Sealladh na Beinne Mòire

Sealladh na Beinne Mòire is an estate, covering parts of Benbecula, South Uist and Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides. It came into community ownership in 2007, but has been fraught with disputes and strife. 

As it has not submitted annual reports to Companies House, which regulates companies across the United Kingdom, it has been issued to what is termed a First Gazette notice. This is the preamble for the dissolution of a company, usually following two months after the initial notice.  

Last month, the directors of Sealladh na Beinne Mòire agreed to step down, and the three local councillors took over as temporary directors. This was followed by a First Gazette notice on 10th March. Our MSP (Member of Scottish Parliament) has issued a statement. And I'm not impressed. 
  
I am very sorry, but the closing lines of this report displeased me. 

I'd rather refrain from expressing my view of an MSP who does not know the implications of a First Gazette notice, has to ask the Scottish Government (like a good boy) what its views are on the possible implications of that notice - the implications are the dissolution of Sealladh na Beinne Mòire. He should be screeching down the A865 to Dalabrog, bang a few heads together, including those of the three councillors who were appointed interim directors last month, and make sure the notice gets cancelled.

I hold strong views about community ownership, as I have outlined in previous postings on various social media outlets. There are quite a few success stories in the Highlands and Islands, such as Assynt, Eigg and Galson (the latter here in Lewis). Sometimes, achieving community ownership involved hard graft against unwilling landowners, as was the case with the Pairc Trust in South Lochs. Sealladh na Beinne Mòire cannot be allowed to fail.

Changes

Reading back through my notes of yesteryear. Little change, yet so much has changed.
At one point, I found it necessary to struggle through bogs and moorland between the Pentland Road and the hills of Meannan and Beinn Mholach.
All those years later, I can just walk up a well-made track - to windturbines, whirring round on the summits of Meannan and Beinn Mholach.
Oh, should I wish to do so, I can walk past the turbines and head northwest into the moor towards Dalmore. Or east, back towards Stornoway along the shores of Loch Garbhaig


Peatbogs on Meannan, August 2005


Track from Pentland Road windfarm, June 2013


Loch Garbhaig, looking east towards Stornoway, June 2013

Mary Anne Macleod

I live in the island from where Mary Anne Macleod set forth to seek a new existence in the New World. She did return here from time to time, worshipped in the church I attend each Sunday. Mary Anne later became mother to five children, one of whom is now the 47th President of the USA: Donald J. Trump.
We raise our children, and instil in them values we hold dear. When they have grown up, they go forth into the world and make a life for themselves to the best of their abilities. What they do with that upbringing is their responsibility.
People in the island of Lewis do not talk about Donald Trump. His behaviour is not the way things are done in the Western Isles, and are a disgrace to his heritage. His behaviour is not the fault of his late mother, he is responsible, as a man of nearly four score years, for his own actions. I never knew Mary Anne Macleod, she died five years before I came to live in Stornoway. I do know people who met her. When I stand at the gate at the bottom of Cross Street, a quiet back street in Stornoway, I glance over to the row of houses on Ford Terrace in Tong. To the demure dwellings in the village beyond. And wonder what she would have made of her son's career in politics. Isn't it the case that she warned never to let Domhnall Iain anywhere near politics?

Holocaust Memorial Day - 2026

Today it is 81 years ago since the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was liberated by Soviet forces. More than a million people, mainly Jews, were killed there during the Second World War. The process was conducted as an industrial process. To date, some of the goods left behind by the victims of the Holocaust remain on display. These include suitcases with name tags, spectacle frames, hair and shoes. I have never visited Auschwitz and am not likely to.

January 27th is Holocaust Memorial Day, remembering all the victims of the Nazi's policy of extermination of all those they considered to be sub-human.

Holocaust Memorial Day remembers all victims of genocide.

We must never forget.

Greenland

Looks like the son of 5A Tong has swept aside all the conventions, treaties and understandings that have kept Europe broadly safe and peaceful for the last 80 years or so. I'm not overlooking the war in the Balkans, nor the current invasion of Ukraine. 

After flouting the rule of law by forcibly removing the (admittedly unelected) president of a sovereign country, namely Venezuela's ruler Nicolas Maduro, the power has gone to the head of the US president. 

Taking a leaf out of the book, written by Vladimir Putin, he now seeks to grab what he wants, never mind that Greenland is a territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, a close ally. He threatens all who verbally oppose his ambitions, and / or those that support Denmark and the Greenlanders in maintaining the status-quo. All the words of condemnation from various European leaders are just that: words. 

It looks that Donald Trump, like Putin, now only understands the rule of the bully, the rule of force. This could well spell the end of NATO, and expose us to the risk of an active threat from Russia. 

Trump turns 80 in June. His own mother once said: don't let Donald John anywhere near politics. How true Mary Anne Macleod's words now ring. 

 

11 January 2005

Twenty-one years ago today, 11th January started as your usual winter's day in the Islands. But when darkness fell, the wind rose to a screaming crescendo. Stornoway was battered by 100 mph winds, the old school I was staying in at South Lochs shook under the onslaught. Blue flashing lights across the water in Laxay indicated that police had closed the A859 to Tarbert, after a busdriver reported a sheep flying past his window. Power went off for 48 hours in my location, up to six days in nearby Sildenis. We all hunkered down in darkness, waiting for the storm to blow itself out. 

The next morning, 9 am. Phew, that was a bad one. Roof off here, trees down in the Lews Castle Grounds, boats wrecked at Newton. You got any damage? 

News began to filter north from South Uist. Five members of the same family missing out of Lionacuidhe, on the South Ford. They had fled towards the causeway in two cars, but never arrived. As the winds abated, a search of the Ford, the channel between South Uist and Benbecula, yielded all the missing. Lost to a storm surge the evening before. 

I can never bear to see the faces of the two wee ones lost that night. Or those if their parents and grandfather. 

I'll just post the link to the news report. 

RIP.

Lockerbie - 37 years on

Wednesday, 21st December 1988. 7.03pm. Flight PanAm 103 was en-route from London to New York, when it disappeared off air traffic control radar, substituted by several fragments, which fell to the ground. One piece slammed into the town of Lockerbie. All on board the plane were killed, alongside eleven townspeople from Lockerbie when houses were destroyed by falling debris and fire. The plane had been brought down by a bomb, planted by terrorists allegedly linked to the then Libyan government of Col Ghadaffi. The full chain of command for the attack has never been fully clarified, in public at any rate, and there are questionmarks as to why security services didn't manage to foil the plot. One man was put on trial, convicted and sentenced. In 2009, he was released on compassionate grounds and repatriated to Libya.

All that is immaterial to the relatives and friends of those killed. They are remembered in a memorial on Sherwood Crescent in Lockerbie, which was flattened by the downed plane. We remember them all. 

Image courtesy BBC

July 1981. On my way north with family for the annual holiday. As we headed north up the A74, an all enveloping horror made me lie down on the back seat. I cannot explain what it was about, or why. But after I had given in to my emotion, I looked up again and asked where we were. "Lockerbie", came the answer, and I saw the sign for the A709 turn-off to Lockerbie and Lochmaben flash by.


The same sign that can be seen in the footage from December 1988. The location where parts of the plane came down. Don't ask me to explain the coincidence. I can't.

In 1988, I was a student in Holland, and given to watch rubbish on the television. That evening, the Lockerbie images flashed by - and that road sign. A74 Glasgow, the North - A709 Lockerbie, Lochmaben.

May the innocent victims of Lockerbie, from the plane, or on the ground, all rest in peace.