So February was like April, March was like May, and April was like a decent June. Now that May has gone back to March, those halcyon days of premature summer are being mocked by cold westerlies and 10mm of rain per day. Nothing can spoil the memories, and the photographs, of a superb half week in Knoydart - a mountainous peninsula in Inverness-shire which you can reach by boat from Mallaig.
Dave Peterson the photographer, my collaborator on a book to be called Glens of Silence about the wholesale evictions of the crofters, phoned from his home in Glencoe to say that weather conditions up there looked set fair and we should do our fieldwork in Knoydart while the sun still shone. We based ourselves at Doune Marine, with the Tibbetts family and their associates. They have built up a boating and wilderness-holiday business in a remote village which was derelict for a hundred and forty-seven years after the clearance of 1853. Now the stone shells of the old cottages have been replaced with five modern houses, two wooden buildings with bedrooms and a restaurant, a boatyard, and a timber quay.
We spent our first afternoon tramping along the coast in light rain, finding places unmarked even by 'Ruin' on the Ordnance Survey map. Here crofters lived until they were cleared out to make a vast sheep-ranch. Next day dawned cloudless, calm, and hazy - the light not really sharp enough to suit Dave's cameras. Andy Tibbett took us north and east in his launch to Loch Hourn, to locate the sites of old villages and to climb up into the great corrie on the mountain of Ladar Bheinn ( 1010 metres ). Here the people used to pasture their flocks and herds in the summer. When filming there for BBC 2 in 1995 I had found the foundations of the shieling huts: circular layers of small boulders, six good strides across, on which the people built 'wigwams' of timber and turf. The women lived there with the children from June to August and made butter and cheese for their winter's keep. It was often drenching while we filmed and one day our helicopter could scarcely fly in the gale. This time we walked up from the shore through idyllic spring flowering. Already the slim, sharp blades of new grass were shooting up through the bleached tangle of last year's growth. The whole ground was one embroidery of primroses and violets, celandines and milkwort. Early summer flowers such as trefoil were vying with the spring species. A lightly scented, almost sultry air breathed between young oaks, birches and rowans with their luminous leafage.
It was all so growthy because the John Muir Trust, which buys up areas of the Highlands to restore them after generations of neglect ( or management solely for red deer and sheep ), has fenced this part and begun to plant broad-leaved species. The oaks were almost wiped out in the days of making charcoal for furnaces, iron for cannon. By the middle 19th century there were few oaks left and not many people either. Hundreds left, more or less voluntarily, for Canada when the last of the MacDonell clan chiefs refused to let them off their rent arrears after the Potato Famine of 1846-7. Hundreds more would not leave and were evicted. Their chairs and pots and spinning wheels were thrown out of doors, their thatched roofs hooked off or burnt, the timbers axed and sawn through. The survivors, including sick people, aged widows, and paupers, hung on for three years in shelters made of sails and scrap timber or in tents in the priest's garden at Sandaig. Then hardly one original Knoydart person was left in the peninsula.
I had no hope of finding what I most value - eyewitness memories of the evictions handed down by word of mouth. Then, as I spoke to the crofter at the very end of Knoydart's eight miles of internal road, one glimpse of the tragic events came to light. He is called Dave Smith and came to Knoydart from Kent in 1967. I spoke to him at the roadside where he was making a portable calf pen to install on the carcase of an old hay baler. ( It costs him the price of three of his twelve calves each year to get them to market in Fort William and he would like to save the expense of hiring a cattle float. ) He had been told by 'one of the older people' that his barn had been the home of John MacMaster at the clearance time. 'He was the only local man who would help the estate men to throw the people out. And he was put out himself four years later.' Dave's barn is a long low building made of unshaped big stones. It now has two doorways and a roof of rusting corrugated iron. Such is the stuff of history.
