Riverwitch – stories of time and place

A collaboration with David Knowles

For a good few Wednesdays to follow, I’ll be offering subscribers a special series of posts in collaboration with my husband David Knowles, whose Substack Elvers by Moonlight I hope you’re familiar with by now. It’s a project we worked on together back in 2014; the full explanation of what it is and how it came to be is below. But in short: when we moved from our croft on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides to a small stone riverside cottage in Donegal in the north-west of Ireland – a wrenching move for so many reasons – we decided that we’d write a joint blog for a while. We wanted to express – as well as to work through, so we might approach some kind of understanding – the process of separating from a place to which we’d given so much of ourselves, and landing in another country. I would write a post from my perspective, then David would write one from his, and so it continued until finally we each moved on to other work and it ended.

We called the blog ‘Riverwitch’, after the name I gave to the Tullaghobegley River which ran along the bottom of our new garden in Donegal. The blog itself doesn’t exist any more, but we still have the words – and so we decided to share them again, on Substack. But what we’re offering here isn’t just a regurgitation of some ten-year-old writing about places that no longer have relevance to us. Although we’ve now lived in three different locations since those years in Donegal, the leaving of Lewis marked us both deeply – each in our own very different way. And so the 2024 version will offer a story-within-a-story, as we finally begin to make sense of the ways in which places claim us, mark us – and then, when it’s time, cast us loose.

Those of you who have read my nonfiction books – If Women Rose Rooted, The Enchanted Life and Hagitude – will know fragments of the story of that displacement, and something of its context. You might even recognise a few of the words and stories which eventually made their way into those books. But this is a deeper exploration of those times and of the meaning of placemaking – because, as I have long maintained, the places I’ve lived have been the greatest teachers of my life. And I hope to convey some of the lessons they’ve bestowed on me in this sequence of posts.

A first post introducing this series is appearing on both of our Substacks this morning, so that all our subscribers know what is happening and what Riverwitch is about. And then, for as long as this project continues, we’ll alternate. One Wednesday you’ll find an article from me here at ‘The Art of Enchantment’, containing a post I wrote on the original blog, along with some new writing to contextualise and deepen it. The following Wednesday you’ll find an article from David at ‘Elvers by Moonlight’, containing his next post from the original blog, along with his new reflections. Each of us, at the top of our posts, will cross-reference the other’s article from the previous week, to avoid repetition but to ensure that you don’t miss anything. David’s Substack is free for all to read, and so I’ll also be making this series available to all my subscribers.

For clarity: this is an extra midweek series; at weekends, paid subscribers to ‘The Art of Enchantment’ will continue to receive my usual exclusive posts and access to my live Zoom gatherings. The ‘Riverwitch’ discussion sections will also be for paid subscribers only.

Below, you’ll find the original introduction to this project that we wrote together for the Riverwitch blog.

The Tullaghobegley River at the bottom of our garden: Riverwitch

Riverwitch

A small river winds through a valley in north-west Donegal, in the hills between Errigal and Muckish mountains, and sews together many scraps of cloth – the fields, the bog, the heather moor, the scree slopes, the stands of trees, birds, fish, sheep, people. People who are and people who were, stories told and stories that might have been told. Lives being lived and lives that might be lived. The Riverwitch somehow holds together this elaborate habitat: ancient and subtle, robust and harebell-delicate. In ‘Riverwitch’ we approach her, gingerly, with words – two animals displaced and moving to a small cottage in her valley, hoping to see how we might fit in.

As this creative project starts (in January 2014) we are preparing to migrate from our home on the far south-west coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. We are in transition – gathering the things we love that can transport, and saying a thoughtful goodbye to those that cannot. This is a place where we worked hard and dreamed deep – where we watched our black lambs being born, chickens hatch and piglets miraculously appear in the depth of night. This is a place where we dug and built. But in the end there were things we could not give to this place and some things the place could not give us. Through our writing during these last months of in-between time, we may come to understand this process better. But at the very least we will see and share our last spring here in a beautiful clear Atlantic light.

When we arrive at our new home, Teach Dhoire an Easa (‘house of the oak grove by the waterfall’) on the banks of the Tullaghobegley River, we will be strangers for a while. We will see and hear and smell a new life. Through ‘Riverwitch’ we will write ourselves into the valley as we experience it, with wide eyes, flapping ears, twitching noses. And for sure there will be echoes of familiarity amongst the discoveries. The wrens will look like wrens even though they will speak, as all wrens do, with the specific voice of their district. After all, it is only a short, direct sea crossing from the Hebrides to the north-west coast of Ireland . . .

The coast at our Lewis croft, looking to the Isle of Scarp

For those of you who don’t know my story, it seems necessary, for this re-membering, to offer a little background to this series. It really began in the spring of 2010, when David and I left the croft in the north-west Highlands of Scotland that I had owned for nearly ten years, and moved across the Minch to another croft on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. I wrote something about the origins of that first dislocation in If Women Rose Rooted: about how for me it resulted from yet another period of work-related burnout, and for both of us represented a flight from the planet-destroying ‘civilisation’ that had suddenly become unbearable. We spent four years on Lewis, in a dramatic, ever-changing landscape, sandwiched between the storm-ridden seas of the western ocean and a range of gnarly old mountains which stretched into the Isle of Harris to the south. We could see Hirta – St Kilda – from our kitchen window; there on the 58^th parallel north, beyond that last patch of land, there was only ocean – all the way to Newfoundland and Labrador. It was a wild and sparsely populated place, and living there stretched us until, if we stretched any more, we ran the risk of snapping.

Hard as it was in many ways to live in those wild Western Isles, Lewis was then, and still remains, the place-love of my life. I fell so deeply into that land’s dreaming that I expected never to emerge. I thought I would stay there forever – until all at once, everything began to break. The foundations of our world crumbled and, almost overnight, it became clear that there was no possible way to stay. Here’s what I wrote about this period in If Women Rose Rooted.

Extract from If Women Rose Rooted: A life-changing journey to authenticity and belonging by Sharon Blackie. September (Duckworth Books) 2016.

Sometimes, when you’re not paying attention, life steps in and deals you a major blow to the head, to make sure that you do. ‘The universe’, by this stage in my life, had had quite enough of me – and so along came the lesson that finally ended all lessons. It began in early 2013, with exhaustion and a recurrence of those old symptoms of anxiety. It began with a series of deaths and losses. It began with a hard spring: icy temperatures, drought followed by serious rain. The grass wasn’t growing and the pregnant ewes were struggling; the wildflowers which should have bloomed by then were non-existent and the bees were struggling too. David cut and brought home huge branches of flowering gorse every time he ventured into more sheltered parts of the island, and for a little longer while they managed to hang on.

Then lambing came, and we lost a pair of twin lambs, from a beautiful Jacob ewe we loved dearly. Drowned in a ditch while we weren’t paying attention, or maybe while we were paying too much. We buried them at the bottom of the croft, by the loch. Red-eyed, David paced the kitchen floor for hours, unable to live with what he insisted was a dereliction of duty. We almost lost a wether who fell into another deep ditch and was swept away in torrential rain, but thankfully a watchful neighbour was keeping an eye out. We carried him into the utility room and I lay on the floor with my arms wrapped around his shivering body to keep him warm while David tried to dry him out with a hairdryer. He survived.

But we lost a goose – a delicate white Roman goose, the daughter of the old goose who I had hatched from an incubator and hand-reared along with her sibling back in the spring of 2006, in the rich, vivid days after I’d first met David. The dead goose’s name was Blue, because of the colour of her leg ring. We buried her on the croft, in the field where the remaining geese lived. A raven carried off another goose’s hatchling, the only gosling from that year; we heard the goose’s long drawn-out cries of distress in the early morning while we were still in bed. The raven left a tail-feather behind as compensation; it seemed like a poor exchange.

I struggled on, because that’s what I did best, and we had responsibilities; there was no time to grieve, no time to stop. Chin up; soldier on. We borrowed a fine and experienced Shetland bull to mate with Brigid, who was now two years old. The bull, while mating, went right through the wall of Brigid’s vagina and into her abdomen. A totally freak thing, according to the vet: she was abnormally small. But she now had a large tear inside her which couldn’t be mended and which meant that even if she survived she would never be able to mate again or carry a calf and give us milk, and she would always be prone to infection. A croft with very limited grazing has no room for a pet cow, especially an invalid, and keeping a cow is enormously expensive. Which meant that Brigid, my beautiful love with her sweet-smelling breath, silky black coat, long sweeping horns and Kerry temper, would probably need to be killed and eaten.

On the lessons came, thick and fast throughout that spring and summer, dealing one blow after another. They didn’t all come from animals. I began to get anonymous hate mail – emails and comments on my blog – from someone in America who had discovered that I’d once worked for a tobacco company and imagined that it was some big secret and that they were going to ‘out’ me. It had never been a big secret – why would it be? – and I’d talked about it publicly on a number of occasions. But that didn’t prevent the intensity of the unpleasantness, the curious sense of violation added to the isolation I was feeling and the death and dying all around me, from almost toppling me.

A part-time elderly neighbour took exception to the way David and I had voted (along with a majority of the community, but that didn’t seem to matter) in an election at a local Grazings Committee meeting which she had not attended, and flew at me with a surprisingly unpleasant verbal attack one afternoon as I walked past her house with the dogs and waved a cheerful greeting. It was crazy, out of all proportion. I’d never experienced anything like it before; I was shaken. I began to walk another way. I began to hate the world.

On it went. I broke a wrist, falling flat on my face while struggling to help David carry a too-heavy metal farm gate down the hard stony track to the headland. I limped back to the house alone, cradling the wrist in my other hand, while he made sure that the gate arrived safely at its destination: the mission must be accomplished.

Finally, David buckled under the strain of a mission or two that could not, for the first time in his life, be accomplished. The community obstinately refused to be brought together, and although, with a great deal of local pride and delight, the fencing project had been completed on schedule, enthusiasm for another round had been short-lived. Other plans dreamed up by the fencing cartel rapidly faded once the project had ended and everyone drifted back to their own lives and reclaimed their weekends. The local warmongers started a new campaign. His vision of a busy, thriving crofting community which depended on and helped each other – the way it was in the old days – was never going to be. He was, he declared, the last man standing, and he grew bitter and angry. The harder he grew, the more I withdrew. Back to the land, back to my own work. Eventually, barely holding myself together and worn out with his dissatisfactions, I persuaded him to take some time away from the village and the croft in July 2013 to attend a week-long Gaelic language intensive on the other side of the island.

He came back home completely transformed. Smiling, softer, excited again by life.

He came back home and announced that he didn’t want to be a crofter any more, but wanted instead to do a degree at the University of the Highlands and Islands, an hour’s drive away in the island’s only town of Stornoway, and devote himself to learning Gaelic. He’d be gone three or four days a week.

And so they went, one by one, the animals that we’d tended so lovingly and for so long; the animals which I would find it impossible to manage alone. Doris and Edna, the big friendly sows, went to a new home on the neighbouring island of North Uist. My small, funny, gentle flock of Jacob sheep went to a young couple on the east side of the island. Off they went, all packed together into a trailer: Norma, Just Jacob, Pirate, Little Sister, Big Sister. Their ewe-lambs Princess, Wobble and Catwoman. Yes, each of them had a name; we had thought hard and long about their names, choosing them carefully for a particular personality trait or other defining characteristic. Freya the Shetland cow, who we had very recently acquired along with her calf, Corra, and who David had begun to milk, went to a new home in Carloway. Brigid – too big to kill carefully and lovingly on the croft and butcher ourselves, as we had done with all our other animals – went to the abattoir.

Our relationship buckled under the strain of the past several years, and under the weight of my desolation as well as my fury at the ease with which David seemed to have shrugged off bonds and responsibilities which only a week earlier had been sacred. It buckled in the face of the changes in each of us which seemed to be taking us in different directions. Finally, my much-loved old golden retriever dog Frodo, who was getting on for ten years old and had been suffering from a mystery illness for a couple of weeks, died on a small patch of grass outside the back door.

It was enough. Finally, I let myself break; after I had broken, I finally came to understand.

With sows Doris and Edna, 2012

My own leave-taking, then, was a process of deep mourning – but it was also a desperate flight from a life and a place that suddenly had become unsustainable. Most of you will know the poem below, which also appeared in If Women Rose Rooted; I’m including it again here because, in those days of shattering endings and hopeful beginnings, it was above all a prayer.

And with that long introduction – I look forward, next week, to offering you my first ‘proper’ instalment of ‘Riverwitch’.

Peregrina

O mother of the sea
lend me a wave that is strong and true
to carry me from this Age which unbinds me.

I do not need a ship, mother,
but make it a buoyant swell
to bear me up and float me on the sea’s dreaming
then beach me on some lighter shore.

When I land there, mother, give me warp and weft again,
and an urchin quill to remind me
how the prettiest barb can lodge under your skin
and leave you undone.

Only lend me a loom and I will
take up the threads of this unravelled life.
I will weave a braid from three strands of seaweed
I will wind it three times around my finger
I will dig my salt-encrusted hands into the soil
and wed myself to the thirsty
brown roots of a new beginning.

Sharon Blackie