Old

 "I had passed through lands that were saturated with invisible people, with lives lived and lost, deaths happy and unhappy, and the spectral business of these wild places had become less and less ignorable." ~ Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

We headed up the hill under a heavy sky, stepping around the boggy places where too many feet had cut through the heather. We angled up over the brow of the hill and came upon the cairn, circling it to find the entrance. We lost sight of each other across the dome of loose grey stones flecked with white that loomed above our heads. One of the chambers had collapsed, leaving entry unwise, but we peered inside using our headlamps. A long stone lintel rested across the pillars that created the entrance. Inside, rocks, shone with condensation. The cairn dated back 5000 years, but archeologists know little except that it houses the remains of an important chieftain or warrior. If ballads were composed in his honor, their words are long lost.

Two days before, at my request, we'd cut in off the ocean to see the chapels at Tobha Mor. The name Clanranald had drawn me, as one of the possible derivations of my name. We came into the village, now called Howmore, on a farm road at the dune side, passed the new church and turned onto the main road. A sign directed us onto a footpath behind the hostel, and there, tucked into a lot in the middle of town stood the head and footboards of celtic chapels. Each of the structures was thick-walled with a casement that narrowed to an arrow-slot like window. Lichens, plumped by mist and rain, festooned the stones in green, silver and vibrant orange. The mist hushed the village sounds, and made me feel all the more that we were walking in a sanctuary. The Clanranald chapel was the oldest of the bunch, dating back to 1200 CE, though a few stones and crosses in the yard, offer evidence of an earlier Christian presence. 

 The more recent history of the Highland Clearances had haunted our walking since we'd arrived. Empty house-shells strewn across the landscape left us asking again and again, "what happened?" Begun in the 1790s when sheep farming became a more profitable venture than tenant farming, land owners began to clear their land of its inhabitants: crofters, families, and highlanders, most of whom had called their crofts home for generations. In addition to the abandoned homes that stood on the land, the clearances ravaged the celtic and highland culture as families moved to cities or overseas toward jobs and new lives.

As I understand it, this forced emptying of the land was, at times, brutal and cruel, but so, too, was the life lived by many of those who worked the land before the clearances began. The houses were small, and provided shelter for large families. Open fires of peat served as cookstove and hearth, the smoke of which gave the dwellings their name, blackhouses. They were, for the most part, windowless, dark, and smokey. The land, long-ago cleared of trees, was marginal for farming. This history lesson accompanied us everywhere. Along Loch Lomond we waked by hollow buildings with roof thatching replaced by sky. On Mull, stone walls marked out once-domains, and out here, on the edge of the earth, sorrow seemed to draft from empty doors: sorrow at a hard life, and sorrow at the impossibility of leaving a place called home.

In each of these places, along highways and lake shores, in villages and farm fields, I began to wonder what it must be like to live shoulder-to-shoulder with history. For me, a visitor in this place, with eyes for which everything is new, the stones stirred an understanding of the depth of time. My own third of a century seemed a small, neat package in the face of fifty centuries. And deeper than our human time, lay rocks whose age was counted in millennia. In these lands, Earth became elder, and I walked more lightly upon her.