Ring of Bright Water. Gavin Maxwell
innocuous were regarded with a wary suspicion. I met only one of Joe’s lost tribe, and he has died since, hastened to the churchyard by a life-long predilection for drinking methylated spirits. He was, I think, in his early sixties when I first encountered him; he told me then that the perils of his preferred liquor were greatly exaggerated, for he had been indulging for forty years and only now was his eyesight beginning to suffer. He confided, however, that it was an inconvenient craving, for most ironmongers throughout the length and breadth of the West Highlands had been warned against supplying him, and he had been driven to the most elaborate of subterfuges to keep his cellar stocked. It was, perhaps, as well for him that he died before electricity came to the remote and outlying areas, for then, as I discovered to my cost, methylated spirits became virtually unobtainable.
The cave-dwelling pedlars had not always been the only inhabitants of the Camusfeàrna coastline, for before the Clearances in the early nineteenth century – whose cruelty and injustice are still a living ancestral memory in a great part of the West Highlands and Hebrides – there had been a thriving community of some two hundred people not far from where Camusfeàrna house now stands. The descendants of one of these families still live in California, where their forebears settled when driven from their homes, and of them is told one of the few local tales of ‘second sight’ that I have come across in the district.
The children of the old settlement at Camusfeàrna used to walk the five miles to the village school every morning and five miles home again at night; each child, too, had in winter to provide his contribution to the school fire, and they would set off before dawn for the long trudge with a creel of peats on their backs. One night this family had given shelter to an old pedlar, and as he watched the two sons of the house making ready their load in the morning he turned to their parents and said, ‘Many a green sea they will go over, but many a green sea will go over them.’ The boys came of a sea-faring line, and when they grew up they too followed the sea; one became a captain and the other a first mate, but both were drowned.
The tumbled, briar-grown ruins of the old village are scattered round the bay and down the shore, but the people are gone and the pedlars are gone and the house at Camusfeàrna stands alone.
Whereas the stories of ‘second sight’ are comparatively few, and refer most commonly to past generations, it should be realized that this bears no relation at all either to current credence in the faculty or to the number of people who are still believed to possess it. Quite contrary to general opinion, a person having or believing him or herself to have this occult power is extremely reticent about it, usually afraid of it, and conceals it from all but his most intimate friends. This is not because he is afraid of mockery or disbelief in the sense that his neighbour will say ‘Behold this dreamer’, but because men fear proof of a power beyond their own, and are uncomfortable in the company of one who claims or admits to it. These people who are convinced of being endowed with what is now more usually called extra-sensory perception are also frightened of what their own clairvoyance may show them, and it seems that they would willingly exchange their lot for that of the common man. Only when they are convinced that their gift can at that moment be turned to benign use are they prepared to call it voluntarily into play. My impression is that a deep, fundamental belief in the existence of ‘second sight’ is practically universal throughout the Western Highlands and the Hebrides, even among intelligent and well-read people, and that the few scoffers are paying lip-service to the sceptical sophistication they do not share. Circumstantial tales of other less controversial matters survive in the oral tradition with but little change in these districts to which literacy came late in history, and there is no reason to assume that those concerning ‘second sight’ should have suffered disproportionate distortion.
My nearest neighbour at Camusfeàrna, Calum Murdo MacKinnon, of whom I shall have more to say presently, comes of Skye stock, and tells a tale of his forebears which by its very simplicity is hard to ascribe to past invention. In the days of his great-grandfather a boy was drowned at sea, fishing in the bay before the village, and his mother became distraught with the desire to recover her son’s body and give it a Christian burial. Some half-dozen boats with grappling irons cruised to and fro all day over the spot where he had been lost, but found nothing. The talk of all the village was naturally centred on the subject, and in the late evening Calum Murdo’s great-grandfather, over eighty years of age, infirm and totally blind, learned for the first time of all that had taken place. At length he said, ‘If they will take me to the knoll overlooking the bay in the morning I will tell them where the body lies. They will need just the one boat.’ The searchers obeyed him, and in the morning he was carried to the summit of the knoll by his grandson, who brought with him a plaid with which to signal at command. For more than half an hour the boat rowed to and fro in the bay below them with grapples hanging ready, but the old man sat with his blind head in his hands and said never a word. Suddenly he cried in a strong voice ‘Tog an tonnag! – Hoist the plaid!’ His grandson did so and the grapples sank and returned to the surface with the body of the drowned boy.
Calum Murdo MacKinnon – ‘a small wiry man in middle age’.
Very little survives in legend from the early inhabitants of Camusfeàrna; surprisingly little when one comes to consider that in all likelihood the community existed for thousands of years. The earliest stories date, probably, from the Middle Ages, and one of these tells of a wild sea reiver, born in the bay, who harried the coast to the southward – notably the Island of Mull, with its many secret harbours and well-hid anchorages – in a galley, one of whose sides was painted black and the other white; an attempt, presumably, to refute description or to undermine morale by reports that in aggregate might give the impression of a pirate fleet. Whatever his tactics, they seem to have been successful, for he is said to have returned to Camusfeàrna and to have died, in old age, a natural death.
In the British Isles it is a strange sensation to lie down to sleep knowing that there is no human being within a mile and a half in any direction, that apart from one family there is none for three times that distance. Indeed few people ever have the experience, for the earth’s surface is so overrun with mankind that where land is habitable it is inhabited; and whereas it is not difficult to pitch a camp in those circumstances it is very rare to be between four permanent walls that one may call one’s home. It brings a sense of isolation that is the very opposite of the loneliness a stranger finds in a city, for that loneliness is due to the proximity of other humans and the barriers between him and them, to the knowledge of being alone among them, with every inch of the walls wounding and every incommunicable stranger planting a separate bandillo. But to be quite alone where there are no other human beings is sharply exhilarating; it is as though some pressure had suddenly been lifted, allowing an intense awareness of one’s surroundings, a sharpening of the senses, and an intimate recognition of the teeming subhuman life around one. I experienced it first as a very young man, travelling alone, on the tundra three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, and there was the added strangeness of nights as light as noon, so that only the personal fact of sleep divided night from day; paradoxically, for the external circumstances were the very opposite, I had the same or an allied sensation during the heavy air-raids in 1940, as though life were suddenly stripped of inessentials such as worries about money and small egotistical ambitions and one was left facing an ultimate essential.
That first night as I lay down to sleep in the bare kitchen of Camusfeàrna I was aware of the soft thump of rabbits’ feet about the sand dune warren at the back of the house, the thin squeak of hawking bats, woken early by the warm weather from their winter hibernation, and the restless piping of oyster-catchers waiting for the turn of the tide; these were middle-distance sounds against the muffled roar of the waterfall that in still weather is the undertone to all other sound at Camusfeàrna. I slept that night with my head pillowed upon Jonnie’s soft fleece-like flank, as years before I had been wont to in open boats.
The first thing that I saw in the morning, as I went down to the burn for water, was a group of five stags, alert but unconcerned, staring from the primrose bank just beyond the croft wall. Two of them had cast both horns, for it was the end of the first week in April, two had cast one, but the fifth stag still carried both, wide, long and strong, with seven