Hyne

Pat Barr Now freed of her editorial duties Pat Barr has dipped her pen into the memory well of Hyne and contributed her first article to the Magazine. We wish her comfort and joy in her 'town house' in the metropolis of Arinagour; as we wish the Jones all happiness in their new home at Hyne.

On the table in front of me is a large piece of tattered, much-creased graph paper with the word HYNE in bold capitals, top left. It's a plan of the cottage as it was when my husband, John, and I bought it in 1967; below is a list of 'Works to be Done' made by the short-term previous owner, Mr Poppleton, as 'Roof to be re-covered with asbestos sheeting; five new windows; walls to be re-plastered'. In accordance with those instructions Bill Flett had put on an extremely well-made roof (which is still in good order) and fitted the windows.

Mr Poppleton himself took on the job of plastering the walls in strawberry pink but, after getting two-thirds of the way round the large room, apparently gave up in despair one wet and windy night, shouldered his tools and walked up the notorious Hyne bog - never to return. When he mentioned in the hotel bar that he intended selling the property, Alastair Oliphant remembered a couple called Barr who'd stayed in the Spring and dreamed aloud of buying an island cottage. They'd left their address....

And so it began. Mr Poppleton called on us on his way south, waxed quite lyrical about the romantic solitude of the place and how seagulls banged shells on its roof at dawn... For just £700 all that could be ours. As we'd never even seen the cottage at close quarters, we took a quick trip north to inspect it. The month was November; gales blew us straight past the Coll ferry-boat to Tiree. On the way we peered through the rain at what looked like a grey stone hut on a dreary, barren shore and then we bought it. £700 was never be spent! For the next three years we spent as much time as we could at Hyne. The neighbouring bays were treasure troves of driftwood then with which we floored the upper storey and made a shed outside for the Elsan. We had it on fairly good authority that a previous owner. Mcphail, built his shed-of-convenience across the nearby burn which acted as nature's own flush lavatory. John used the best driftwood pieces to make furniture - table, sideboard, bookcase - which stand yet, silver gray, sturdy, time - smoothed very much a part of Hyne's large and beautiful main room. A wicker tender became our laundry basket, a wooden mill-wheel our occasional table, fishboxes our kitchen cupboards.

Our first expensive acquisition was a woodburning Jotul stove (such as our friends, the Hedderwicks, had at Crossapol), which Indy brought along the shore from Friesland on the back of his tractor one sunny day. It certainly gave out heat, but ate driftwood voraciously. Lighting was by paraffin lamp until Callum and Janet Burnside came to install the gas. We mentioned the problem of drinking water and Janet vowed there was a well somewhere on the foreshore. We went to look and she started prodding one patch of turf - I can see her now; she was a strong-armed woman. And lo! a well was there, though it was only a shallow one. Near the well, remains of an airplane that crashed in the second war were embedded in the sand. Islanders (always fond of a good yarn) assured us it was a German plane and that the blonde Teutonic ghost of its dead pilot haunted our cottage. We weren't entirely convinced, especially when we found, buried in a nearby bog, an airplane tyre made-in-Britain by Dunlop. (For the true story of the disaster, refer to Coll Mag. 1987.)

The sun used to shine at its proper season - at least my memory of those summers is of warm winds, bright skies, a magical sense of freedom and happiness. We never did hear seagulls bang shells on the roof, but we tuned in each day to the sounds of curlews, larks and snipe at twilight when we sat down to imbibe our somewhat renowned 'Hyne specials'. Not being Scots, we scarcely knew what a ceilidh was at first, but we soon learned - and our first guests soon learned to negotiate the bog in the wee small hours.

Early in 1971 John suddenly died of cancer and I had to decide whether to make Hyne my own place or sell it. The latter would have been the easier decision at the time, but I'm very glad I didn't take it. Island friends were a great support and I somehow felt that most people hoped I'd make a go of it myself. Materially, things were made easier by the advent of electicity -- no more lugging gas cylinders down the bog and, waking up there alone on a dark and windy night, it was reassuring to have a light switch beside the bed! But I was never really afraid and (after a while) seldom lonely because Hyne itself seemed always secure and welcoming - solid little shell of quietness and peace to which I returned each year for longer periods and with ever-increasing pleasure. Friends came to stay and often to love Hyne too and more people faced the perils of the bog on black wet nights. Character-ful cats came from Freisland to spent their summer holidays with me and Mill Cottage hens (brought down in a sack) provided both eggs and comic relief.

1981 was the year of the great renovation. Roy Thomburn and his merry men (who got less merry as the weather worsened) knocked down the old lean-to kitchen and the loo that leaned on it, installed a water supply, built a splendid, large kitchen (proper cupboards instead of fishboxes), a bathroom with all mod. cons., a wooden staricase, a proper bedroom instead of the dim, draughty area accessible only by rickety ladder.

They had problems. Hamish's boat, overloaded with building materials from the village , nearly sank in the bay; Neil Galbraith's tractor, piled with sand and gravel, nearly sank in the mire; I was there when Davy Moore came staggering through the shallows from the aforesaid boat under a bag of cement which burst all over the wet rocks. But at last it was finshed. I could soak in a whisky-coloured bath; eat meals at the kitchen table and look out to sea from the large picture window; gaze at the moon through my Velox skylight before going to sleep in my pine-lined bedroom.

And that is Hyne today, certainly a more comfortable dwelling than it ever was in the past. The main structure, built in the 1890s, was never a croft apparently and so had a great number of tenants - including a missionary and his family, some 'poor old women' (one with a withered hand) and the much-loved John Hyne, who made violins. Now my period of 'tenancy' is over and I have sold the cottage, content in the knowledge that I made it mine for a while, and loved it and have, in my own way, come to the end of it. And yet I know too that sometimes (on bright windy mornings, golden summer evenings,) I shall wish with all my heart that I was back there again - watching the sheep and the rabbits on the foreshore, the glitter of waves in the bay and lapped in that tranquil silence which is intrinsic to Hyne as to nowhere else on this earth I have had the good fortune to be.