Maritime Heritage

I was born, one street back from ‘the hoil’ of SY harbour and grew up in one of the Terraces which housed so many families, moved into the town, for work, from rural areas of Lewis. But the kids still found their way to the piers, to jump on bales of wool, come to feed the Harris Tweed mills which were busy then, turning out warps to deliver to weavers out on their crofts.

We gathered the spill of herrings by the neat heaps of corked black cotton mesh. I studied the raked Zulu sterns of the Lilac and the Daffodil. We could all intone the names of the small trawlers which were beginning to serve the international appetite for nehrops – simply ‘prawns’ to us.

Now, the klondykers come no more for herring, the number of trawlers has fallen to the smallest in my lifetime. High steel piles have been driven into the bed of ‘the hoil’ to take an impressive system of pontoon berths, serviced with electrical power and ready for the needs of a developing leisure industry.

The geography of Lewisian gneiss and the black basalt of the Shiant islands does not change so fast. The bays are still the natural shelters valued by the Viking settlers who gave us so many names, now filtered through Gaelic pronunciation. I moved from angling boats to dinghies and dipping-lug rigged sgoth Niseach – a fine example of indigenous craft. There is open access to these vessels to locals and visitors alike. But I also sail what you might describe as a seagoing E-type Jag – a 33ft wooden sloop, designed by Robert Clark.

We took her from Kiel in Germany, through the Limfjord across Denmark and then non-stop home through Pentland Firth. She has now called into many anchorages, in the indented coastline of the eastern side of the Hebrides, rested off Mingulay and played in the fast water below the outline of Barra Head. She has also gone west, through the interesting pilotage of the Sound of Harris, now well-marked and lit, to reach village Bay, St Kilda. She has made the onward links to both Orkney and Shetland and this year we look to Ireland, if the winds allow.

After many years of cruising in both traditional and contemporary craft, whether skippering community boats or crewing on commercial ones, I can say there are still a huge number of places I’ve yet to visit, within the length of the Long Island.

Ian Stephen’s first book of poems, Malin, Hebrides, Minches, was published in Denmark, in 1983. His re-telling of Western Isles Folk Tales is due from The History Press in  2014 and his home harbour features strongly in his first novel A Merry Book of Death and Fish, due from Saraband, this year. He will be Scotland’s representative in Commonwealth Poets United, in Canada in 2014 and read his poems and told stories at the Wooden Boat Festival of Tasmania in 2015.