Songs of an island bogey-man whose name still curdles the blood

ChrISTMAS is past. New Year is come. Winter is yet deep. And on those dark hebridean nights, as the wind moans in the cables, one crunchy Gaelic name still gives the children of Lewis and harris a delicious shiver.

Behave, be quiet, go to sleep – ‘or Mac an t-Srònaich will get you…’

If the tales are to be believed, Mac an t-Srònaich was a murderer on the run. A psycho, a sadist, a serial killer who terrorised the island for some years either side of 1840 till the law finally caught up with him and, not before time, he at last dangled from a rope.

In almost every corner of the island someone, somewhere, can point out his locally favoured cave. Attribute to his unhinged hands this homicide or that. darkly talk of certain people who left food out for him and turned a blind eye if he kipped in the barn now and then.

But, largely, Mac an t-Srònaich was a man of no fixed abode and a creature of the night. And, the more you dig into his tale, the more elusive it becomes – though that he existed, and was extraordinarily dangerous, is hard to dispute.

even his Christian name is disputed, but he is said to have been robert Stronach, son of the innkeeper at Garve, ross-shire, and near the bandit country of the ‘dark Mile’.

And it was greed, if the tale is to be believed, that not only sent young Stronach on the lam, but took his sanity.

Both his grandfathers were ministers, which meant something in those days – and he had a sister. One night a friend of hers came to stay, with a stunningly beautiful necklace. It at once attracted the youth’s covetous eye and, come nightfall, he sneaked into their bedroom to steal it. One lass woke, called out, and he panicked, seizing her neck.

MINuTeS later, beholding her lifeless body, Mac an t-Srònaich realised that he had murdered his own sister.

And, like many broken men over the centuries, he fled to Lewis. A mad, shambling creature, keeping his head down by day in some hole or other, and by night roaming hither and yon for food – even as the body count steadily mounted.

I have spoken to the greatgrand-nephew of a harrisman Mac an t-Srònaich did in, on the steep and lonely road over the Clisham, for a ‘piggie’ of whisky the youth had been carrying south for a wedding.

In the north of Lewis they still talk in horror of a young boy Stronach drowned in a pool, for little more than fun. And in Lochs they murmur yet of Lilias Finlayson, wife of a much-loved local minister and in every other regard wholly respectable – except she would leave food in the byre for the fugitive, who was her cousin.

Mostly, though, Mac an tSrònaich stuck to the wilds of the south-western parish of uig, and is said to have been afraid of only two things: dogs and ghosts.

When he did occasionally win hospitality, children were often disconcerted by the viciouslooking dagger he kept in his stocking. A dog’s timely wrath is said to have saved one man’s life from Stronach’s attentions.

On another occasion, a girl was out searching for a lost calf when the villain exploded from some lair and dashed towards her, roaring: ‘If I were closer to you, you wouldn’t be smiling.’

She had the presence of mind to stand her ground and shout for her brothers: ‘Iain! Angus! Mac an t-Srònaich is coming for me, hurry up.’ In fact, they were miles away but he took fright, turned tail and ran.

Yet, in public records we have but one tantalising glimpse. In 1834 a warrant was laid before Stornoway Sheriff Court, pressing for the arrest of a man ‘said to be lurking about the island of Lewis’ and putting inhabitants ‘in fear for their lives’.

It is titled, still more oddly, ‘Proc Fiscal v Bodach no Mondach’ – old man of the moors – ‘or Fantom. A Moor Stalker’. The suspect is not even named, nor is any specific crime attributed to him.

And some now argue that a phantom was all that Stronach really was. A man perhaps on the run on account of some minor crime but who – in an age when you could be hanged for stealing a sheep – had quite a few local sympathisers.

Local tradition also retells that, when the bloodhounds of the law finally had Mac an t-Srònaich in their clutches, about 1844, he was hanged at the top of Gallows hill by Stornoway.

But executions there had long ceased by then. It is more likely that he finally met justice on the mainland; and yet, though the late author and journalist James Shaw Grant made a long trawl through archived numbers of the Inverness Courier – then the principal highland paper – he found no report, anywhere, of a murder spree on Lewis nor of anyone, anywhere, being hanged for crimes committed on Lewis.

It was an unsettling time on the island in other regards. Its laird, Mrs Stuart-MacKenzie, was the last of the Seaforths and with no heir to succeed her. And the community was ablaze with new, evangelical religion.

EXCITed folk imagined the devil everywhere and, as they roamed the island for sermons and fellowship, tales the more readily spread.

It is said that when Mac an t-Srònaich was finally manhandled to the gallows, he expressed but one regret: he could never forget the look in the eyes of the lad he had murdered in the pool. And that, finally, the murderer cried: ‘had I stuck by the hills of uig, the hills of uig would have stuck by me.’ In fact, murder on the island is so infrequent that, to the dismay of his publishers, author Peter May refused to write more than three Lewis-based whodunnits, pointing out that homicides happen there but twice a century.

But in one respect, as one local historian darkly remarked in my hearing, Mac an t-Srònaich remains very useful.

It is much easier to blame this ‘fantom’ for a killing, long ago, in your close-knit crofting community than to pin the blame on your neighbour’s great-grandfather.

Mac an t-Srònaich got away with it so long, Grant concluded, because – fluent in english and from a privileged background – not a few in high places were prepared to turn a blind eye.

‘On one side of the line his identity was known and he was given succour because of his connections.

‘On the other side of the line he was a danger to wayfarers. he lived rough, stole and resorted to violence when he needed food.’

even more remarkably, when Margaret Bennett in the 1960s made a protracted study of surviving Gaelic song in communities of hebridean descent, she found Mac an t-Srònaich’s name still deployed to daunt naughty children – four generations after the immigrant ships.

And it curdles our blood still.