Silver Darlings

Seasonal migrations turned Scotland's herring girls into spirited workers and storytellers

- COINNEACH MacLEOD

If you look closely at the coat of arms of Stornoway, you'll see how its people and the seas shaped the soul of the town. The colours recognise the three families who have had the most influence on the island: the MacLeods, the MacKenzies and the Mathesons. Along with the castle, the symbols in the shield represent a ship and the most important fish to the island - the herring.

My father, brothers, uncles, grandfathers, and the generations before them, worked as fishermen. But this story talks of the women in my family and how the seas changed their lives.

My granny, Anna Sheonaidh, was born in Marvig in 1900. Back then, opportunities for island women were few, but the sea offered work, if not rest.

Each season, along with nearly 2,000 other local women, she packed her belongings into a wooden chest - her ciste - and set out from Stornoway, bound for the herring ports of Lerwick, Wick, Peterhead, and even as far as Yarmouth and Lowestoft.

The journey began on the mail steamer to Kyle, followed by long train rides across the country. Those carriages and decks echoed with Gaelic song and laughter as the women caught up with news from other villages.

They travelled in crews of three - two gutters and a packer - and worked at blistering speed. With a swift twist of the wrist, they gutted 30 to 50 herring a minute, fingers wrapped in bandages to guard against the sharp blade of the cutag. A cooper would bang at their doors at 5am, shouting “Get up and bandage your fingers”, and by dawn the girls would be elbow deep in salt and scales.

When Queen Elizabeth II visited Stornoway for the first time in 1956, she was presented with a golden cutag inscribed with the town's motto: God's Providence Is Our Inheritance.