Like lost memories, the Atlantic waves wash tirelessly on the silver sands by Shawbost

IPARK my van discreetly behind the large Free Church and pad down the main road through the village of Shawbost, on the west side of Lewis. It’s a good mild Tuesday for the ploy.

The iced north-easterly that clawed at us for days has, for the time being, retired. Daffodils dance by gateposts. A lark is singing on high and the Atlantic washes tirelessly on the silver beach a little to the west.

I turn left at what we used to call the Gate, where when I was a little boy Angus Gillies had his characterful little shop, selling rope by the yard and paraffin by the jug, and with an orange metal sign by the door extolling Brooke Bond Tea.

But he died in 1976 and his sons wound up the business a year later, unwilling to put in his hours for such scant profit. How he loved that shop. His latest calendar hung in my grandparents’ kitchen every year, as confident as if it were Harrods – ‘Angus Gillies, General Merchant, the Gate, Shawbost.’

But I am approaching that house now, erected in 1933, wherein my mother was born and where, as long as my grandparents lived, my brothers and I enjoyed many days of holiday.

My aunt, forewarned, gives me warm welcome. She says that, apart from Iain Tormod over the road – who calls with the papers every Saturday – I am only her third visitor in two years. How folk were constantly in and out of each other’s houses, she says, and how that way of life has gone.

I do not tire her by staying too long or putting her in the position where she might feel obliged to make tea.

BUT she has a grope in the freezer when I leave and gives me a bag of lamb chops. ‘Go-Go’s lamb is special,’ she says, for he is one of the last crofters still to put his beasts in the hills every summer, and there is nothing like heather-fed mutton.

Go-Go, and his father and his uncles before him, have wintered their stock on my late grandfather’s croft for half a century, since he gave up his cow about 1971.

It was thereafter my daily holiday job to run up to the croft every morning for the bottle of milk they would leave at the top for us, previously in the service of Quosh and its contents still warm from the cow earlier relieved of it.

It was very yellow and you could taste the flowers.

I make the same journey now, more sedately, up to that same little gate.

The six-acre holding is still in grand heart – well drained, the ditches maintained and in a few weeks’ time will be shimmering with silverweed, dotted with buttercups and purple orchids.

The croft has been with my mother’s people since 1851 – my cousin, now the official tenant, is in the fifth generation – and the land did not prosper all by itself.

There were decades and decades of grinding work. The spring ploughing, the weary spreading of cartloads of seaweed and dung. The backbreaking job of planting and later gathering, potatoes; and the sowing of oats and barley.

The rhythm of the day was set largely by the family cow, the only unit of livestock ever honoured with a name and, usually, milked and cared for and even sung to by the woman of the house. I slip through that wee gate and, a minute later, sit on a certain outcrop of rock where you can still see the scorching and searing of a great fire, long, long ago.

Here blazed the beacon the village lads lit here in May 1945, in celebration of Victory in Europe and Hitler making an end of himself.

My mother recalls it vividly, and it was in this area of ‘skinned ground’ – its peat won for fuel decades and decades ago, and just the turf spared – that I used to play as a boy, just close enough to the house to hear the bellowed summons for dinner.

I was born just in time to see something of the old weft and warp of life in this village. When most homes still had a milk-cow and a vast, shapely stack of peats.

When two or three families still lived in the old, thatched blackhouses, where the ground was still widely tilled and fishermen still put to sea in broad open boats, and when there were still dozens and dozens of children.

And where few ever spoke English, for there was so little occasion for it.

There were little old ladies in black, mostly widows of the Great War. Most older women wore a traditional headscarf – the ‘beannag.’ But I could sit on this rock as a youngling and hear the clatter of tweedlooms, lambs calling for their mothers, and the pad of hooves down the road as cows were taken in for milking.

The crowing of roosters, the growl of little grey Ferguson tractors and, when the wind was in the right direction, the ominous roar of the surf at Dalmore.

The gusts of distant merriment, the romping of children, the toot of horns as the vans from Stornoway made their rounds with baking and butchery and groceries and, often, too – on a fine summer evening – a man who lived near the Gate would play the pipes.

ONLY three things stilled almost all this. The Sabbath, for one: save for the care of stock, you went to church and otherwise stayed indoors.

The midweek prayer meeting was another. Though only committed believers attended, no one else did any outdoor work during that Thursday evening hour.

The conch is still preserved by which the faithful were summoned.

It was blown like a trumpet – it took me some minutes, a few years ago, to get the hang of it – and, on a calm day, could be heard by everyone within half a mile. And, of course, a death in the village also suspended much activity. Even today, a weekend dance in rural Lewis is still called off when there has been local bereavement.

Much has changed. Shawbost is much less green now, for there is very little cultivation.

The last milk cows vanished in the Eighties. Not many cut and dry peats these days – it is hard work and harder still to get the help – and there seem to be far fewer people, who keep themselves largely to themselves.

The past ought not to be romanticised. It was an era of grinding physical toil, monotonous diet and real terror of childbed. There were few opportunities for women and a lot of people were in many ways trapped, in caring for elderly parents or otherwise.

But it was an egalitarian order with its own merriment and vitality, its own rites and flavours and mythology.

It was seen at its best from after the war till about the late Seventies, when at last there was social security and healthcare for all.

And before the tall, blinking mast arose on a distant moor, beaming television into every home, like a dagger into the heart of a culture.