In Shawbost, on the west coast of Lewis where my mother’s family comes from, an old turn of phrase still carries a particular local force whenever someone is spotted heading off somewhere: “Murdo’s gone in the road,” or, just as tellingly, “Murdo’s gone out the road.”
The distinction is not quite what an outsider might assume. To go “in the road” is to move in the safe, familiar direction — usually for work — towards the shore. In the old crofter-fisherman world, that meant the boats drawn up on the beach, the bright strip of sand, the known rocks and the vast Atlantic beyond them.
To go “out the road,” however, suggests something darker. That road leads towards the Great Moor, a place long regarded as faintly ominous, somehow separate from ordinary life. Even as a child, I understood its charge instinctively. As one widely travelled Highlander once observed, in the dramatic wilderness of Canada you felt that no one but God had ever stood there before you.
On the Great Moor of Lewis, by contrast, the feeling is that everyone who ever mattered has already vanished. It is a landscape of bog, heather and low hills, scattered with countless lochans, white cotton sedge flickering in the wind and dragonflies darting over dark water — a place where children were warned not to wander alone.
This was country of bogles and shrieking spirits, of old violence and whispered deaths. It even had, within relatively recent memory, its own serial killer: Mac an t-Srònaich, an outlaw fugitive said to have strangled a maid, drowned children and throttled the occasional bridegroom returning home with whisky for his wedding.
Shawbost, on the west side of Lewis
Mac an t-Srònaich was eventually hanged in Inverness around 1836, but on Lewis his name has never entirely lost its power. Even now, children on the island can thrill themselves with a shiver at the sound of it.
Yet this same moor, stretching across the island, was also the setting for one of the great shared rituals of spring: cutting and gathering the peats, with breaks for tea and small treats. And until the edge of living memory, it was linked to “going to the shielings” — perhaps the last regular practice of transhumance in western Europe.
About May, all the women of the village and their children would pack what they needed, tramp out the road and out the hill – driving the family cows before them – and camp, in traditional stone-and-turf dwellings, for several weeks.
This was partly to give the cattle sweet new grazing, to allow your man to rethatch the family home – an annual chore – and, in an age before galvanised fencing, to keep Daisy away from the sprouting crops.
The mothers, though, usually returned every evening, bearing home the day’s milk and to make their man’s tea.
The children out on the shielings were left in the charge of the teenagers: and the teenagers, as in any age, were far more interested in each other.
As a rule, what happened in the shieling stayed in the shieling, but enough went down for, decades later, to make old ladies go pink and their men heartily chuckle.
And central to those thin white nights of giggles and desire, the first kiss and the odd fumble, was the falaisg – the prudent muirburn.
I must confess to one 1998 memory of a falaisgear at work – probing questions; flirtatious intent, by a little Harris loch beyond sight of any road; we actually called it Loch na Falaisg – that makes me go just a little pink too.
Muirburn has two purposes: to burn off the ‘thatch’ of last year’s dead, dry growth, the better for the grazing, and – counterintuitively – to prevent uncontrolled wildfire.
A lack of grazing has meant wildfires have become a problem in the Outer Hebrides
Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh is also at risk of wildfire
At its most sophisticated, to encourage the sprouting of new soft heather, it is central to managing grousemoor.
Which is why we should be a bit wary when folk clamour – as, this week, some vocally have – for a halt to muirburn while some jobsworths investigate: it tends to be driven by the folk who hate field sports, the gentry, and shooting of any kind.
The day of the shielings took a hammerblow from the Great War and never recovered from the 1939 rematch. But many young folk still lovingly maintain holiday huts in the depths of Lewis, and repair thereto, far from electricity and Wi-Fi and devices, for – uh, oh, those summer nights.
A falaisg might well be totemic of such evenings, of new yearnings and taut desire.
But wildfire is now no joke in Scotland – last weekend, a blaze was so out of control in the Cairngorms that Nethy Bridge had to be evacuated – and, as we have all seen in the news, is now a matter of stark terror in Europe.
Pyrocumulonimbus convection firestorms, generating their own wind systems, hitting temperatures of 1,100C… Tempests flinging burning embers over hundreds of yards of parched undergrowth like mortar fire; scenes at Bordeaux, several days ago, that put you in mind of Dresden.
The threat to homes, the destruction of forest, the spoliation of habitat – in the Cairngorms, the peat in many places caught fire; nothing will grow there again for a generation – and the slaughter of wildlife, from adders to ground-nesting birds – are sobering indeed.
Because our moors, these days, are so little grazed, wildfires have become a serious problem on my own island, especially as we are prone to spring droughts.
One, in 2012, doing some damage to the Lews Castle Grounds and actually closing for hours the main road, was probably started deliberately.
Another, miles to the south of my home in April 2022, had our village thick with smoke; we wheezed and spluttered. And, in 2003, another in Harris so alarmed the authorities they seriously contemplated the evacuation of Leverburgh.
Not that you have to be in the boondocks. In March 2022 there was a destructive wildfire in the Ochil Hills.
Blackford Hill, amidst the suburbs of Edinburgh – much of it thick with whin – has been torched more than once and, by the very Palace of Holyroodhouse and, indeed, the Scottish parliament, Arthur’s Seat went up in flames last week.
Sometimes it is arson. More prosaically, it is a carelessly discarded cigarette butt, or imprudent deployment of a disposable barbecue.
Perhaps as prosaic as a piece of broken glass, in the wrong place, magnifying the rays of the noonday sun.
Sorley MacLean, the great Gaelic poet
Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth…
There is a strict code about muirburn, laid down by NatureScot, and a defined season for it – between 15th September and 31st March.
It calls for common sense, keen awareness of wind direction, sufficient in attendance to control and extinguish it and awareness of particularly sensitive habitats – and, from this autumn, you will need a licence for it.
Not that all our Highland memories of fire are benign and blushful. I am pleased I got to know the great Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean in the last years of his life, and visited him often.
As an ardent young man in the Thirties, he had known a very old man in the village of Duirinish. This elder, in turn, had as a mite known a very old lady. Who had never forgotten, as a little girl, watching the fires blazing across the water in 1746 – thatched homesteads ablaze, as the Redcoats laid waste to Raasay.
