When writing about Eigg, the lure of words like ‘magical’, ‘dream-like’ and ‘fairytale-esque’ is difficult to resist. By the end of my week there, my refrain became that I was sick of rainbows. Sick of them! Everywhere I looked I was confronted with another glorious technicolour arch: over my shoulder, out of the window, in the reflection of a teapot, in the bottom of my hiking boot. If I reached into my pocket for a cigarette, I would probably pull out a rainbow.
The beauty of the island was relentless, and there is nothing as distracting as perfection when you’re trying to find inspiration for work. Like most Grimm fairy tales, however, when I looked a bit closer I realised that there was something unsettling under the surface of the island’s postcard-beauty. There is an eerie, unplaceable feeling that radiates from all ancient places, and I never felt it so acutely as I did on Eigg.
Eigg is a free range island, so you share the roads and paths with sheep and cows more often than with people. Sheep are skittish and uneasy, and give you a wide berth, but the cows stand like thugs at the side of the road. Sometimes I would hold my bag a bit closer when I passed. Anthropomorphising is normal when you live in a city, and are removed from the realities of farming, and the often cruel, cyclical nature of the wild. In my world, animals have first names and surnames, they have complex personalities and jobs, and, when they die peacefully surrounded by their loved ones, they are mourned. Sometimes worshipped.
On one sunlit walk along the Singing Sands, I was confronted suddenly, due to a break in the low wall I was walking beside, with a dead sheep – eyes gone, but not yet decomposed. Another time, on another walk along the cliffs, I found two more – only these casualties were much older, amounting to sad piles of greasy yellow wool, the living arrangement of their bones intact, like a set of school clothes carefully laid out for the next day. I felt ashamed of my squeamishness. A natural death on a hillside by the sea was a lovelier way to go than most living things could boast, but still I wondered – where would the service be held? Did they leave husbands behind?
On another walk through the elevated pine forests in the middle of the island, the sight of a small group of red spotted toadstools lured me to edge of the trees. The pure air in Eigg meant that the forest floor was bedded with an impossibly thick blanket of moss, that when walked on, felt as though you were walking on the fleshy belly of a sleeping giant. As soon as you entered the trees, what little sound there had been on the path disappeared, and you were met with a silence that seemed to squeeze you. All of a sudden I had the feeling that if I turned around to face the path again, I’d find that it had never been there in the first place. This, combined with the ghost-like presence of ‘old man’s beard’, a lichen that clings to the branches of dead trees, makes it easy to feel as though the forest has a human presence – one that ought to be tiptoed past.
With this experience of the island in mind, it is easy to see why Eigg has such a rich mythical history. One of the most prominent myths associated with Eigg is that of the big women – abnormally large female warriors who were said to have massacred St Donnan and his 52 monks on the island. The big women were subsequently lured to their deaths by a mysterious light in the middle of a loch – known in Eigg as Loch Nam Ban Mora, Loch of the Big Women, or a better translation still, Loch of the Powerful Women.
I couldn’t read about this story without immediately calling to mind the women in the illustrations of R. Crumb: a curious juxtaposition between gross-out exploitation genre American comics and ancient Hebridean folklore. R. Crumb’s depictions of women are invariably endowed with caricaturish large breasts and hips, but they’re also undeniably powerful. Built with thick, muscular legs and broad shoulders, they tower over their male counterparts, warrior-like. Whether dressed in tight clothing, or completely naked, they are confident, unabashed, and completely unapologetic. This is how I liked to imagine these legends, and it excited me to think that these terrifying female spirits might have a malevolent presence on the peaks of the Sgurr.
Another captivating local myth was that of Sweeney, the bothy’s namesake. I was thrilled by Seamus Heaney’s repulsive description of King Sweeney of Dal-Arie, cursed by the priest Ronan after a territorial dispute into the form of a hideous bird-like creature, and doomed to wander the wilderness until his death.