How the ponies that carried the Picts were saved from extinction by a priest
IT was but minutes after I first landed on Eriskay, more than 30 years ago, that I saw them. Half a dozen grey barrelchested ponies, mooching near the shore, belonging to no one, with the watchful gaze of truly wild animals.
The Outer Hebrides once abounded in such little horses, strong and hardy, and into mid-Victorian times when, Lewis apart, there were few things anyone could dignify as a road.
But from about the 1850s, and on well-intended external advice, crofters increasingly cross-bred these beasts with other horses, until by 1972 the true Hebridean pony was found only on Eriskay – and within a decade of extinction.
The population had dwindled to only 20 mares and that they survive to this day is down not just to the people of a remarkable little island but, largely, to a still more remarkable priest.
Born on Eriskay in 1926, Father Calum MacLellan tended successive parishes in Dunoon, Barra and Benbecula, with a dry chuckle, great people skills and a keen political brain for the parlous realities of island life.
He was no stranger to bigotry. Early in his Dunoon pastorate, the rector of the local high school told him – to his face, and with relish – that, as long as he were in charge of the school, no Catholic pupil would ever be Dux.
Father Calum eventually fetched up on Inverness County Council, where he chafed as its affairs were decided largely by a cabal of grouse-moor gentry and the desperate needs of far-flung Hebridean wards were ignored.
The last straw was a tragedy on Vatersay, when two children died in a house fire because there was no waterpoint close enough for local firefighters to douse the flames.
FATHER MacLellan had raised this worry more than once with his county council colleagues – and been ignored. Thereafter he fought for what is his abiding historic legacy, the establishment of Comhairle nan Eilean Siar – the autonomous, free-standing Western Isles Council.
He was its first vice-convener and particularly enjoyed banter with Lewis’s less herbivorous Presbyterians.
Father Calum always regretted that the likes of Coll, Tiree and Skye refused to be part of his ‘wee Gaelic empire’. But to a wider world he is best remembered as a semi-retired, avuncular Eriskay presence on that gentle BBC television series, An Island Parish.
To his high amusement it brought him a rake of fan mail, which he did not trouble to answer – though he delighted in the visitors it brought to his parochial house.
It was 40 years earlier, though, in 1972, that he moved to save the Eriskay pony.
The most urgent need was to find a surviving stallion and, thanks to an intrepid vet, Robbie Beck, one was soon traced to Tiree and borne home to be surprised by a harem.
His name, by the way, was – prosaically – Eric.
The gene pool, half a century on, is accordingly limited, but today there are some 300 of Eric’s doughty descendants.
And they remain at risk. Eriskay ponies are still rarer than the giant panda and listed as ‘critical’ by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.
Eriskay is a corner of the Western Isles that, despite long neglect, has always somehow punched above its weight.
It was here, in 1745, that Charles Edward Stuart first landed in Scotland. Its priest in late Victorian times, Father Allan MacDonald, was a noted folklorist and tradition-bearer. And when the first-ever film was shot in the Western Isles in the 1930s and by the eccentric German Werner Kissling – A Poem of Remote Lives – it was on Eriskay.
Most famously, it was here the SS Politician ran aground in 1941 with – to great local enthusiasm – 22,000 cases of whisky, inspiring Compton MacKenzie’s celebrated novel Whisky Galore and Alexander Mackendrick’s 1949 feature film – which the late Barry Norman ranked in the best 100 movies ever made.
Yet it was 1980 – and largely by Father Calum’s endeavours – before Eriskay even acquired a car ferry, and that across a channel only navigable at certain states of tide.
He lived with quiet pleasure to see, at last, the opening of a causeway in 2001. And by then the future of the Eriskay pony seemed much more secure.
For its size – the largest Eriskay nags are only 13 hands tall – the pony is surprisingly strong, able to carry a light adult and hardy enough to live outdoors, even in the Outer Hebrides, all year round.
That’s because an Eriskay pony has a warm, coarse winter coat, growing a lighter one for the summer months.
They have an excellent temperament, are particularly good with children, and sought out for therapeutic riding programmes.
They even have their own trade union, guarding the Eriskay pony as doughtily as the Lord Lyon King of Arms.
COMANN Each nan Eilean – Society of the Island Horse – can alone certify a true Eriskay pony. Its lineage must be traceable to the ‘Foundation Stock’ – as recorded between 1972 and 1985 – and, since 1986, it must be sired by a purebred Eriskay stallion.
It might sound fussy but it matters because – along with two other breeds, the Shetland and the Exmoor – the Eriskay ponies are the last, uncrossed descendants of the wild British horse.
In true Scottish style, though, there is also a second body – the Eriskay Pony Society, formed by mainland green-welly types in 1986 – and there’s a little bit of an edgy history there. Islanders do not appreciate such cultural appropriation.
The Eriskay has been fondly dubbed the ‘back-door pony.’ And it survived, exclusively on Eriskay, because of the difficulties of access and because crofters concluded its grazings would not support a larger hybrid horse.
The Picts waged war with pretty well the same sort of horse at the Battle of Nechtansmere in 685 – and the ‘little grey palfrey’ The Bruce, no less, rode at Bannockburn was probably just like an Eriskay pony.
Not so long ago, every Eriskay family had a pony, as Comann Each nan Eilean’s Sandra MacInnes last November confided to the BBC. ‘They wouldn’t have got peat to keep them warm, they wouldn’t have got seaweed to help the crops.’
Father Calum, who passed away in July 2012, was of the same mind, saying: ‘Without the people of Eriskay, there would be no pony, but without the pony there would have been no people on Eriskay.’