I remember it was a beautiful, sunshine day, really nice day.
And I was just sitting there, just idly wandering around with a old mind, you know,
it was going like places, and drifted back homeward.
All of a sudden I was sitting there and this damned cold shiver came.
But before the shiver came along, was the panoramic view of the village itself.
I thought, oh hell what's going on here?
Because, being a superstitious person,
I thought, 'Oh this has to be a warning of some kind', you know?
- There's a special song within my family that we kept.
Kept the song secret.
So we worship this song, my family did,
and it's the main song within my family's culture.
[Singing] Near as I rove down to one summer's morn,
a man lofty hell as a moor land and mountain,
it was there I spied a lovely maid,
wildest eye with fathers was out a-hunting.
No shoes nor stockings did she wear,
neither had she hat, not a hat she feathers,
but her golden locks, I am a ringless fell...
- If it's been walked over by all sorts of peoples in it's times,
probably the little remains of Venetian gullies lying outside there on the screens.
As well as Roman ships, Viking ships and quite a lot of others.
- So we lifted the top off where the garden was
and underneath about a foot under the ground we found bodies, about three or four,
bodies in the ground, you know.
At the end of the day we lifted about 700 bodies, dead bodies, before we got right down through to the...
And on the way down we met up with a poor old Viking, deaf and dying, on the way down.
- There's certainly presences even in an old house like this.
Not threatening or not materializing but presences, you're aware of them.
- Well there are some places where you get a feeling that there is a bit of haunting.
There's no one in the world who'd take me down that harbour in the dark or the wee-,
you know, at midnight.
- I was with my grand uncle and we stopped at a house on the Glen called Coons
and I went into the buyer because
a bitch watching-dog had had puppies and I wanted to see the puppies.
All of a sudden, there was a shadow cast over the doorway and I looked up
and there on the rafters in a spot there was a strange creature,
I could not make out, was it a human being or was it some kind of animal?
My vision cleared a wee bit and I saw the gnarled face of an old person
sitting on this rafter and speaking to me in a language I didn't understand.
Strangely enough, the bitch put her ears back
and the hairs on her back of her stood up but I felt no fear.
What draws me back is intonations of mortality.
I get comfort from these old, old things that I heard when I was a wee boy
because they, for a short while at least,
they remove me from the futility of existence, if you like.
- There are certain names that we won't say in the morning before 12 o'clock because it's unlucky
and we don't say them.
But we've got made up other names for them.
Like... I said it but I said it after 12 o'clock really.
'Pig,' we'll no say 'pig' in the mornings, we say 'graffy'.
We'll no say 'snake' in the morning, we say a 'wriggly'.
We'll no say 'monkey' in the morning,
and we'll no say...
'R-A-T' in the morning.
- Called things on bird about, we called things by different names:
rats were 'long tails', cats were 'scratchers', and what they call the revenue of something else entirely.
Because we have such a large population of newcomers, so much of this has just been lost.
- There are thousands of songs in my background that have died and I don't know about, you know,
it's like the millions of dead souls that are floating around as we speak just now,
they just don't exist anymore.
The song dies.
[Singing Gaelic]
- Seen the best of this world.
I said that I had seen the best of this world.
The resolute of things, it changed in my life.
- My older sister died at 48; my other sister died at 56; my brother died at 70.
So I've... I've lived lonely.
I have nay ache nor pain.
Just, my legs are no gone the way I want them.
So I hope I can finish my days out. [laughs]
- As far as the old folk, they're nearly all gone now,
the old people that I knew and grew up with.
This is God's waiting room as far as I'm concerned, you know? [laughs]
For all the old people that's all it is now.
It was said to be the gift that nobody wanted because
you would have an experience or a vision or an encounter of something that hadn't yet happened.
But you were never really given to see it in the actual way that it was going to happen.
It could be a sound or a snail, or it could be something.
It was usually a premonition of death.
According to my own mother, her father – Norman – he had second sights certainly,
I mean he foresaw his own death.
He saw himself going down with the ship.
And he got out after an afternoon's rest and said to his wife, my granny:
'Well, I'm not going to return this trip.'
'Oh shit what are you talking about?'
'No, no,' he said, 'I'm going down with the ship.'
Really quite cold-blooded about the whole thing.
And it came to pass, a German U-boat shot the ship and he went down with it.
- It's my life.
It's my life completely and utterly and I'm so...
so afraid that when I go, well I know when I go,
my culture is gone.
[Singing in Gaelic]
It expresses just such a depth of feeling, and sense of loss of something
that was exquisitely wonderful.
In this case, a sweetheart.
But it could be also a sense of loss of something else.
In that sense of loss, when words fail, only a song can express it.
I wouldn't want to think that it was all lament, I think there's still fight in there,
and there's still optimism in there.
- And everybody sees a ghost in a different way.
I see a ghost as a helper, you know, because my folk comes to me and they help me
because I'm singing their songs and telling my father's stories
and I believe that when I'm telling the stories, my father's there.
-They would think about it and maybe think about all of the things that that person meant to them in life,
including the values that that person had and held,
realising that wasn't a complete severance, afterwords.
What that something did continue.
Not just the values but the traditions as well.