JOHN MACLEOD: Thin white nights of giggles and desire... and a kindling of passion and flame

Published: 20:28, 29 July 2026 | Updated: 20:28, 29 July 2026 In Shawbost on the west side of Lewis, where my mother’s people are, there is yet a striking idiom when some neighbour is sighted on his travels. Variously, ‘Murdo’s gone in the road,’ or ‘Murdo’s gone out the road.’ Because it has not the meaning you might think. ‘In the road’ is in the reassuring, usually work-related (in a community, of yore, overwhelmingly of crofter-fishermen) tramp in the direction of the shore. To the beached boats, the silvery strand, the familiar rocks and the mighty Atlantic. ‘Out the road’ has a faint air of menace. In the direction of the Great Moor. Always just a little sinister, a little ‘othered’. Even as a boy, by some Jungian capacity, I sensed this. As another, a well-travelled Highlander once put it, in the dramatic wilds of Canada you felt no one but God had ever been there before you. But on the Great Moor of Lewis you feel everyone who ever mattered is dead and gone. A realm of bog and heath and hill, untold lochans and dancing cotton sedge and zooming dragonflies, into which you never ventured on your own. Where bogles roamed, spectres shrieked and people had been murdered. They even, not that long ago, boasted a serial killer – one Mac an t-Srònaich, an outlaw on the lam, who had strangled a maid, drowned children, and throttled the odd bridegroom making home with whisky for his wedding. Shawbost on the west side of Lewis The psycho was finally hanged at Inverness around 1836, but – even today – Lewis children shudder deliciously at his name. Yet the same moor, all round the island, was also central to one communal spring labour – the annual winning of the peats, with pauses for tea and treats – and, just at the edge of living memory, ‘going to the shielings,’ perhaps the last instance of regular transhumance in western Europe. About May, all the women of the village and their children would pack what they needed, tramp out the road and out the hill – driving the family cows before them – and camp, in traditional stone-and-turf dwellings, for several weeks. This was partly to give the cattle sweet new grazing, to allow your man to rethatch the family home – an annual chore – and, in an age before galvanised fencing, to keep Daisy away from the sprouting crops. The mothers, though, usually returned every evening, bearing home the day’s milk and to make their man’s tea. The children out on the shielings were left in the charge of the teenagers: and the teenagers, as in any age, were far more interested in each other. As a rule, what happened in the shieling stayed in the shieling, but enough went down for, decades later, to make old ladies go pink and their men heartily chuckle. And central to those thin white nights of giggles and desire, the first kiss and the odd fumble, was the falaisg – the prudent muirburn. I must confess to one 1998 memory of a falaisgear at work – probing questions; flirtatious intent, by a little Harris loch beyond sight of any road; we actually called it Loch na Falaisg – that makes me go just a little pink too. Muirburn has two purposes: to burn off the ‘thatch’ of last year’s dead, dry growth, the better for the grazing, and – counterintuitively – to prevent uncontrolled wildfire. A lack of grazing has meant wildfires have become a problem in the Outer Hebrides Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh is also at risk of wildfire At its most sophisticated, to encourage the sprouting of new soft heather, it is central to managing grousemoor. Which is why we should be a bit wary when folk clamour – as, this week, some vocally have – for a halt to muirburn while some jobsworths investigate: it tends to be driven by the folk who hate field sports, the gentry, and shooting of any kind. The day of the shielings took a hammerblow from the Great War and never recovered from the 1939 rematch. But many young folk still lovingly maintain holiday huts in the depths of Lewis, and repair thereto, far from electricity and Wi-Fi and devices, for – uh, oh, those summer nights. A falaisg might well be totemic of such evenings, of new yearnings and taut desire. But wildfire is now no joke in Scotland – last weekend, a blaze was so out of control in the Cairngorms that Nethy Bridge had to be evacuated – and, as we have all seen in the news, is now a matter of stark terror in Europe. Pyrocumulonimbus convection firestorms, generating their own wind systems, hitting temperatures of 1,100C… Tempests flinging burning embers over hundreds of yards of parched undergrowth like mortar fire; scenes at Bordeaux, several days ago, that put you in mind of Dresden. The threat to homes, the destruction of forest, the spoliation of habitat – in the Cairngorms, the peat in many places caught fire; nothing will grow there again for a generation – and the slaughter of wildlife, from adders to ground-nesting birds – are sobering indeed. Because our moors, these days, are so little grazed, wildfires have become a serious problem on my own island, especially as we are prone to spring droughts. One, in 2012, doing some damage to the Lews Castle Grounds and actually closing for hours the main road, was probably started deliberately. Another, miles to the south of my home in April 2022, had our village thick with smoke; we wheezed and spluttered. And, in 2003, another in Harris so alarmed the authorities they seriously contemplated the evacuation of Leverburgh. Not that you have to be in the boondocks. In March 2022 there was a destructive wildfire in the Ochil Hills. Blackford Hill, amidst the suburbs of Edinburgh – much of it thick with whin – has been torched more than once and, by the very Palace of Holyroodhouse and, indeed, the Scottish parliament, Arthur’s Seat went up in flames last week. Sometimes it is arson. More prosaically, it is a carelessly discarded cigarette butt, or imprudent deployment of a disposable barbecue. Perhaps as prosaic as a piece of broken glass, in the wrong place, magnifying the rays of the noonday sun. Sorley MacLean, the great Gaelic poet Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth… There is a strict code about muirburn, laid down by NatureScot, and a defined season for it – between 15th September and 31st March. It calls for common sense, keen awareness of wind direction, sufficient in attendance to control and extinguish it and awareness of particularly sensitive habitats – and, from this autumn, you will need a licence for it. Not that all our Highland memories of fire are benign and blushful. I am pleased I got to know the great Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean in the last years of his life, and visited him often. As an ardent young man in the Thirties, he had known a very old man in the village of Duirinish. This elder, in turn, had as a mite known a very old lady. Who had never forgotten, as a little girl, watching the fires blazing across the water in 1746 – thatched homesteads ablaze, as the Redcoats laid waste to Raasay.