Vol. 19 No. 21 · 30 October 1997
pages 32-33 | 4046 words
Diary
David Craig
Eight years ago, at Buaile nam Bodach on Barra, the landlady at the B&B had said, ‘My great-aunt was cleared from Pabbay’ – the next island but two to the south, the third-last joint in the backbone of ‘the Long Island’ of the Outer Hebrides. I was researching my book On the Crofters’ Trail at the time, collecting from people whatever their grand or great-grandparents had told them about the High-land Clearances, when landlords desperate to increase the income from their land forced many thousands of small tenants from their homes by a mixture of bribery, threats and the torching of their thatch, their roof-timbers and their looms.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 24 · 11 December 1997
From Margaret McHugh
David Craig’s Diary (LRB, 30 October) about the Outer Hebrides mentions the Coddy, ‘Barra’s famous memorialist or seanchaidh ‘. I discovered Barra in 1945: the Coddy was in full flight and Compton MacKenzie had a house on the Cockle Strand. The Lochearn left Oban before daylight and carried a cargo of sheep and a white stallion which was swung over our heads to the hold. The journey to Barra took almost 12 hours and we were met by the Coddy in his car, of which he was inordinately proud. Other visitors to the island travelled on the back of the coal lorry.
The Coddy took us all around the island and told us the most hair-raising stories of second sight. The evenings were spent sitting in front of the glowing peat fire listening to more tales told by a priest. I have lived in Australia for thirty years, but when I hear the wind in my pine trees here, I imagine it is the sea roaring on the white strand.
Margaret McHugh
Yass, New South Wales
Vol. 20 No. 3 · 5 February 1998
From Penelope Curtis
Readers who enjoyed David Craig’s Diary from Barra (LRB, 30 October 1997), and subsequent letters, might enjoy another diary, written from Harris in 1817-18 by the naturalist William MacGillivray (a version edited by Robert Ralph is published by Acair). MacGillivray visited the island of Pabbay in December 1817 and made a number of notes and lists of things observed, many of them comparable to David Craig’s. Unlike Craig, however, MacGillivray was able to smoke tobacco and drink mash and whisky in the island’s brewhouse. Pabbay, then regarded as ‘the granary of Harris’, was divided into two parts, one tenanted by Mr MacNiel, the other by a ‘great number of small farmers’. The MacNiels were to become the competitors of the MacGillivrays, and by the end of the diary William is detained in Harris awaiting the settlement of his uncle’s affairs. The diary falls in the middle of the Clearances, which were to destroy the communities about which MacGillivray writes so engagingly. He was not simply the budding ornithologist who later published a History of British Birds, but also a spirited commentator who enjoyed all the opportunities he was afforded by the social life of the island to drink, dance and ‘take Miss Marion up to the sheep-fold’. Within twenty years of his writing the journal, every village in West Harris would be cleared: according to the book’s glossary (and in answer to the problem David Craig set himself), Pabbay was cleared in 1842.
Penelope Curtis
London W12
