Today was a people day! Mairi’s sheep had been spotted so we were off to get to them so I could photograph her again with the Hebridean black sheep. I was astounded at the feel of the thick wool on their backs which was nearly ready to shear. They came running when they heard the feed bucket and definitely were greedy!
After that I walked down to Calum George Buchanan’s house to meet with him. He is a weaver for Harris Tweed but his passion is his sheep. He had his loom set up and had started on a tweed but said he was taking a sabbatical from weaving. The pay is not what it should be for the hours of work it takes to weave this amazing tweed. Calum has 200+ sheep and his eyes lit up when we were talking about the sheep! He has set up a small shed where he brings in the sheep carrying twins or those he thinks may need help. It was interesting to learn that he ultrasounds the sheep and knows which ones are carrying twins. In the shed were a few ewes close to lambing and a couple of day old lambs and one that had been born that morning. Outside he showed me a set of triplets! Some of his sheep he has moved, by boat, across to an island to leave them there to graze! He keeps his rams in a separate field up on the hill and will sometimes keep one of his own but also buys from a breeder in Ft. William to insure the bloodlines do not get too overbred. I came to appreciate the amount of work involved in raising and marketing sheep. Now when I see sheep in the road I have a whole new perspective!
The afternoon was spent driving around with Roddy MacLean, a descendant of Hector MacLean of the Lords of the Isles. Roddy has held a number of jobs in his life time – as he told me, you do what you need to do to survive. He currently works for a company building wind farms in Taiwan! So he spends a few months in Taiwan and then comes home. He is firmly tied to the land – he showed me the land on which his family has lived since leaving Mull in the late 1800’s. The land is harsh and Roddy acknowledges that you have to want to live here. Many houses are now owned by absentee landlords who use them as second homes or as self-catering homes and the cost of renting them has risen affecting the cost of housing itself in these small settlements.
