Monuments that give a voice to our history

We can pass a lifetime by these pillars, cairns and circles of stone without knowing very much about them or about our own past.

The Lewis land raid memorials, constructed over two decades in Pàirc, Aignish, Gress and Reef in Uig, change all that.

The sculptures, most of them commissioned by Cuimhneachain nan Gaisgeach and all designed by artist Will Maclean, are permanent monuments to the 19th and 20th century struggles by island crofters for control of the land on which the lived.

‘Compelled to Memory’, a large format book published to coincide with a Will Maclean retrospective exhibition in Edinburgh this summer, details how these memorials to the land heroes came into being.

These land raiders can be lauded as political radicals taking on the power of landlordism and the British state, but when you read the accompanying history you recall that these were struggles for survival against odds.

Because they were closer to the land than we will ever be, for our forbearers the pointed bayonets of Royal Marines held less fear than starvation and emigration.

In Point, one of the areas where overcrowding and anger boiled over in the 1888 Aignish riot, we grew up with a vague awareness of the land raid.

My great-grandfather, Iain Crichton, was one of the organisers, we knew that in the family. Of the details, and the cause, we knew nothing, not even the names of the 16 men arrested and sent to prison.

As the book notes, these men did not just raise awareness of their own poverty. Their actions shaped our destiny and the freedom and legal rights for crofting generations to come.

By the mid-1980s that era of radical, Highland history was beginning to chime again.

The history in books like Jim Hunter’s ‘The Making of the Crofting Community’, Iain Fraser Grigor’s ‘Mightier than a Lord’ (and a thousand Free Press columns) re-assessed the past and pulled the idea of modern land reform into the mainstream.

An Lanntair’s 1986 ‘As an Fhearann’ exhibition, an artistic examination of the land struggle from clearance to crofting, became the visual focal point of that radical revival before community buy-outs made it a reality in the next decade.

The change wasn’t just in the artistic environment.

On the ground, the Scottish Crofters Union had been reformed out of the ashes of the 1960s Federation of Crofters Unions.

One of the key movers behind the union was Angus "Ease” MacLeod, a former island entrepreneur whom Jim Hunter, the first director of the union, happily described as someone who became more radical with age.

After prodding him about his idea for a cairn to mark the 1887 Pàirc deer raid during one of the first AGM’s of the Crofters Union, Angus wrote inviting me onto his still to be formed memorial committee.

The letter is gone but I clearly recall Angus’s accompanying sketch showing a simple cairn made up of round stones to mark the Pàirc raid.

Standing beside the towering pile was a tiny stick figure giving an idea of the literally, monumental scale that would produce a memorial rivalling the pyramids of the Pharaohs.

What Angus lacked in draughtsmanship he made up for in organisation and drive. Very soon he had set up Cuimhneachain nan Gaisgeach, had a constitution and a committee.

An inaugural meeting was convened in Stornoway’s Royal Hotel, attended by grazing clerks from various districts, Catriona Campbell from the tourism board, myself, and others.

There, the idea was gently introduced that the monuments in each of the districts could be different designs so as to encourage people to travel and learn about the individual events.

The concept of sculpture rather than piles of stones raised deep concerns about the Second Commandment, as any figurative representation of the land struggle might be misinterpreted as graven images.

It was clear the project would require careful handling.

To a large degree the committee was ill-equipped for the task. As Angus put it: “Bha sinn sporghail san dorchadas oir cha robh airgead neo talamh airson làraich againn, neo beachd soilleir air dealbhadh no co a b’urrainn ar cuideachadh. Bha creideas ga’r cumail a’ dol.”

Into the darkness where there was only blind faith, came Malcolm MacLean of Proiseact nan Ealain, Roddy Murray from An Lanntair and through them, Will Maclean.

The renowned artist had already made a mark with the Ring Net Fishermen exhibition and his work was rooted in his own family’s Highland history.

With Maclean, came the crafter of stone, James Crawford, engineer and planner John Norgrove and the research skills of Joni Buchanan whose book, ‘The Lewis Land Struggle’, became a vital accompaniment to the project.

Joni’s essays in ‘Compelled by Memory’, in Gaelic and English, reprise the events while Robin Gillanders photographs capture the beauty of Maclean’s sculptures in the landscape at Pàirc, Aignish and Gress.

A further ‘cairn’, An Sùileachan at Reef in Uig, was conceived with Marian Leven and commissioned by the Bhaltos Community Trust. It is the sophisticated culmination of all the experience at the other sites.

All the sculptures fulfil Maclean’s requirement that they fit into the landscape, should withstand the weather and reflect the event they commemorate.

They all do that, although for me the Gress memorial is the best combination of stone, symbolism and landscaping, with the waves and trenches of WWI worked into the ground surrounding the site.

There were other land raids and there are other memorials. Bernera and Coll have memorials, for example.

Only in the process of researching Donald Trump’s Lewis connections did I discover that the Tong Park crofts, next to the Ford Terrace housing scheme, were the result of a 1919 land raid which is all but forgotten.

Public art is very hard to get right. Just ask them in Golspie, where ‘The Mannie’ still stands, or Bristol where slaver Edward Colston was symbolically thrown into the harbour during protests following the death of George Floyd.

Millions of pairs of eyes and memories will focus on the final result, so from the beginning these emotions have to be taken into account.

If monumental art is trying to tell people their own story, planning permissions are less of an issue than the consent of the community the work is speaking to.

It was natural then that Will Maclean, working in collaboration with Arthur Watson, should have been commissioned to design the centenary memorial to the Iolaire tragedy.

There could hardly be a more hallowed collective memory in Lewis history. The drowning of 181 Lewis war veterans and 20 of the crew of the Royal Navy yacht Iolaire was a hammerblow of history which knocked the island off its axis.

However, the 1970s obelisk at Holm, installed on the 50th anniversary of the tragedy when the memory was still shrouded in the living grief of survivors and relatives, was always an inadequate and less loved memorial.The site itself, remote and wild, despite just being at the mouth of the massive natural harbour of Stornoway, is an austere and haunting location.

Once again Maclean’s sensitivity comes out in the design of ‘Call na h-Iolaire’, an incredible monument which works brass, stone, wood and words into a visual poem of lament.

It works, like his other sculptures work, because they have the assent and the authority of the people they seek to represent.

A series of essays in ‘Compelled to Memory’ detail how Maclean succeeded in giving history over to these “voices from below”.

If history tells us where we came from, art tells us who we are. Maclean, his collaborators and Cuimhneachain nan Gaisgeach, combined these powerful forces to bestow Lewis with an indelible story in stone.

Angus MacLeod knew our place in the landscape should not be taken for granted and was aware of the danger of memory being lost.

In his speech at the dramatic unveiling of the Aignish memorial in 1996, 'Ease' asked, rhetorically, what made him think of the idea in the first place?

He told the crowd, assembled on the very site where their forefathers had fought the Marines: “It was the realisation that we as a community neglected to honour the memory of our heroes of the land struggle and it was something that needed to be done.”

Compelled to Memory

The Lewis Land Monuments 1994-2018

Will Maclean with Marian Leven and Arthur Watson, Sansom and Company, £20

(Torcuil Crichton is Westminster Editor with the Daily Record and one of the designers of ‘Sheòl an Iolaire’, the tidal memorial sculpture in Stornoway harbour.)