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Uist Lady has given me permission to use extracts from her e-book, I Heard a Heron Bark. If you'd like to read her entire collection of blogs, please head to: www.uistlady.com

I HEARD A HERON BARK


PREFACE

Perhaps I should have named this book The Townie Has Landed. Before moving to North Uist, population 1400, the smallest place I had lived in was Salobrena, a Spanish town of some 10,000 souls. Although I was born in Kamapla and lived in a rural Uganda for a while, I grew up in Edinburgh and proceeded from there to study in Durham, and work in Dundee, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness, and Marbella, Andalucia

Even though these places are of different sizes and characteristics, they are definitely towns. I hadn’t experienced truly rural life with all its joys and frustrations.
Once we landed in North Uist, my husband’s ancestral home, I felt compelled to write my observations of a life more different than I’d ever experienced before. New media offered the perfect solution to finding and creating my own audience, and I began to blog, posting in several different places and in return, finding a definite interest in these islands.

For blogging it seemed essential to have a nickname, so instantly and without much thought I plumped for Uist Lady. Fortunately I’ve remained happy with it, and it has even helped shape my writing. The Uist bit is a given, the Lady perhaps more debatable- but in writing about my present surroundings, a community which has been here for millennia more than I have and which has an unfathomably complex web of human history I decided to take a lady-like approach. So although there may be things and people I’d like to write about, discretion is the better part of valour.

I write plenty of reports about the islands for newspapers on a daily basis, so I wanted to try something that expressed more about myself, the being whom you must excise from press reporting. And I’m afraid if you’re looking for an island expert, I’m revealed as a rather inadequate, with no great knowledge of anything, and a horrible habit of anthropomorphising animals.

The blogs have many gaps due to excess busy-ness in other areas, and also periods of unexpected ill-health, so they are far from a complete account of a year in North Uist. I wasn’t really planning to e.publish them, seeing them simply as passing ephemera, but began to realise that I had a body of writing which might be of interest to others before getting lost in cyberspace for ever.

So thanks for choosing to read this. And if you can join me at www.uistlady.com from time to time, I shall be delighted.

Finally, thanks to the long-suffering Mr Mac for his enduring support in whatever I chose to do, even if it’s writing about him.

Uist Lady aka Susy Macaulay, December 2009



I HEARD A HERON BARK

Life aboard an island on the edge

A year of blogs from Uist Lady, anchored in North Uist, Outer Hebrides

September 4, 2008

THE VIEWS FROM OUR HOUSE

I should say something about the views from our house.
Meals are rather mesmerising, because the dining room faces north-west.
That means the island rolls away from us in strips and stripes, dotted with crofts and cattle, for about a mile to the sea.

Seven miles out is a line of flat islands, known as the Monachs. They used to provide rich pastures for sheep, and host an enormous seal colony. The Monachs had a long history of habitation, culminating with the Morrison family, who lived there from 1945 to 1949. Lachie Morrison, now in his eighties and living in Grimsay (a lovely part of North Uist, on the east side) describes those years as a great adventure. He says his mother thought of them as the happiest years of her life.

Nowadays people go out there for day trips, or the hardy can hire the old school house, all done up with mod cons, and spend the night there listening to the seals wailing, an eerie sound the idea of which immediately put off my brother-in-law from a fanciful notion of going out for a week with some mates.

The Monachs boast a very tall lighthouse, allegedly visible from right across Uist, on the east side. (I don’t think so though.)

This morning, calm and fairly sunny, we could see huge waves bursting up round the lighthouse. From a distance of nine miles or so, I wonder how big they must have been to be so visible.

Looking further north-west, there is an expanse of sea, also punctuated by immense breakers, given the right conditions.

The mountainous waves hit against underwater reefs, leap up and fall away, almost in slow motion. It’s quite hypnotic.

And out there more than forty miles away looms St Kilda. We can’t quite see it from the dining room, but if you go upstairs and crane out of the window at a certain angle, you can make out the brooding outlines of that most mysterious archipelago.
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