1 EAGLETON NOTES: Lewis Memories: Moving and Gardening

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Sunday 6 December 2020

Lewis Memories: Moving and Gardening

When I was looking for a house on Lewis in 1975 there were two available outside Stornoway within commuting distance.  I opted for the one nearer to Stornoway in the township of Coll, 7 miles from my office. It was an old 3-bedroom bungalow with an upstairs room reached by a loft ladder in the hall. However it had a large 'barn' built as an agricultural building but in effect a large double garage capable of housing both a caravan and a car or, in our case, a Bedford CF Autosleeper.  There was also the original byre attached. In addition on the ¼ acre plot was a good sized garden and a plot of trees. The latter was very unusual.

I had come from a village in Cheshire where houses were both expensive and sought after,  However on Lewis I had to pay very substantially (over 60%) more for a similar sized but detached house. Moving was not going to be cheap. Ironically when I sold the house in 2005 it had almost trebled in price whereas the house in the Cheshire village had multiplied in value over 10 times when I last looked in the '90s.

C'est la vie.

When I bought the house the neighbour opposite said "Oh. You're English. That's okay. The house has a garden so you'll be at home. You can always tell the English. They have gardens."

Outwith Stornoway it was true that few people had gardens in the '70s. They didn't have the time because they were tending the croft nor the inclination to have a hobby which was more of the same. For me, desk-bound during the day, the luxury of manual labour in the garden was wonderful.  

How things have changed. Within 15 years the neighbour's sister (they both lived in the family home) had insisted that her brother fence off a garden area for her. Nowadays there are so many gardeners that there is a Western Isles Gardening Facebook page and two substantial garden centres and quite a few people growing plants and food on a part time commercial basis too.  

Mind you when I came to the Island incomers were relatively rare. Now the place is full of them!

52 comments:

  1. Did you travel over there in an inflatable boat with about thirty others - all wearing useless orange life vests provided by the people smugglers? Oh, and what was your job when you first arrived on Lewis?

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    1. YP, at the time I came here to live on 30 November 1975 England was not a third world country from which I wanted to escape. I came on modern a ro-ro car ferry the same as anyone else that year (it had just been introduced). I came for 2 years but I never returned. I was a bureaucrat. Which, of course, tells you nothing more than is on my profile page.

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    2. Bureaucrat? Intriguing. I guess that is shorthand for spy.

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  2. You started a trend for gardening then Graham?

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    1. No, JayCee. I simply had a garden. It took a lot longer for the crofting system to start to collapse and for people to start gardening outwith the town.

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  3. I would like a house like that with a big shed. I'm looking for a small house but it has to have a big shed for Adrian things. I found one but you know what planners are like. The whole bit of estate needs levelling and a big shed building with a nice airy timber frame semi popping up in one corner, Half for me and half for my carer when I need one. They haven't knocked it on the head but want sketches. I suspect what they want is a consideration but I've yet to settle on a price with the owner. I wasn't foolish enough to mention such matters but may offer you employment as a consultant should push come to shove.
    Tell the pudding it's none of his business, not that it's any of mine what you tell him. Nosey Twat and if he was anything of a geographer he would understand that even a brain dead Somali would think twice about venturing into the Minch.

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    1. Adrian for you my consultancy fees would be half of nothing. But then my knowledge of planning law which was considerable is probably out of date now. These bureaucrats and politicians can never leave well alone. Never try to bribe a bureaucrat. Their loss of pension wouldn't be worth it. Even politicians get paid these days. Public service is paid for legally now. As you well know The Minch on a calm day can be a challenge even for the big guys. By the way I've just asked John aka Hamel to moderate his comments. Nosey Twat isn't polite. This is a polite blog. Mainly because you can't see the spam I've been getting lately.

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  4. A house without a garden always looks lonely to me, like it has not quite made it into the "home" category. It must be the tiny bit of English blood in my ancestry!!

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    1. Margaret, that's a very good way of putting it. Mind you all the croft houses were so surrounded by the accoutrements of the plural economy ie farming and fishing gear (not to mention old cars) that lonely never occurred to me.

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  5. A lovely home, Graham, and it looks very sturdy.

    Recently we discussed “the hurrier I go the behinder I get” but this week’s statement, one I just made up, is “the older I grow the dumber I get”. Yesterday Tasker Dunham introduced me to a new word, ceilidh. Then today in your post I have encountered two more new words (well, new to me), byte and croft.

    Life was going so swimmingly until 80 hove into view.

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    1. Oddly enough, Bob, I have just commented on ceilidh on Tasker's blog. It is a Gaelic word. A byre is a British word for cowshed although it is generally used up here for a building which houses the various animals kept near the croft house eg the milking cow, and a few hens and any lambs that were being hand-reared. It probably house feed and other agricultural stuff as well. A croft is a legal entity. In common parlance it is a fenced or enclosed area of land tenanted by a crofter and often with a croft house on it. Crofting Law is complicated but basically it was enacted to give people displaced by the lairds a legal right to land to farm. A Laird is a Scottish landowner by the way. Crofts are only found in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

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  6. You don't sound like a bureaucrat. :)
    It's no wonder to me that folks are flocking to your island with views like you have from your garden; and crowd paranoia being what it is today.

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    1. Maywyn, what does a bureaucrat sound like? When I read Public Administration at Uni, P M Blau defined a bureaucracy as a 'large organisation' ergo anyone working for a large organisation was a bureaucrat. Of course now people tend to think of a bureaucrat as a faceless government official. The one thing about being in government in a smallish community when I came here was that you were anything but anonymous.

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  7. The "You can always tell the English. They have gardens" quote makes me wonder, did you (your parents) have a garden back in England where you grew up, too? During my first 4-5 years we lived in a flat in town, but then moved to a house of our own with a garden (and later to a bigger house with a bigger garden), in both cases also with direct access to a forest behind. My parents both grew up kind of like that as well. I've not followed the pattern as an adult, though, as I've never had a house/garden of my own.

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    1. Monica, my Dad had an allotment when my parents married but also had a front and back garden to the house. There was grass, flowers, bushes and a tree at the back and a hedge and roses and annuals in the front. I have always had a garden since I've been married.

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  8. Things change where ever you are. Some things are good and some are bad. I think the decisions you made turned out to be right.

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    1. Red, you so often hit the nail right on the head.

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  9. Most of the houses here that have beautiful gardens are owned by the English. Gardening seems to be in their blood.

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    1. Cro, it does seem to be a very English thing wherever they have colonised.

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  10. The bungalow looks rather posh! I had to look up "byre", as I don't think I have ever come across the term. Now I have learnt something new - thank you for that!
    Over here, most house gardens have undergone quite a few changes in the past decades. During and after the war, people grew as much vegetables and fruit as they could, and even with that supplement, many went hungry for a long time. Then, when the situation in this country improved and people were able to buy food again, many a vegetable plot was turned into grass and flowers; gardens were more for leisure then anyhting else. Children had sand pits and inflatable paddling pools in the summer. Then, about 10-15 years ago, a trend back to grow-your-own meant that now most gardens are a mix of useful and leisure. My house with four flats has a small garden at the back, but I never go there; it is mostly used by the people who live on the ground floor with direct access to it from their living room.

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    1. Meike, when it was built it was considered fairly posh compared with the surrounding houses which were largely croft houses but in reality it was very ordinary and by the time I bought it was decidedly ordinary.

      There is some parallel with gardens here although a lot depends on the size of the garden. Certainly most people I know seem to have at least some vegetables. .

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  11. I wouldn't like to have to keep all the white, white, although maybe you didn't have all the muck and the traffic some places round here get.

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    1. Tasker, the air here is very clean and there was very little traffic dirt. I actually painted it cream afterwards.

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  12. As regards commentators who may be rather wordy, there's a right barney taking place on YP's blog.

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    1. I've noticed the barney. I'm not quite sure what has come over some people. I don't mind comments on topic even if a bit controversial but I won't have continued aggravation or rudeness.

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  13. Well, I am really feeling quite smug, I knew the meaning of byre! I think that your comments about remote places swarming with newcomers holds true for many locations throughout the world. Pristine, tranquil havens are quickly discovered and people want to move there or at least have summer places, and the very characters that appealed to them originally slowly disappear. I can quickly bring to mind several places where I have seen this happen. Fine young boy in front of the house - your son I assume? I know you were younger when you bought the house, but not that young!

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    1. David, the other thing is remoteness is less of a problem now. It used to take me two days driving with at least one overnight to get to my parents in Liverpool 465 miles away by road and nearly 4 hours on the ferry to start. Now the roads are very good and the ferry only takes 2½ hours. I could do it in a day if I had to. (My parents are both dead now). The youngster is my late elder son, Andrew.

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  14. Many of the gardens in Eastbourne have been sacrificed for parking spaces. Such is life! They still have lots of flowers though and lots have gardens, it's just I have seen these changes over the years in the little corner I know in England. My English gardener, that is my husband, is very talented with the care of plants and flowers. Lucky me!

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    1. Kay, most of the houses in the country here have plenty of land so no need to sacrifice gardens for parking.

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  15. I really like the house, I could quite happily live there mind you I would love to live there you live too. Maybe that's why I love gardening, must be the English side.

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    1. Amy, it was a happy house as is my current one. I only came for two years so there must be something I like about Island life.

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  16. A sturdy looking house, built to withstand whatever weather may come its way.
    My familiarity with crofting terminology can be traced back to Lilian Beckwith and her book The Hills is Lonely.
    Alphie

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    1. Alphie, in those days houses were all built very sturdily with relatively small windows. The large window you can see use to flex when we had hurricanes. Now with toughened glass etc some people have massive windows. Lillian Beckwith. The Hills is Lonely. She married Ted Comber in 1937 and the couple moved to the Isle of Skye in 1942. They bought a croft and her books were based on hers and Ted's experiences while living there. The Hills Is Lonely was published in October, 1959. By the time I came to Lewis she was deeply unpopular amongst locals who felt that she had made fun of them. I only ever mentioned her name once and then learned better of it. However nearly 20 years after her book was published it was possible to see where she got her material from.

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  17. The Gardening-75 virus....spread by the British! It's still rampant...uncontrollable! :)

    That looked to be a lovely, solid home.

    Take good care, Graham. :)

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    1. Lee, spread by the British (sic) is interesting. Did we spread it across the globe? Probably because gardening implies non-essential cultivation. Up on Lewis it was probably spread by the English and the Lowland Scots. In Britain we are all legally British but few Scots say they are British first.

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  18. The house seems quite substantial, Graham and I was wondering if you have ever had a more recent look at it. Also I was curious about the identity of the young fellow standing out front - family member? Gardening is something that ran in my family when we lived in NJ and my parents were Italian ancestry so it's definitely not just be "an English thing."

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    1. Beatrice, the house was quite substantial certainly. I see it quite often when I drive down that road. It's had a few alterations since then. The child outside is our elder son, Andrew. I have many friends of Italian extraction (Scotland was a very popular place to emigrate to at the start of the 20th century)and most of them are, as you said, keen gardeners. Because I've seen relatively few gardens (as opposed to agricultural plats) in Italy I always assumed that they hade caught the gardening bug from the leisured English.

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  19. That looks like a very nice house. I expect you know what caused the demise of crofting, but I don't, not really. I know it was a very hard life but I am imagining that crofters or their children began to want things that subsistence farmers can't buy, like big freezers and reliable cars, or perhaps needed a better education for today's world. And then, I suppose, the crofting community fell apart. Did you commute every day to an office on the mainland?

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    1. Jenny, it is not a easy question and there is no simple answer. It was a hard life but during the war and the recession of the 30s at least people didn't starve. Indeed when I came many crofts and the sea provided basic food needs. The economy in the crofting areas was a pluralistic economy even in the '70s but the demise of crofting was alarmingly swift thereafter.

      I commuted to my office in Stornoway which was the administrative centre of the Wester Isles (Outer Hebrides) after local government reorganisation. It was 7 miles away. The nearest government offices on the mainland was in Dingwall or Inverness. Both at that time were at lease half a day's travel away although one could fly to Inverness Airport about 30 minutes outside the city.

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  20. I'm always interested in what happens to my old houses when I've moved on. I make a point to check up on them to see how they are priced in today's market. While I'm not a gardener in Graham's class, I do try to improve each property where I've lived, e.g., I grew up in Smyrna, Georgia USA, "The Jonquil City of the South." So I dutifully planted jonquils around each of my homes. When I landed here in northern New Mexico I continued with my jonquil planting, putting 100 bulbs in the upper terrace in back of my home. I was dismayed by three lonely blooms in the Spring, the squirrels and other critters had feasted on all my bulbs during their dormancy. I have had better lucky with Hollyhocks as they are native to this area and I frequently refer to this as Hollyhock Cottage.

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    1. Jill, I have only lived in 5 houses in my lifetime: two on Lewis. I moved into my current house 27 years ago when my wife and I separated. I've had no problems with bulbs being eaten but a friend in Glasgow has just been complaining about the urban squirrels eating hers and here some friends have complained about theirs being dug up and eaten (but we have no squirrels).

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  21. I like how a passing comment by a neighbour all those years ago is so clearly remembered. No doubt you have recalled that comment many times over the years. Lesson - we never know what others take from what we say. I'd hate to think which of my past comments may be remembered. I would have no worries at all about what you may have said, except perhaps a former incomer saying now the place is full of them. I know you won't take that the wrong way. I think it's lovely that you are so much a part of the community where once you were a stranger.

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    1. Pauline, I felt that I could pass the 'incomer' comment simply because I am one and, despite being here the best part of half a century, always will be one. My son, on the other hand, is an Islander through and through. In the early days he was knows as my son. Now I am known as his dad. The only other place where I have felt as at home was when I lived in New Zealand.

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  22. I have seem many such bungalows around the world.
    Low and squat, and powerfully build to withstand the rigours of the weather
    Chin chin

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    1. Hello
      I see you have challenged Ursula on another blog.
      I’m interested in your food blog

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    2. Soupspoone, I've been trying to think in all the places I have been in the world (which is not that many in total if I'm honest) and I can't really say that this form of construction has struck me as common at all.

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    3. John, my gut feeling is that it may be an ongoing spat but I may be wrong.

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  23. it's a good looking house and it would have only improved with the addition of a garden.
    I think I have a good vocabulary but you have introduced me to a few previously unknown words, byre being one!

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    1. Kylie, I tend to forget that many words used in the Highlands and Islands are not common elsewhere although byre is quite common in Britain.

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