Rare Scottish Stories #3 The Man In The Heather

Read on thoughtfully and with an open mind - miracles, even those given by the faeries, do happen and are well documented throughout Scottish history. Some things are never as they seem.

Our story starts in the late 1800's in Eilanmore in the Summer Isles of Scotland. In a small croft a man by the name of Alasdair Achanna lived with his five brothers and his elderly father. Of his brothers, he was the oldest and they unaffectionately named him "Silent Aly' or the "Anointed Man". You see - Alasdair was no ordinary man. The original events were taken from the perspective of Alasdair's friend who is not named so for sake of continuity of story telling, we will call him Gregory.

As a young boy of 10 years old, Gregory would visit his widowed aunt in Eilanmore during the Summer and stay the season. There was very little to keep a young laddie amused but he forged an unlikely friendship with the neighbouring crofter, Alasdair Achanna, who the boy would chat to while Alasdair was cutting and carrying the peats, hoeing the turnips and conducting his daily tasks on the croft. Gregory noted throughout the years that Alasdair's brothers were unfriendly and morose, never once showing any kindness to him or their brother. Alasdair by comparison was joyful and optimistic, seeming to radiate a contagious positivity about life. The Summer passed and Gregory returned home to where he was from, always thinking of his strange friend from the Summer Isles.

The following year, which was to be Gregory's last visit to Eilanmore, Gregory and Alasdair were walking and it was approaching sundown. The weather was threatening rain and the air was humid and clammy. He stood on the top of a hill with his friend and Gregory, gazing over the west, reflected on what he had learned from Alasdair about his life over the past year. Three months before, Alasdair's brothers Alan and William had drowned, a month later his brother Robert had been struck with an illness that left him catatonic, staring in a chair, deathly thin, his eyes sunken in his skull. His father too had been struck with the same strange paralysing illness. The fields of crops were rotting from a season of heavy rainfall and blight has ruined the potato harvest - leaving the fields blue specked with mould. How Alasdair could feed his family now, Gregory could only guess and pray for the charity of others. Gregory took a second to glimpse up as his friend in compassion but instead of depression, Gregory could only see the light of joy that shone from within Alasdair.

Scottish Ling heather

"Are you looking at Achnacarn?" (this was the name of the tract) Gregory asked.

"Yes. I am looking. It is beautiful: beautiful. O God, how beautiful is this lovely world!" beamed Alasdair

Gregory in a fit of grief and disbelief threw himself into the heather in convulsive sobbing. Alasdair looked down at the crying laddie and scooped the boy up into his arms.

"Tell me laddie, what is it? What is the trouble?" Alasdair asked.

"It is you - it is you, Alasdair! It terrifies me to hear you speak as you did a little ago. You must be fey. Why? Why do you call that hateful, hideous world beautiful... on this dreary day... and after all that has happened?" Gregory sobbed.

"Listen, and I will tell you. I was little more than a child, a boy just like you, when something happened. I was out upon the heather in the time when the honey oozes in the bells and cups. I had always loved the island and the sea. Perhaps I was foolish, but I was so glad with joy that golden day that I threw myself onto the ground and kissed the hot, swing ling (a species of heather) and put my hands and arms into it, sobbing the while with my vague strange yearning. At last I lay still with my eyes closed. Suddenly I was aware that two tiny hands had come up through the spires of the heather and were pressing something soft and fragrant upon my eyelids. When I opened them, I could see nothing unfamiliar. No one was visible. But I heard a whisper -

"Arise and go away from this place at once; and this night do not venture out, lest evil befall you" So I rose, trembling, and went home. Thereafter I was the same, and yet not the same. Never could I see, as they saw, what my father or brothers or the isle folk looked upon as ugly or dreary. My father was angry with me many times and called me a fool. Whenever my eyes fell upon those waste and desolate spots, they seemed to me passing fair, radiant with lovely light. At last my father grew so bitter that, mocking me the while, he bade me go to the towns and see there the squalor and sordid hideousness wherein men dwelled.

But thus it was with me; in the places they call slums and amongst the smoke of factories, what I saw was lovely, beautiful with strange glory, and the faces of men and women were sweet and pure. I came back to Eilanmore. On the day of my homecoming, Morag was there - Morag of the Falls. She turned to my father and called him blind and foolish. “He has the white light upon his brows," she said of me “Ican see it. He was been touched with the Fairy Ointment. The Guid Folk know him. It will thus be with him till the last day of his death. He upon whom the Fairy Ointment has been laid must see all that is ugly and hideous and dreary and bitter through a glamour of beauty. Thus it hath been since the MacAlpin ruled from sea to sea, and thus it is with the man Alasdair, your son."

"That is all, my boy, and that is why my brothers, when they are angry, sometimes call me the Anointed Man." Alasdair finished.

Gregory was dumbstruck at the precious treasure that Alasdair had found in the heather.

Gregory never returned to Eilanmore but he treasured the memory of his sweet friend throughout his life.

Copyright by Laura McParland taken from antique sources.

Not to be re-distributed in any form online or in publishing without written consent by the author.