A Fern from Skye

This edition is from our archives, so it is presented as scanned pages rather than text.

and other instrument (these pipes are much more suited than the Highland pipes to playing with other instruments), and song plus pipe accompaniment. There is one legend that says to be considered a competent Lowland piper you had to be able to play, sing and dance at the same time!

I was invited along to judge at the recent LBPS contest, held in the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh, and I asked Gordon Mooney, president, how he saw the future.

‘All the makers tell me that their sales of small pipes are booming. The larger Lowland pipes are also catching on but at a slower rate. I think this is because they are more difficult to handle. But for anyone who has the application the rewards are great. Highland pipers who have had to give up through poor health will find this instrument just the job. No blowing, just a gentle pumping action with the elbow and you can have the same sound almost as the Highland pipes with a lot less volume.

‘This is what people find attractive. We currently have 100 members, half of them overseas. There’s nothing formal or stylised about what we do. There’s even room for improvisation. It’s all very much a case of doing your own thing.’

And what of the competition? Lowland pipe champion was Paul Roberts from Lecus who was informality itself (Army style peaked cap, ear-ring, leather jacket) with a sparkling display of Border melodies, complete with bendy notes, vibrato and overblown extra notes. Scottish small pipes champion was Jamie MacDonald-Reid, the pipes-song competition was won by David Robertson and brothers Julian and John Goodacre took the pipes-and-other-instrument title.

It was all a far cry from the days of the MacCrimmons, but who knows things may have been just as rough and ready in their day.

Robert Wallace

A Fern from Sky

for Somhairle MacGill-eain (Sorley Maclean)

‘Lament for the Children’ — a pibroch by Pàdraig Mór MacCrimnein

We came across two worlds to see you, Sorley, To Skye The last battlefield, the last Never say die

Of the Gael: the Celtic world squeezed out, Cauterised for sheep; Its leaders angled in sharp practice; Highland and creek

Emptied of the tribes; Croft and song Left rotting like bladderwrack On the high strand.

It was here, in Peinnachorrain of the Braes, That the tenants held fast, Met and showed fight. Broken head, Clout and gasp

By their intransigence, refused That grey day At the sea coast, to be dumped Or charted away.

Visitors we came. Clean air delighted us, gull music, Cottages Under the hill, clinking of little streams And a damp breeze

From Raasay across the Sound. But you, you live here, Poet, among The presentative past of your people, The old tongue

Chanter 37

You teach to seed, in the imagination’s
Freehold
To grow and in untoward time, to green bare rock
Like veins of gold.

3
To a tryst I’d come. For fifteen years
I’d fingered the coin
Of our one meeting together, kept our currency
Of talk warm

In the pockets of my heart.
Poet —
Greatest in these islands now — here’s that groat for you,
Look, my hand holds it!

4
But your cottage was closed. You were away!
In the filtering light
Tangled woods and wet places
Of Raasay were bright . . .

But as I turned to join my children already
Racing down
In the joyous concentration of shingle and sand,
The shrill sound

Of them dimmed in the great space like oystercatchers’,
Like peewits’.
And their mother walking between them, drawing them
after her
For all their tricks

Like a shepherd to the best pasture —
As I turned.
It was your wall caught my eye: the piled stones,
stone-crop
And the mats of fern.

5
Male fern, was it? Branching stocks,
Stiff straight frond
Crinkled and each pinna upturned to the air — no,
It felt wrong! —

Dryopteris oreades then? Pioneer
Of high screes,
Not under a thousand feet, the books say.
Nor by the sea.

A highland plant, its distribution
Not fully known —
Not, certainly, expected in the sea-level
Stones of your home.

For a moment it seems like the Gael himself —
Its history
A lost unexpectedness, a perfecting
Entelechy

Informing the blue distances.
Not for it
The plush leafmould of a wood.
Rock its roots fit.

6
Rock. And a great music.
Apprehension
Of the fern resonating
To the taut scansion

Of that ground. Piper pulls the lament
Round him,
Walks the contemplative ways
The air has found him.

Slow measure of this music’s
Magnanimity.
A reaching certainty. Sorrow
Between the cloud and sea.

Each variation affects the light,
Each singling
Of gracenotes the geometry of this
Lament for the children.

For the children that are not.
For those died
In all ages, now. For those
In the hunger have died.

For the Gael who loses this music.
For the children,
For me, O Conarán of the Curraigh,
This grace singling.

7
Oreades in the stone. Music’s geometry
Along your wall
Makes interface. People with real names
Find your door.

The heart has freehold. Green veins
Of a poetry
Gold in the rock. Black roots
Between cloud and sea.

The children circle the beach. Their antennae
Gather
Treasure from the stones — a shell,
A curlew’s feather . . .

I thought, you wouldn’t mind. I widged
With my knife —
A tiny crown — this fern — from the mat
Of its crinkled life.

It grows now by my kitchen window
My daughters carp
As they come from school. Their Welsh words
Tugged and sharp

And flown across its space like a kite
In the wind.
It uncurls its own time still.
It chooses to sing.

                                 Tony Conran  
                                 Bangor, 1986