Words: Deepanjana Biswas (she/her)
Memories of love and the remains of mortality heap into the sensibilities of this soil, creating a composition which can never fully be translated.
‘When we have put distance between ourselves and our intentions, the sensibility comes awake.
Every day should contain a pleasure as simple as walking on the machair…’
– Riasg Buidhe
For the poet Thomas A. Clark, the downy grass of “machair” went beyond the cloudy haze of the Romantic sublime; it was instead a place for precise clarity and connection. When one trods on this loamy soil and feels the gentle nip of wildgrass, there is a pleasant euphoria of being present – of being there, in the moment. Yet every bit of dark soil pressed and reshaped by your feet, holds histories larger than the sea nearby – a million moments pressed into the shape of a shore. To unspool the archive of the machair, is to untether the tendons of the earth itself – yet let me try to write you (a very brief) memory sketch. Would you care to remember?
The word Machair (‘mɑxər’) itself originates from Scottish Gaelic ‘magh,’ meaning a ‘field’ or ‘plain.’ It is indigenous to the Western Atlantic coasts of the British Isles, and has existed for centuries as the native ecology of these regions. In Scotland, it can be mainly found in the Outer Hebrides of Uists and Barra, in the Inner Hebrides in Tiree, and in some parts of the Northern Isles such as Shetland and Orkney. Official mentions of it can be dated all the way back 1692, in the writings of a minister and printer of the Church of Scotland named Andrew Symson: ‘These three parishes last described… are commonly call’d the Machirrs… indeed those parishes contain by far much more arable and white land than up in the moors.’ The reason for these habitats being so arable is their rather variable composition, largely formed of marine derived calcareous shell-sand (though the exact mass percentage of carbonate can range from 1 to 95% – making nearly each clump of sand unique!). This also allows for porosity, and the saturation of calcium carbonate creates a shallow rocky layer which allows water to pass through quickly, making this soil free-draining and fertile.
The alkaline soil also provides for minerals such as calcium and magnesium, which are very useful for plant growth. These plants in turn, after death, enrich the soil further, as organic matter decomposes rapidly in alkaline conditions. This soil is quite literally formed through migration of organic materials – that of broken shells carried by traversing Westerly winds before settling into coarse soil, and that of seaweed washed ashore, fertilising the land. There is also the seaspray which, after landing on the topsoil, changes the geochemical composition of it (such the content of water-soluble magnesium) and also the migratory ecological cycle, traversing life and death – the cyclic lungs through which the land breathes. Even if one wasn’t to wax poetic about that (apologies, but aren’t soil compositions perfect as literary metaphors?), it is undeniable that the soil itself is an archive of presence – of the world merging and remerging at the shore.
However it is important to note that machair habitats are not all the same, but rather a composite of various ecologies. The Joint Nature Conservation Committee describes these habitats to have the ‘most extensive and floristically-rich formations’ made up of ‘a mosaic of drift-line, foredune, machair plain…acidic grasslands, fens, heath or bog.’ This tapestry has also been vastly shaped by the human involvement in it. While the development of machair can be traced back to the Holocene epoch’s rise of sea levels, leading to accumulation of sand in beach and dune systems, the anthropocene has undeniably altered this land through grazing regimes and low intensity agriculture such as rotational cropping. A study by Edwards et al, used radiocarbon dating and lithostratigraphy on soil samples from Kallin in Grimsay (in the Outer Hebrides) to trace this anthropogenic involvement. Elevated microscopic carbon and sand content presented a strange conundrum; this combination is one hard to create through natural processes alone! The evidence instead pointed towards accidental or deliberate burning by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic communities (depending on the region). This destabilised vegetation cover and promoted aeolian sand mobility, leading to the eventual spread of machair!
Yet, centuries later, this involvement has changed as we evolved as a species, now endangering the habitat instead. The use of inorganic fertilisers, changes in land management policies – such as the restriction of arable cropping in Uist, a 50% reduction of active crofters (over the last 35 years, as of 2012, however financial strains continue to drop this number), and the decline of strip cropping leading to homogenisation of landscape – have all changed the way we remember and interact with the Machair. However, even as the hands caring for this land change across millenia, the shores remember. Memories of love and the remains of mortality heap into the sensibilities of this soil, creating a composition which can never fully be translated.
