The sound of Mingulay, a story of a rare recording field trip

Susan came on the scene at the very start of digitisation and was expected to do everything herself – produce, record, edit and manage our travel – for we were travelling to some of the most remote and beautiful places in Scotland. Sadie was the name given to the system she operated.

Susan was producing for BBC Radio Scotland’s religious affairs department and for some reason they had latched on to me as a presentably tame agnostic with spiritual leanings. We started off with four programmes, recorded mostly on the Isle of Skye.

This was Susan’s first big commission and when she handed in the finished results to her boss, Johnston McKay, she was understandably nervous.

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He upbraided her for her nerves: “You are paid to know when you have done something good.” The result was a commission for seven half-hour programmes called Between Two Worlds which took us as far afield as Mingulay and North Rona – the latter reached by helicopter – this all in pursuit of early Celtic Christianity.

One highlight was recording John MacNeil who was skippering us on our way to Mingulay, classic MacNeil territory.

I introduced him in his presence as the skipper of a boat which he had not had the decency to name. His snort of indignation is a treasured part of the programme and, being a true Gael, he took the remark as I knew he would – with a sense of fun and mischief. Susan never missed these things, nor did she ever suggest editing them out.

Mingulay has been uninhabited for a century but John’s grandparents had lived there and he remembered it fondly.

We recorded all we needed in a grey drizzle but, the next day being free and a beauty, we went back just to explore its mighty cliffs, Biulacraig, which is over 700ft and, unlike many a so-called cliff, is truly vertical, in places overhanging, from top to bottom. “Biulacraig!” is the clan cry of the MacNeils and if you have ever seen that cliff you will know to take the MacNeils seriously.

I got to do some field recording on Mingulay myself on a special visit organised by Ray Burnett to record island traditions. His son John came with his bagpipes, itching to play. I had asked him to learn the pìobaireachd MacNeil is Lord There – Tha MacNeil Tighearna Ann.

Mingulay (Image: Martini)

It’s a terrific piece, a gathering full of growling low Gs and Bs that do battle insistently with the drones on A, never mind the wild high Gs that stand out like the cries of seabirds. Hearing that coming ashore from the MacNeil’s galley, it would take a lot of courage to decline to pay the MacNeil the rent – which was probably in birds and feathers and eggs gathered off those dramatic cliffs.

I persuaded John to wait before recording, hoping that le moment juste would make itself known. It did. On the Tuesday night there was a big midsummer storm and on the Wednesday morning huge waves were breaking on the pink sand crescent beach behind which the village once sheltered.

They broke cleanly along the whole length of the beach in a thunderous, widely spaced cannonade. There is only one instrument in the whole world which can compete with such power, both of sight and sound, and that is the Highland bagpipes, and Tha MacNeil Tighearna Ann was the perfect music.

I lay with my expensive hired microphone with its wind muffler in the shelter of a rock and John started playing at the waves’ edge and walked up past me into the ruined village. Waves breaking are usually messy on a microphone – especially when they retreat, but not these ones. Nothing needed to be added or taken away, not with the pipes, and for sure not with nature herself.

But back to Susan MacKay (below). On our second trip to Mingulay, John MacNeil and his shipmate Lachie were in the wheelhouse and Susan and I admiring our wake glittering astern when I realised that the beautiful clinker-built dinghy he had been towing had slipped the cleat and was drifting behind us. I chapped on the wheelhouse door and we turned back to retrieve it.

(Image: Martini)

JUST as we came alongside, I was about to put my hand on the wooden gunwale of the dinghy when it occurred to me to say to Lachie that if I put my hand on it the dinghy would, by the laws of salvage, be mine.

You never saw a hand shoot out so fast. He never thanked me. I think he was too shocked that such an idea could ever have crossed the mind of a mere passenger. She really was a lovely little dinghy ...

North Rona was a different matter. While Mingulay has no landing place, you jump on to rocks or wade in through the surf on the strand.

It is known as “the nearer St. Kilda” which latter has a jetty, a military presence and a pub. Mingulay is much more challenging than that but its difficulties are as nothing compared to North Rona. There is no sand on North Rona. The jump on to the rocks is really awkward and, being 40 miles out into the open Atlantic Ocean, the sea is never calm.

We went by helicopter – not because we had an unlimited budget but because at the last minute a French film crew pulled out and we got three seats at a knock-down price.

The moment we left the mainland, we flew into a thick sea fog. We had to fly low and fuel consumption went up. “If we don’t see the island in the next three minutes we’ll run out of fuel,” our insouciant pilot announced. Right on the three-minute mark the island emerged out of the mist.

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“It is a very strong green beautiful island” I had been told by Findlay MacLeod who knew it well and whose great-grandfather had been born on it, his great-great-grandfather having been exiled there in 1829 with his wife for five years as his punishment for illicit distilling.

When he had served his “sentence” he returned to Lewis but his heart yearned for North Rona and when he was told he could get a sight of it on a clear day from the top of a hill in Lewis he said “I don’t think my heart could bear it.” I can understand why. It is indeed a strong green beautiful island – a tough triangle of Lewisian gneiss covered with a green sward of remarkably productive soil.

Up until the 17th century it had supported a community of 30 souls (they never allowed it to exceed that number) until passing sailors stole their bull and left them an infestation of ship’s rats which consumed their store of barley. They died of starvation. According to Martin Martin, writing in the 1690s, they took their names “from the colour of the sky, rainbow, and clouds.”

Fraser Darling wrote of North Rona: “It is certainly not safe for human beings to go looking at the wonderful spectacle of wild sea. The water climbs up the steep gullies on the west side of the peninsula and at a height of 50 or 60ft above the sea has still sufficient force to roll boulders up and down which may weigh anything from a hundredweight to two tons.”

The island is named after a Saint Ronan who fled Lewis and “the gaggling of women” on a vessel provided, after earnest request, by God.

It was called the Cionaran-crò - a beast best described as follows: Seven herring a feast for a salmon Seven salmon a feast for a seal Seven seals a feast for a small whale Seven small whales a feast for a great whale Seven great whales a feast for the cionaran-crò.

With Ronan were his two sisters – but whatever Ronan thought he was escaping, he brought it with him. When one of the sisters noticed that her brother was lusting for her, she removed herself from his temptation to the next island of Sula Sgeir, 11 miles to the west, where there is no food, no water and where she died of starvation.

So this most northern outpost of Christian hope carries with it a desperate and twisted morality. That equivocal status is presented uncompromisingly on the North Rona cross. It is particularly significant in that besides its three holes, it has clearly marked male genitalia – no surprise to the Bretons for whom Ronan is a fertility saint on whose stone barren women used to sit in the hope of bearing a child.

Along with his sisters, Ronan brought a stone to the island: a beautiful round green stone the size of a sheep’s heart. It probably comes from Iona and would have been a pledge of Ronan’s own service to that community and to his God.

Darling dug it out from under the small altar in Ronan’s seventh-century cell and took it away. I hated that and brought a piece of green Iona marble to return to the island as some kind of recompense for the theft, which is permanent – the stone is now in Eorpie Museum.

On the last day of recording, I ended up talking about the stone. Susan and I were sitting on the slope of Fianuil where Ronan is said to have exclaimed at the beauty of his sister’s legs as she hoisted her skirts to climb up the steep grassy slope.

I felt a bit silly, wanting to find a place for my stone from which it could never ever be retrieved, especially as it was a grassy slope with nowhere suitable on offer. I thought we had finished and stood up and within one pace found a rock just protruding from the grass and a gap like a post-box slot underneath it. I slid my stone in and it disappeared into a totally unexpected void – or so it must have been.

Susan, being the producer she was, had kept recording and you can hear the island swallowing the stone. When I took my wife there the next day (I had paid for her on the remaining seat on the copter), the rock and its slot were not to be found. They did not exist. In the general mysteries of life, that is one I will put down to my having, for once, done the right thing.