This is a remote part of the Scottish highlands — an abandoned township two miles from the nearest scrap of civilisation, a seldom-used road. It’s the end of a bright, blustery day. Under the vanilla and gunmetal skies of a North Atlantic sunset, the wind hisses through yellow-crowned gauze. Ahead of you, the shells of houses are surrounded by magenta waves of rosebay willowherb and the geometric traces of ridge and furrow fields. The remaining shards of walls are like part of the terrain. Raised from the same stone as the surrounding knolls and escarpments, it is as though they have been pushed up from the bedrock, bursting wetly through the skin of the earth only to be beaten back by the relentless bombardment of air and water.
You’ve spent a good chunk of your life visiting places like this. It began with the chance discovery of an abandoned village at the end of a track in another, equally isolated, part of western Scotland. The experience of discovering the husk of an entire village, with its buildings and lanes still present after decades of decline, was a startling one. There have been many more since then.
Many of these forgotten villages still have tracks leading to them, some harder to follow than others, barely discernible on the ground, no more than the idea of a path recorded in a thin line on a map. This township doesn’t even have that, and yet the ghost of a street is still clearly defined by the buildings. Two lines of houses stand on a rise, slightly above the surrounding boggy heathland; houses where families once lived. Behind them, there is a second row of smaller buildings: barns, kale yards and lazy beds. The lines of tumbledown blackhouses stretch away from you towards a larger, newer house at the top of the street. It is taller, its rendered walls are thinner and better made, and above it, still standing, a proper chimney stack.
You’ve approached from the sea, as most visitors would have done. The bay behind you is really just a broad cleft in the rocky shore. It’s filled with boulders but a slipway has been cleared through them, wide enough to drag a small fishing boat from the water. The wet moss and sods of tough grass yield beneath your feet as you follow the ‘street’ between yawning doorways, watched over by empty windows. This village, unlike two of its neighbouring communities, was never ‘cleared’. That is to say, it’s residents were never evicted in order to provide land for sheep farming or enhance a rich family’s estate. This community died slowly over generations, the youngsters leaving to pursue an easier life among city streets — paved, of course, with gold — while the old timers stayed on, dwindled. One way or the other, the last inhabitants departed this little township in the thirties.
What a strange and sad existence it must have been, to be the last here, when the houses still had roofs and ghosts still clung to the stones. It would be forgivable to imagine ghosts here, but these places have never seemed haunted to you. Maybe they’ve decayed too far and lost the uncanny ability to haunt that more recently abandoned buildings seem to possess.
Despite the level of their dissolution, the houses still show occasional traces of the lives that passed through them and, walking along the lost lanes of the settlements, it is difficult not to sense the population that once lived there. The grandeur of the landscape that surrounds these ruins contrasts with the intimacy of their scale and the human traces left in the fabric of the buildings: a window surround warped by the elements, a corroded metal picture frame that has somehow remained among the tumble of stones, or a doorstep worn away by generations of feet passing across it. It’s in these details that you sense the time that has passed here.
Time, and the unkind elements, have stripped almost everything else away, helped, no doubt, by the Highland necessity of recycling any materials that can be re-used. It’s a long way to transport building materials to this place at the end of the road network, and any wooden joinery and roof timber probably found their way into the construction of byres and fences all over the area. What was left has rotted away, or been burnt. Of the few features that remain it is always the fireplace that draws you in. However humble the houses, all have a hearth of some description. The chimney stacks tend to last — they are often the most solidly built part of the house — and, aside from the windows and doorways that have kept their integrity, this most human piece of the building is often the only piece of architectural detail left.
This lost settlement is melting back into the landscape as the wilderness reclaims its acres. If you aren’t careful it will lull you into the sentimental territory of the picturesque, the romantic — imagery that some have described as ‘ruin-porn’. But it’s not romanticisation that draws you to this place and others like it. Although you love the wildness of the landscape, and its biology and geology fill you with awe every time you come here, it is its role as the backdrop to a human drama that fascinates you. And, of course, you are only human — like any voyeuristic movie goer, or watcher of soap operas, you are fascinated by the bits where it all goes wrong. As with all ruins, the remains of these abandoned crofting villages mark a change: the point when an idea or a way of life was abandoned after many generations. But, as they fade back into the landscape, they maintain a sense of presence – of place.
These are places where each stone and hillock meant something. The people who lived there, the builders who made them, the workers who toiled there, knew every detail, gazed at the same view from the window so often that they ceased to notice it. Each house, field, stream and hill would have had a name, not just on a map, but on the lips of those who lived here. For a moment, you wonder if their descendants still speak about it, or even remember it exists.
The naming of things, places, is a practical necessity, but it extends beyond that. It is partly about remembering. We experience a place physically but, without a name to call it by, our ability to remember it to ourselves or others becomes uncertain, abstract and mercurial. Unnamed features in the landscape are reduced to being part of the spaces between. As soon as we name somewhere, we give it significance. It allows them to take their place in the stories we tell ourselves.
Perhaps merely noticing somewhere gives it significance, and naming it only stretches that moment of recognition (or the moment of somewhere having meaning to us) into something more lasting that might linger even after the place has been abandoned. As long as we go on noticing them, recording them on maps, remembering them somehow, the names will cling to the places, and the places will go on having meaning.
On a day like this, you need to remind yourself just how bad the weather here can get, and for just how long it can blast. It’s a hard place, unforgiving and isolated. To stay here would have been a difficult living. Maybe more than any other ‘archaeological’ sites, the remains of these settlements mark a change: the point when an idea or a way of life was abandoned, peoples destinies were bent, pathways suddenly altered. Whether it is sudden or a slow unfurling, change brings trauma with it. There’s a residual anxiety in this township. Like ghosts in the ruins, loss and absence will cling to these stones until they are accepted back into the earth. Places like this — places that exist just beyond the reach of living memory — make us question our idea of permanence, but they maintain a sense of presence. They are the marks left on the landscape by the lives moving through it.
The wind is picking up now and the daylight is fading. Out at sea, the ragged black strip of the Hebrides lingers against the soft blue of the evening – the soft blue of dreams. You move into the biggest house on the street.
In the void between its leaning gables, the house seems to tangibly hold the pause between abandonment and dissolution. The wind strikes the walls and pours through a hundred gaps in the masonry. In the hearth a dog rose curls among a few tumbles bricks.
The fireplace is made from dressed stone; perhaps a status symbol once. The heart of a long-forgotten home, it feels colder even than the space around it because it speaks of absence.
The shattered domesticity of the cold hearth reminds us of our impermanence.
The street and the houses that line it are sinking softly back into the landscape. It is less than a hundred years since their abandonment and many of the buildings have been reduced to a tumble of stones, others have been saved only to become pens for sheep. It can’t be long before the street disappears from the world. Gravity and time will draw the walls down, one flake at a time. The fading of the township reminds us how quickly the world removes us if we turn away. But there is a peacefulness in knowing that the village will fade back into the wilderness and all will be as it once was, like a ripple smoothing.
