Author: robinacrawford

If history has taught us anything it is that people will always find their way around barriers to achieve their goals, eventually.

The land raid memorial, Gress. When industrialist millionaire Lord Leverhulme bought the Island of Lewis in 1918 he thought that he could do away with the traditional crofting way of life and replace it with an industrial capitalist system. Returning soldiers who had suffered the horrors of industrial World War in the trenches and their families had other ideas and refused to bow down to his dictat, refusing to accept the imposition of a culture alien to their values so they made land grabs to re-establish the crofts that they had been promised during the war by government. This memorial celebrates their victory in 1922 when the land was taken over by the Board of Agriculture and divided up into 100 crofts.

“It was very heavy rain, and I was wet to the skin, Captain M’Lean had but a poor temporary house, or rather hut; however, it was a very good haven to us. There was a blazing peat-fire, and Mrs M’Lean, daughter of the minister of the parish, got us tea.”
Monday 4th October, James Boswell, ‘The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D.’

In the bay where the peaty waters of the moor meet the salt waters of the Atlantic two grey seal heads plop quietly to the brackish surface. They watch us inquisitively. Angie sits on a rock watching back, a little mermaid. Selkie…

Contours of the #peatlands

…where the peaty waters of the moor meet the salt of the sea.

“…We think na on the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps and stiles,
That lie between us and our hame…”

#peatlands

‘The Unsinkable’, a boat out of water on the drained moor, slowly succumbing to the waves of watery mosses and sphagnums. Rossie, Fife.

Woven bog grasses from Scotland’s #peatlands.