Lewis and Harris

Out on the Edges

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Full Audio- Podcast Style

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I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over.
Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the centre.

Kurt Vonnegut

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Photo: Island of Lewis and Harris © Jamie Millard

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The Wild West!

Out on the edges of Scotland lie the Western Isles. The outer Hebrides. The edge of medieval Europe’s known world. The northern most and largest isle is one island with two names. The island of Lewis and Harris. The great megalithic stone builders found the island after the glaciers had receded. They left their three thousand year old stone circles and beehives for the bronze age Celts and Picts to marvel at. In more recent times her coasts, beaches and mountains became sites where the thalassocracies, the medieval sea powers of Norway and Ireland, fought for control out at the edges of their world. Vikings and Gaels. The lords of the isles. Their presence still felt everywhere as evidenced by place names, language and DNA spiralling out from genetic ancestry tests.

Cloud clings to the hills and mist slowly bends to the light. The trees gone, long since harvested for fire and fury. Peat glows, unfolded from the earth by the sharp edge of blade cutting open her layers to reveal treasures of fuel and fortune. Vivid greens, red fescue and yellow violet wild flowers kiss the cerulean tongued turquoise waves of the sea, adding colourful flavour to the cinereous stone tinged slate of sky. Salty vinegar and brine wet chafed lips. Mystery still sings loudly on the songs of the wind, a constant companion. There is nowhere to hide from the gusts and the gales. To stand up tall there you learn to lean in. To walk, you learn to weave.

Weaving. This is the home of the infamous Harris Tweed. Sea, sky, smoke, sand, shore, machair, marram, moor, mist and mountain melt into a tapestry of colours that have danced on looms for hundreds of years. This tough tartan tweed was originally created by the resilient blackhouse dwelling crofters who made a life woven out of what the land and sea could provide for them. The cloth was initially made for the practical purposes of protection from the cold and wet that the north Atlantic abundantly and selflessly provides for her children. The tweed slowly became a currency of its own and a whole industry spun out of this tradition. The Harris Tweed Authority and it’s Harris Tweed Orb trade mark consisting of a globe surmounted by a Maltese Cross, is found inside jackets, scarves, handbags and closets throughout the world.

I visited her in May of this year and quickly discovered that this island is a communion of spirit, people and place. From Rodel and her Sheela-na-gig in the Harris south to the wind swept Butt of Lewis lighthouse in the Ness north, this island is infectious. She has a sense of community, resilience and wildness of presence that lustrates one with a transcending wonder. To be in this place is to be of something bigger. It is beyond bone and skin and out beyond the edges of the body. There is a knowing here that lives in the soft lilt of the gaelic tongue that speaks to soul. I do not comprehend the language yet my very essence knows her every word. Her sounds and songs ancestral to the core of my being. I know this place. Out here on the edges, I am not from this place. I am of it.

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Lewis and Harris Photos by J.Millard

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Lewis and Harris

She has two names
     Eternity and imagination
      Mountain and valley
       Ocean and moor
Yet she is one
  Unfurling in a naked wildness
       that does not hide behind trees
  Umber tawny peat burns
       in the cinereous
          salt stucco slate gray
            of a drowning fog
  Swallowed in a mist
       of faithful light
          wrapped in a wind
            that flows as a blessing
  To kiss golden sand
       at the cerulean church
          of the shore
  Where the confluence of
Spirit People Place
  merge in a communion of colours
       that unfold
          in the tangle of the loom
  that weaves a tapestry
       of transfiguration
Born of the sea
  embedded in the earth
A prayer
  set free
       through the rippling smoke
           of the blackhouses
  Revealing layers
       of substance with the stone
An island - of rock and resilience
  Woven of story and song
       that softly sings
          with reverence
            out on the edges
               of -
           Home

© Jamie Millard

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Thank you for Being Here.
Living into the questions.
A cuoreodyssey.
In the south may the birth and new growth of spring kiss your sweet lips and in the north may the colours of autumn baptize you in the mystery of transformation.

The full audio podcast style version can be found under the main titles above.

Have the best of days!

Lots of love,

Jamie