Eorasdail village, Vatersay
An early start. Up to catch the bus to Aird Mhor jetty to catch the ferry to Eriskay, only to find it cancelled due to high winds. “Come back at noon,” the bus driver translated the ferry-hand’s sweeping pseudo-semaphore from the on-ramp where we stood. “That’s island life,” shrugged the only other person on the bus, an old lady, who presumably has seen her fair share of grounded ferries.
Back to Castlebay then, to camp out in the hostel living room until the next attempt. The owner’s mother-in-law, another nice old lady on an island full of nice old ladies, is busy cleaning up. We get onto the topic of poor John the bipolar Glaswegian, fate unknown. “You get a lot of people with emotional problems coming to Barra,” she says in her easy twitter. “They either get better, because of the island, or it becomes too much for them and they just crack up entirely.” She has such a comforting voice that I almost miss that last bit.
It was suggested to me that I phone the ferry office at Lochboisdale in Uist, to confirm the 1230 sailing, since the Castlebay office would be closed around noon for a funeral. A bit of a local celebrity, the man who founded the local Search and Rescue passed away yesterday. Slave to the bus schedule again, I’ve got a 2-minute window between confirmation and catching the jetty bus. “Et’s a goooh! Get on that boos!” the jolly Scotsman shouts through my mobile, and I’m off, racing down to the stop, only to find the bus sitting full and with no intention of moving. “Oh, you’ll never make the ferry. I can’t move: funeral coming through town,” she shrugs, and like that, I’m stuck on Barra for another day: the one road out of town, blocked by the funeral procession for a man who helped stranded people.
Still, if you have to be stuck somewhere, Barra’s not a bad option. The bus to Vatersay was unaffected, so off I went. This little island off Barra is the southernmost inhabited island in the whole Hebridean chain and was, before 1990, only reachable by boat. Cattle farmers would swim their cattle across the little sound to Barra. Disaster one day when Bernie the prized heffer got swept away; the causeway came in shortly after. The ruined hulk of Vatersay House loomed over the only settlement on the island. Not a soul in sight as I got off the bus and made southwards.
I criss-crossed Vatersay that afternoon, stumbling through the rolling fields and barren outcroppings, dodging cowpats and freak hailstorms. A ghost village called Eorasdail to the south overlooks the ocean. Hard to believe it was only abandoned in the 70s: eerie stone gables are all that’s left, like unnamed tombstones staring blankly at the sea. Back to the north is a single obelisk, monument to a nasty shipwreck in 1853. The Annie Jane, bound for Canada, went down with more than 400 men, women, and children aboard. Something in how they’ve maintained this marker, on a deserted, windswept hill over a choppy bay, on an island with 70 residents and few visitors, seemed to lend it more poignancy and gravity than the memorials we pass in hectic cities, usually without a second thought.
For all its foibles, island life holds a pretty powerful draw. As an outsider ignorant of all the issues, mind; I’ve heard it’s an economically depressed area—that many are gravitating towards the mainland for the opportunities it represents. At the same time, people are moving to the Hebrides as well, perhaps seeing the same things I’ve seen. Passing motorists wave hello. Old ladies chat with you on the bus. The air smells like the clean, deep ocean, not the crushing, body-odour of civilisation. And for a brief, beautiful moment, a ray of sun lights up a derelict village, chimneys cold and veined with moss against the sky. “Island life” with a shrug: because in the end, better to be stuck on Barra because your boat didn’t sail, than at the bottom of the bay because it did.
