The Last of Mary’s Places, by Marilyn Bowering

Mary MacLeod was a rarity: a female bard in seventeenth-century Scotland. A chronicle of travel through the Scottish Hebrides, More Richly in Earth explores MacLeod’s life and legacy, preserved within landscape and memory. Marilyn Bowering forms an unlikely connection with MacLeod despite differences of culture and language, time and place.

In the piece below, Marilyn Bowering explores Mary’s places.

Throughout my time with the mysteries surrounding the seventeenth-century Scottish Gaelic bard Mary MacLeod, Mary’s places have been key to how I understand her life and work. My journey did not begin in a library or a book – I had the chance to read her thirty years earlier and didn’t – but in the church of St. Clements, Rodel, on the Island of Harris where, as I came to learn, Mary is said to be buried beneath the flagstones. I returned there several times and to the Island of Berneray, where Mary lived in the house her patron, Norman MacLeod, built for her. For me, the place is imprinted with lightheartedness and gladness. This time, on my first visit to the Hebrides since I finished writing More Richly in Earth, I visited Rodel and Berneray again, but I also wanted to see one more of Mary’s places, the last I knew of through oral tradition.

Standing in Place

El and I are staying an hour’s drive across the causeway from Berneray, at Grimsay on North Uist. I have been on the road to the Lochmaddy ferry on North Uist’s east coast many times, but had never before lingered in the watery, shimmering, and mirroring landscape of the west side. Roads here tread lightly over bridges and causeways spanning high-rising fresh-water lochans and sea lochs. Across the machair, white sands paper the edge of the ocean, and sunset colour-washes both water and sky.

Before the building of causeways, much of the coast could only be accessed at low tide or by boat. In winter and bad weather, travel must have been near impossible – and dangerous. On walks with El along footpaths to burial cairns and stone circles in swirling wind and rain, we learn a little ourselves of North Uist’s lack of ready shelter.

From the sitting room window of our B&B, we gaze across moor and water to Ben Eaval / Beinn Eabhal, North Uist’s highest hill (347 metres / 1140 feet). When the weather clears, we can see all the way to Skye. This area was home to two twentieth-century Gaelic poets. One of them, Mary MacLean, lived on a nearby croft. Her poem about Beinn Eabhal, which mirrors poetry techniques used by earlier bards like Mary MacLeod, won the prestigious Bardic Crown in 1951:

And my subject will be the high mountain
That coloured the years of my childhood
With its ramparted face, its ridge
Like a henchbone . . .

Time and people have come and have gone
But your beauty is changeless,
Your beauty endures . . .

Until time is drawn back to the heights
And the bright sun is dimmed –
You will stand in the place where you are

‘Standing in the place where you are’ is what characterises bardic places.

Smeircleit

“In another anecdote, Mary [MacLeod] is said to have fallen from her horse at a stream that runs from Loch Smeircleit in South Uist to the sea. The horse’s leg was broken in the fall. The stream is known as Sruthan a’ Bhàird (Bard’s Stream) after this event.”

Close between North and South Uist, linked to them by causeways, is the small island of Benbecula. Mary MacLeod’s mother’s family was said to hold property there at Aird to the west of the road we are following south. After her sister died – Mary may have been living at Aird with her – Mary set out with her sister’s body, on foot and on horseback, on a journey north-east across South and North Uist and over the sea in an open craft (birlinn) to the MacLeod burial ground at Rodel, Harris. It was a journey of close to 100 miles by track and water, taking several days and requiring resources of courage and endurance from a woman then likely in her eight or ninth decade. In the story of this travel, Mary meets a woman who joins in with the mourners but does not know who the dead woman was or who Mary is. At one time, Mary was both praised and vilified; now her reputation as a bard has simply vanished.

My sense of being on roads criss-crossing a plate puddled with liquid silver is gone as soon as we leave North Uist behind. South Uist is watery enough with frequent lochans, but we also travel through farm, grazing, and moor land with a range of hills shadowing to the east. Westward, out of sight of our inland path, the map depicts a coastline edged with white sand. This last of Mary’s places is in the far south-west corner of the island.

We turn off the road onto a lane which tracks a shale, sand, and rock shoreline for a mile or so, and park the car near a footbridge spanning Sruthan a’ Bhàird (Bard’s Stream). This stream, running out of Loch Smeircleit to the sea, is where tradition says that Mary “lost” a horse through a broken leg. It is late spring, but from what I see of the surrounding sea-level boggy ground and mud banks stirred and crushed by cattle, most horses would have difficulty with the terrain at any season, and a broken leg might not be surprising. Sruthan a’ Bhàird is little more than a grassy-banded ditch, not what one would expect if intended to memorialise a bard.

The lines Mary is said to have composed here are satirical, aimed at those who denied her the support and position (and income) to which she was entitled:

It’s no surprise that I am without wealth
There are many ways it was taken from me.

The final two lines refer to gossip about her whisky-drinking. Self-mockery deepens to something darker as she appears to address the dead horse and unite her fate with it: it is like the punch-line to a cruel joke.

I paid for my half dozen bottles
Pulling (dragging) your corpse to the grave.

These are bitterly funny lines. Clear-eyed, gifted, mind and wit intact, tasked with the near impossibility of leveraging a horse into what must suffice for a grave in a water-logged landscape, the poet invites us to stand with her in the slough and see exactly how things are.

Notes:

Quotations from poetry by Mary MacLean, are taken from Timothy Neat with John MacInnes, The Voice of the Bard: Living Poets and Ancient Tradition in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 1999), 35-64.

The anecdote about Mary MacLeod at the Bard’s Stream is found in Fr Allan Macdonald, Gaelic Words and Expressions from South Uist and Eriskay, 1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. 1972), as cited in  Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh, Song-maker of Skye and Berneray, edited by Colm Ó Baoill (Glasgow: The Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, vol. 22, 2014), 6. Translation by Sharron Gunn.

Marilyn Bowering is a novelist, poet, and librettist; she is the author of four novels and numerous books of poetry. She is the winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Gwen MacEwen Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Prize, and the Dorothy Livesay Prize. She has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, the Prix Italia, and the Sony Award. Her work has been translated into numerous languages including Spanish, Finnish, German, Romanian, Russian, Greek, and Punjabi. In a review of her novel What it Takes to Be Human the Globe and Mail said of her “[Bowering] does not seek moments to be brilliant: those moments just arrive.” Marilyn Bowering lives in Victoria, BC.