JOURNAL
| Window into Scotland
Notes from the Isles
Memories of Christmas still linger in the heart of our friend, who made it back to the family home in the isles this year Words by KATE FRANCIS
I
shall treasure Christmas 2021 for the rest of my life. My daughter Mary and I left here at 5am on 23 December to catch the ferry from Uig, on Skye, to our family base in the Outer Hebrides, for four days of phenomenal joy. There were 24 of us: eight of my immediate family were absent on in-law duty, so we were only nine in the house, including my recently widowed brother-in-law, whose children and their families were in three cottages nearby. When we bought the house, 50 years ago, it had been the trade centre for the southern end of the island. It enclosed three sides of a courtyard: one wing was residential; one held the post office with bedrooms above, and the third was the shop with a flat above. The corner linking the post office and the shop was a byre, filled with cattle pens. All the goods were shipped to the pier at the end of the garden. The shop had been moved elsewhere a couple of years before we arrived, and the whole building was in need of a drastic restoration. The byre is now a large, comfortable sitting room with a fire fuelled by driftwood foraged from the beach; the shop is a ping-pong room, and the post office is the main entrance and hallway. Part of the pleasure of those few days was reminiscing back to the
10 Scotland
days when we had no electricity, just oil lamps and candles, and our whisky-coloured water, speckled with shreds of bracken, came from a burn up the hill. We remembered the time when our parish priest came to stay and announced at breakfast on his first day that his room was haunted, and he must bless the house. He organised a ceremony, and that evening we found a heap of gifts on the doorstep: crucifixes, little statues of Our Lady, rosaries, phials of holy water... signifying the relief of our neighbours in the glen, who had all known about the ghost but hadn’t liked to say. Over Christmas, each family took on responsibility for
