ISLE MARTIN TRUST
NEWSLETTER – AUTUMN/WINTER 2009
I just love Joan’s lemon cake - toss me crumb, please…!
Our warden Cat Logie has asked to remain on the island for the coming winter.
We were very happy to agree as she has been a great help this summer and we are extremely grateful for all the work she has done.
So, a very happy warden -
and a very happy hen…. it seems…!!!
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AGM
The annual general meeting of the Isle Martin Trust was held in Ullapool Village Hall on 14 May 2009.
Three new board members were appointed -
Lindsay Duncan, the Highland Council Ranger for Wester Ross,
Elizabeth Beer who is currently studying for an Archaeology Degree and who has agreed to oversee future archaeology projects on the island for us
and
Audrey MacLennan who will help organise events on the island during the summer and help with fundraising.
We are delighted to welcome all three to the Board and really appreciate them giving their time and expertise to the Trust.
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COMMEMORATIVE TREE PROJECT
The establishment of the commemorative tree project has been a great success and we are happy to report that we now have 18 trees planted, and all seem to be thriving.
Special thanks must go to board members Alex Scott who is responsible for sourcing the trees and planting them and Gregor MacDonald for making the posts which hold the plaques. Individual photos will be taken next spring and sent to all those who have sponsored the trees so they can keep up with progress.
We have plenty of space for more, so if anyone would like a tree planted on Isle Martin in memory of a person or persons, a birth, a marriage or any special event, please contact:
Sheila Didcock on 01854 612937
for details or e-mail:
islemartin@lochbroom.freeserve.co.ukThanks should also go to Neil McCrimmon who together with his uncle board member Fraser Mackenzie went over to the island to make a gap in the dry stone wall to enable easier access to the plantation. Neil has done a fantastic job making a feature of the entrance and we are also grateful to Cat Logie, our warden, for keeping the bracken-strewn path strimmed throughout the summer - through from the graveyard to the plantation.
No mean task, we can assure you…!
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CROFT HOUSE / MILL HOUSE
Both the Croft House and the Mill House have been well used this spring and summer. We have had weekends booked by a number of sub-aqua clubs and kayaking clubs from out with the area, as well as our local Sub Aqua Club who held their annual BBQ in June. There have also been a number of families who have enjoyed a peaceful time on the island. Both properties will be available again next year so if anyone would like more details, please contact Sheila Didcock on 01854 612937.
If finances allow, we hope to have a gas shower fitted in the Croft House this winter, which we are sure will be appreciated by those who stay there…!!
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LOCHBROOM FIELD CLUB and SAILING CLUB
Members of Lochbroom Field Club went over to the island in July to conduct a new bird survey and they are happy to share their findings with us so another project for this winter is the updating of the current Bird Leaflet which we sell at the Ullapool Museum and the two bookshops in Ullapool.
At the same time local Sailing Club came for the weekend, so the island was buzzing with activity… So good to see so many people enjoying this very special place.
Sailing Club yachts moored at the pontoon on Isle Martin
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ANGUS BRUCE, PHOTOGRAPHER
We have recently been contacted by Angus Bruce, a local photographer who has asked permission to stay on the island occasionally during the winter so he can photograph aspects of Isle Martin which could be made into postcards etc.
He is willing to donate a percentage of any sales to the Isle Martin Trust so we are very happy with this arrangement…!
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HISTORY WALKS/TALKS 2009
The very popular walks and talks led by Joan and Sheila have taken place throughout the summer, weather permitting, and we hope to be doing some more next year. All those who have come have been very interested in the unique history of this island and the informal way in which the walks are operated - popular too are the teas at the end of each walk, especially Joan’s lemon cake…!!
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LOOPALLU –
ANNUAL ROCK FESTIVAL on BROOMFIELD CAMPSITE
Once again a team of 20 volunteers donned their gloves and their high viz vests, collected their plastic bags and set to work picking up litter at Loopallu over the weekend of 18-20 September.
It is not always a pleasant job but the appreciation of the festival-goers and the camaraderie made it all worth while, as did Robert Hicks’ e-mail saying: "Thank you and all your gang for an amazing job done yet again (and make us the envy of all the other festivals..!).
Oh, and the cheque for £1200 makes a substantial contribution to our coffers..!
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ALISTAIR NOBLE - MAPPING ARCADIA PROJECT
Mapping Arcadia
project took place during two weeks in July and the rowan trees were planted behind MacLeod’s House in the shape of Isle Martin with the help of volunteers and warden Cat Logie.This is part of a world wide project which Alistair is undertaking and should provide good publicity for the island as a book will be published at some time in the future.
Alistair stayed with his wife and young son in the Croft House and loved his time there - so much so that he has asked to be considered for Cat’s job as warden if and when she decides to leave..! Quite different from living in a Manhatten apartment block and his busy life in New York..!
We were very pleased when Alistair asked to become a Life Member - we asked him to write an article for us for this newsletter….. so here it is…!!
Small red flags glowed in the bright evening July light, not as globes but as luminescent fluttering wings dancing across the stubble of a meadow. These iridescent forms, surrogate Rowan trees, followed the topographical contours of the island in a field we had cleared behind one of the remaining white washed buildings. This late-night light intensely exaggerated our sensory perception. The uncut surrounding grasses flowed back and forth hissing and swishing in the air. Each motion reverberated uncannily on this isolated place called Isle Martin.
This is the site of an artistic intervention in the landscape Mapping Arcadia: Isle Martin a Topography of Place. It is the second in a series I am planning at different locations in response to the short story On Exactitude of Science by Argentine poet and writer Jorge Luis Borges. This brief narrative identifies the mission of an empire to map its land and how their maps progressively grew larger and larger to eventually become on a scale of 1:1 with the land. It investigates the concepts of representation and the value of mapping and copying. Originally published in 1946, it is still pertinent within our current cultural context of electronic media in which everything is reproduced, copied and simulated. My mission is to examine the environmental nature of each site and re-present it in the form of a map on the land and notate its topography through an actual engagement with it. The initial version took place at the LAND – an art-site during a residency in the summer of 2007 in near Albuquerque New Mexico. The dry red desert floor of this location had been my canvas to draw a scaled up map of the terrain in blue powdered chalk.
The Isle Martin project was the second mapping intervention I planned for over a year and in preparation for it I made a brief visit there in March of 2009. My first glimpse of the small island was from the hillside just before the road descends to Ardmair. Enveloped in grey winter clouds, it was mysterious and dark and larger than I had imagined. Its scale had deluded me even though I had spent many hours studying an Ordnance Survey map of it. Maps may tell you how to get there but do not provide a true sense of place which is the premise of my projects. The ferry ride over was wet, very wet and it barely stopped raining for the three hours I was on the island. My photographs contested to this with their blurry images of dark peat bogs, burnt umber bracken and dripping stonewalls the remains of old crofts. Scaling the hillside on this occasion provided me with a sense of the natural environment I was to encounter four months later when my family and I would live on it whilst completing my mission.
How was I going to transpose a map of the island in an effective manner that corresponded to this natural setting still remained a question after my visit. However I soon found myself studying Isle Martin Trust’s booklet on flora and fauna at which point I realized how I was going to fulfill my vision. I would plant Rowan trees plotting the topographical contours of the island. In doing so I would be using something that was indigenous to the island to trace a map, at the same time I would be fulfilling one of Trust’s missions of reforestation.
I specifically chose Rowan trees in view of their mythological roots that go back to classical times but particularly their significance to Gaelic folklore, including poetry and song. The old Gaelic name for the Rowan from the ancient Ogham script was Luis from which the place name Ardlui on Loch Lomond may have been derived. The more common Scots Gaelic name is caorunn (pronounced choroon, the ch as in loch), which crops up in numerous Highland place names such as Beinn Chaorunn in Inverness-shire and Loch a'chaorun in Easter Ross. There were strong taboos in the Highlands against the use of any parts of the tree save the berries, except for ritual purposes. I had picked their berries with my parents as a child to make jelly. I imagined a future labyrinthine field of these trees bearing an umbrella of burning red fruit.
July 4, 2009 I took up residence with my wife Kathy Bruce and nine year old son Stuart, in the Croft House on the island. Once again the ferry crossing seemed to be cursed by excessive rainfall, however we were not deterred and fortunately the weather proved to be excellent during most of our stay. Immediately we proceeded to seek an appropriate site for my plan. I was looking for an area a little over 30 x 30 metres, to correspond to a gridded ordnance survey map of the island I had marked up that would need to accommodate two or three hundred trees. After a day of wandering over the blooming heather, long grasses and struggling through head high bracken that grows abundantly across much of the lower reaches of the isle we found a relatively flat meadow. This is located behind the Macleod House and just off the only footpath that bifurcates the island and affords easy access across from the Loch Kanaird side to a pebble beach on the west side. This setting is also clearly visible from above situated at the base of the hillside that rises steadily to the solitary loch at the peak at 123 metres. Although I had a general notion of where I could locate this plot I did not anticipate I would be lucky enough to find such an ideal location.
Preparing this site for planting was a major hurdle, the knee high wild flowers, grasses and brambles needed to be cut down to several inches at most. Unprepared for this we were very fortunate to have the devoted assistance of the island warden Cat Logie who came to our rescue with weed strimmer and rakes in hand. We all toiled together working the land cutting and raking the hay. This was a formidable task that never seemed to end. The long summer days enabled us to start early and work late until the midges attacked and they were relentless when they did. It truly gave us an insight into farm life of centuries past and evoked the history of the place in which past residents of the island may well have followed the same actions. Their ghosts were probably laughing at us as we struggled to clear the field.
We then plotted a two x two metre grid over the whole field with string and bamboo canes that corresponded to a one x one centimetre grid on the map I had in hand. Within the squares of my chart I had marked crosses along the topographical contour lines of the island each of which became a small red flag in the field, which in turn indicated the position of a Rowan tree. The field of shimmering red flags flicking in the wind as indicated above was a mystical experience. Replacing them with the actual 40cm saplings I had ordered was not without its problems, the sun was at its hottest the day we started. This was the day the Alba Gaelic television crew came to film the project and to interview us however, without television or even electricity on the island, we never saw the programme that aired a few days later. For the next three days instead of rain as might be expected we were faced with blistering sun turning each plant limp as we set them in the ground. This necessitated us running back and forth from the kitchen of the Mill House to the field with kettles and plastic bottles of water in a race to resuscitate these fragile plantings and had all the appearance of a comedy routine.
We survived and the plants survived just. And we took a day off to prepare the second part of the project, which covered the whole island. This consisted of anchoring twelve sets of nine short flags in the form of compass co-ordinates at various locations over the island. Each flag-stick 60cm high set into the earth formed a cross of five green flags tipped each with a red flag suggesting the red berries of a Rowan tree. These crosses were set up primarily for the community day at which point the public was invited to locate them and then to record their responses to that particular location in a notebook provided. This open community celebration was intended to explore poetry, word and mapping in relationship to the completed land intervention.
After the sun the rains came back on July 18 and consequently the ferry and celebration day was postponed. Fortunately, the planned alternate day (the following Saturday) proved to be a perfect day, thus Cat Logie was busy ferrying the public back and forth to the island. The event was introduced to those attending in the meeting room of the Mil House by Lindsay Blair project manager and representative of an talla solais the arts organization hosting my project. Joan Michael of the Isle Martin Trust followed with a brief summary of the mission of the Trust and I concluded the mornings meeting with an explanation of my project. Before wandering off to locate the flags the public was invited to plant trees in the field as a number of spots had been left for the community to complete this process. Hill climbers and bird watchers trekked to the peak and outreaches of the isle seeking flags. While on the island, participants wrote ideas, words and poetry in response each site thus recording the topology of the landscape. "Topography" in Greek is topographein, from topos place + graphein to write, in other words, to describe a place with written language. Hence, both text and symbolic tree line functioned simultaneously in describing the landscape. Locations varied considerably from the rocky beach of the western shore to the mossy banks of the loch and at the summit thus presenting a wide selection of vistas and contextual sites for the public to meditate on. Notebooks were returned with comments and drawings of every order that will be the subject of a future publication along with a film of the event.
We sailed back to Ardmair at the end of the day without rain, satisfied we had completed our task but sad to leave the natural environment of the Island. The sense of space and solitude on the island provided a truly spiritual experience that we have found nowhere else.
This environmentally oriented work offered an opportunity to advance an educational understanding of its topology through the engagement of the local community and public with the project. In re-presenting the topography of this place on the site and advancing community involvement with the act of mapping in the context of an artistic/poetic act, I hope that my endeavour has benefited the cultural and historical heritage of the island and that Isle Martin may be the site of future artistic and poetic interventions.
I am grateful to the Isle Martin Trust for giving me the opportunity undertake my project on this location which enabled me to encompass the whole of the isle within the scope of my vision - this was a unique experience that continues to resonate with me…
"While climbing, take note of all the difficulties along your path".
René Daumal (Mount Analogue 1952)
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ULLAPOOL BOOK FESTIVAL
Unfortunately the planned Book Festival event in May on the island had to be cancelled due to appalling weather.
Joan and her committee had intended to have a marquee erected on the grass beside the Mill House and all the arrangements for taking passengers from Ullapool on the Summer Queen, and for the sound, flooring, chairs etc., had been made but to no avail. It really was the most horrendously windy day with unrelenting torrential rain…!
However, undeterred, Joan welcomed everyone to the Ullapool Village Hall and we had a "virtual" Isle Martin event there using a power point presentation.
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ANDRO LINKLATER
Author Andro Linklater lived on Isle Martin in the late 1970s/early 1980s while writing his biography of Compton Mackenzie. He was one of the writers at this year’s Ullapool Book Festival and it was planned to have him on Isle Martin reading and talking about his work. But, as has already been said, atrocious weather conditions prevented the trip happening. However, everyone was determined that he would somehow get to the island while he was here. Fortunately, on the Sunday the sun came out and the seas calmed and board member Derick Boa was able to get to take Andro and his wife Marie-Louise across to Isle Martin. When the literary editor of Scotland on Sunday asked Joan Michael what aspect of the book festival stood out for her, she said "Managing to get Andro Linklater across to Isle Martin"..!!
We were delighted when Andro asked to become a life member and Marie-Louise, a professional photographer, sent some of her photographs for the Trust to use.
We asked him to write an article for this newsletter and we were all delighted to receive the following outstanding piece of writing.
Isle Martin 1979 and 2009
by Andro Linklater
All the time I was on Isle Martin, I had the impression that a herd of elephants was looming over the island. Sometimes, especially in winter with cloud lowering the sky and darkening the day, they seemed angry and threatening, as though about to charge. More usually they were simply watchful, but on good days they were benign, great, broad-headed guardians, with pendulous, folded ears of stone, and protuberant, rocky trunks that jutted out from the cliffs of Coigach. Looking up at them day after day made the shapes so familiar I could see the entire rock face as a gigantic frieze of animals. I was glad when they were in protective mood. Nothing could break through such a solid defence.
The idea seems fanciful enough now, but the whole experience of living on the island thinned the curtain that hangs between reality and - well - unreality. Looking back, Isle Martin often resembled Prospero’s island, with parts of it capable of magicking up spells and wonderments that transformed rock into pictures and conjured up spirits from the storm.
I arrived in October of 1979. Bill Allan was still teaching, and would only appear at weekends. Bernard Planterose did not come until the spring the following year. So for much of that first winter I had the island to myself. What I brought with me was a contract to write two books, a carved wooden stool I had acquired during the summer when I was living with a tribe of headhunters in Borneo, known as the Iban, and the strong impression they had left on my way of thinking.
I remember waking early on the first morning in one of their villages, and gradually realizing that the pale balloons hanging in a net above me where actually skulls. Fortunately they were ex-headhunters, or headhunters in remission to be precise since they have occasionally reverted to past habits, and so I returned with mine intact. However, those of them who lived high up in the forested mountains of Sarawak close to the frontier with Kalimantan, still retained a way of life centered on the belief that whatever happened in the everyday world, from a successful fishing expedition to two people falling in love, was the result of actions in the spirit world.
Unlike the rational, divided world of western society, where the failure of an outboard engine to start might be caused by oiled up plugs, lack of fuel, or an electrical failure, they believed also that the engine’s spirit needed to be appeased. And so, if cleaning the plugs, filling the fuel tank, and checking the leads failed to remedy the problem, they would also hang a small basket of rice and tobacco leaves beside the offending engine overnight. (Come to think of it, Bill Allan would do much the same with his outboard when, having tried everything else to get it to start, he would say, "Let’s go and have a dram and leave the stupid thing to make up its own mind." And oddly enough both methods seemed to work as often as they didn’t.)
Dealing with the spirit world demanded a lot of attention to other-worldly matters. Dreams were discussed, birdcalls and birdflight interpreted, people’s behaviour analysed, everything in this existence had its otherworldly significance. Every part of what was happening needed to be examined thoroughly. As though they were characters in Dirty Harry, the Iban needed to answer one fundamental question that haunted every new day, did you feel lucky?
They would have understood the changeable nature of the elephant cliffs of Coigach. If they threatened, keep your head down, don’t sail to the mainland, don’t try out a new idea in the book; if they merely guarded, then write hard and confidently; and if they were bright, start a new chapter, explore a sudden inspiration, sail over to Ardmair.
I never asked Bill whether he felt the same way about Coigach, he tended to look south towards An T’eallach, but Bernard was much too practical. He saw the island as it was, bare, windswept, and bereft of any wildlife bar rabbits and seabirds. From the day he arrived, he began ditching, fencing, and planting saplings, to return its ecology to its pre-sheep state. I think I felt slightly resentful at such interference.
If you depended on luck, it was important to read the signs aright. In Sarawak, I had seen one young man carried up the steep ladder to the village, and as the man bearing him stumbled across the veranda to his house a line of dark, shiny splashes in the dry white dust. That was what happened if you misread the auguries - in the young man’s case, a dream that he thought good, but his wife bad. By way of compromise, he had restricted an all-day hunt in the forest to the afternoon. Despite the precautions, he had swung his machete at a bunch of wild fruit, missed, and half-severed his leg. Nothing would stop the bleeding. However much we bound the wound, the bandages and rags turned red and sodden within minutes. After that there was nothing to do but sacrifice a cock to the gods, and offer up a sumptuous sacrifice and lengthy prayer.
The Iban would have had no difficulty in working out the parts of Isle Martin that possessed particular power. Like me, they would have found the graveyard disturbing, although for them it would have been the honeycomb of bones beneath the turf whereas I found something imprisoning in the grid carved into St Martin’s stone.
They would have appreciated the lazybeds. Hard physical work was second nature to forest-dwellers, as it must have been for the island’s crofting inhabitants, and as it clearly was for Bernard whose unending effort was evident in the lines of thin treelets snaking across the hillside. For me, the lazybeds were both whip and carrot. They made the mental labour of writing a book seem trivial, but at the same time they were practical proof that scratching at the surface day after day after day left a mark that endured for years.
But the best bit of the island was the place where I could see the elephants from the finest vantage point. On a summer’s day, it was possible to float weightless and see them twice over, in their original rocky form and rippling on the blue and tawny surface of the loch at the top of the hill. At such moments, there were no dimensions, no gravity, no up and down, no interior and exterior, only existence in the benign presence of the guardian creatures. It was bliss.
There is one drawback, however, to living in this unitary existence. Nothing can change. Luck happens, you go with the roll of the dice.
When the wounded Iban had been prayed over -- and as the one who sacrificed the cock, and called the forest spirits to help him, I can promise that side of it was performed with commitment -- there was nothing more to be done in Iban terms.
In western terms, however, there was a bagful of penicillin, sulfa powder, and strips, waiting an hour downriver. All of them had been developed with the aid of the divided western sensibility that understood cause and effect, and worked out that something other than the spirits controlled the circulation of the blood, the cause of shock and the danger of putrefaction.
Eventually a crew of sweating paddlers returned with the bag. The soaking rags were peeled off, the two halves of the butchered thigh were disinfected, pressed together and pinioned with a dozen strips, and a clean compressive bandage held the reconstituted limb in place. The bleeding stopped almost at once, soon after the shock wore off, and before the end of a long night, it was clear that the patient would not die.
By the second year on the island, I realized that Bernard was doing much the same thing to Isle Martin. Inside his fences, the grass grew long, the saplings produced leaves, and the earliest signs suggested a new, more complex cycle of growth was beginning.
Coming back to the island after the festival, the forest of trees was astonishing, and the birdsong and buzzing insects made it clear that something radical had altered. Intervention not luck. All Isle Martin needs now is people to make the cycle complete. At the top of the hill, I floated in the loch, and contemplated the elephant herd. The entire frieze of rock and ripples glowed with goodwill.
Andro in the kitchen of the Mill House
Copyright for this photo and the Isle Martin stone belongs to Marie-Louise Linklater - thank you Marie-Louise for allowing us to use them.
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and finally.....
SCOTTISH ISLANDS EXPLORER MAGAZINE
Joan was contacted by the editor of this magazine to write a 1500 word article on Isle Martin. It has now appeared in the November issue together with a number of spectacular photographs. The magazine is on sale by subscription and a fee is being paid to Isle Martin Trust for the article and for use of the photos.
It’s a wonder the article appeared at all, as with just a few words to go Joan’s computer crashed in a spectacular fashion and everything was lost. Despite Dulcie’s best efforts nothing could be retrieved and she had to start the article (and her life..!) all over again.
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The Isle Martin Board, which meets in Ullapool on the first Wednesday of every month, now comprises:
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Chairman |
Kenny MacLeod |
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Vice Chairman |
Fraser Mackenzie |
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Treasurer |
Paddy Stowell |
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Interim Secretary |
Sheila Didcock |
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Derick Boa |
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Gregor MacDonald |
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Murdo Mackenzie |
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Joan Michael |
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Alex Scott |
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Audrey MacLennan |
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Liz Beer |
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Lindsay Duncan |
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Jean Urquhart (Highland Councillor) |
The Board meets on the first Wednesday of every month in the registered office of MacLeods w.s., 26 Argyle Street, Ullapool.
Isle Martin Registered Office, 26 Argyle Street, Ullapool IV26 2UB
Scottish Charity No: SC 028 934
www.islemartin.co.uk
E-mail: islemartin@lochbroom.freeserve.co.uk