For The Crofters Poem by John Beaton

My ancestors, you were burned from the glens

As the ice gouged Strathcarron, then melted to mingle with sea-loch, you melted from glens to the shore.
When your roof-timbers crackled in Sutherland's fires at Strathnaver, you scoured a treeless coastline.
As the fall of the wind-sand made machair by Luskintyre's Sound, you blew and shifted and settled.
When the factors staked crofts on scraps of blasted Strathy, you thrashed in the grip of the gusts.

and built on the coast.

As the sandstone sediments buried each other in Caithness, you split them and built with the flagstone.
While your clachan surrendered to moss at Achanlochy, you coursed new walls in the wind.
As the mica sparkled from moine schist slabs in Argyll, your lintels and byre stalls glittered.
As whale-bones braced Stone-Age roofs at Skara Brae, you thatched your rafters with marram.

You broke the bleakness of the land,

As the run-rigs still wrap the ruins of Auchindrain, your townships were plaids for the bays.
As the Vikings sculpted their pots from the soapstone of Unst, you hand-ploughed your fields from the moor.
As gneiss cupped pools of rainfall that brimmed with sphagnum, you sustained the peat-fire flame.
When the spring brought transhumance and high-ground grazing for cattle, you husbanded low ground for crops.

farmed it,

As the Standing Stones of Callanish jut from the earth, your seedlings sprouted in spring.
As Mousa's broch-builders ground their grain in querns, you milled the bere for your bannocks.
When the black-faced sheep grazed the out-bye scattalds of Flugarth, you drove them in with your dogs.
As pilasters of basalt kilted the cliffs of Staffa, you wore the wool that you spun.

and harvested the sea.

As the Ness men row to Sula Sgeir for gugas, you climbed for the eggs of the guillemot.
As the meltwater gouged Corrieshalloch to shelter the sanicle, you dug nousts in the shore for your boats.
As the Bronze-Age people of Jarlshof filled middens with fishbone, you trammelled the silver darlings.
As Fingal's Cave mouthed its Hebridean wind-songs, you rowed on the swells with Mendelssohn.

But hunger came nonetheless.

As the rain hollowed caves at Smoo and Assynt from limestone, your bellies were hollowed by winter.
While the seaweed burned in the kelp-fire kilns of the Uists, you laboured for lairds who starved you.
Though the planticrues fed the people of Shetland with cabbage, you bent your backs on potatoes.
When the blight blown from Ireland blackened the haulms of your hope, you ate nettles and shellfish and weeds.

You coped as you could,

When Macleod of Dunvegan doled bolls of meal for your thralldom, you prayed for the faerie flag.
When Cromarty's laird built a Gaelic church to tempt you, your sweat anointed his fortunes.
When the Lothian fields and the Glasgow factories lured you, you walked the length of the nation.
While the lairds of Lewis and Barra evicted the starving, you paid your rent with your flesh.

and many left forever.

When MacDonald deported three generations from Suishnish, your wails were a funeral coronach.
When the lowly lairded the wilds of Nova Scotia, you waved to your children from wharves.
When the Ballarat gold-rush siphoned Australia's labour, your neighbours followed old felons.
While Lord Selkirk settled the land-locked Red River prairie, you waited for unwritten letters.

You remained and fought

When orphans returned on ships turned back with typhus, you shared your meagre shelter.
When the women of Braes stoned constables sent from Glasgow, you turned an ancient tide.
When the rent protestors of Glendale were jailed in Edinburgh, you unsheathed the steel of the martyr.
When the cottars fought the gunboat marines at Aignish, you defied the feudal fist.

for reform.

When Lord Napier's Commission listened in the Ollach Schoolhouse, your wielded your words like broadswords.
When your spokespeople told how women and men pulled harrows, you bridled the brutish factors.
When the laird of Kirkwall blackballed those who bore witness, you braved his retribution.
When the nation's conscience adopted the Crofting Act, you secured your rights of tenure.

You made your living for a time,

While last century's waves unrolled on the beaches of Harris, your lives rolled, poor and proud.
As you walked by Sligichan into the mists of the Cuillins, you worked and the world slid by.
While the march of progress became a battle-charge, you nurtured your land by the decade.
As the ages changed the shapes of the Shetland voes, your time-honoured ways eroded.

and changed with the times.

While Lorgill, the glen of the deer's cry, lay deserted, you moved from the old black houses.
As the lords of the lambs paid a guinea a dead golden eagle, you traded your garrons for tractors.
As the drovers swam cattle across Kylerhea's swift narrows, you bridged the sea to Skye.
As you drive on the roads that run where your forefathers trod, you lean to the whine of the wind.