Ring of Bright Water. Gavin Maxwell
the snow was still heavy on the high peaks and lay like lace over the lower hills of Skye across the Sound. The air was fresh and sharp, and from east to west and north to south there was not a single cloud upon the cold clear blue; against it, the still-bare birch branches were purple in the sun and the dark-banded stems were as white as the distant snows. On the sunny slopes grazing Highland cattle made a foreground to a landscape whose vivid colours had found no place on Landseer’s palette. A rucksack bounced and jingled on my shoulders; I was coming to my new home.
I was not quite alone, for in front of me trotted my dog Jonnie, a huge black-and-white springer spaniel whose father and grandfather before him had been my constant companions during an adolescence devoted largely to sport. We were brought up to shoot, and by the curious paradox that those who are fondest of animals become, in such an environment, most bloodthirsty at a certain stage of their development, shooting occupied much of my time and thoughts during my school and university years. Many people find an especial attachment for a dog whose companionship has bridged widely different phases in their lives, and so it was with Jonnie; he and his forebears had spanned my boyhood, maturity, and the war years, and though since then I had found little leisure nor much inclination for shooting, Jonnie adapted himself placidly to a new role, and I remember how during the shark fishery years he would, unprotesting, arrange himself to form a pillow for my head in the well of an open boat as it tossed and pitched in the waves.
Now Jonnie’s plump white rump bounced and perked through the heather and bracken in front of me, as times without number at night I was in the future to follow its pale just-discernible beacon through the darkness from Druimfiaclach to Camusfeàrna.
Presently the burn became narrower, and afforded no foothold at its steep banks, then it tilted sharply seaward between rock walls, and below me I could hear the roar of a high waterfall. I climbed out from the ravine and found myself on a bluff of heather and red bracken, looking down upon the sea and upon Camusfeàrna.
The landscape and seascape that lay spread below me was of such beauty that I had no room for it all at once; my eye flickered from the house to the islands, from the white sands to the flat green pasture round the croft, from the wheeling gulls to the pale satin sea and on to the snow-topped Cuillins of Skye in the distance.
Immediately below me the steep hillside of heather and ochre mountain grasses fell to a broad green field, almost an island, for the burn flanked it at the right and then curved round seaward in a glittering horseshoe. The sea took up where the burn left off and its foreshore formed the whole frontage of the field, running up nearest to me into a bay of rocks and sand. At the edge of this bay, a stone’s throw from the sea on one side and the burn on the other, the house of Camusfeàrna stood unfenced in green grass among grazing black-faced sheep. The field, except immediately opposite to the house, sloped gently upwards from the sea, and was divided from it by a ridge of sand dunes grown over with pale marram grass and tussocky sea-bents. There were rabbits scampering on the short turf round the house, and out over the dunes the bullet heads of two seals were black in the tide.
Camusfeàrna
Beyond the green field and the wide shingly outflow of the burn were the islands, the nearer ones no more than a couple of acres each, rough and rocky, with here and there a few stunted rowan trees and the sun red on patches of dead bracken. The islands formed a chain of perhaps half a mile in length, and ended in one as big as the rest put together, on whose seaward shore showed the turret of a lighthouse. Splashed among the chain of islands were small beaches of sand so white as to dazzle the eye. Beyond the islands was the shining enamelled sea, and beyond it again the rearing bulk of Skye, plum-coloured distances embroidered with threads and scrolls of snow.
Even at a distance Camusfeàrna house wore that strange look that comes to dwellings after long disuse. It is indefinable, and it is not produced by obvious signs of neglect; Camusfeàrna had few slates missing from the roof and the windows were all intact, but the house wore that secretive expression that is in some way akin to a young girl’s face during her first pregnancy.
As I went on down the steep slope two other buildings came into view tucked close under the skirt of the hill, a byre facing Camusfeàrna across the green turf, and an older, windowless, croft at the very sea’s edge, so close to the waves that I wondered how the house had survived. Later, I learned that the last occupants had been driven from it by a great storm which had brought the sea right into the house, so that they had been forced to make their escape by a window at the back.
At the foot of the hill the burn flowed calmly between an avenue of single alders, though the sound of unseen waterfalls was loud in the rock ravine behind me. I crossed a solid wooden bridge with stone piers, and a moment later I turned the key in Camusfeàrna door for the first time.
Two
THERE WAS NOT one stick of furniture in the house; there was no water and no lighting, and the air inside struck chill as a mortuary, but to me it was Xanadu. There was much more space in the house than I had expected. There were two rooms on the ground floor, a parlour and a living-kitchen, besides a little ‘back kitchen’ or scullery, and two rooms and a landing upstairs. The house was entirely lined with varnished pitch pine, in the manner of the turn of the century.
I had brought with me on my back the essentials of living for a day or two while I prospected – a bedding roll, a Primus stove with a little fuel, candles, and some tinned food. I knew that something to sit upon would present no problems, for my five years’ shark hunting round these coasts had taught me that every west-facing beach is littered with fish-boxes. Stacks of fish-boxes arranged to form seats and tables were the mainstay of Camusfeàrna in those early days, and even now, despite the present comfort of the house, they form the basis of much of its furniture, though artifice and padding have done much to disguise their origin.
Ten years of going into retreat at Camusfeàrna have taught me, too, that if one waits long enough practically every imaginable household object will sooner or later turn up on the beaches within a mile of the house, and beachcombing retains for me now the same fascination and eager expectancy that it held then. After a westerly or south-westerly gale one may find almost anything. Fish-boxes – mostly stamped with the names of Mallaig, Buckie or Lossiemouth firms, but sometimes from France or Scandinavia – are too common to count, though they are still gathered, more from habit than from need. Fish baskets, big open two-handled baskets of withy, make firewood baskets and wastepaper baskets. Intact wooden tubs are a rarity, and I have found only three in my years here; it has amused me wryly to see cocktail bars in England whose proprietors have through whimsy put them to use as stools as I have by necessity.
A Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson instinct is latent in most of us, perhaps from our childhood games of house-building, and since I came to Camusfeàrna ten years ago I find myself scanning every weird piece of flotsam or jetsam and considering what useful purpose it might be made to serve. As a beachcomber of long standing now I have been amazed to find that one of the commonest of all things among jetsam is the rubber hot-water bottle. They compete successfully – in the long straggling line of brown sea-wrack dizzy with jumping sand-hoppers – with odd shoes and empty boot polish and talcum powder tins, with the round corks that buoy lobster-pots and nets, even with the ubiquitous skulls of sheep and deer. A surprising number of the hot-water bottles are undamaged, and Camusfeàrna is by now overstocked with them, but from the damaged ones one may cut useful and highly functional table mats.
A surprising number of objects may be used to convert fish-boxes into apparent furniture. Half of one of the kitchen walls, for example, is now occupied by a very large sofa; that is to say it appears to be a sofa, but in fact it is all fish-boxes, covered with sheet foam rubber under a corduroy cover and many cushions. Next to it is a tall rectangle, draped over with a piece of material that was once the seat-cover of my cabin in the Sea Leopard, my chief shark-hunting boat; lift aside this relic and you are looking into a range of shelves filled with shoes – the whole structure is made of five fish-boxes with their sides knocked out. The same system,