The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (19 page)

I wriggled into the northerly shieling on hands and knees. It was dry inside, and quiet. It felt strange to be in shelter after the long day in the wind of the moor. I felt as if I had stumbled into Tolkien’s Shire. I measured the shieling interior with my body: seven feet across at its widest point, and perhaps five feet high at its apex.

From inside, the simple but exquisite architecture of the shieling was more apparent. It was constructed of gneiss slabs that had neatly overlapped to create the corbelling. Turf had then been laid on top to act as windbreak, insulation and mortar: a living roof that grew together and bound the gneiss in place.

In the southerly shieling I cooked the trout. After supper, I crept out. No midges. A calmer wind, a massive sky; a sensation of extreme emptiness. Loch Reasort’s magnesium-flare sheen, and the day’s light lingering far into the night. In the last phase of twilight, three deer passed close by and upwind of me. One of them glanced at me, and its eyes flashed an alien silver. What was it that Nan Shepherd had wondered about glimpsing the eyes of creatures in the ‘
dark of woodland’
at dusk: whether the ‘watergreen’ colour of their eyes was the ‘green of some strange void one sees … the glint of an outer light reflected or of an inner light unveiled’.

Anatomically speaking, the reason that the eyes of birds and animals glow uncanny colours in low light is due to the presence of the
tapetum lucidum
(the ‘bright carpet’), a mirror-like membrane of iridescent cells that sits behind the retina. Light passes first through the rod and cone cells of the retina, then strikes the membrane and rebounds back through the retina towards the light source. In this way any available light is used twice to see with. What we are witnessing when we perceive ‘eyeshine’ is the colour of the
tapetum lucidum
itself, which varies between species and according to light conditions, but is often red in owls, pale blue in cows and greenish-gold in felines. Even moths and spiders possess this membrane, and their eyes can sometimes be seen in darkness as tiny silver stars.

I slept in the northerly shieling, dry and warm in my den, grateful to have found these ancient shelters out in the moor’s old expanse. I was woken only once that night, by a hoarse coughing close by; rasps of air from the lungs of a deer.

Dawn: two more golden eagles circling above. A big easterly wind meeting the sea wind from the west; the sky above the beehives full of crashing air. I walked on south-east all that day towards the Isle of Harris, following shieling path, croft path, drover’s road and green way, stitching a route together. At some unmarked point I crossed the disputed border between Lewis and Harris, marked on a 1630 map of the Western Isles as ‘a boundary between the two countries’. Around mid-morning a sharp sun burnt through the clouds and set cloud-shadows scooting across the moor:
Rionnach maoim
– another Hebridean Gaelic term of exquisite exactitude, meaning ‘the shadows cast on the moorland by cumulus clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day’. Late that day, on a wet tarmacked road, by whose sides the rusty wrecks of cars and tractors were part sunk into the peat, I reached the peninsula village of Rhenigidale and slept in the youth hostel there, grateful for a bed.

The next morning I went west along the so-called ‘green track’ towards Tarbert, the main town on Harris. The track has been described as ‘the most beautiful path in Britain’, and that day it was hard to refute the boast. The track contoured above sea coves. Raised stripes of
feannagan
, or
lazy beds
, could still be seen on the hillsides; vestiges from the crofting years. After a mile the path dropped down into a sheltered coastal glen called Trollamaraig, and here, protected from the sea wind, I found a flourishing dwarf forest of willow and aspen, honeysuckle, foxglove and woodrush. Then it was up, zigzagging the east face of a hill called the Scrìob until the path eased and led due west between two pap-like peaks with Norse names, Trolamal and Beinn Tharsuinn.

And from that pass, the landscape of the Harris interior was suddenly visible to me – a maze of
scarp
, lochan and moor, laid out like a map to the eye, through which slender paths traced. I descended on shining tracks and under rainbows to Tarbert, and from there I went further south and east down the Harris coast, and eventually I knocked on the door of Steve Dilworth – artist, demi-magus, path-maker – the man who had given me the kist to take north to Sula Sgeir, and in whose house I stayed for several days, days which have in my memory taken on the texture of a fairy tale: the traveller on foot welcomed in off the path for a pause in his travels, to a house of dark wonders, the strangest energies and delight, and an apparently self-replenishing tumbler of gin.

Gneiss

The Hanging Figure — Beef as body, mane as hair — Skulls, skin, sperm, stone — Cryptozoology & shamanism — The aura of inner spaces — The hand-held, the held hand — Magus, murderer — Seal oil, baleen, cochlea — Unicorns? Hippogriffs? Dragons? — ‘The stuff that the world is made of’ — A mummified sparrowhawk —
Atticus atlas
— Swan-murder & pigskin mannequins —
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
— Laputa, the gannetry — A path to the sacred landscape — Erratics — One hundred kilograms of best German lard — Frozen light — The last kist.

I find I incorporate gneiss
& coal & long-threaded moss … & esculent roots.

Walt Whitman (1855)

On the south-eastern coast of the Isle of Harris, in a three-house village called Geocrab, behind a fuchsia hedge, in a chilly thin-walled workshop, hanging by a meat hook from a rafter is a human skeleton. Its 206 bones are held together by sinews of braided seagrass, which, as they pass through the vertebrae, are knotted alternately left over right and right over left. Stitched onto the bones are patches of meat cut from a dead calf, which together form a rough over-body. At the time of their first sewing – when they had been recently preserved using a solution of formaldehyde and sodium fluoride, administered with a horse syringe and prepared according to a mix-ratio perfected by the members of a mid-1920s zoological expedition to the Amazon – the meat patches were still plumply muscular. They have dried out over time, though, and wizened, their fibres bunching and separating such that their texture is now that of well-used hawser. Set within the hollows of the skeleton are a gnarled heart, a liver, two dried eyes and a windpipe, all also retrieved from the same calf. The skeleton is bound by seagrass ropes, and its trussed hands are outstretched before it, as if in a gesture of prayer or supplication. From its skull flares a fright wig of horsehair, black and blonde, the strands dropping down to the
scapulae
.

Steve Dilworth acquired the skeleton one day in 1978 when he contacted an anatomical suppliers in the well-named Gravesend and, posing as a professor of anatomy, bought the skeleton off them for £100, which was then more money than he could easily afford. The bones arrived in a box at the fifteenth-century cottage near Cirencester where he was then working part-time as a gardener. He spent weeks drilling and re-articulating the bones using
marram
and cords, and weeks more filling the skeleton with calf organs and clothing it in calf flesh, and weeks more noosing and binding it. The result – his sacrificial victim, his voodoo fetish, his Grauballe man, his friend – he named ‘The Hanging Figure’.

As Steve and his wife Joan moved around the country, the Hanging Figure moved with them. Eventually in 1985 they washed up on the Isle of Harris, in the coastal township of Geocrab, where the three of them have lived happily ever since.

I knocked on Steve’s door after my crossing of the Lewisian moor, footsore, sweaty and faintly apprehensive. There were shuffling and banging noises from inside the house. The door opened: a figure filled the frame. A hand of welcome was extended. Steve was wearing a
Matrix
-length coat, and slippers. Tall and fair-haired, with high cheekbones and bristling yellow eyebrows, he looks like a warlock or Viking raider. If you only knew Steve from his work and from his appearance, you’d be intimidated by him, imagine him severe and forbidding. In fact, he’s good-natured and clownish, which is a relief. A shaman who took himself seriously would be insufferable.

Within a few minutes of arriving I was at the kitchen table with a coffee in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other, telling Steve and Joan about the night in the beehive shielings and the discovery of Manus’s path. A stuffed guillemot regarded me quizzically from on top of a wall-mounted speaker. On a three-foot-deep southern windowsill sat what looked like the bronze skull of a praying mantis, two feet long and with bulging eyes. Stacked under the window were dozens of empty bird’s-egg display cases: dark pine, glass-topped, segmented by fine wooden partitions, with cotton-wool nests ready to receive each blown dead egg, and copperplated name cards to identify the species:
Sardinian Goldfinch
.
Greenshank
.
Red-Billed Tern
.

The Dilworths came to the Outer Hebrides because it was one of the few places in Britain where they could afford to buy – beg, borrow, build – a house. It turned out that Harris also supplied Steve with the raw materials for his art. He found himself on a coast where he could walk the wrack-line each day to see what it held, and where he could live cheaply in a landscape of animal rituals,
megaliths
, weather dramas and excellent malt whiskies.

‘When he first suggested we move to Harris, I thought he said Paris,’ Joan remarked. ‘So of course I agreed straight away. It took me a while to work out my mistake.’

The best description I have heard of Steve’s art is his own: ‘
I have spent my life
making ritual objects for a tribe that doesn’t exist.’ Among the materials that he uses in his work are the skulls, beaks, bodies, eyes, skins and wings of herons, wrens, guillemots, gannets, woodcock, fulmars, swans, owls, sparrowhawks, buzzards, black-backed gulls, hooded crows, puffin, sand eels, John Dories and dragonflies; tallow, lard, blubber, sperm; seawater collected during equinoctial gales, fresh water gathered from a deep well, still air gathered in a chapel, storm air gathered in the overhang of a boulder; the north wind, the south wind; the bone, baleen and teeth of whales; the vertebrae of porpoises and sheep; bronze, brass, nickel, copper; dolerite, gneiss, granite, soapstone, alabaster; 10,000-year-old bog oak, walnut, mulberry, rosewood; the prow of a fishing boat; hawking lures; sea beans, sand dollars, sea urchins; eggs, feathers and sand.

Among the objects he has made are the dolerite-and-ivory kist which I’d carried north to Sula Sgeir to placate the storm waves; a lead casket, barred with whalebone and bound with rope; a foot-long mulberry-wood chamber in the shape of a coffee bean, ribbed in steel and containing the body of a blackbird; a hollow case made of a shell of lignum vitae and a shield of whalebone, filled with loose dolphin teeth and the whole bound with fishing rope; a walnut sarcophagus, edged and locked with brass, in which lies a bird made of bog oak, beaked and tailed with bronze; a pair of herons, kills from a fish farm, locked into an embrace, their wings hung with hundreds of fish hooks, their legs bound with fine black cord (archaeopteryx fetish; an avian S&M dance). Crypts and chambers recur in his work; the aura of inner spaces, implied but not proven. The internal, often invisible, aspects of an object are considered equally with its palpable surfaces. One of the first of many hand-held objects Steve created was for a friend who was dying of cancer. He scooped seawater on a day of absolute calm, sealed the water inside a vial, sealed the vial inside a polished and hollowed piece of oak, bound the oak with rope and pressed the oak into her hand for her to hold, her own palm and fingers thus becoming the third layer or casing.

Paths and their markers fascinated Steve. After he had heard my description of Manus’s path, he told me how he and his daughter Alexe had traced and then re-walked the routes of the old coffin trails which ran transways across Harris, from the townships on the east coast where the peat was too shallow to receive a corpse, over to the richer and deeper soil of the west coast where the bodies could successfully be laid to rest.

‘Like Manus’s track,’ Steve said, ‘these coffin paths don’t exist as continuous lines on the land. They’re marked by cairns. Some of the cairns are just stones leant up in a triangle, but some are huge, at least as tall as me and really finely made, properly sculptural. Sometimes you get three or four together on a high point, and when you see them from a distance they look spookily like a group of human figures, huddled out there on the moor.’

The journey from east to west could be six or seven miles over very rough ground. ‘It was tough enough walking the path on a sunny day,’ Steve said, ‘with a rucksack on your back and a nice little picnic along the way. To have done it in a group, with a corpse in the coffin and the coffin on your shoulders, slipping on the peat and struggling over the boulders: well, it’s almost unthinkable. But they had to put the bodies somewhere.’