Marram by Leonie Charlton

Review by Gary Kaill

‘In the night the ponies galloped by the tent and I wondered if I was dreaming, but the boran-beat of their hooves on the machair and the racket of disturbed oystercatchers were more real than even my wildest, most vivid dreams.’

So begins this tenderly observed and affecting memoir, as Charlton and her friend Shuna make camp on the island of Barra for the first night of an epic Hebridean odyssey: a three week journey beginning in the southern Outer Hebrides and finishing in Callanish at the western tip of the Isle of Lewis. Their ponies, left overnight to settle, to roam and explore the machair (the low-lying, grassy plains prevalent in Scotland’s north-west coastline) are Ross and Chief: two brave and characterful Highland breeds, whose part in the adventure ultimately extends beyond their role as trusty steed, as both find themselves facing unexpected challenges en route.

Such is the generosity of Charlton’s writing in this compelling biography. Inspired, in part, by a desire to confront and better understand her relationship with her deceased mother, (‘…seven years after her death… it felt like the relief and the regret were intensifying. I was bone-weary of the guilt…’), she plans a unique form of tribute: the leaving of a trail of beads - in hedgerows, under stones - for the woman whose life was lived so chaotically and wildly (and is told here as a series of flashbacks threaded into the broader narrative.) Having visited the Hebrides with her father, but never with her mother, it is this desire for connection and reparation that underpins Charlton’s journey.

Marram is a multi-faceted work and succeeds on several levels: personal memoir; family portrait; an insight into Scottish history and tradition; a deeply fulfilling natural history. Notably, it is this latter element, vividly drawn and deeply fulfilling, that almost unseats the book’s emotional impetus and its striving for an emotional settling.

Charlton’s passion for the flora and fauna of the land is communicated with a passion as focused as it is breathless: she shares with authority what appears to be, rather than research, the result of a lifelong involvement in the world around her. On that level, her book earns the reader’s trust implicitly. Whether it be Shuna’s delight at spotting her first corncrake, a small squadron of fairy terns (‘their tails ribboning through the plaited sundown sky’), or simply the old Eriskay mare, whose lone existence causes Charlton to halt (‘It’s never easy seeing a horse on its own’), Marram emerges as a generously shared and implacably soulful nature diary. (Though the capitalisation of the common names of single animal species is, despite a preface that spells out Charlton’s stylistic preference, an odd contravention of accepted practice. It becomes rather distracting, especially when the likes of ‘Worms’, ‘Grubs’, ‘Cattle’ are treated in this way, and the practice is not followed throughout: ‘Eagle’ and ‘eagle’; ‘Cockle’ and ‘cockle’, for example, often on the same page.)

Marram connects even more deeply when the journey and its impact are captured in the moment, when the reader becomes positioned within the surprises and delights of the emerging narrative. There are any number of moments when the the reader falls unwittingly into step with these gutsy travellers, and the book is better for it: a last minute decision to rise early for a fiery sunrise; an encounter with a group of offshore workmen, after Ross is nearly swallowed by a peat bog, that is genuinely unsettling; daily events that have the quality of minor miracles, such as the spotting of a short-eared owl or the magical ‘clapping stones’ of Caisteal Bheagram.

Much of that connective power is fuelled by the inspiration Charlton finds when documenting the beauty of the landscape and the wonder of the islands’ unique natural history. These poetic asides are often as delightful a jolt for the reader as the events that inspire them are for the travellers - who might be doing nothing more ordinary than stopping for a snack, when the unexpected lights up both the day and the page.

In Vallay, on the island of North Uist, Charlton observes a broken-down tractor ‘rusted away to finger-touch crumble’, marvels at sea pinks with their ‘petals Rizla-dry’, and watches as ‘the sun burned a dent in the sea and slowly dropped into it.’ An old shieling becomes a thing of wonder: ‘a faint algae bloom greened the concrete floor… its cheerful demise, its graceful decay.’ The prose, in these moments of discovery, is often extraordinarily elegant.

And, while the unsettling events that led to Charlton’s parents separating when she was barely a child, and the introduction of Paul, an unspeakably horrific stepfather, are delivered with a steely candour, they often arrive with little in the way of introduction. At these points, when Charlton recounts examples of the often deep disconnection between mother and daughter, or the various abuses delivered by Paul, the book would have perhaps benefited from clearer space being made for these recollections. They do jolt at times when they come up against the easy rhythm of the earlier passage.

Still, even if, at journey’s end, it is an uneasy acceptance of the life and behaviour of her mother (and their fractured relationship) that Charlton finds, the real achievement here, you suspect, is not so much the outcome as the journey itself.

Marram is published by Sandstone Press, 19/3/20