05 11 07

In Scandinavia, the burning of birch has led to whole technologies of the wood-burning stove. Although it gives off a good heat, it’s no sooner lit than burned through. There’s plenty of it here, as in Scandinavia, but here also we have oak, the quintessential firewood, lasting long & burning hot. Firewood has been taken from these woods as long as people & woods have co-existed here, with folk still taking logs & brushwood, though nowadays most wood, if felled & if removed (rather than left for the slow energy burn of beetles, wasps & spiders & their kin) goes for other purposes. In other times, holly was said to burn like wax; plenty of ash was laid to a fire, burning as it does green or seasoned. I still start fires when I can with knuckles of ash, from faggots collected under the trees when storms crack off limbs & shower down twigs. Likewise the whitethorn, which burns hot & is said to bake the best bread. Rowan also burns hot, but though I’ve saved the trunk & arms of a storm-felled rowan for three seasons, I’m too superstitious to burn it; rowans guard a house, & although I sometimes believe this & sometimes don’t, it’s just not polite to burn your guardians.
The bonfire to celebrate Guy Fawkes (though there was no effigy of himself or the Pope) was a huge wigwam of scrap wood on the foreshore at Salen. I’ve no idea what types of wood it was made up of; though it’s a fair bet that most of it came from elsewhere. As far as I could tell, it was salvaged from demolitions & renovations of local houses; though there appeared to be the sides of an old shed, entire. It felt mean at a fine public festivity, of which there are too few left, to be thinking of the use all that wood could be put to. When the man from Salen said, almost in a whisper, that it was a shame to see all that heat wasted, I couldn’t but agree. But; & but, the anarchist, the peasant at the tumbrel, the child in me, was overjoyed to see the fire catch & take in the offshore wind, flames neither dancing nor licking, but drinking the wood. It was the sparks that danced in that elemental dance, retaining the shape of the hot updraughts, pushed this way & that like stars at the beginnings of time; that same dance of purest elation, driven by the same force, to be seen in shoaling fish & swarming bees & the swoop of starlings at dusk as they prepare to roost & pour into a tree or ivied wall.
It all made a fitting spree for the passing into winter, although it was past All Saints & All Souls Days. The flames, if you believe such things may have helped souls of the faithful attain their places elsewhere. Saints needed no such help, having probably already been roasted to ensure their sojourn in the clouds. With harps. (or is that angels?) Myths are fun. & the month is called samhain in Gaelic anyway, meaning harvest & surely a time to remember the dead & that we’re alive & with a fine crop.
The commemoration of a man who didn’t succeed in blowing a parliament to hell & which led to excesses of anti-Catholicism (why do I think of the Revd. Paisley & his refined sense of smell: “No pot-pourri here!”); the celebration of Halloween, itself a kind of Christian theft of the harvest hullabaloo of Samhain, at which cattle bones were thrown in fires to ensure prosperity for the coming year (indeed the word bonfire or bonefire is said by some to be a direct translation of the Gaelic tine cnamh), all makes for a mix where, like at the edges of the fire, at this fringe of the Sunart oakwoods, distinctions become blurred. Perhaps the more so because it’s damned cold & we’re outside the pub clutching our whisky glasses, but within sight of the still crackling blaze on the shore & its sense of redemption for those damned in the myths. Though I note that over the road the big house was once a Temperance Hotel, so maybe the whisky will lead us all to perdition. Or to laughter: the same place for an unbeliever.
The children, tumbling in the wet, leaping from the walls, clattering into shins & yelling, are there already.

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My prevailing sense of anarchy, the child in me at this bonfire, has echoes in an unpublished chronicle I’m privileged to read - A Highland Boyhood in Ardnamurchan, written by Angus Cameron, who grew up here & like most of his generation in the peninsula, had no English before he went to school. It was loaned to me by my neighbour, a cousin of his, but even though she & one of her sisters & another relative try to unravel the knot of kinship, it remains tied & unresolved as to what degree of cousin.He writes of Kentra in the years of the First World War: “As the year rolled round, Hallowe’en was looked forward to with great fervour, as a crowd of us would dress up to go out “guising” and get involved in a host of pranks and tricks. Boats and carts would be removed and replaced in somebody else’s croft or patch. The shoemaker (Allan) guarded his boat carefully, but as soon as he left for a cup of tea, we would have it shifted. One year we put it beside John George’s potato pit, exchanging it with John George’s cart, which we left on the shore.”