Calum's Road is one of those books that I have been aware of for a very long time, but wish I had got around to reading long before now. I've never been to the island of Raasay, although I have sat and gazed across it from Skye, and watched the sunset behind it from the Applecross peninsula. Having read this book, I'm sure that next time I am in that part of the world I will have to explore it for myself, now that I have leaned so much about its people and history.
Calum MacLeod, was a crofter and lighthouse keeper who lived his whole life on the North end of the island. Calum's Road, after which this book is named, is the only connection between Brochel Castle in the south of the island, and South Arnish, Calum's home hamlet further North. The premise of the unlikely, but true, story is that this crofter built a road up the island, by hand, using a pick a shovel and wheelbarrow; because nobody else would. The book though, tells a broader story than just one unique man's ambitious project.
Roger Nicholson, in his narrative, weaves between images of Calum MacLeod, alone in the landscape, smashing rocks, levelling land, building walls, and drainage ditches; with the long and painful history of Rasaay - and the story of why a road was necessary here. He tells a tale of brutal Highland Clearances, of Scots landlords preferring the cash income from sheep to the presence of crofters. He explains the depopulation of the south of the island, and the cramming of the locals into the rough and hard ground of the North, and the construction of a wall to divide the poor land from the hunting estates to the South. He speaks of the men of the island (and adjoining islands of Rhona and Fladda) going away to world-wars, and returning, to little improvement. A succession of absentee landlords and English mineral companies, then owned the island, seeing it, not as a home or a community, but as an anonymous asset. By the time Calum MacLeod began to build, the North of the island was almost empty; as better opportunities had lured successive families away to better land and easier access in Skye, or on the mainland. While huge numbers had been driven away to America and Canada in earlier emptyings, the final 20th Century emigration virtually ended human settlement in North Raasay.
A long local campaign for a road to help revitalise the dying community fell on deaf ears at the Inverness County Council; as it would cost so much, and serve so few people. The inevitable logic of which meant that with every family who left because of the infrastructure problems, the case for the expenditure became weaker. Calum MacLeod realised that unless he built a road, nobody would.
The book, rather movingly then describes how he set out, after work at the lighthouse, and on his croft and built a few metres of road every day. Virtually unaided (he was given a hand dynamiting a couple of massive rocks in his path), he worked for a decade building his road -and gaining a media following as he did so. For six days a week he worked unstintingly; but never on a Sunday, which for a Highland Presbyterian was his Sabbath rest. Retaining walls, earthworks, tight bends, bog-crossings all were achieved by hand. Finally the road, good enough for a land-rover was completed, and the Council agreed to top it with smooth tarmac. Sadly, it seems that by the time Calum's Road was complete, his was the only family left in the North of the island.
If Calum's Road is billed as a personal story of a unique character (MacLeod was a largely self-educated Gaelic writer who won several literary prizes when he wasn't road-building); it's also a case study of the challenges faced by remote communities. It highlights the problems of absentee landlords, and asset-strippers, and explains why people on the margins of the land so often resent those at the core of the power structures in far away cities. Charming and insightful in turns, Calum's Road is definitely worth a read.
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