Rod Smallwood: Nether Moor Images
Raasay is a small island lying between Skye and the mainland. Unlike most of the Hebridean islands, it has beautiful woods of birch and rowan, festooned with lichens. The strikingly diverse geology is reflected in the vegetation. The proprietor, George Rainy, cleared the common people off their land, replacing them with more profitable sheep. The memory remains, as do the house ruins. Unusually, there are also remains of heavy industry – an ironstone mine worked for a few years during the First World War by German Prisoners of War, in defiance of international agreements. The scenery is peaceful and beautiful, witness to inhumanity and outrage.
Towards the north of Raasay, Calum’s Road – built by Calum MacLeod with shovel and wheelbarrow – leads from Brochel to Arnish. From Arnish, there are paths to Eilean Fladday’s tidal causeway and to the remote bothy by Caol Eilean Tigh. Walking south, at the top of a long hill, the view to Dun Caan opens up. Below Dun Caan is the fertile limestone grassland of Hallaig and Screapadal. The people were cleared from there onto the infertile gneiss in the foreground. In the far distance is Rubha na’ Leac, above which is the track to Hallaig and the monument to Sorley MacLean.
‘Between the Leac and Fearns
the road is under mild moss’ (Sorley MacLean, Hallaig).
The track from North Fearns to Hallaig is wide and well-built until the cairn
commemorating Sorley MacLean. It runs part-way up the hillside between the
beach and limestone cliffs. Below the track are grass-covered walls, remains of
dwellings and field walls.
Below the track from North Fearns to Hallaig is an enclosure with a handsome wall, the upper part one vertical stone thick. The sanctuary of Applecross is on the other side of the Inner Sound.
After Sorley MacLean’s cairn, the track becomes a footpath through a birch wood.
‘I will wait for the birch wood
until it comes up by the cairn
until the whole ridge from Beinn na Lice
will be under its shade.’
After the birch wood, the fertile limestone grassland below Dun Caan can be seen, with the remains of Hallaig above the enclosure wall.
The enclosure wall at Hallaig was built using the stone from the houses, and the name of the wall-builder is remembered. Applecross is on the horizon.
Below Dun Caan is green fertile grassland on the limestone. The people were cleared from here to make way for sheep, which were more profitable than people. The remains of houses are scattered across the more level ground.
Some house remains at Hallaig still stand waist-high, others are only low mounds in the grassland. It seems beautiful in the sunshine, and peaceful, with Applecross visible across the Inner Sound, but ecologically this is a devastated landscape and the Highlands as a whole are a monument to destroyed communities.
Part way up the east side of Raasay is Brae, with obvious house remains like this, and other walls buried in the grass. A path through the birch wood leads to Inver on the Sound of Raasay. There is said to be a Norse burial below the tree.
Ironstone was mined in the south of the island during the First World War. The buildings of Mine 1 are about 100 m above sea level, at the head of an incline down to the pier. The compressor house and haulage house can be seen, with the Cuillin on Skye across the Sound of Raasay. The mine entrance is to the right of the buildings.
In the foreground is the concrete base for the compressor. The mine was mothballed when it closed soon after the war, and all the machinery was removed for scrap during the Second World War. The Skye Cuillin are visible in the distance.
The 8 km of tunnels in Mine 1 are accessed by this adit (a horizontal tunnel). A steel grill now closes the entrance to the dangerous and unventilated workings.
The mine was ventilated by a fan house on the hillside above the Mine 1 entrance, looking from a distance like an abandoned church. The grill on the left is across the shaft leading down at 45° into the mine. The curved walls minimise the resistance to airflow.
Above the pier was a crusher and the kilns. Coal for the kilns was hauled up the incline from the pier. The pier incline hauler house echoes the shapes of Glamaig and Beinn Dearg Mhor on Skye. Loch Sligachan is to the right of the building.
The five calcining kilns had concrete bases with circular steel kilns above them. Only the bases remain, used as shelters by sheep.
The interior of the concrete bases of the five calcining kilns.
Further reading
The island was cleared by George Rainy, son of a minister, a lawyer and slave owner in Demerara, Antigua. Slave owning, and the despicable behaviour that resulted from it, is deeply implicated in wealth generation in Britain, and largely ignored. See Slaves and Highlanders for more about Rainy. An excellent resource for learning about our slave-owning history is the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London. The National Trust have published an Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery.
The social and economic history of the Clearances and crofting is impressively told by James Hunter in ‘The Making of the Crofting Community’.
Angus and Patricia MacDonald provide a superb overview (literally) of the landscape in ‘The Hebrides, an Aerial View of a Cultural Landscape’.
The history of the mine, with many historic photos and maps, is covered in ‘The Raasay Iron Mine: Where Enemies Became Friends’ by Laurence and Pamela Draper.
Sorley MacLean’s poem ‘Hallaig’ is quoted in full in the MacDonalds’ book, and also found in his ‘Hallaig and Other Poems’. The relationship between the Highlander, the Gaelic language, and the land is explored by James Hunter in ‘On the Other Side of Sorrow: Nature and People in the Scottish Highlands’, which includes a penetrating discussion of ‘Hallaig’.
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