Author evening with Willie Orr

Willie Orr described his first glimpse of Shiaba, a deserted village on Mull as he climbed the hillside with a fellow-shepherd. There were no roofs on the dwellings, simply stone walls still standing,  yet it was as if the people had left just yesterday. The very hearthstones, Willie said, seemed to exude the sorrow of their leaving. He was moved deeply that day, and felt that there was a story there, a story of people swept away, a story to be made known.

Later, as a a research assistant for Tom Devine (with whom he worked on The Great Highland Famine) Willie uncovered the history of that deserted village in the records, and shared the people’s story in three novels -  Shiaba, published in 2023 and Return to Shiaba in 2024. The third in the trilogy, Shiaba no more, is published next month.  The books combine evocative description, and vivid characters with quotations from contemporary documents woven into the text.

We were delighted to welcome Willie to the March HighlandLIT event at the Chieftain Hotel in Inverness.  A man of both passion and compassion, he has had many roles in a long and varied career:  shipyard worker, actor, shepherd, teacher, writer and researcher, counsellor, novelist. 

He spoke to us about the Shiaba books, and read to us from them.  It takes a novelist to capture the overwhelming dismay of a crofter taking a spade to harvest the potatoes on which his family’s survival depends, only to find that plant after plant, row upon row has turned to mush.

The story of the Shiaba township in the 1840s is summarised as follows on the website of the Mull Historical Society, with which Willie has had close links:

This was a prosperous township, which benefited from good land and boasted sheep, cows and even a few horses.  It had a schoolmaster and the Gaelic poet, Mary MacLucas, who wrote Child in a Manger amongst many other songs and poems, lived there.  Prior to 1847 Shiaba was home to some 130 people and their forefathers, but, in 1845 the Duke of Argyll issued the villagers with an eviction notice.  He cleared the land in 1847 to facilitate the more profitable activity of sheep farming.  Many of the people were moved away to avoid the worst effects of starvation following the 1846 potato famine.  The Duke moved some to other areas of Mull, such as Ardtun, where they attempted to make a living on less fertile land, but many were encouraged to go overseas to America, Canada and Australia. 

Willie spoke about two historical figures looming over the story.  One was Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan who, Willie told us, took control as a powerful civil servant of the handling of the Irish potato famine, and then did the same in Scotland. He was considered by many to be callous and uncaring.  The other historical figure is John Campbell, the Duke of Argyll’s factor who was responsible for clearing many communities on the west of Scotland. Evidence of compassion in Campbell is rare, Willie told us.  The only way to deal with some of those involved in the famine was, Campbell wrote, ‘to starve them into habits of industry for their own benefit.’

There was some discussion after Willie’s talk about the political and economic background – the Enlightenment principle of ‘industrial salvation through hard work’ or ‘no work, no bread’ and also a lack of empathy with the Celtic peoples, which saw them as ‘lazy’, ‘slothful’, and requiring to be dragged into the modern world.

Into this setting, into this political and economic complexity Willie Orr has placed richly-imagined characters, notably the stubborn Calum MacGillivray who will not be driven off the land of his fathers, and his more pragmatic wife Catherine. To save their dying children’s lives, she goes to Glasgow with them,  encounters both hope and  jeopardy, makes a future for herself, and then faces the challenge – will she return to Shiaba?

We’re so grateful to Willie Orr for coming and generously sharing the story behind the Shiaba series. We also had distinguished company in the person of Clive Soley, (now Lord Soley), former MP (Hammersmith/Ealing) in the Blair government, who was Chair of the PLP between 1997 and 2001, and who contributed richly to the discussion.

Very many thanks as always to Dr Paul Shanks, Chair of HighlandLIT who chaired the evening, and to Cathy Carr who wrestled successfully with recalcitrant technology.