So this was Calum Mor's House, the oldest dwelling on the Scottish island of Hirta. According to legend, young Calum had built it in a single day to prove his worth: He had been passed over for the annual fowling expedition to Borera, a smaller island in the group that makes up St. Kilda.
This happened a thousand years ago, and I found my imagination racing. That's what comes of writing historical narratives, as I've been doing for the past dozen years.
I could see it all. The September expedition to Borera, six kilometres away, was the one great adventure of the year. The strongest men would risk their lives paddling through rough seas to harvest hefty birds that had to be killed at night while they slept on slippery ledges. Often, the men would stay a few days on Borera, sheltering in the stone cleits or storage houses they had previously erected. In my mind's eye, I could see the aggrieved Calum Mor building furiously with these heavy stones, bent on showing those who had voted against him that they had been wrong, wrong, wrong.
Later, on reflection, I began to doubt that anyone working alone could erect such a structure in a week, never mind a day. But the details I could tease out later. The racing of the imagination – that is what I seek when I travel, that inspirational revving. I'm a history junkie. In places where history happened, I get excited. And I was finding this voyage through the Scottish Isles almost (but not quite) too stimulating.
This circumnavigation of Scotland was mounted by Adventure Canada. Our home for the 11-day voyage, the 335-foot-long Clipper Odyssey, was rightly billed as a “small luxury ship.” We're talking well-stocked bars and lounges, white-linen tablecloths in the dining rooms, fully equipped presentation rooms, and cabins with portholes or windows.
The vessel carried a full complement of 110 passengers, among them a number of lecturers: authors Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson, musician Ian Tamblyn, publisher Douglas Gibson, ornithologist Brent Stephenson, myself and another author-historian, Ted Cowan. Starting from Oban on the west coast, we sailed north to Orkney and Shetland, and then south to disembark at Edinburgh. Once a day, sometimes twice, we would pile into 12-person Zodiacs – inflatable craft with outboard motors – and zoom ashore to explore a different island.
The archipelago of St. Kilda, the westernmost islands of Scotland, gave me not only Calum Mor but Lady Grange, a headstrong woman who, in the 1700s, spent eight terrible years there as a prisoner. Articulate, uncontrollable and enraged by the philandering of her husband, she had threatened to expose him as a treasonous Jacobite. That gentleman responded by having his irrepressible wife kidnapped and bundled off to this almost inaccessible island. Even today, only one ship in five is able to put passengers ashore.
Of course, my mind went into overdrive: possible book, possible book? But then, on another less-isolated island, I got talking with a young woman who runs an art gallery. She told me that her mother, Margaret Macaulay, had just published a book about Lady Grange: The Prisoner of St. Kilda. Not only that, but someone had optioned the film rights and started shooting the movie. I was too late.
Some of my fellow voyagers were less about history than birdlife. As we sailed out of St. Kilda, several passengers saw two massive birds swoop down onto a smaller one, drive it into the water and kill it. The ornithologist explained that the great skua, predatory birds with a wing span of up to 1.5 metres, have always been given to dive-bombing smaller birds to steal fish from their mouths. But the quantities of fish in the central Atlantic have dwindled, and the great skua have learned to co-operate in drowning other birds to eat them.
