Book extract: For the Safety of All – A Story of Scotland's Lighthouses

Butt of Lewis Lighthouse, Na h-Eileanan Siar 

The view from the Butt – the gleam from the lighthouse once cast its glow on the crofthouses and croftland, moorland and machair, sand and shore from its stance on Rubha Robhanais, illuminating the waves of lazy beds as well as those found on the surface of the sea.

We are extremely pleased to be publishing this extract from For the Safety of All: A Story of Scotland’s Lighthouses. In this new book, Donald S Murray explores Scotland’s lighthouses through history, storytelling and the voices of the lighthouse keepers.

By Donald S Murray

Frequently, during my childhood and teenage years in Ness, on the northern tip of the Isle of Lewis, there were reminders of the depth of darkness that existed for centuries around the coastline of this country. 

At night or early evening, a storm might rattle windows, a gust of wind puff above chimney tops. The lights across the house would falter and flicker before disappearing. After that, there would be a scramble for matches and candles, a torch if there was one to be found. A Tilley lamp would be lit, taking a moment or two to ignite and burn before its warm glow added intricacies of light and shade to a room which seconds earlier had been illuminated only by the flame of a peat fire. It was as if we had stepped back in history, into the period before electricity had come to our homes, the ages swirling into reverse for a moment or two. 

And that change was most apparent when we peered out of the window at the rest of the village and the broad stretch of the moor. Apart from the spin and eddy of the Butt of Lewis lighthouse, the stillness of the red light above the Decca Station and the rare sweep of a set of car headlights, all was in darkness. We could imagine the householders performing the same rituals we did – scuttling through the kitchen cabinet or chest of drawers for matches, looking in the understairs cupboard among sheets and blankets for the lamp – before they restored muted light to their homes. This was what might have been seen in these houses if a passer-by had peeked in. The faint glimmer of firelight. The subdued flame of a Tilley lamp. Or perhaps even more dim and pale than any of these lanterns – a wick dipped in the oil of a seabird, seal or whale. An unsteady flicker casting more shade than light into the room. 

The scale of this darkness was one of the factors that made travel around the British Isles difficult for centuries. Difficult enough on land, this was especially the case when boats were the main mode of transport. Until the expansion of road and rail, after all, the seas and waterways were Scotland’s main highways. The seasons intensified travel problems, especially during late autumn and winter. In many ways, the sailors and travellers of these early times lived the opposite kind of lives to the modern city dweller. The latter’s constant use of electric light, whether found in the streets they walk and drive through or within their homes, prevents them seeing the moon and stars above their heads. For those who made journeys either on shore or at sea in the past, there were sometimes contrary issues. The need to observe and navigate by the stars made them focus overhead, leading – occasionally – to failure to see the rocks and skerries that loomed out of the ocean, the unpredictable nature of both depths and shoreline. 

And then there was the unreliable character of light before the arrival of the lighthouse to these shores, a process that began in earnest around the commencement of the nineteenth century. Sometimes, when a storm buffeted their boat, the glow of fire on the coastline meant safety and security for sailors, a harbour where a vessel could be tied up and fastened until that night’s tempest passed. However, there were occasions when their need for shelter and protection made mariners too easily deceived. Allegedly wreckers on the coastline of these islands took advantage of their desperation, ushering them to a shore where the consignment of goods aboard would be plundered, their lives lost. Fires would be lit, and signals flashed, but their boats were ushered only in the direction of danger. Over the course of the nineteenth century and later, the Stevenson family and the Northern Lighthouse Board put an end to these practices. Their lighthouses were charted and mapped. If anything flickered elsewhere, as it sometimes had in the past, it would most likely be a trick or a ruse, a deadly trap. 

There were other hazards in the northern edge of the world in summer. During this season, those of us who live in places like the north of Scotland have the sun as an almost constant companion. Its presence, in some shape or form, rarely leaves the sky, creating a continual twilight, blurring at most to a shade of ochre in the sky. The persistent lack of rhythm of light and dark has its effect on people, making some edgy and ill-at-ease. Insomnia abounds: attention wanders. Storm-clouds and dangers on the horizon can fail to be seen. Mist, particularly on Scotland’s east coast, prone to haar, can obscure and conceal the risks ahead. 

It was this – their awareness of the constant threat of terrors posed by both human actions and seaborne life – that made men begin to build lighthouses, a way of making the existence of both ship and crew more secure and safe. 

***

Donald S Murray grew up under the gleam of Butt of Lewis lighthouse, and lighthouses have remained a continual presence in his life. He is the author of non-fiction, fiction and poetry, with a particular focus on Scotland’s islands.  His books include the acclaimed As the Women Lay Dreaming, In a Veil of Mist, The Dark Stuff: Stories from the Peatlands and The Guga Hunters.

For the Safety of All is out now, published by Historic Environment Scotland.

Eh-ALL-ing: Finding Poland in London

Photo by Nina Vlotides

By Emma Bielecki:

Let me take you to a part of London you probably don’t know, and won’t find on any map. It has a physical infrastructure, located in West London, but mainly it exists in people’s minds, and more specifically these days in their memories. It exists in my memory because it’s where I spent slivers of my childhood, taken there by my father, who inhabited it psychologically if not physically, and who would now and then announce on a Saturday morning: ‘Let’s go to Eh-ALL-ing.’

Going to Eh-ALL-ing — or Ealing, as people without Polish accents persisted in pronouncing it — most often meant going in search of foodstuffs then unknown to English supermarkets, with strange, sonorant names: kabanos, myśliwska, krakowska, chleb. Kabanos: a long, thin, leathery sausage hung in horse-shoe shapes behind the counter of the Polish delicatessen; myśliwska: a short, thick, leathery sausage displayed in bunches like bananas; krakowska: a fat cylinder of pork, paler pink on the inside than the others and with bigger white splodges, which comes in a synthetic casing you need to remove.

I remember how my dad would peel the sausage as he ate it, leaning against the kitchen counter with the sausage in one hand and a sharp knife in the other. I would try to imitate the gesture, the confident twist of the wrist, but I always made a mess of it, hacking off big bits of meat along with the casing. There was, though, something thrilling about the process. When I was a child, meals were often a formal and fussy affair: one ate sitting down, at the table, never standing up and never, never, in the street; one minded one’s manners, which meant worrying neurotically about one’s elbows and the correct way to hold the utensils. How liberating to be able to stand at the counter, to peel the casing from a sausage in a gesture that could never be described as either well-mannered or ill mannered, but was simply, perfectly, adequate to the task in hand. To see my father peeling smoked sausage was to see a man completely at ease in the world.  

Most often we ate the sausage withchleb and Kremska. A dictionary will tell you that chleb is bread. The dictionary is wrong — or was wrong in the 1980s, when bread was white and spongy when untoasted, but hardly ever untoasted or unbuttered; chleb was darker and harder, with a little aniseed kick from the carraway seeds. Kremska is a Polish mustard, and was a source of endless frustration and disappointment for my father. No jar of Kremska bought in London ever tasted right, which is to say no jar of Kremska ever tasted like it had back home. 

My father chalked this up to geographical displacement: in Poland, surely, Kremska still tasted like Kremska? He was wrong, of course, because it wasn’t physical distance that had wrought this change, but time. Kremska in Poland no longer tasted like Kremska either, that is to say no longer tasted like it had when my father was a boy.

Nowadays, all these products are widely available. You can get Polish sausage and Polish bread and Polish mustard in pretty much any supermarket in England. Along with Polish foodstuffs, the Polish language has become ubiquitous. I’m writing this in a café and I can hear Polish in stereo — a conversation between two young men in one corner, between two young women in another.  I think of pierogi, those little dumplings stuffed with all sorts of things. I like mine z kapustą i grzybami, with cabbage and mushrooms. When I hear Polish in the background, wherever I am, on the bus or the tube or in a supermarket queue, phantom pierogi always haunts my palate, the bassline rumble of affricate consonants like the deep umami taste of mushroom, the nasal vowels like the sharp acid burst of sauerkraut.

Sometimes, when we went to Eh-ALL-ing it was not to buy food but to visit friends of my father. In general, this was not an experience I enjoyed. My father’s friends seemed much older than him (they weren’t, but in his 60s he had married a much younger woman and had kids for the first time, creating an illusion of relative youthfulness) and much more old-fashioned. They lived in tudorette semis furnished with tasselled lamps and Roman Catholic wall art, smelling of herring and talc. 

As a small child I slightly dreaded venturing into such houses; as an adolescent, I sneered at their decor. It was only as an adult, at funerals, that I learnt about what had brought their inhabitants to Ealing in the first place. About Zula Stankiewicz, who spent her childhood in Dachau; about Andrzej Plichta, who had five older brothers, all killed at Katyń; about Halina Kwiatkowska, who lived for six years in the sewers under Warsaw; about Olga Rymaszewska, who joined the resistance at 17, was captured and tortured and sentenced to death, but who survived because, for some unknown reason — maybe she reminded him of his sweetheart back home? maybe it was his mother’s birthday? — the German officer supposed to shoot her let her escape. Now I regret every time I wriggled away from a bosomy hug, or rolled an eye at a tasselled lamp, or imitated an accent for a cheap laugh. Now I marvel at the how the heroic made a home in the most humdrum of English suburbs.

What I learnt from my father and his friends is that nothing is fixed: you can always rebuild a life, even on a heap of rubble and ash. The reverse is also true though — a life can collapse into a heap of rubble with very little warning, can go up in flames in the blink of an eye. The town my father was born in was in the east of Poland. When the Soviets invaded in 1939, he was sent with his mother and grandmother to a labour camp in Siberia. Now the town he is from is in Ukraine, and women and children are being deported once more. 

***

Emma Bielecki lives and works in London, where she teaches and researches nineteenth-century French literature. In addition to authoring articles on Balzac, Belle Époque detective serials, and radioactivity in the popular novel, she sporadically enjoys writing about other things that interest her, such as Bob Dylan, pet cemeteries and the history of Poles in London.

Limin-alley at Imagine! Belfast

Image: Imagine! Belfast

By Sara Bellini

“A successful city is an entity that is continually reconfiguring itself, changing its social structure and meaning, even if its contours don’t look very different” writes Deyan Sudjic in The Language of Cities. By successful, he means a city that is lively and functioning, where citizens not only feel safe and secure, but they feel like they belong. Well-maintained structures and infrastructures connect and serve people’s lives and “legible, handsome, easily negotiated public spaces make the individual feel part of something that they share with the rest of the city”.

The conversation on how we imagine the future of the city is at the core of Imagine! Belfast, a free festival about politics, culture and activism, promoting under-represented voices and equality. The annual event is now at its seventh edition and will run from the 22nd to the 28th of March, featuring talks, film, music, drama, readings, exhibitions, discussions and workshops. Highlights include an interview with Noam Chomsky and the possibility to pitch in ideas on how to change Belfast in the initiative Build Belfast Back Better. Due to the pandemic, all of the events are online, which means that anyone living elsewhere can join, with special exhibitions taking place in real life. 

One of them is Limin-alley, a group exhibition where eight local artists and designers are called to create site-specific pieces in “entries” (alleyways) across South and East Belfast. The project is a collaboration between 9ft in Common, developing a Belfast Alley Map, and Liminal [Space] Belfast, a platform for pop-up exhibitions in liminal spaces. The locations of Limin-alley, the alleyways between Belfast’s terrace houses, were chosen because of their potential for civic activism, due to their very nature of in-between spaces, neither completely private nor exactly public. The artworks will be on display between the 25th and 28th of March and will be introduced with an online talk by project partners Amberlea Neely, Aisling Rusk and Meadhbh McIlgorm on the 25th. Images of the exhibition will be available on the website of Liminal [Space] Belfast after the end of the festival.

Image: Imagine! Belfast

Although Limin-alley and the whole festival are Belfast specific, the themes and ideas are easily relatable. During the pandemic, as a consequence of the lockdown, the social fabrics of our cities have changed. The way we use public space has changed. The way we perceive togetherness. Even the way we experience the places we’ve always deemed safe, our own houses, where suddenly we have to spend more time than we deemed possible and at the same time we have to follow strict rules about whom we can allow in or about whom we can visit. Now more than ever, we need to imagine what could be and how we share our collective spaces, both physically in our cities and metaphorically in determining who gets to express themselves in politics, culture and public life.

To find out about all the events and to donate in support of the non-profit organisation behind the festival, please visit Imagine! Belfast
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Podcast: The Adventure Podcast

By Paul Scraton:

There are many ways to have an adventure. For some of us, it means climbing to the top of a mountain or exploring a remote island. For others it means pushing ourselves to our physical and mental limits. For yet others, it means challenging our perspectives or our beliefs through learning and discovery, by searching out the stories of people and places, and sharing them with others. All of these forms of adventure are the subject of The Adventure Podcast, a series of conversations hosted by the filmmaker Matt Pycroft.

Many of the interviews are with people who might fit your preconception of what an “adventurer” is. These are men and women who have done things that are barely imaginable to most of us, people who have travelled to extreme places. They are mountaineers who have summited K2 or crossed Antarctica, people who have climbed trees in the Amazon or trekked the desert. I discovered The Adventure Podcast through the edition featuring Chris Bonington, one of the world’s greatest mountaineers. The next I listened to featured Dee Caffari, the first woman to sail solo, non-stop around the world in both directions. These are the type of people whose stories have long fascinated me, precisely because they set out do those very things I would never be able to do myself.

As I listened on, getting deeper into the archive – 62 editions at the time of writing – I saw that Pycroft’s understanding of adventure was as broad as the range of guests he invited to speak to him. In a two-part interview, Sophy Roberts spoke eloquently about how, over the course of six trips and many thousands of miles, she gathered the material to write her book The Lost Pianos of Siberia. I listened to the absolutely fascinating tale of Emma Crone as she tracked down the father and son who were known as the ‘last poachers’ in England – and a reminder that distance, when it comes to adventure and discovery, can be as much a matter of time, place, culture and class as it is miles or kilometres. And I found myself stopping on a walk to scribble down some notes as Michael Turek reflected on how a deep personal connection to place informed his photography, and why photographs are perhaps the closest thing we have to time travel. 

Recent editions of the podcast have included Ed Caesar, a writer of long-form essays that has taken him to the DR Congo, a Russian prison camp and on frequent deep explorations of libraries and archives in search of stories, and Cal Flyn, whose book Islands of the Abandonment led her to all manner of abandoned places around the world and discussion that included the appeal of ruins and the dangers of Ruinenlust, the many conceptions of re-wilding, and why places and their stories speak to us and can really matter. 

What all these editions and conversations have in common is that Matt Pycroft has found conversation partners who have not only done extraordinary things, but people who have thought long and hard about the places they inhabit, whether for a short period or a long while, and who have something truly interesting and thought-provoking to say. And they have found, in Pycroft, an interviewer who is skilled in asking the right questions, who knows when to challenge or discuss, but who also knows – crucially – when to stay quiet and let his guest tell the story at their own pace and the way that works most naturally for them. The result is a podcast that is a form of exploration and discovery in its own right, especially for us – the listeners. Highly recommended. 

The Adventure Podcast website
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Podcast: Language Keepers

Marie’s Dictionary – Photo Emergence Magazine

By Sara Bellini

“I left my Indian language behind when my grandma died. So that was it. Since 1991 I’ve started remembering words: lake, ocean, sea... I wrote them down on pieces of paper [...] I would wake up [around] 1 o’clock and write down a word. I guess I dreamt about it or something, maybe my grandma was trying to tell me: remember, remember.” 

Marie Wilcox is 85 years old and she’s the last fluent speaker of Wukchumni, one of the Indigenous languages of North America. She gathered all the words she could remember and compiled the first and only Wukchumni dictionary, typing on a computer until late at night. Her daughter started helping her and picked up the language herself, taught it to her own daughter and grandson, and is now  teaching it to anyone interested in Indigenous cultures. The story of this family’s efforts to save their language from extinction, and that of three other Indigenous communities across California, is told in the mini-series Language Keepers.

In 2018/19 Emergence Magazine documented the process of revitalisation of the endangered Tolowa Dee-ni’, Karuk, Wukchumni, and Kawaiisu languages, which culminated in a multimedia story and film. This autumn they have released additional material in a six-episode podcast, to dig deeper into the reality of cultural extinction. Many languages solely exist in an oral tradition passed on from one generation to the next, which means that the only sources are the people who speak it, and in some cases, some notes written by foreign anthropologists. 

In terms of language loss, California is one of the most endangered places in the world: 200 years ago over 90 languages and 300 dialects were spoken, and today only half of them remain. This is the result of centuries of colonisation, Christianisation, forced assimilation, relocation, rape, enslavement, repression and genocide. The collective intergenerational trauma and the linguistic imperialism that allows participation in the political, economical and cultural life of a country only through a dominant language, are key factors that lead to language extinction. Language connects us to our ancestors, our traditions and the place we live in. Language loss is not just an individual identity crisis, it’s the loss of a worldview and the loss of diversity for society at large.  

Indigenous Languages in California – Image Emergence Magazine

Loren Bommelyn is the last fluent speaker of Tolowa Dee-ni’ and contributed to finalising the alphabet in 1997. He explains that, in his native language, to express where you are from you say that “you are actually from that ground. [...] There’s a bond to that place, almost as if you were a sibling, so everything in that environment becomes intimate to you: the shape of the bark of a tree, the way a tree forks [...] We’re all interconnected, we’re all interrelated, it’s all interlaced into one gigantic entity. [...] This understanding of the universe and how we relate to our universe is bound within your language. If you don’t learn your language you miss out on that understanding of how the world fits together.”

Indigenous languages foster a connection with the environment by expressing and shaping a mindset where humans are not separate from nature. By passing on traditional ecological knowledge, Indigenous people have been able to maintain and value a sustainable relationship with their ecosystems - a relationship endangered everywhere by urbanisation, industrialisation and capitalism. In a time of climate emergency and a related pandemic, this resonates more than ever. 

Language Keepers takes us on a linguistic journey that explores the legacy of colonialism within Indigenous communities in North America, and the complex and transformative dynamic of language revitalisation. It is a reminder of the multiplicity of identities and lack of equality in our multi-ethnic societies and, most of all, an invitation to heal.

You can listen to the Language Keepers Podcast on the Emergence Magazine website, and find out more about Indigenous languages in California.

Printed Matters: Fare

Photo: POST

By Sara Bellini

Sometime during the first lockdown, I found myself longingly holding a copy of a beautifully designed magazine called Fare that I had picked up because of the word ‘Glasgow’ in all caps on the cover. It was already clear to me at that time that my trips to the UK were cancelled for the immediate future and possibly indefinitely - so I started exploring momentarily inaccessible places through literature.

Reading Fare turned out to be an immersive experience where I would go back and forth from the page to my memory. The texture and complexity of the city were there: the sounds and smells as well as the visuals, and most importantly the taste. Glasgow is not an obvious place where to look for outstanding culinary experiences, and yet if you’re open to serendipity, you’ll find plenty of them.

Fare is a travel magazine focusing largely on food, one city at a time. It was founded three years ago by Ben Mervis - food writer and contributor to Netflix Chef’s Table - combining his degree in medieval history, his experience working at noma and his passion for writing. It would be more precise to state that the magazine is about the cultural scene of a specific place, as it doesn’t feature only tasty treats. But culture is an abstract and general term, while Fare looks at the particular with a meticulous and gentle eye.  

Beside Glasgow, Fare has been to Istanbul, Helsinki, Charleston (SC), Seoul and Tbilisi and the latest issue on Antwerp is just out now. The choice of location as well as the themes of the articles set the magazine apart from more mainstream publications, which tend to stick to big names and offer a polished and homogeneous image of a city. Rather than featuring well-known Michelin-star chefs, Fare looks for stories of ordinary people that have managed to create - inside or outside their kitchens - something valuable for the community around them. The way these stories are captured in full colour - through words, photography or illustrations - makes sure they can be enjoyed by readers that have never been to or will never visit the place they’re reading about.

Food is a vessel to pass on traditions and link generations across time and sometimes across space, like in the case of Punjabi immigrants in 2019 Scotland. It’s also the glue of community, especially in multi-ethnic and economically diverse cities. Food brings people together to share something that goes beyond your five-a-day and is rooted into collective memory. Food is about people and the relationships between them, as well as their relationship with the place(s) they call home. That’s why it’s important to tell these stories and we hope Fare will keep doing so for a long time.

Here is our chat with Ben Mervis:

Photo: POST

What have you learnt from Fare in the past three years?

I've learned so much: about Fare itself (what it is and isn't), and about creating a magazine. Most indie publishers like myself have little or no prior experience with magazine publishing before getting started. As a magazine, we've really found confidence in our voice and design in the last couple of issues. In some ways, I regret Fare not being a quarterly magazine, because each issue is a chance to improve on the last, to tweak things that went wrong and try out new ideas! I'd love to have more opportunities for doing that.

Could you talk a bit about the connection between food, history, community and culture at the heart of the magazine?

Yeah! So my background is in history--medieval history--however, I fell into the food world when I moved to Copenhagen several years ago. Traveling around the world with my then-boss, René Redzepi, I began to understand new cultures through their food: meeting cooks and craftsmen and hearing local histories tied to food production or technique or ingredients. It was incredibly fascinating. When I started Fare it was a very natural convergence of all of those things.

Why did you choose the print magazine as a format? 

To be honest I chose print before I knew or had decided anything about the magazine itself! This came as a love of print.

How do you pick a city and which aspects of its culinary scene to highlight?

City selection is about creating a balance within the 'series' and choosing cities that are different enough to make each issue feel wholly unique and its own.

What are the literary inspirations behind Fare?

One was Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I love the idea that the same city could be described in a thousand different ways.

What are your plans for the next issue and how has Covid changed them? 

For the time being, Covid restricts our travel, so we're changing the structure of our magazine slightly to bring on a guest curator. They're an individual who intimately knows the featured city, and we collaborate with them on finding the right voices and themes for the issue. That's something you'll see for Issue 8 and Issue 9.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you’d like to share with our readers?

One thing we're really buoyed by is the fact that, in times like this, a desire to travel has not faded--even if the opportunities to do so have. We're really encouraged by the fact that so many people have written to us to say how Fare has helped them 'travel' in this time when armchair travel may be the closest they get to the real thing! 

Pick up a copy of Fare at Rosa Wolf in Berlin or at one of their many distributors across the UK and Europe. And if going into a shop is not a possibility, you can order it online.

Hoyggja: Harvesting grass in the Faroe Islands

Photo by Stephen Pax Leonard

By Stephen Pax Leonard:

(You can listen to an audio version of this essay, read by Stephen Pax Leonard, at the bottom of this post)

July is the time of the hoyggja which refers to the cutting of the in-field (bøur) grass and harvesting it for the sheep’s winter feed. Families are outside; their cheery voices drift in the wind. Children’s laughter sweeps across the fields. There is noise everywhere. Flies hum heavily. I hear the haunting curlews, the ghosts of dead boys, on the horizon. The air tremours with their distinctive call. High up on the mountain ridges, skuas defend the spines of the hills. A woman’s brassy voice can be heard jabbering from a nearby window, her sentences shrinked to disconnected words. There is the sound of scythes being whetted. Radios are perched on the stumps of fence posts. Their aerials waltzing in the wind. Music plays. Dogs bark. 

Leaning on two-tined pitch-forks, elderly men with creased brows stand around exchanging gossip. Their voices dangle in the light breeze. The farmers nod as they listen to an account of a wet harvest two score years ago. They square their shoulders and lower their tones as the lay-reader shuffles by, his shoes grinding on the gravel. Then the conversation turns to lawnmower designs. They all swear by a certain liver-shaped Italian brand that is used to negotiate the very uneven ground of the steep slopes. But first the long grass has to be scythed. With scythe in hand, I cast a glance over the hills and see elderly men scything grass with obstreperous grandchildren at their feet collecting the grass. This rural scene, this summer idyll could be from a hundred years ago. Further up the bank where Gudmund and his extended family are at work, Stein from Hvalba talks endlessly about the huldufólk (‘supernatural, elf-like spirits to be found in the Faroese countryside’) of Lítla Dímun (the uninhabited island without electricity where sheep are taken to graze in a smack). His conversation turns to the intertwining of the visible and the invisible, the material and the spiritual. The places where the stones speak to the ocean. Families battled over ownership of Lítla Dímun, this tiny nipple of basalt in the mid-Atlantic, for many years. In the end, a cooperative of 48 farmers from Hvalba bought the island and still keep their sheep on this mysterious, unsettled outpost. The talk turns to politics, parliamentary squabbles, fishing quotas and the dead. Telling stories seems to be an essential part of hoyggja. It is a time to meet with friends, laugh, pass on memories from previous harvests and of course prepare the grass. Then, orders wrapped in a shower of expletives are barked at Stein and it is back to work. The people of Suðuroy are known for their expressiveness, their sometimes crass language and the way they wave their arms around when they speak.

It is a dry summer’s day and we are busy raking the grass and placing it on long drying racks (turkilagar) that line the hilly pastures running from top to bottom. Flocks of starlings feast noisily on clews of worms that are revealed as the rake drags across the earth. Covered in nets, the grass is left to dry on these racks in the wind. It is imperative that the grass is dried as much as possible before the rain comes which can be taxing in the Faroes. More than the rain, the farmers fear fog and windless days. Providing there is wind, the grass normally dries even if there is the odd shower of rain. This summer has been rather dry and the farmers are hopeful that we will have a good harvest of hay to feed the sheep over the winter. Sunshine has been forecast for the whole week and all going well the grass should be sun-bleached in ten days or so. If the grass gets very wet, it turns into a soggy mush, a useless liability and a rotting curse. Nowadays, it is less important than it was before. Almost no farmers are dependent on just sheep anymore and some now have silos to make silage. Previously, a wet harvest could have had disastrous consequences. This is the last day of harvesting the grass to make silage. Everyone is helping out to make sure the job is done. Aside from the grass that is being dried the old-fashioned way, this grass will be stored in airtight silos and fermented using formic acid and water. Men tread the grass in silos as if it were grapes; they try to squeeze out as much of the air as possible. There is little baling here for the ground is so uneven and the slopes are so steep. That must in part explain why farming methods are barely unchanged.

After a long, hard day in the fields, we are fed ræst kjøt at Gudmund’s house.  Ræst kjøt is lamb that has been air-dried for several months and then braised for 7 hours. With few trees and no salt production due to adverse weather conditions, the Faroese were not able to smoke or salt meat to preserve it. The pungent smell of ræst kjøt, somewhere between a veiny cheese, lamb and wool hits you as you enter the kitchen. The meat is served with root vegetables. The meat comes from the sheep that were slaughtered in September. Gudmund sells the meat privately to local people and distributes the rest to his extended family. Almost all the meat is eaten air-dried, the way the Faroese love it. 

Dinner finished, we stand outside on the veranda. The air is crisp and fresh. I used to tell visitors to the Faroes ‘when you land, stand on the tarmac for a minute and just breathe in the air’. It feels so clean and perfect. Tonight it tastes of the sea. The view over the green slopes and the principalities of sheep that border the fjord could only be the Faroes. The gullied hills, the vestiges of a glacial age, wrinkle the bare lead-coloured rock. Houses, painted the colours of the rainbow, hug the bay. As is often the case this time of the year, the colours of the fuschia-coloured sunset have invaded the sky by the rounded peaks that cradle the fjord. The Trongisvágur valley looks like an oil painting with the evening glow gushing across the horizon. Gudmund tells me repeatedly how he loves this view. The Faroese take great pride in their country. Elderly women in the village would often be seen photographing their landscape even if they had spent their entire life there. They never tire of its beauty. Late in the evening, we retire under the scattered light of the fading sun to homes warmed by the summer sunshine and to kitchens alive with radio noise.

***

Stephen Pax Leonard is a writer, linguist and traveller. He is the author of six books on the Scandinavian and Arctic region. In total, he spent nearly a year living in the Faroe Islands. He is currently compiling a book of short travel stories which focus on the poetic memory and acoustic experience of his travels in northern climes. Wherever possible, he travels with his 3 year old spaniel, Stan.

Libre

By Kenn Taylor:

Those 1950s American cars are a key symbol of Cuba under Communism, giving a bit of old glamour to all those Lonely Planet images and travel documentaries. They’re real enough, seen all over Havana. Many however are like ‘Trigger’s Broom’ - having had so many parts replaced they’re more new than old. There’s no denying though that they’re still cool. In Cuba, they are a key part of that desire for ‘difference’ that attracts people to a place. And their owners are only too keen to earn some extra cash taking visitors for a ride along the sea drive, the Malecon, under the sun and close to the spray of waves.

Less well photographed though are the Ladas. The reason the old American cars are still there of course, has largely been the lack of something to replace them, due to the ongoing economic blockade. Though now they’re so famous they are likely to always remain, as visitors will always want something of the past that meets their expectations. The Ladas from Mother Russia though, were the main replacement car for all those decades after the Revolution. They were popular locally for their ruggedness and relative modernity, though of course the Ladas themselves are now also ancient. While less well known as a symbol of Cuba, Ladas are a big part of the modest traffic that runs around Havana, in particular being used heavily as taxis.

I had little naivety about Cuba’s ‘alternative’ system. While there’s a general lack of the hunger and homelessness that marks much of the UK, in turn you are faced with a Government which tolerates no alternative political parties or dissent and heavily restricts its citizens. While basic needs are generally met, the standard of living is also low. Those old cars may have a certain romance and now a tourist income for their owners, but having to constantly repair a forty year old refrigerator has less allure.

The famous free education in Cuba also doesn’t always translate into liberation. In my final Lada taxi to the airport I spoke at length with the driver. He had a master’s degree in IT but saw little point in using it in Cuba when he could make more money by driving. As well as have more freedom, not having to work for the state. He talked about how he felt his education was wasted and how, like many, he wanted to leave. In turn he asked me about IT work in the UK. I said as far as I knew, it was well paid, but highly competitive. And that a lot of IT jobs were now being ‘offshored’ to other countries where labour was cheaper. He was aware also that we had to pay for university and asked how much it would cost to study for an IT masters. It took me a bit of time to work out the maths and then convert it into to Cuban currency. He was aghast at the expense. “Yes, it’s a real problem,” I said. “Especially if you’re from a poor background.” 

We were pretty quiet after that as we did the final leg towards the airport, pondering the madness of our two systems. Neither of which anyone really believes in anymore, both slowly falling apart. 

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Kenn Taylor is a writer and arts producer. He was born in Birkenhead and has lived and worked in Liverpool, London, Bradford, Hull and Leeds. His work has appeared in a range of outlets from The Guardian and CityMetric to The Crazy Oik and Liverpool University Press. www.kenn-taylor.com