Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

When my son Alan and I were visiting Eigg in 2007, we stayed at two places: the Laig Farmhouse and the Lageorna Guesthouse.

Staying at Laig Farmhouse (Alan at 8 years)

I was visiting Eigg again in 2007 with the the great-great grandson of Ruaridh Ruadh, Alan (my son). We stayed at Laig Farmhouse. Unfortunately, I forget the name of the landlady. I remember vaguely that she was not resident on Eigg, but lived in Manchester.

Laig Farmhouse was rebuilt in the late 18th century. At the core of this building is Eigg’s oldest tacksman’s house. It was remodelled by Angus Macdonald to the standard two-storey, three-bay format. The windows were set well in from the sides and smaller above.  Angus was the grandson of the great Gaelic poet Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair.

Breakfasts at Laig

It was quite a delightful stay at Laig. The young teenager daughter served us breakfast in the breakfast room (bed and breakfast).The landlady and her teenage daughter managed to facilitate an enjoyable stay. I vaguely remember the sumptuous breakfast. There was also the company of an elderly couple, who were also staying at the guesthouse. We had an amiable chat while eating our ‘full’ Scottish breakfast. It had egg and bacon, pork sausages, black pudding, fried bread, beans, and toast and marmalade.

This is perhaps an ‘unhealthy breakfast’, according to recent reports. I have eaten Scottish breakfasts, sometimes called “English or American breakfast”, in other places around the globe. Some examples wereThailand and the Philippines, but they never get it quite right.

The disadvantage of eating ‘healthy’ breakfasts, such as the Japanese breakfast, of rice, raw fish, raw vegetables, and green tea, is that it tastes pretty dull. Another is that you might ‘live forever’; hence, you might need to be nursed by robots for the last 20 years of your life! So perhaps British and American breakfasts can reduce health costs, and reduce the torture of living a demented life in a nursing home for 20 years and more!

In fact, Rishi Sunak’s government has proposed to introduce mandatory and free ‘British egg and bacon’ breakfasts for the over-60s to stimulate the farming economy. It reduced life expectancy; thus, also reducing the health and pension costs of an aging population. Rishi says this is much more humane than the ‘cold’ Japanese and their elderly care robots. It is also recommended that free cigarettes should be handed out to encourage social intercourse among pensioners after they have eaten their egg and bacon breakfasts.

Rishi says that this will enable the government to reduce the taxes on the rich, and thus boost the economy; such change facilitates a ‘trickle-down’ effect that will reduce poverty among the millions of the British precariat and working poor.

Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair

Little did I know at the time that one of the great Gaelic poets, Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, was a tacksman at Laig, or at least one of his descendants was. Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair (c. 1698–1770) was a Scottish war poet, satirist, lexicographer, political writer and memoirist. He was born into the minor Scottish nobility, and Clan MacDonald of Clanranald. (…)

According to Derrick Thomson, even though he would have been only a teenager at the time, a memoir by the poet suggests that he may have fought for Prince James Francis Edward Stuart during the Jacobite rising of 1715. Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair died at Arisaig in 1770. He remains, along with 20th century Symbolist Bard Sorley MacLean, one of the two most important poets and writers in the history of Scottish Gaelic literature.

Bumpy and jarring ride

Eigg has only one road. However, this is not strictly true. The road also has ‘sub-roads’ to the various farms, such as Kildonnan and Laig. However, the ‘sub-road’ to Laig was hardly a road at all. All the services on Eigg are located at Galmisdale on the south side of the island; that is, the café, ferry and the island’s shop. The landlady of Laig graciously provided me and my son with free transport from the farm to the café in her Japanese pick-up. Japanese pick-ups are perhaps even more hardy than British and American variants. However, they also had hard suspension. This entailed a pretty bumpy and jarring ride along the dirt track to Laig! 

Comically, this jarring experience brings to mind the article written by John Herries McCulloch some 60 years before in 1957. “The one road isle – but oh! what a road!” (described elsewhere here). John notes, “You hit the trail in the canvas-covered truck driven by Dugald McKinnon, feeling like a pioneer sitting in the shadowy depth of a covered wagon. Every passing mile unfolds beauty, but you don’t notice it because potholes jog your spine and blur your hindsight.” In other words, to rewrite a quote by Shakespeare, you might say that “nothing much changes under the sun” (original quote: “There is nothing new under the sun” (Sonnet 59). 

‘Bad’ father – let’s go rock-climbing on the rock face of the An Sgurr!

For some perverse reason or other, I always liked to ‘trick’ my son Alan. Perhaps it was because I used to enjoy ‘tricking’ my younger brother Gavin when I was a teenager. Anyone who works with children knows that they need an ‘agenda’. That is, “What are we going to do today, or, where are we going today and tomorrow?” So, in order to make things ‘exciting’, I had said to Alan, “Tomorrow we will climb up the rock face of the An Sgurr!” Children are pathological optimists – so the difficulty of such a task never even crossed Alan’s mind! 

The next day we started on the quest of ‘climbing the rock face’. When we reached the bottom of the rock face, after a hike of about 30 minutes along a well-trodden footpath, I said to him, “Let’s take the route around the mountain, and we can get to the top of the mountain that way, because we don’t have our mountain climbing gear.” Alan was of course disappointed when I said we will just walk to the top!  

In retrospect, the climb up to the An Sgurr is perfect for 50-year olds and 8-year olds; it is quite demanding, but manageable. One has the feeling that one is Edmund Hillary climbing up Mount Everest. Apart from the ‘weird’ volcanic formations one is exposed to, there are the Iron Age fortifications; one wonders what they were trying to defend in times long past.

Ceilidh

Ceilidhs are an important part of Eigg life. Any smart dictator knows that you have to give the people ‘bread and circuses’. But Schellenberg was not so ‘smart’, quite the opposite. Keith Schellenberg at this time, had forbidden his ‘serfs’ to use the Eigg Community Hall, accusing them of being ‘hippies’. In short, according to unsubstantiated rumour, the ‘hippies’ set fire to his Rolls Royce, and, ironically, also set fire to his veteran fire engine. He was eventually forced to sell the island. He sold Eigg to the ‘artist’ ‘Maruma’ in 1994. This is described in more detail in Part One of this book.

Staying at Lageorna, Isle of Eigg, in 2007

Alan and I also stayed at Lageorna guesthouse, which is run by Sue Kirk. While staying at Lageorna, by chance, we met Aunt Violet and Uncle Gavin, and their son Alan, and his wife, Kerry, and their two children, Kyle and Erin. We decided it would be a good idea to have a meal together, so I invited them to dinner at Lageorna, which also has a restaurant. 

It’s a little absurd meeting your cousin for the ‘first time’ on a small island in the West of Scotland, when you are already in your fifties! But the fact of the matter is when we lived in England we rarely visited, or had visits from, our Scottish cousins. However, Auntie Violet and Uncle Gavin visited us with their sons when we lived in Billericay, Essex, England in the early 1960s. But the sons were much younger than me at that time, and being a typical teenager, I was not that interested in my young cousins.

On the other hand, my younger brother Gavin had more ‘contact’ with his namesake, Gavin, the elder of the two cousins. But he was still some years younger than Gavin.

In other words, of my several cousins, I only met two of them as far as I can remember. I did meet my cousins Iain and Dawn later in life (my Uncle Donald’s children). But I suppose this is not so unusual in the modern world, characterized by migration and nuclear families that erect walls around their private worlds.

In addition, my mother had a close relationship with her younger sister, Violet, but she did not foster close relationships with her other siblings. This about sums up my mother. On the one hand she had some romantic and sentimental notion of the extended family, but in reality, she tended to erect walls between herself and other members of the family. This inclusion/exclusion policy also extended to the treatment of her own sons.

We finally met up for dinner. I can’t remember much of the actual dinner, but the dining hall was quite relaxing, and encouraged social interaction.