The Baleshare Bard is back

Eighty years after its first publication, the collected Gaelic poems of North Uist’s Baleshare Bard Roderick Mackay are back in print in a new revised new edition of Oiteagan à Tìr nan Òg, ‘Breezes from the Land of Youth’.

The book was launched at Lochmaddy Hall last Thursday by singers Julie Fowlis and Linda MacLeod.

The Carmichael Watson Project, which looks after the ‘treasure-chest of Gaelic stories, songs, customs, and beliefs collected by Lismore’s pioneering folklorist Alexander Carmichael, holds the bard’s own 152-page manuscript of poems at Edinburgh University Library.

The author of the mysterious bundle, it explains, was described in the catalogue only as ‘a North Uist bard’.

He was later identified as Ruairidh MacAoidh, mac an t-Saighdeir Ruaidh, or Roderick Mackay (1872–1949), a clerk to the factor to the North Uist estate, who travelled from township to township collecting rent.

In North Uist tradition, MacAoidh is better known as Bàrd Iollairigh after the district where he lived, in the north of the island of Baile Sear/ Baleshare on the west coast of North Uist.

He was ‘a very skilful, vivid, and humane poet gifted with a remarkable command of language and a keen eye for the quirks of his fellow islanders and island life’.

This book was originally published in Glasgow in 1938 as Oiteagan á Tìr nan Òg, ‘Breezes from the Land of Youth’, but has been out of print for many years.

The publisher Acair said: ‘Iain MacDonald, who edited the book, enriched this edition with a history of the people whom the poems are written about, as well as an extended account of the poet himself, along with an account of the initial reactions people had when it was first published.

‘There are a number of poems which did not feature in the original book, which add to the precious body of work of which was left behind by Roderick MacKay.

‘This new edition of Oiteagan à Tìr nan Òg is sure to stir up memories for those who have previously read some of these poems, but they will also be loved by new readers, and contemporary singers, as they are introduced to the rich heritage of North Uist Gaelic poetry.

‘Renowned singer Julie Fowlis has written a foreword to Oiteagan à Tìr nan Òg, and states that she remembers hearing these poems in her youth long before she read the book itself, and that this collection had a profound impact on the Gaelic songs she learned as a child, which have remained with her to this day.’