Paul Theroux - The Kingdom by the Sea - A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

We were walking around Balnakeil Bay; he was headed for a farmhouse. We passed a shepherd driving a flock of sheep to be shorn.

Doctor Pike said, "You might take that shepherd to be a fool or a rustic. But most of these shepherds are sensible men. I mean, they read. I go to many of these shepherds' wee cottages and — do you know? — I find lots of books in some of them. They take books with them out on the hillsides."

We had a good view of the sea — the mouth of the bay was wide. There were no boats out there. I seldom saw boats, at any rate. It was one of the roughest areas on the British coast, and the scarcity of boats added to the feeling of emptiness I felt on shore. It was like the world after a catastrophic bomb.

Doctor Pike was still talking about shepherds. He said, "There was a man here from Edinburgh. He saw a shepherd in the hills and said how wonderful it was to get so much fresh air and exercise. 'But how does it feel to be so far from the center of things?'

"The shepherd stared at him and smiled. 'That depends what you mean by the center of things.' You see, he felt that it was just a matter of perspective. Who was this city man to say that the shepherd was not at the center of things?"

I told Doctor Pike that I had seen nine sheep drown in the incoming tide at the Kyle of Durness. He said it was a pity but it sometimes happened. Although sheep could swim, the horns of a ram made it hard for the creature to keep its head up, and the lambs were too frail to swim very far. But he said that he loved sheep — he loved working with them.

"They have very keen instincts. They have a wonderful sense for forecasting the weather — they know when a gale is coming. They begin leaving the hills many days before it begins to snow."

The next day I went with Doctor Pike to Loch Eriboll. It was a sea loch piercing ten miles of Sutherland, and it was deep enough to take the largest ships. In the storms for which this part of Scotland was notorious, ships found a quiet anchorage here.

"I want you to see something," Doctor Pike said.

We rounded a bend, turning south toward Laid, along the shore of the hugh loch.

"Look at this hillside," he said.

It was a rough, steep slope, covered with small white boulders. Patches of the slope had been plowed, but most of it was covered with glacial rubble and humps, and the grass was blackish and sparse. Some sheep stood on it and looked at us with their characteristic expression of indifference and curiosity. This grazing land was very bad.

"Now look over there, across the loch," he said.

It was like a different country, a different climate. It was not bouldery — it was soft and green. There were grassy meadows and gentle slopes over there. It was sheltered by the mountains behind it, and pleasant streams ran through it. There were trees over there! There were no houses; there were no sheep.

But this windswept side of the loch — the western shore, on which we stood — was lined with tiny whitewashed cottages. They were surrounded by broken walls and fences and some bushes. And there were gnarled trees, none higher than the cottage eaves. The roofs fitted the cottages in an irregular way, like lopsided caps, and made the cottages pathetic.

"These people once lived over there, on the good side of the loch. They were cleared off that land and moved here. They were crofters then — they're crofters still. They were given the worst land."

He was talking about the clearances, the evictions by the chiefs and landlords who wanted to cash in on the land. It had taken years, but the Highlands were eventually emptied — that is, the fertile parts. Enormous sheep farms replaced some crofts, and others were turned into playgrounds — grouse moors and baronial estates. This was also a major reason for the tremendous number of Scottish emigrants, dispersed across the world between 1780 and 1860. So what had seemed to me no more than an early chapter in a history of Scotland, or a melodramatic painting by Landseer, was a lingering injustice. The cruelty of the clearances was still remembered, because many people who had been made poor still remained where they had been dumped.

"Is it any wonder that some of them are poachers?" Doctor Pike said.

He was fairly passionate on the subject. He said the land ought to be nationalized and divided into smaller units. The land could be made productive — people would have jobs.

I said he was the first left-wing veterinarian I had ever met. He denied that he was left wing. He said most radicals were devils. Then he said, "Want to meet one of the victims of the clearances?"

We stopped at a small white cottage near the edge of the loch and were greeted by an old man. This was Davey McKenzie. He wore a tweed hat and a threadbare jacket and loose trousers. His shoes were cracked and broken. He had a healthy face and good color, and he was sinewy. He was about seventy or a bit more. He raised some sheep and he grew vegetables and he was always followed by a black terrier with a pleading face that lay down and snored whenever Mr. McKenzie sat down.

"We can't stay," Doctor Pike said.

"You'll have a cup of tea," Mr. McKenzie replied. He had the same Norse whirr in his accent that I had been hearing for days.

We entered the cottage and were introduced to Jessie Stewart, Mr. McKenzie's sister. She was perhaps a year or two younger than he, but she was pale and rather feeble. Doctor Pike whispered to me that she had recently had an operation, and he added, "She's far from well."

"Sit down in front of the fire," she said. "I'll put the tea on."

It was the end of June — a few days from July — and yet a fire burned in the cottage hearth, and the wind made the rosebushes scratch at the window.

Doctor Pike said, "Don't trouble yourself, Mrs. Stewart."

"It's no trouble," she said. "And don't call me Mrs. Stewart. No one calls me that. I'm Jessie."

The cottage was comfortable but austere — a few potted plants, pictures of children and grandchildren, a calendar from Thurso and some Scottish souvenirs, a glass paperweight showing Arthur's Seat, and a little doll in a tartan kilt.

Doctor Pike said his piece about sheep scab and then turned to me. "You know you're in the Highlands when people make you welcome like this. No one is sent away. If you come to the door of a Highlander, he lets you in."

"That's very true," Davey McKenzie said softly.

"I know a rune about that in Gaelic," Doctor Pike said. "Translated, it goes like this:

'I saw a stranger yestreen.

I put food in the eating place,

Drink in the drinking place,

Music in the listening place—

And the lark in its song sang!

'Often, often, often, often,

Comes the Christ in the stranger's guise.'"

"That's very beautiful," Davey said.

"Some people come," Jessie said. "But these days there are vandals about. We never locked our doors before, but now we lock them. People come — they look so strange, some of these hikers and campers, and the women are worse than the men."

She went for the tea. Doctor Pike said, "I was telling Paul about the crofters here, how they were moved from the other side — from that good land."

He did not say that it was over a century ago.

"It was unfair, aye," Davey said. He blinked at me. He had wet, red-rimmed eyes. "There's so much good land lying idle. Aye, it's hard land where we are."

He was a quiet man. He said no more. It seemed to me terrible that he had spent his whole life trying to feed his family by digging this stony ground, and always in sight of the green fields under Ben Arnaboll across the loch.

But the bad land had turned many people into wanderers. Jessie Stewart's life was proof of that.

"So you come from America," she said to me. "I've been to America myself. I spent eighteen years there."