From One Extreme to Another
- The MacLeods of Raasay and Tofino
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RON MACLEOD'S grandfather's house at Kyle Rona in Scotland.
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By HARRY McGRATH
GLASGOW - The journey from Glasgow to the Hebridean island of Raasay feels epic. My brother's aging Proton car rattles and creaks north, threatening to overheat when the sun is out, but cooling off again in the apocalyptic downpours that hit every half hour or so.
Scotland's history rushes past the window - the skeletal remains of the shipyards along the Clyde, the bonnie banks of Loch Lomond immortalized in Jacobite song, Glencoe and its terrible massacre.
I note especially the Canadian connections - a distant view of Greenock from where so many sailed, the district of Lochaber which filled the ships and, north of Fort William, the great sweep of Glengarry, its name copied for the Scottish settlement in Ontario.
By the time I reach the wee ferry from Sconser to Raasay, however, I am thinking of journeys that really were epic - the journeys made by the people who left Raasay for all corners of the world. "All the blood that flowed away" as Scottish band the Proclaimers put it.
In the early Twentieth Century, a family of MacLeods left their communities on the northern tip of Raasay and eventually found their way to Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
I know something of this family because Ron MacLeod, a son of the original emigrants, told me of them in his White Rock kitchen three years ago. I have come to Raasay to try to understand more of their remarkable story.
From the ferry terminal I drive to Raasay House on the south end of the Island. It is now an "adventure centre" but was once the home of the MacLeod lairds until the last of them emigrated to Tasmania in 1843.
A previous building on this site was burned by government troops in revenge for the laird secreting Bonnie Prince Charlie in a Raasay bothy after the Battle of Culloden. Johnson and Boswell were here too during their tour of the Hebrides in 1773, with Boswell observing that the family seat "was in a pleasing low spot with good grass fields and corn lands about it...and a good garden plentifully stocked with vegetables and strawberries, raspberries, currants etc."
Boswell's innocent observations on the fertility of this corner of the island, however, held dire portents for the people of Raasay. I remember Ron MacLeod telling me of his family being moved from "the fertile south to the barren north," a process that ensured their eventual departure for Canada.
The grass in the south is still as green as it was when Boswell admired it, the corn lands are still there and, because it is late Spring, the area around the house is alight with blooming rhododendron bushes.
Heading north, however, things change quickly just as Ron said they would. The grass and corn gives way to heather and rock. Sheep are disappearing in other parts of Scotland (something to do with a change of subsidy structure from sheep to food planting), but they are still on Raasay.
They part reluctantly to let the car past, the lambs making last minute dashes in front of the bumper to join their mothers on the other side of the single track road. These are the descendents of the sheep introduced to Raasay in the 1840s.
To make way for these sheep, people were moved around or cleared completely from the island. For a time even marriage was banned to discourage settlement.
Raasay is an example of a Scottish island that suffered almost continuously from landlordism. The island changed hands often and, with a few exceptions, the landlords were either neglectful or rapacious.
Ron's family somehow survived here until the early Twentieth Century and to see where they lived I walk beyond the end of the public road to the most northern tip of the island where even the sheep can't find much to graze on between the rocks.
Ron's father Murdo MacLeod came from Kyle Rona, his mother Julia MacLeod from Fladda a small island joined to Raasay at low tide. Julia's cousin, Calum MacLeod, built the last two miles of the road himself after the District Council refused to help him which is the only reason I don't have to walk even further than I do.
When Murdo MacLeod left Raasay, he went to Glasgow and then joined his brother Ewen in Victoria, British Columbia. Finally, he settled with Julia in Tofino and there they raised a family.
The three families of MacLeods who settled in Tofino were Gaelic speakers and Ron remembers gatherings at the house where the ceiling echoed to the sound of an ancient language that he couldn't understand.
There was no road into Tofino when the MacLeods arrived just as there was no road into Rona or Fladda, and to survive the family fished just as they had fished on Raasay. But there were opportunities in Canada that the landlord system in Scotland did not allow.
Ron eventually became Director General of Pacific and Freshwater Fisheries and was awarded the Order of Canada for his services.
Sadness clings to the north end of Raasay like mist. It echoes the sadness that I heard in Ron MacLeod when he spoke in his White Rock kitchen of the place his people came from.
Walking around the broken communities of Fladda and Kyle Rona, I come across ruined cottages that at one time would have had families in them and the source of Ron's sadness is suddenly clear to me.
One of the cottages is home to a litter of Border Collie puppies which venture out one after another to have their pictures taken. Someone has left food for them but there is no other sign of human presence. Another is the house of Ron's grandfather, still standing at Kyle Rona but used as a storage space by a shepherd. The MacLeods are all gone.
Sorley MacLean, the great Gaelic poet of Raasay, felt the spirit of the departed people at the cleared community of Hallaig:
They are still in Hallaig,
Macleans and Macleods,
All who were there in the time of Mac Gille Chaluim:
the dead have been seen alive.
The characters in Alistair MacLeod's Canadian novel No Great Mischief have this sadness too. His MacDonalds carry around a sense of loss or dislocation that lurks in their folk memory and stays with them regardless of their status or material circumstances in Canada. And of course there is nothing wrong with this. It is just the way it is and the way it should be.
Ron MacLeod remembers his father saying to him "I came to Canada so that you could be a Canadian." Canada has been good to the people of the Scottish Highlands even if it was not always their choice to go there.
The important thing it seems to me is not to forget and Ron's efforts to preserve his family history and the invaluable work he has done on the history of piobaireachd, the classical music of the Highland bagpipe, shows that he has not forgotten. Hold fast.
[In 2004 the Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University initiated an oral history project entitled "Voices from the West: The Story of the Scots in Modern British Columbia." Interviews were conducted by Ron Sutherland, a community founder of the Centre, his wife Eileen and Harry McGrath, the Centre's Coordinator. Ron MacLeod was the first person interviewed for the project.]
Harry McGrath is the Coordinator of the Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University currently residing in Scotland. He can be reached by e-mail at: harrym@sfu.ca.
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