A golden eagle. I’d never seen one before, not in the wild. Only those depressed, scrawny specimens on their Astroturfed perches at game fairs, shackled at the ankle. ‘Is that a good omen or a bad one?’
‘Good,’ said Alex definitively. ‘He survived.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I hope so.’
The road wound a slalom path down into Glen Brittle, through a neat-penned conifer plantation. Stray larches pressed against the wire, stretching their feathery arms out between the strands. Dead pines swayed, monuments to themselves, bare of needles but shrouded entirely in thick white lichen like cobwebs, or lace – bridal somehow, so many Miss Havishams in their veils.
Snow had gathered in this sheltered nook, where ploughs rarely ventured. A single car had preceded us that morning, and its tracks wriggled down over the narrow strip of tarmac, bunny-hopping at places where the driver had nearly lost control. Neat heaps of grit had been left at five-yard intervals along the worst stretches by the council, so the locals could help themselves.
The Cuillin rose up on our left as we descended, recent snowfall exaggerating the terribleness of its crags, each crack picked out in the sharp black and white of a Victorian engraving; the jagged line of the ridge stretching above dark and forbidding, sharp enough to skewer a cloud to its highest peak. At its foot, the hillside was a magnificent technicolour of the clashing orange vegetation, darker bracken and flashes of bright, almost neon green where burns had overflowed and spilled out across the face of the slope.
We abandoned the car and hiked in to where the water rushing down off the mountains rumbled through a series of perfect turquoise ponds: the Fairie Pools. The noise was tremendous as the water crashed between levels, then slowed and stilled in the deep, dark channels between the rocks. I clambered down to a pool partway up the chain that had been split in two by an elegant underwater arch, and dipped an arm in up to the elbow. The water was gloriously, bitingly cold, numbing my fingers almost instantaneously.
Alex was impatient to be on his way, and set off alone towards the start of the ridge. I watched him go, then turned back towards the road, with the roar of the falls in my ears. Water was everywhere, slipping between the rocks, dripping on my forehead, resting in still pools and puddled on the ground, which was sodden as a dropped cloth. Where tributaries had cut down into the hillside, stripped birches huddled for warmth out of the wind, naked branches crimson. Erratic rocks dotted the burned-red hillside, teetering where they had sat so unsteadily for hundreds of years.
I waited at the car until I caught a glimpse of him silhouetted against the sky on the crest of the ridge, then drove down into the township along a single-track road, scattered with sheep-droppings. Here and there amongst the heather and peat bog that lined the foot of the glen clumps of hut circles nudged mushroom-like from the earth.
There wasn’t much to Glenbrittle: a youth hostel, closed for winter; a mountain rescue base; a clutch of cottages, barely enough to call it a hamlet, where the glen opened up by the water’s edge. Three lush fields, spotted with heavy-set sheep, led down to a dark pebble beach. The landscape was stark and unforgiving, the colours rich: the burgundy of the heather, the rusting bracken, the bare purple birch, the hawthorn’s scarlet berries, the gleaming white snow of the peaks.
Glenbrittle House was easy to identify; a somewhat tumbledown, but nicely proportioned stone building, its grey-harl façade patched up in places with concrete. I was hovering outside, considering my options, when a young man stamped across the puddled road, enveloped in thick, kelpy green oilskins.
‘Excuse me,’ I blurted out, stupidly. ‘Do you know which one is Glenbrittle House?’
He paused. ‘The big grey one.’
I nodded and made to leave, but he spoke again. ‘Do you mind me asking why you want to know? Only, it’s my granny’s house.’ He was friendly enough, and about my age, with dark hair crammed under a beanie hat. He led me up the garden path and peeled off his waterproofs at the door as if shedding his skin, leaving his trousers cinched into his rubber boots. ‘I’ll fetch her for you. She often doesn’t hear the bell.’
I stood politely on the doorstep in the rain, craning my neck to get a look inside. The interior was big and roomy, but dated – the hallway papered with photo-detail brickwork. Finally the owner came out, and blinked at me, cautious. She clutched a copy of the West Highland Free Press in one hand, holding it to her breast like a shield.
‘Angus McMillan?’ she said. ‘Oh, no. I don’t know. When was this?’ She was a tiny, white-haired woman.
‘1810?’ I hazarded. She batted the air, letting out a puff of air – ho! – as if to say, ‘Well, I’m not that old!’ and her grandson and I laughed.
‘It’s been in our family, the MacRaes, for seventy years now,’ she told me. ‘Though it’s not ours, you realise. We’re tenant farmers. The whole lot belongs to Macleod of Macleod at Dunvegan.’
I nodded. Some things never change. ‘Who else lives round here?’
She considered. ‘There’s just us, really. Our family.’ She looked fondly at her grandson. ‘There’s a few moved in from elsewhere, but’ – a bit disapprovingly – ‘all just holiday homes.’
Down on the beach, I picked my way across the coloured pebbles and the seaweed lying thick and variegated as autumn leaves. Hailstones drew a white-rim tideline along the shore, like foam swept in off the sea. A band of rain drew across the bay like a curtain.
It was such an isolated spot. A man with thirteen siblings – perhaps more: records from that period are very partial – would never be lonely. But his parents would have been instrumental in the formation of his character. They were his only role models.
Out across the water I could make out the faint outline of the island of Canna. Directly behind it, unseen in this weather, was South Uist, the family’s next stop, and to its south, McMillan’s beloved Barra. Each of these islands has its own personality. South Uist, the flat sandy isle, tucks its head down out of the wind, its back grown thick with a fur of wildflowers upon the machair in summer: eyebright and lady’s bedstraw, harebells and butterfly orchids, corn marigolds and sea bindweed, field gentian and red clover. Barra is a rougher, readier sort of place, its one green peak looming from the sea, slipping the earth from its shoulders like a shawl, smooth rocks poking through the slopes like clavicles, smoothed by the wind.
I visited Barra too, alone this time, and camped on a silver cockle beach unseen by any other; then, tramp-like, on a grass verge on the outskirts of Castlebay, the only village. I cycled the circumference of the island on a borrowed bike, otter-spotting, calling out in greeting to the curious seals that followed me along the water’s edge, singing them nonsense songs and the scraps of pop music that popped into my head.
The McMillans’ solid Georgian farmhouse at Eoligarry, on the north end of the island, has long been demolished, but I cycled up anyway, finding the tide out and the enormous expanse of white sand now employed as a runway for the tiny airport. Wind battering my face, I watched a twelve-seater propeller plane land, wheels bouncing on the sand, sending salt water up behind it in a sheet, carrying the post and groceries. Five figures ventured down the steps and out into the rain, bent double against the wind. Even today, I thought, this is a remote outpost of humanity.
Angus McMillan never explicitly explained in his journals why he left the Hebrides, but it is not hard to paint a picture of the prevailing tides that swept him from their shores. Scotland at that time was in crisis, both financial and existential. In the century since the union with England the ancient clan system had been dissolving, and dissatisfaction among the poor was growing.
Historically, the clan chiefs had held a position of paternalist responsibility over their subjects in a subsistence economy. However, since the advent of the United Kingdom, the lairds were becoming increasingly embedded in the moneyed society south of the border, frequenting the gentlemen’s clubs of Mayfair