The Crofter and the Post Man

Mike has a way of getting people to talk. It may be his thoughtful questions, or perhaps the way he turns his full attention on the answer. Our hostess at the Balranald preserve, was a crofter, working the land around us with her husband. The land they had inherited from his father who, in turn, had received it from his uncle. She spoke in the gaelic lilt, softening her "ch" from the hard "k". We'd walked her land that morning, following a dirt track that cut out into the bouquet of the machair, and through fields of oats, barley, and rye. We had passed through a cattle gate, and shut it behind us, securing the bolt and the line. The headland, rocky and tree-less, was pasture for cows, but also for the wheatears, dunnocks and pipits that flitted away from us as we walked.

Crofts are small farms, worked by tenant farmers. While the Scottish Government owned the land at Balranald, the North Uist Estate, she told us, owned the majority of the island as a gift from the queen. But for the crofters, the rent wasn't high, and after a tumultuous history, their place was secure, unless they abandoned the land or let it lie fallow. It wasn't meant to be a big money maker, just a few animals and crops to see them through the winter. As she saw it, there wasn't any benefit to owning. The landowners retrained fishing and shooting rights, but otherwise the land was hers to work and pass down to her children and her children's children.

She handed us our scones slathered with butter and

black current jam, their warm weight easing through the paper napkins that held them, and gave directions to the bus stop. We left, reluctantly, and headed up the driveway to wait for the post bus.

***

The regularly scheduled 10:09 Royal Mail truck pulled over at the bus stop to let us in. We paid our fare and took a seat behind the driver next to cartons of mail. Our route took us past post boxes and offices, where the driver hopped out with his ring of keys to collect the mail.

He grew up in Edinburgh, he told us over the engine's rattle, but moved out here fourteen years ago with his wife. It was a good place to raise a family: safe and tranquil.

The mail he collected was headed down to the main office at Barra, where it would be sorted and flown to the mainland from Barra's sand beach. The flights are tide dependent, as the high tide covers the runway, and so the flight schedule changes daily. I tried to imagine it, I'd seen the air strip from the ferry. But then, here I was in a mail truck doubling as a public bus.

The postman dropped us off at Clannach where we changed to the bus for Langass, but he promised to collect us at half-two and take us the rest of the way to Lochmaddie. Though off of his scheduled run, he'd be passing by that way on his way back to town. The time allowed us two hours to explore the 5000 year old cairn of Barpa Langass and the stone circle of Pobull Fhìnn. And collect us he did, greeting us warmly, and ferrying us the last five miles into town. The red truck offered shelter from a driving mist that had just begun to fall. We quickly fell into conversation.