In footsteps of poet Sorley MacLean ...

I had never heard of it.

Some weeks ago, Shaun sold a pamphlet from the 1970s publicising a poetry reading, held at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It was signed by Seamus Heaney.

The reading had been organised to celebrate Sorley MacLean. “Who?” I asked. “The world’s greatest Gaelic poet – the chief of the Scottish Renaissance,” Shaun replied.

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“He lived on the isle of Raasay, just off Skye.”

I packed my bags and drove north, in search of this poet and his island.

Heaney’s interest began after he read MacLean’s love poems, Dain do Eimhir, translated by Iain Crichton Smith in 1971. Soon afterward, Heaney met MacLean in Dublin and decided to translate Hallaig, the Scot’s most famous poem.

“Whether you were listening to him or reading him on the page, you were led into an uncanny zone, somewhere between the land of heart’s desire and a waste land created by history,” Heaney said.

Standing at an empty pier, I looked through the rain at Raasay. Once upon a time this island was home to my ancestors, the MacLeods.

In 1846 the clan sold out to a man named the Rev George Rainy, who barred marriage and deposited the native Gaels behind a wall at the north end of the island.

I boarded the ferry. Rasaay is the same size as Manhattan but with a population of 162, With my ferry docked, I walked up to Raasay House Hotel and was greeted by a young man called Finn.

“You’re the one on the search for Sorley?” “Yes, that’s right.” “Great,” he said.

“My grannie knew him. She will come over tomorrow to speak with you.”

I was treated to a dinner of local venison and veg from the walled garden behind the house. The window of my bedroom revealed a field of community-farmed sheep and the “brow-stubborn” reaching Sound of Raasay, trembling in the rain.

So far, from what I could gather, MacLean was a tortured romantic and active socialist, finding consolation in the unchanged beauty of his homeland, “island of my desire, / island of my heart and wound”.

He had fought Rommel’s army in Egypt, having narrowly missed joining the Spanish Civil War due to his unrequited love for a woman named Eimhir. (I later discovered that Eimhir was in fact two women, distinguished by “the red-hair” and “the gold-yellow-hair”).

I slept soundly thinking on a line that seemed to encompass MacLean’s tortured emotions upon a land haunted by its past, “you made a poet of me through sorrow”.

The next morning the rain slanted sideways and the wind pushed from behind so that the backs of my legs were black with water. To my right, the disturbed sea rose with white horses. Two ewes and their lambs stood to the side of the track under a copse of naked birch trees.

Weary and falling down, a cairn in commemoration of MacLean sits on a bend in the path. Hallaig is inscribed in its original Gaelic onto a plaque, now no longer legible.

I moved on, jumped over the “Hallaig stream”, and there, before me, a green reaching pasture sloped to the cliffs below. I had reached the cleared village of Hallaig.

The shape of several houses can be deciphered easily enough, while other bands of stone are harder to re-imagine.

As I was to discover on the island’s other deserted settlements, earth and time have a canny way of crawling over these heavy stone foundations, raising them into the air while clasping them to the chest of the ground.

To MacLean, Hallaig had become “the Sabbath of the dead”, yet his interlaced sense of past and present made this ghostly village “the land of the living”.

With a sheep’s carcass as my companion, I took refuge from the weather behind three walls of an old home. I read Hallaig as loud as I could and then stood up to face the wind. Suddenly, it softened.

The rain eased too. To my left the summit of a jagged reach of rock came into full view, with only blue sky behind it. The hill of Dun Caan. I walked towards it.

Later, my socks dripped on to the fire and my boots were stuffed with newspaper as Lyn Rowe, founder of Raasay House Hotel, sat on the sofa opposite me. Her understanding of MacLean’s work was complex and personal. This had started to become something of a theme.

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Having met the poet at the side of a shinty pitch in her 20s, it was only recently, while recovering from cancer, that Lyn had begun to read his poetry.

“I had thought he was famous because he was Gaelic … I now know it is some of the most beautiful poetry in the world … I am in love with his poetry and with his life.”

The next day the Sound was calm. I read Uamha ’n Òir (The Cave of Gold) and made my way to North Bay. Oystercatchers inspected the sand. I waded into the sea. Brimming with adrenaline, I then climbed Temptation Hill and paused at the summit, looking across to Skye.

At last, I could see the “rocking of the antlered” Cuillin Hills, “sharp-wounding” over the water. On my way down from the hill I visited St Moluag’s Chapel, sitting in ruins behind the walled garden.

I recognised the interlacing of Celtic and Christian symbols from a journey I had made to Iona a year previously, home to St Moluag’s teacher, St Columba. Roots of history were coming alive around me.

Lyn picked me up and we drove north. We passed Inver gorge, the original seat of the MacLeods, and then stopped to look east, down onto the pastures of the immortalised Screapadal, another of the cleared villages mentioned in Sorley’s poetry: “Rainy left Screapadal without people… but he left Screapadal beautiful; / in his time he could do nothing else.”

I found the cemetery where MacLean is buried. If the day before he was a romantic and socialist, I was now beginning to see him as existing “in a between place”.

Moored to an ageless island while the world around ceases to be still. I read aloud Srùth Traghaidh (The Ebb-tide Running) and, soaked to the bone, walked away.

Dh’ aithnich iad annad-sa an fhéile

Nach do reub an cuan,

Nach do mhill mìle bliadhna:

Buaidh a’ Ghàidheil buan.

They knew in you the humanity

that the sea did not tear,

that a thousand years did not spoil:

the quality of the Gael permanent.