Applecross fisherman Alasdair Macleod's family on their loss: 'We’ve put his ashes in the sea because he’s at home there'

Let’s start at the end. On November 20, 2017, Macleod went fishing as usual on the Varuna – a 25ft creel boat painted buttercup yellow and bracken green, which he had named after the Hindu god of the sea and rain (“We’ve got plenty of both,” he would laugh). Macleod kept the Varuna at a mooring close to his home on the Applecross peninsula. He fished the Inner Sound, between the mainland and Raasay, as had his father and grandfather. He knew the waters intimately, loved them in all their moods. That morning they were flat calm. It was not long after 9am when he untied the boat and headed out. He did not return.

That afternoon, around 2.30pm, Alison Macleod was on her way home with the dogs. She had spent the morning dealing with problems at the community-owned filling station and was passing Milton Loch when a man stopped her and said, “That’s Ali’s boat on the rocks, and he’s not in it.” Eleven words to end one life; eleven to change another forever.

Alive to the implications of her husband’s absence from the Varuna, she hurried towards home. Reaching a high point on the road, she found coastguard volunteers looking out over the water to the boat. The Varuna had run aground on Saint Island, a small dark low-lying strip not far off shore. “That’s Ali’s boat, isn’t it?” Alison asked, knowing fine that it was.

The lifeboat arrived; one of the crew got into the Varuna and confirmed, by radio, that it was empty. Alison went home. She was later joined by her grown-up son Kenny. “And then we didn’t hear anything until it got dark and one of the coastguards and a policeman arrived with a missing person’s form,” she says. “They’d done all the searching they could at that time, and would carry on in daylight hours. We knew by then he was dead. There was lots of folk saying, ‘Oh, there's a glimmer of hope!’ But I thought, ‘No, there’s not. Stop it.’”

Macleod’s body was discovered almost three weeks later, on the morning of December 9, on the shore at Staffin Bay, Skye, by a member of the public out walking. The tide, that eternal bier, is thought to have carried him approximately 30 miles north-west. He was identified from his dental records, and the cause of death recorded as “drowned while creel fishing”. He was 57.

***

I met him once. It was in the August of 2016. I was working on a story about the North Coast 500. While recognising the importance of tourism to the economy, the Macleods had concerns about the impact of the popular driving route. The roads were taking a battering, and where was the money for maintenance and repairs?

Ali had said to look for him in the Applecross Inn, where he worked, part-time, doing front-of-house. Through the window, I could see a Corvette Stingray, rowan berry red, in the car park. The idea of speeding through this northernmost part of Scotland, ticking towns and villages off a list, was anathema to the Macleods’ way of looking at the world, and it didn’t sit well with how Ali felt about Applecross in particular.

“The old name for Applecross is a’ Chomraich and it means ‘the sanctuary’,” he told me. “It goes back to medieval times. The monastery up on the head of the bay used to have a six-mile ring of stones. If anyone wanted to escape a blood feud, if they got inside the ring they were protected.”

What was true then, he felt, still held. “It’s one of these special places, like Iona, where people find peace from the crazy world. This is a bubble. You can have solitude.”

Applecross became an important Christian centre from 673 AD when the Irish monk Maelrubha landed on Saint Island. The word “Applecross” is often used incorrectly to refer to the settlement of Shore Street, where the Inn can be found, but is in fact the name for the whole peninsula. Part of Wester Ross, it has a population of just over 200 in 65,000 acres, mostly living in crofting townships along the coast. It is a pleasure to pass along the single-track road and chant their litany: Camusteel, Camusterrach, Culduie. Across the Inner Sound is the island of Raasay, and beyond that, the mountains of Skye.

Macleod’s immersion in this beauty, a daily baptism, was part of what made him who he was. Perhaps uniquely in Scotland, he brought to diners’ tables shellfish he himself had brought up from the depths: “Those langoustines you’re eating? I caught those.” Macleod was a great advocate of sustainable fishing, a founder member of the Scottish Creel Fishermen’s Federation, and certain practices were important to him. Whenever he caught berried prawns – those females bearing eggs – he would put them back in the water so that the animals would continue to reproduce. This moral choice meant he was unable to make a viable living as a full-time fisherman. Macleod was also against trawling and dredging, which he knew could leave the bottom of the sea like a desert. “The best fishermen,” he wrote on his blog, “are not the ones catching the most, or earning the top dollar, but those that can leave for the next generation.”

He fished alone. A lot of creel fishermen do. Often that’s economics; not being able to afford a crewman’s wage. But Macleod had other reasons. He enjoyed the solitude; needed it. Being on the water, his body working hard but mechanically, his mind was free. It was meditative, a way of feeling at one with nature, not above it or separate: the cormorant that would follow the boat and take food from his hand; the mermaid’s purses and cuttlefish eggs that came up on his creels, indicating the changing seasons; he and they were all part of the same dance.

On the day we met, he had been out that morning. “I was tailing squat lobsters when I looked up and I was surrounded by dolphins,” he told me. “A pod of about twenty or thirty. Lots of young ones. They played around the boat for a wee while and then headed off. It’s a word that’s used too much, but it was ‘awesome’ in the true sense.”

He smiled at the memory. “I don’t call it work. I do stuff and people give me money for it.”

***

Until 1975, when the coast road north was built, the only way in and out of Applecross was the Bealach na Bà, or “pass of the cattle”, a 25-mile single-track through the mountains. On a regular day it is an exhilarating drive, the closest thing in the British Isles to those steep hairpin bends in the Swiss Alps. On a day when people were arriving to celebrate the life – and grieve the loss – of Alasdair Macleod, it felt like a much more sombre passage: a coffin road.

“It’s not a funeral,” Alison Macleod insisted. A private cremation in Inverness would take place the following day, but the ceremony in Applecross was intended to be a time for joyful and grateful reflection. The tone was set by the dress code: guests were invited to wear woolly jumpers and kilts in tribute to Ali’s dress sense.

The Macleod home, the day before, felt cosy and calm. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, hyacinths flowering in the window. Views over the Inner Sound. A stopped clock, an Auden touch, showed quarter past seven. Alison and her son Ruairidh, who is 27 and a medical student, sat together on a couch. The Macleods had four boys – Kenny, Calum, Ruairidh and Niall – now all grown men with lives and ambitions away from Applecross. “You are the bow and they are the arrows,” Ali had written of his sons, “and you fire them off into the world.”

Alison Macleod, originally from Kirkcubrightshire, is a development officer for the Applecross Community Company, formed to help sustain life on the peninsula. Applecross is, she explained, a “fragile community”: there are only ten pupils in the primary school; some 40 per cent of the population is over 60; young people move away for jobs and homes and lifestyles that they cannot find locally.

She and Ali were the driving force behind the setting up of initiatives intended to make Applecross a more attractive place to stay. The filling station is community-owned and run by volunteers, as are the public toilets. There is local broadband, AppleNet. A hydro-electric scheme generates income.

Such projects take enormous emotional and physical effort to instigate and maintain. Ali spent around 40 hours a month doing voluntary work. Pushing for change in a small place, where everybody knows each other and everything is personal, can lead to bad feeling. There was a difficult period in 2012 during a campaign for locals to become members of the Applecross Trust, the charity which owns much of the land on the peninsula. The Macleods believed this could result in land being made available for affordable housing, and lead to job creation. However, it caused division within the community and much personal angst. “I am fighting for the place where I live,” Ali wrote, later, on his blog.

He was “hefted” to Applecross, Alison told me. The verb is more commonly used of sheep, describing the way they keep to the hill where they were born, but it gets at his animalistic sense of belonging. He had grown up in Kyle of Lochalsh, but his father was from Applecross, and Ali spent holidays on the peninsula, on his grandparents’ croft. It was, for him, a place of freedom. Life in Kyle had been characterised by the scriptures and strictures of the Free Presbyterian Church; he wasn’t allowed to listen to music, or celebrate Christmas; on Sundays, he was permitted to read only religious texts. Applecross respected the Sabbath, and his grandparents were churchgoers, but there wasn’t quite the same severity in their home.

As an adult, he abandoned the faith of his childhood, weaving together a personal spirituality based on strands of Buddhism, Hinduism, and the writings of the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran. But he felt no disdain for the Protestant culture in which he had grown up. He did not, for instance, fish on a Sunday. This was done out of respect for those, especially the Gaelic-speaking older folk, who held the Lord’s Day sacred, but also because he believed the idea of resting the fishing grounds was a good one – it would help stocks recover. This was an example of the confluence of his beliefs: Bible black meets eco green.

“Although he was a very modern, free-thinking, forward-looking person, many of his personal attributes, and many of the ways in which he tried to live were typical of the generations that had passed,” Pat Tyrrell, a close friend of Ali, would later tell me. “He cared for this place and wanted to preserve the way of life, which didn’t mean harking back to the past. He knew you had to adapt to changes, and look at ways to meet the future.”

This idea of being respectful and tender towards the traditions of a place, while also seeing the necessity of moving it forwards in radical ways seems to be expressed by the two elements in which Ali lived and worked: the unchanging shape of the land, symbolised most powerfully by the Cuillin peaks, and the ceaseless beat of the sea. Stillness and movement were all around him, and within him, and were the two forces which governed his world view.

Alison and Ali had met at Edinburgh University, where they were studying history. In 1983, on graduation, they married and moved to Applecross. They picked whelks to make money, saving to buy a fishing boat.

“He had a spiritual connection with the sea and would suffer if he spent too long ashore,” Ruairidh explained. “In winter, when it’s blowing a hoolie from the north, he might not be able to go out for a couple of weeks, and he’d really start to suffer mentally.”

This feeling Ali had for the water seems to have given some comfort to his family since his passing. “I am sure he would have preferred to die peacefully as an old man in his bed, but he would probably not have thought the death he did have was so very awful,” Alison believes.

What about the fact that it was almost three weeks before he was found? “He’d have been quite happy down there,” Ruairidh smiled. “I was saying to my brother, there’s a certain poetry in him being eaten by prawns.”

It is not clear what caused his death. He appears to have finished fishing and to have been heading back home. The Macleods believe there must have been some sort of accident – a trip on deck, an overbalancing while cleaning the gunwale – which caused him to fall overboard. In the cold water, in heavy clothing, with the boat on autopilot heading away from him, he would likely not have lasted long.

It was striking how serene Alison and Ruairidh seemed as they explained this, as if they had already made peace with it.

“I don’t find it easy to explain how I am,” Alison told me later, by email. “I feel a bit dead inside. And very tired, tired right down to the centre of my being. But determined that I will carry on living and make good use of all the love, skills, knowledge and determination I have in me; most likely not in Applecross long term, though. Ali loved it, I don’t so much.”

***

On the day of Alasdair Macleod’s celebration, the cloud had lifted, revealing the hills painted with snow. The tide was out, the strand wet and glossy. A heron stood atop its own reflection.

The family had asked if people could please walk to the church as parking was limited. A pragmatic thought, but there was something about the act of procession around the curve of the bay that felt appropriately solemn and lent itself to contemplation.

“You meet the world here,” I remembered Ali telling me. Applecross, though remote and isolated, is also something of an international hub. He loved that the Inn drew visitors from dozens of different countries. Human connection and conversation nourished him in a different way to the seclusion of the sea. He was a craic addict. Talking with people whose eyes and bellies were full of the wonders of Applecross kept his appetite for those things sharp. Walking into the Inn on the previous day, the smells of food and drink and the laughter of diners had seemed jarring, even obscene, a feast at the death. But as Judith Fish, the Inn’s owner, acknowledged, through tears, “He would absolutely have wanted that. You have to carry on.”

The Clachan Church, which dates from the early 19th century, sits at the foot of Beinn a’ Chlachain. There must have been a couple of hundred people gathered. The arched windows let in a pearly Vermeer light, illuminating bare stone walls and white rafters. It was standing-room only. A folk band played, and the beat of feet on the wooden floor caused the candles to flicker in time.

Here was as happy an occasion as a sad occasion can be. Jokes, stories, songs. A life dealt out like a good hand of cards. We sang Caledonia and there were tears. Ruairidh ascended the pulpit; red of hair and beard, he is the image of his father.

“When I heard the news about my dad, I cried the entire night thinking about what I’d lost and how I’d lost it,” he said. “But as time passed, I was surprised to discover how much of him remained. I’ve walked with him every day for the last six weeks.”

The thing he remembered best, he said, was his smile.

***

On Saturday January 13, the Macleod family set off into the Inner Sound in the Grace Anne, the boat of a local fisherman. They went just a few minutes north-west of Saint Island, where Maelrubha came ashore and the Varuna ran aground. It was a calm grey morning. They saw oystercatchers, herring gulls, seals. Kenny Macleod, the eldest son, scattered his father’s remains from the stern. Here he had fished, here he was lost, here he found meaning, and here he now returned.

“We’ve put his ashes back in the sea,” Alison said, “because we think he’s at home there.”