The First Story of the Houlin Girls

 Many of my songs are a mix of reality and fantasy. But the song about the Houlin girls was based entirely on reality, but turned out to be nothing but fantasy.

My father was born on the Isle of Eigg, in the Inner Hebrides, in 1912. His father was a shepherd on the island and his mother ran a hotel at Laig Farm. The farm is in a stunning setting at the western end of the beautiful Laig Bay. At the other end of the Bay there is a house called Houlin, and it was here that my great grandfather, Duguld McCallum lived.

 

Howlin (formerly Houlin) was one of 8 farms on Eigg leased to Clanranald tacksmen. The farm was leased in 1770 to Lachlan MacKinnon who, reportedly, built the present house with his son, Hector. It was said to be the first house of lime and glass on the island, with a byre and hayloft at one end. Records suggest that the house was the only one on the island with an orchard and walled garden.

My father once told me a tragic story about Duguld and his family and I found it sufficiently moving that I chose to write a song about it. The story was that Duguld and his wife lived at Houlin with their three daughters. It came to pass that Duguld was taking some calves to the mainland to sell at market. Bad weather delayed his return to Eigg and several days past before he got home to Houlin. On his return he discovered his wife and three daughters dead in the house, all having died of diphtheria.

 

Whilst diphtheria was a common killer in the mid 1800’s, I could not imagine the horror of finding your entire family wiped out without warning like that. The story stuck in my head and whilst it was a sad and tragic tale, I wanted to use it in some sort of ballad.

 

I looked at various ways of writing the song and settled on a mix of the tale and the local myths that surround a stretch of sandy beach that is over looked by Houlin. At the eastern end of Laig Bay is an area of sand known as the ‘Singing Sands’. If you walk across the sand it makes a strange sound under each footfall. The noise is a natural phenomenon generated by the unusual shape of the grains of sand as they rub together.  But over the centuries there have been many theories put forward as to the cause of the singing. Some said it was like the sound of a baby crying. Others thought it was the sound of seal pups calling for their mother or mermaids crying.

Because of the proximity of the singing sands to Houlin it occurred to me that the three daughters would have played there. That led to the thought that the ‘singing’ might be a ghostly echo of the girls playing, singing and laughing on the beach. But there again it might be an echo of Duguld walking across the bay singing a lament for the loss of his family.

 

With those thoughts bouncing around in my mind, I wrote the lyric of the song. The tune was something I struggled with, and I eventually gave the words to my friend Stan Ginter to see if he could come up with something suitable. Stan is a banjo player unlike most other banjo players. He uses the instrument delicately and gently to accompany ballads and could not be further away from the traditional image of a banjo player.

Stan eventually came up trumps and we started to learn the song together. It was a powerful story and we thought that it might do well in competition. So, we entered it into a song writing event at Kirkcaldy Folk Club in 2001. The prize was a day in a recording studio to record the winning song. The song had an obvious impact on the audience and we were confident that we would triumph. However, the judges thought differently, and we were placed second. We did receive lots of positive comments at the end of the night which was reassuring. One of those comments came from the owner of the recording studio who thought the winning song was nowhere near as good as the Houlin Girls, and he insisted that Stan and I come along to his studio so that we could record it free of charge. It was a generous offer and one that we both appreciated greatly.

 Later on that year we entered it into the annual song writing competition at the Edinburgh Folk Club. As in Kirkcaldy, we did not win, but neither did we go away empty handed. The competition was judged by a panel of three, but it was also judged by the audience. The Dougie McLean Real Music Quaich was to be awarded to the favourite song based on the audience vote, and at last, the song won its first silverware.

Here are the words to the song, followed by the second story of the Houlin Girls.

 

The Houlin Girls

Houlin was a happy home on the Small Isle of Eigg

For Mary and for Ina and their eldest sister Meg

They worked hard wi’ their faither on the croft throughout the day

But as the sun sank in the evening sky on the sands of Laig they’d play

The crofting life was a hard life and the work was never done

But the Houlin girls they grafted as hard as ony son

Turnin’ o’er the lazy beds or bringing in the hay

But as the sun sank in the evening sky on the Sands of Laig they’d play

CHORUS       

Do you hear the sound of the Norlan’ wind or is it the curlew’s cry

Can you hear that sound of singing as you cross the Sands of Laig

Do you hear a father’s sad lament as you walk around thy bay

Or do you hear the sound of the Houlin girls singing as they play

Wi’ the Irish Blue Grey heifer the crofter he set sail

He was bound for the mainland market as he left Glamisdale

And the Houlin girls would tend the croft while their faither was away

But when the sun sank in the evening sky on the sands of Laig they’d play

The market trade was good that day and they young Blue Grey sold well

But the weather it was on the turn and the wind it blew like hell

For six long days and six long nights no boat would leave the quay

And how he missed his Houlin home, his wife and family

Chorus

At last the crofter did return to his island home once more

No wife or smiling daughters to greet him at the door

Diphtheria had visited and ta’en their lives away

Nae mair they’d see the evening sun or the sands of Laig Bay

Nae mair he’d hear his daughters singing as they played

Nae wife tae hold and comfort him – he was broken and afraid

And the money from the young Blue Grey he took down to the bay

And threw it hard as e’r he could into the surf and spray

Ch.

 The Other Story of the Houlin Girls

The Houlin Girls proved to be an unusual song in that the story it was based around, turned out not to be entirely true. Around the time I had written the lyrics I was also doing some genealogical research into my family tree. With the story of the Houlin girls in mind, I headed for New Register House in Edinburgh to search through the records for the date of their deaths.

It seemed an easy task to find four entries recorded in the Small Isles register of deaths, all on the same day. I knew that Duguld was born in June 1832 and so I started searching the records from 1850 onwards. I went over and over all the deaths on the Isle of Eigg but could find no trace of the Houlin girls, or their mother. A member of staff had noticed my puzzled expression and came over to offer assistance. I related the story of Duguld’s family and explained that I could find no trace of the tragic events.

“Maybe the story isn’t true.” he said.

I explained that this was a story that was well known to the family and folk on Eigg so it had to be true. After all, I had been told the tale from my father and Duguld was his grandfather.

“Just because someone thinks it is true, doesn’t necessarily mean that it is true.” He sat down and asked me what records I had that could be verified. From that starting point, the two of us started to trace the true story which proved to be quite different from the one my father had related.

By the end of the afternoon we had established exactly what happened to Duguld and his family. He had married and left Eigg to move to Glasgow where he and his wife had a son – not a daughter. Tragically, within a week of the birth, both his wife and son died from diphtheria. Duguld then returned to Eigg and moved into Houlin. At some point he took a housekeeper and the two of them eventually got married. They went on to have  a family of three daughters – all of whom went on to lead a healthy and happy life. Duguld passed away on Eigg in 1915 aged 83 and his wife, Helen died five years later in Glen Artney aged 78.

How the false story of the Houlin girls came into existence remains a puzzle. Whilst there are parallels in that he lost a wife and child to diphtheria, it is still a big leap to arrive at the story in the song. So the tragic tale of the Houlin girls is nothing more than a falsehood.

The song also taught me a couple of good lessons. Firstly, don’t believe all you are told, and secondly, get your facts right before committing them to song. The facts I had been given were false, but even so there was a discrepancy in my account of them within the lyric.

After performing the song one night at Glenfarg Folk Club, I was approached by a lady called Alison Wilson. She explained that although she thought it was a wonderful song, she did have a problem with it. She had an issue with the line, “The market trade was good that day and they old blue grey sold well”. Earlier in the song I referred to the “Irish blue grey heifer”.

“How,” Alison asked, “can it be an old blue grey, if it’s a heifer?”

A heifer of course is a young cow, yet to have a calf. It was a valid point and as a result, the word ‘old’ was changed to ‘young’. Thanks Alison.

Below is a YouTube link to Stan Ginter and myself performing The Houlin Girls at a fund raiser concert for the R.N.L.I.

The Houlin Girls

Experiences like being sent at the age of fourteen to the Dubh Choirien House at the foot of Ben Vorlich to do the lambing, and to Moirlanich in Glen Lochay the following year to help run the farm all helped to make my father a resilient and independent young man. However, they were not the first character building experiences he went through, and nor would they be the last.

When he was only thirteen years old he got his first job in September of 1926. He was employed as a rabbit trapper by the Drummond and Ancaster Estates. His pay was dependant upon how many rabbits he trapped and he would not receive that payment until completion of his six months contract. The estate had half a dozen rabbit trappers and they each had their allocated area to trap in. Another estate employee would visit a different trapper each with a pony, and the rabbits were taken away in panier baskets.

 

The area my father was allocated was the most remote and isolated on the estate. A small wooden shack was taken up into Glen Ghoinean and this would be his home for the duration of the contract. The shack was secured to the ground with a series of wires and posts to prevent it being blown away in the winter storms. It was then kitted out with small stove, a bed and not much else. It’s location was near to a wood and a burn which was to be his water and fuel supply while he was there.

He arrived with the ponyman, armed with a sacks of oats and barley, his snares, a change of working clothes and a sack of coal for the stove. The ponyman bid him farewell and headed back down the track from whence he had come. That was the last human contact my father would have for six months.

Determined to earn as much as he could, he was on the go by first light checking his lines of snares. The rabbits he caught, he carried back to the shack where he hung them in couples on a wire between two posts. Around once a week the ponyman would arrive and collect the rabbits. Occasionally he would leave a food parcel or some clean clothes, but he never lingered. He would be gone by the time Dad returned to his tiny wooden home in the wilderness.

He talked about how the red deer would come down off the hill in the dead of night and waken him. He would lie there in the dark listening to the sounds of stags snorting and using the wires that secured the hut to the ground to scrape the velvet from their antlers. The first time that happened would have been frightening for most people, but even more so for a thirteen year old, on their own, in the middle of nowhere.

As winter closed in he worked away each day irrespective of the weather. On December 5^th he rose exactly as any other day and headed out to check his snares. There was nobody there to celebrate the fact that he had turned fourteen. No cards. No presents.

Christmas and New Year came and went without ceremony, fanfare or company. Each day was the same as the one that went before.

At the end of February his six months were up and the young rabbit trapper headed home. A few days later he attended at the estate office in Muthill to sort out the small matter of payment. The factor got the ledgers out and started to calculate what my father was due. When he added it all up he was astonished at how many rabbits he had killed. Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly how much he had earned, but it must have been a pretty penny. The factor, having done his calculations, said that it was obscene for a young boy of fourteen to have that amount of money, and refused to pay him.

After my grandfather got involved, and after a great deal of argument, the factor eventually paid up and gave the money to my grandfather. How much of the money in that pay packet found its way to my father is open to debate.

Below is a video of the song being introduced by the wonderful Paddy Bort at the Edinburgh Folk Club.

The Wilds of Glen Ghoinean

 

Song writing has always been something I have enjoyed doing, and there have been many different things that have motivated me to put pen to paper.

I suppose I simply like making rhymes and I like telling stories.

I have had many experiences throughout my lifetime, and the vast majority of them have been consigned to the waste disposal unit in my brain. But some events remain firmly fixed in the memory, and they do so for a reason. It is the events that are unusual, funny, tragic, humiliating or heart warming that escape the waste disposal unit. They are the events that provoke emotion, and those are the stories I like to tell in song.

The songs I write are mostly based on my own experiences. But the emotions they generated in me are hopefully emotions that others can relate to on hearing the songs.

My evolving relationship with my father generated several songs. Our inability to understand each other when I was in my teens was a huge source of friction. He saw me as an idle, daydreaming, long haired, useless son with a head full of music and girls, (In hindsight, a fairly accurate assessment). I saw him as an unreasonable, workaholic, old fashioned, heartless man with no compassion for his wife or family, (with hindsight maybe not so accurate an assessment)

But as the years went by, I grew up and matured, and he aged and mellowed. We eventually became incredibly close and enjoyed many years of a happy father and son relationship.

The emotions at either end of that spectrum remain with me and inspired several songs.

Humorous events, like the unusual circumstances in which I lost my virginity, are favourite topics to write about. I’ve always enjoyed funny songs. As a youngster I was a huge fan of Matt McGinn and sang several of his songs doing floor spots around the folk clubs. Making an audience laugh remains something I derive a great deal of pleasure from.

Things that angered me, like the MPs expenses scandal generated songs.

Events from my working life also feature, although some of the stories I could tell will never make it into a song for legal reasons and my dislike for prison food.

Of course, matters of the heart, as for most song writers, are a big source of emotional inspiration. Waxing lyrical about a new love or lamenting the loss of a loved one are all deeply emotional things. Whilst I have written about such matters, I tend not to sing them publicly. I have focused more upon my failures as a teenage Romeo. I find the humour in those stories more palatable than some of the deeply personal incidents I have experienced.

Entering song writing competitions, where there is a given theme, has generated several of my songs. It is always a challenge to write about a random subject and to do so in a way that approaches the given theme from an angle that no other competitor has thought of. On the day of the event I am always terrified that another competitor will sing before me with a song that has all my punch lines and ideas. To date, this mercifully has never happened.

But now I come to this month’s song, “Lay All My Troubles Aside”. This is a song that evolved from a new situation for me.

I was invited along to a Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland (T.M.S.A.) song writing workshop in Perth. I had never attended a song writing workshop before and was unsure of how it would work. I was very aware of how I normally write, and it was not sitting in a room with a group of people conjuring up a song on demand. I also had no embryonic ideas of songs floating around in my head. This was going to be a challenge.

Although I didn’t know everyone there, I did know quite a few, and a stalwart of the TMSA, Doris Rougvie, was busy cutting out random pictures from a collection of magazines. She spread out the photographs and invited everyone present to take one.

There was one that stood out to me, and it was of a seascape taken somewhere on the north west coast of Scotland. In the foreground at the bottom of the image there was some sedge grass growing up through sand dunes. Beyond that, a beautiful pale, golden sandy beach with gentle waves lapping at the waters edge. Across the sea, on the horizon was an island with a couple of hilly peaks, and above in a blue sky was a solitary small white cloud.

It was a scene that felt peaceful and tranquil and somewhere that I would have loved to visit. There was no sign of human activity. It was a place of solitude and calm. Within seconds, I was oblivious to the others in the room, and I started to write. The first verse was simply what I could see…

Where the dunes meet the shore

And the shore meets the waves

That lap with the incoming tide

Where the sea meets the island of faraway hills

There I’ll lay all my troubles aside.

Back in the year 2000, I made the most difficult decision of my life. I left my marriage of 25 years. For a long time I had been in love with another woman but had never had the courage to tell her or do anything about it. That year, I told her how I felt about her, and as a result, my life turned upside down. We talked at great length about the implications of what we were considering, which was to leave both our marriages and set up together as a couple.

We had many friends in many places and so we sought out remote, quite locations to discuss our future. She was the sea breeze that ruffled the calm of my sea and this photograph reminded me of the sort of place we would go to escape, and that manifested itself in the lyric of the song.

I wish I had kept the cutting from that magazine, but it was thrown away at the end of the night. However, the memories and emotions that photograph evoked remain with me, and I’m delighted to say, so does the lady who walked hand in hand with me along that shore.

Not being an accomplished  musician, I came up with a very basic tune for the song. I was never particularly happy with it and so rarely sang it. Then during the Covid 19 lockdown I became involved in a musical collaboration which involved friends, Ian Simpkins and Dave McLagan, both from Perthshire, and Dave Spittal. Dave, a member of the popular folk group Kindrick, currently lives in Lima in Peru. The lads would record various songs and pass the various leads, harmonies and instrumentals to me and I would stitch them together into videos. It was something that the four of us did for fun during the corona-virus pandemic.

It occurred to me that Dave Spittal might be able to put the lyric of the song to a better tune, so I sent the words to Peru for him to have a look at. He immediately resonated with the song and in no time at all a rendition of him singing it was winging its way back to me.

I loved what he had done and set about trawling through video footage I had taken on various visits to places like Oldshoremore, Balnakeil beach at Durness, Sheigra and other locations in north west Scotland.

I put those images together with Dave’s rendition of the song which you can now see and listen to on YouTube.

 

Lay All My Troubles Aside

Where the dunes meet the shore, and the shore meets the waves

That lap with the incoming tide

Where the sea meets the islands of faraway hills

There I’ll lay all my troubles aside

I’ll lay all my troubles aside

I’ll lay all my troubles aside

Where the sea meets the islands of faraway hills

There I’ll lay all my troubles aside

Where the wisp of a cloud drifts lazily over

A sky of cold winter blue

Where the sea breezes tease the calm of the seas

Then you know I’ll be thinking of you

And I’ll lay all my troubles aside

I’ll lay all my troubles aside

Where the sea meets the islands of faraway hills

There I’ll lay all my troubles aside

Where sandpipers pipe, and the curlew cries

And plovers parade on the sand

Where fulmars glide over the foam on the breeze

At the cusp of the sea and the land

There I’ll lay all my troubles aside

I’ll lay all my troubles aside

Where the sea meets the islands of faraway hills

There I’ll lay all my troubles aside

Where you and I met to escape from them all

Just to walk hand in hand on the shore

Where you and I both laid our troubles aside

How I wish we could walk there once more

And we’d lay all our troubles aside

We’d lay all our troubles aside

Where the sea meets the islands of faraway hills

We would lay all our troubles aside

 

Where the dunes meet the shore, and the shore meets the waves

That lap with the incoming tide

Where the sea meets the islands of faraway hills

There I’ll lay all my troubles aside