JOHN MACLEOD: A home for sale... rich in childhood memories and the delicious notes of my forebears

Published: 19:01, 22 July 2026 | Updated: 19:01, 22 July 2026 It was 1851, it was a wholly new township on the west side of Lewis, the thatch had barely been roped, and Catriona – mother of eight – already had quite enough on her plate when she first glimpsed the carriage on its patronising trundle out the road. The laird’s carriage: Sir James Matheson had seven years earlier bought all Lewis, from a fortune made in Chinese opium. Of late busily modernising the island and who, with one curl of an eyebrow, could have the land from you. Catriona froze as the horses paused by the very door. The coachman beckoned. Acted as interpreter – for she had no English, and Lady Matheson no Gaelic – as the proprietor’s wife eased her hooped skirts out of the transport to patronise us all. Were Catriona and her man settling in at New Shawbost? Yes, milady. Happy on their appointed six acres? Of course, ma’am. Was she not most grateful? Certainly, milady. Might Catriona appreciate cloth for a new dress? Catriona swallowed. Nodded nervously. In what colour? My great-great-grandmother panicked. Lady Matheson frowned; how might red suit? Very well, milady… After an eternity, Lady Matheson – doubtless bored – moved on. You can still see, outside Shawbost Free Church, a milestone. Not the distance from Stornoway: rather, the miles to the new-minted Lews Castle, for the convenience of aristocratic guests at the Matheson lair. Days later, a bolt of the finest scarlet fabric was delivered to Catriona’s door, as her great-granddaughter shared with me in 2005; last week, that same croft – and the modern house my grandfather in 1932 erected, the house wherein my mother was born – went up for sale. At a price beyond most local wages, and taking much of me with it: a physical space, childhood memories, and delicious notes of my forebears. Like Catriona’s son Donald, who around 1851 was early in manhood and already a professing Christian. He was on the caithris – the night-courting – in Breasclete, a chaste but curious custom when he was tucked up atop her bed with the latest love-interest, a blanket between them, and – adoze – had a vivid dream. Of another young, beautiful woman. He woke out of it, delicately advised his companion he’d send his cousin down to see her, made excuses and left. Days later, on his way to Cross communion through the village of Shader, Donald bumped into the girl he had dreamt of. And married her. Decades later, Donald’s baby sister Ciorstag made the inordinate trek back to Shawbost from Crulivig in Uig. A long, long walk, and why? Because, as her granddaughter told me twenty years ago, word had reached her that the Shawbost psalmody-class was to learn a new tune that week – Torwood – and Ciorstag could not bear to miss out. That Shawbost croft fell in 1912 to my grandfather, Murdo ‘Murdaig’ MacLean, born in 1891, and whom of all my forebears I most physically resemble. High cheekbones, wide-eyed level stare, stooping gait and a tendency to talk too quickly. As almost the last child in a long-tailed family, Murdo wasn’t that interested. After years at sea, Great War service and untold labour on the prairie, he was enchanted with America; determined to make his life there. There was one wee problem: he was loved up with a New Shawbost lass from not five minutes out the road and his Mary, fair-skinned and blue-eyed, would not emigrate for all the ships of Solomon. So bang went Detroit. I still have a wag-at-the-wa’ American clock my grandfather acquired before Hitler’s war – the one wistful reminder of what might have been. Shawbost, when I was a little boy in the early Seventies – sharing a bed with my brother Murdo, as across the room my grandparents snored in the other – was still a village that looked two ways in time.  James Matheson made a fortune from the opium trade with China in the 19th century Even then, a couple of families still lived in thatched blackhouses. Murdaig and Mary’s world was one of soothing routine. Up betimes to milk the cow. Family worship after breakfast – and again, after tea. He liked Fowler’s treacle with his porridge and a dunt of English mustard with his beef. He preferred brown bread to white; used darkly to murmur that cheese was ‘binding.’ Denied the New World, soon after his 1924 marriage he blew his savings on a bus. Said grace not just before meals, but after them.  Only when he was well in his forties was he ‘converted,’ as we say – dying in 1974 as a Free Church deacon – long after an elder brother so versed in Scripture that ministers sought his advice on points of doctrine. But, as one old man decades later remarked to my father, ‘Angus was the abler theologian – but Murdo was the lovelier Christian.’ That bus proved lucrative and, in 1932 – finally blessed with a male heir, a vital condition for a 50-year loan from the Board of Agriculture – Murdaig built his house, not to mention a garage with a great wheeled door for the prized coach and that is there yet. So Murdaig and Mary at last repaired from their ‘improved’ blackhouse to the classic West Highland two-up-two-down; improved further in the Fifties with the advent of running water and electricity. A new kitchen was adorned with the first Rayburn in the village; not that it impressed one elderly neighbour from an era when respectable fires were in the middle of the floor. ‘I’d be as well looking at a sideboard,’ she sniffed. But – in an age when having even a cousin in the ministry was a mark of great distinction – Murdaig had the last laugh. Three daughters married Free Church ministers: that male heir was ordained as one. Lews Castle and grounds in Stornoway My grandfather refused ever to flatten the home; kept the thatch on its byre-end in repair till the day he died.  In the summer of 1973 I’d perch on the wall-head, snuggling into the straw as I read my latest adventure of the Secret Seven, as the bees drowsed in the clover and the breeze rippled the silverweed. But things were not as they should have been. My grandfather, strangely fatigued, excused myself on the day his son and my father were helping him to tar the garage roof; when his firstborn was days later inducted as minister of Tolsta, he felt on the day too weak to go. A year later I stood by his new-dug grave. A daunting mound of ripped turf and the first I had ever seen. Granny, serene and queenly, weathered another decade: she died in October 1984 as I began university. Within months, my uncle had obliterated the blackhouse; thus began the end of an old song.