Journey to the Shielings in Winter
A visual description of my/ the deceased James Mackay’s journey to the Glen Leraig Sheiling grounds on boxing day 2022.
‘They tell me that walking is good exercise for a man recovering from the fever, but I covered that final mile to the shielings with difficulty. From up here, I can see all the way to Handa island in the north and Oldany in the West. I can look down upon the rocky shore of our bay, although where our home itself stood is hidden from view. As I write to you, I stand and watch the next squalls of snow approaching across the bay. It is cold, but I sit on. These showers appear to be the last and even through the falling snow the sky grows lighter to the north and west. I fix my eye upon the growing streak of light at the eye’s horizon, until sea and sky become one vast sheet of light.’ James Mackay to Flora Mackay, 2 January 1829.
I take the place of the deceased James Mackay. James Mackay was cleared, along with his family, from a farm in Strath of Kildonan by the Countess of Sutherland in 1813. As a result, three brothers, including James, emigrated to the West Indies in search of employment and wealth. All three died in the West Indies: Hugh in Jamaica in 1815, whilst both Robert and James perished in Demerara in 1829. They were members of the Sutherland diaspora. In being forced to leave their own homeland they came into contact with another diaspora, this one from Africa, in the form of the thousands of enslaved people forced to labour in the sugar plantations where the Mackay brothers sought their fortune. A fortune which they hoped would allow them to return home to Sutherland.
The letter that James wrote home to his sister Isabella describing his return to his childhood home, and the trauma of the clearance of his family from their farm, is fictitious.