or vales) were an important element in Celtic society, and although they were already beginning to die out when Martin was writing, they were still common enough for their gift to be treated like an extra sense, as everyday as smell, touch or vision itself. Martin devotes a whole chapter to the subject and includes many examples of prophecies which he himself saw fulfilled.

The visions generally concerned death — a seer would see a vision or a person covered with a shroud and the person, perfectly healthy at the time, would die soon afterwards; in another version the seer would be wandering along a road at midnight when he found himself 'in a crowd of people, having a corpse which they carry along with them; and after such visions the seers come in sweating and describe the people that appeared: if there be any of their aquaintance among them, they give an account of their names, as also of the bearers, but they know nothing of the corpse . .

Seers, I imagined, had died out long ago. Fifty years after Martin's book was pub- lished, the Highlands were devastated, first by Culloden and the suppression of the clans, then by the clearances and the emigrations to America. Today the very last remnants of traditional Hebridean society are disappearing: Gaelic is going down in front of English, crofting giving way to tourism, and the faeries, like the great shoals of herring which used to fill the Hebridean fishermen's nets, have dis- appeared without trace. That the tradition of the second sight could have survived the disintegration of the society that produced it seemed unthinkable.

Nevertheless, soon after I had finished reading Martin, I met a man who had worked for two years in the Isles. He maintained that there were still seers in the Hebrides, although today they kept quiet about their gifts due to the disapproval of the Kirk. Caesar's vales were trained (it took 12 years to become a qualified seer; 20 to be a full Druid) but their modern successors, he said, received their gifts involuntarily. He recommended that I visit the Isle of Barra, the most distant and isolated of the inhabited Hebrides. The island was Roman Catholic and traces of the old religion had lingered stronger there than in any of the other, Protestant Heb- rides.

By pure good fortune, it turned out that the Parish priest of Barra, Fr Calum McLellan, had been at seminary in Rome with my uncle. He greeted me like a lost nephew, plied me with cups of coffee, and immediately filled me in on the island's folklore: 'Of course people don't talk about these things openly,' he said. 'Even here, people have become so tied up with the television that they talk more about Dallas than what happens around the corner. But the sight is still in existence.'

Two hours later, when I left Fr Calum, I had a list of all the possible seers in the island. Top of the list was Donald Mac- Neil, one of the oldest crofters on Barra. He lived in a small, whitewashed house beside the church of St Brendan, sup- posedly founded by that saint during a stopover on his famous — if probably mythical — journey to America in the seventh century. In front hens pecked about the rusty sk %leton of an old red tractor; all around the air was acrid with the scent of burning peat — a thick, fusty smell like smouldering mothballs.

Inside, the house was warm and com- fortable, with the chairs drawn up around the peat-fired range; a pair of wally dogs flanked the mantelpiece. Donald, dressed in boiler suit and tweed flat-cap, invited me to take a seat while he put his copper kettle onto the range. When tea was ready, he sat back and began to speak: 'In the old days they really had the sight. My goodness! The old ones had the wonderful tales; some of them used to see the future as clear as day. Now we don't see so much. . .

He gestured at the television at the other side of the room: 'This box here has spoiled the world! We've only had the electricity in Barra for 20 years, and look what it's done. The children don't bother with the old songs, or their heritage. And they don't believe in the sight. . . . They say it's all in the mind. None of the youngsters have it. . . The crofter paused, 'The sight used to run in families, and there was certainly a little of it in my blood. My sister was the first to see things. She had a friend who — poor soul — was the radio officer on the Tresilian. He was a local boy, a MacNeil, related to us. One night my sister was going from Ledaig to Horve with two of her girlfriends when the three of them saw this beautiful light coming in across the bay. It passed Kisimuil castle and set off slowly along the road, and over their heads. It passed Borve and came down in the old cemetery.'

Donald rocked backwards and forwards in his chair: 'My sister knew immediately that her cousin was dead. She was upset, and came straight over here. I said that it was nothing — probably marsh gases — but no, this young boy was drowned at sea that very night. He went down with the boat, radioing for help. His body was recovered and brought back. On its way to the cemetery of course, it took the same route as the light had taken.'

'What about you?' I asked. `Do you have the sight?'

Donald considered before replying. `No I wouldn't say I have the sight,' he said eventually. 'But I've seen . . . a strange thing, once.'

He looked down at his feet, as if afraid of meeting my eyes while admitting to this. 'Twenty years ago the parish priest in Castlebay — this was long before Fr Calum's time — was very ill, and I had taken my turn at nursing him. At midnight he said, "You can go now, Donald, but be specially careful tonight." I was walking home and wondering why he said that, when all of a sudden I saw . .

'A funeral procession?'

'Aye,' he looked up and smiled, 'that's right. You probably think I'm daft, but as sure as I'm sitting here it's true. I thought, "Goodness gracious! What's a funeral doing at this time of night," but I stepped back sure enough and let it pass. The coffin was open and I knew the boy inside. When I got home I told my wife what I'd seen, and she said, "a lot of rubbish", so I kept quiet about it. But two days later the boy who I'd seen was killed. That was 20 years ago now.'

'And have you seen anything since?' I asked.

`No,' replied Donald. 'And it's not just me. I haven't heard any stories of the sight in all that time. Maybe it's finally died.'

'The television?' I asked.

'No,' he said, 'it's not just because of the television. There doesn't seem to be the same contact with the spiritual world as there used to be. Life has become so busy that there's very little of the spiritual left in people. Even in a place like this. . . .' He gestured out the window. From where I was sitting I could see only empty sheep tracts stretching out to the dunes, with the Atlantic breakers crashing beyond. 'Even in a place like this,' he repeated, 'there's no time left for . . . for contemplation.'

He picked up the copper kettle from the range.

'Would you be having another cup of tea?'

The paperback of William Dalrymple's In Xanadu is published next week by Flamingo at .£4.95.