Calanas and Clò-mòr (The Big Cloth)
Speed, scale and song
In the long winter night
All are engaged,
Teaching the young
Is the grey-haired sage,
The daughter at her carding,
The mother at her wheel,
While the fisher mends his net
With his needle and his reel.
Collected by Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica, 1899
Clò-mòr (big cloth), is a woven, woollen cloth, that has been made by the Gaels of the West Highlands and Islands for centuries. It’s a garment that’s perfectly suited to protecting the wearer from the region’s often harsh climate. The transforming of the raw wool used into the finished cloth involved a number of steps and processes. In days gone by these processes were collectively referred to as Calanas.
In this piece I’ll first look at some of the stages involved in Calanas historically, and how it was integrated with various types of songs and offerings which reflected a distinct belief systems and culture, practiced by a people with a deep connection to the natural surroundings they saw themselves as part of. I’ll touch on why much of these practices and beliefs no longer exist and what we may have lost because of this, before finally exploring a framework to allow us to question the limits of speed and efficiency, two of the ideologies that have contributed to an erosion of the things that made this particular culture distinctive.
DYEING
The process of Calanas would begin once the woollen fleece had been shorn from the sheep. The first step was to carefully sort the wool, with the coarser parts separated and put aside. It was then washed and dried and carefully examined again to make sure that it was free from debris and clumped wool. At this point the wool could be dyed. According to Alexander Carmichael “The work of dyeing requires much care and knowledge and practical skill. It is done with native plants gathered with patient care from the rocks and the hills, moors and fields and lakes, and within certain earths. When it is considered that a thorough knowledge of plants is necessary, their locality, their colouring properties, whether of root, stem, or leaf, and the stage of growth or decay, it will be understood that those who use them need much intelligence.” Indeed, the gathering and foraging of dye stuffs must have required the Gaels to have an intimate and deep understanding of the natural surroundings and the various properties of their environment’s flora and fauna.
For instance, in order to obtain a deep ruby, magenta colour, the Gaels would often look for the crustaceous lichen Ochrolechia Tartarea, commonly called orchil or crocur in Gaelic. People gathered this in May and June from the surfaces of rocks and trees, where it would frequently grow alongside other mosses and lichen. It would then be dried over a period of months. Once ready to use it was crumbled into a container and covered with a liquid made up of 2 parts water and one part ammonia of putrefied, stale urine or graith in Gaelic. According to Sue Grierson in her book ‘The Colour Cauldron”, after being thoroughly stirred, the container was left steeping for 3 weeks, during which “the colourless depsides present in the lichen are being converted into the dyestuff orchil by the presence of the ammonia.” After the three weeks the contents of the container were a bramble like purple. Once the fleece was added to the dye it would require a long time to “take” to the wool. The best results were achieved by heating and cooling the dyebath over several days, whilst regularly turning the wool.
The different parts of Birch trees (beithe) would yield different hues of yellow: the leaves from early summer would give a bright lemon yellow; the female catkins would give more of an amber; and the bark of the birch if collected when the sap was rising would give a deep, rich caramel colour. The leaves of Bearberry(Braoileagan-nan-con), which grow on acidic moorlands if gathered at flowering time in mid-June would produce a violet grey. The berries, leaves and stalks of the Crowberry (Lus-na-fionnaig) which is found growing alongside heather in rocky moorlands would give off various shades of blue depending on the dyeing process. Leaves from Bogbean (An tri bhileach/ Ponair chapull) which grows abundantly in wet bogs would be gathered in August and give an olive green colour. If collected in June before flowering, Meadowsweet (lus-chneas-chuchullainn) would give a raw umber colour, where as if the roots were lifted in autumn after the plants would begin to dye back, a black could be produced. The flowering tips of Ling Heather (fraoch) if cut before their flowers fully open would give a deep green. The rhizomes of the White Water Lily (Duilleag bhaite bhan) which were collected by wading through shallow lochans and feeling for the roots with feet, would result in a deep and very dark, earthy blue. Fir-Clubmoss (garbhag an t-sléibhe), a rather odd-looking plant which accumulates high levels of aluminium, would be used as a “mordant,” the component in the dyebath would help to “fix” the dye colours to the wool. The knowledge and understanding of how to collect and use these dye materials, was passed down through the generations and the specific dye recipes each dyer would have would be closely guarded.
CARDING and SPINNING
Once the fleeces had been dyed, the next step was to blend the different colours before carding these blends of wool by drawing them through long combs. This process determined the nature of the fabric. Colour has always been of great importance to the Gaels. According to Alice Starmore, a renowned Hebridean textile designer, who still forays into the blanket-bog-scape of her native Lewis to gather natural dye materials, “colour was one of the few ways to express distinctive and unique appearance among people who possessed very little”.
It’s worth quickly noting, that the Gaelic perception of colour and the way the language facilitates this would appear to be different to that of English speakers. According to Meg Bateman and John Purser “in Gaelic, colour did not have a fixed, objective value but was mutable, part of a process, defined in relative terms by other colours in the domain and moving back and forth along scales of hue, saturation and shininess.” In other words, the specific colour hues are not seen or described in isolation from these other factors of, for instance saturation and shininess. What this means in practice is that the same Gaelic word can be used to describe, for instance, the green of foliage as is used to describe the blue of the sky. Bateman and Purser later say that “if we can learn to see the connections between differently-hued, but similarly reflective and saturated colour-terms across domains, we are beginning to see through a Gaelic lens.” History of Art professor Murdo MacDonald adds, “these colour words tend to be holistic rather than discrete descriptions. One might say that these colour words tend to reflect the general colour properties of a place rather than a precisely defined aspect of a place. That is to say they are as much about place as about colour.” This mercurial, everchanging colour quality of the landscape and mindscape was something that the Gaels would try to capture in their yarn and their woven textures and patterns. Often a great number of different colours of dyed fleece would be blended together to create a highly complex yarn, which mirrored the landscape. The colour of clò-mòr was seen as a continuum of the landscape and it’s wearing would allow someone to become part of this landscape and disappear into it.
After the colours had been blended together and carded, the wool was ready to spin.
I.F. Grant writes in her “Highland Folk Ways”, that “the oldest implement for spinning is the spindle (fearsaid). Spindle whorls dating back to the Iron Age have been found all over Scotland…. Spinning with the spindle is, however, a slow process and wherever attempts to introduce spinning for the market were made, every effort was made to teach the women to use a wheel. Spinning wheels seems to have become very general in the Eastern Highlands by the end of the eighteenth century…But in more out of the way districts women continued to use the spindle. In 1820 there was not a spinning wheel in Gairloch and in the Hebrides in 1850 most of the women were still using the spindle. Yet, by 1884, very few women were said to be still using it.”
THE WEAVE
With the yarn spun the next stage was come up with a pattern to weave from. The design was first worked out with patience and care on a bit of wood in order to understand and bring out the pattern correctly. This is called suidheachadh or setting. Once a pattern and design was fixed upon it was time to set up the loom to be ready for weaving. The first step to this is setting the warp or lengthwise threads. As with a huge number of ceremonies and rites, this would always be done on a Thursday, the day of Calum Cille, St. Columba. Along with Sundays, Thursdays were regarded as the luckiest days of the week. Whist setting the warp onto the loom, the women who were setting the web would sing a chant of warping:
“Thursday of beneficence,
For warping and waulking,
A hundred and fifty strands there shall be
To number.
Blue thread, very fine,
Two of white by its side,
And scarlet by the side
Of the madder.
My warp shall be very even
Give to me Thy blessing, O God,
And to all who are beneath my roof
In the dwelling.
Michael, thou angel of power,
Mary fair, who art above,
Christ, Thou Shepherd of the people,
Do ye your eternal blessing
Bestow
On each one who shall lie down,
In name of the Father and of Christ,
And of the Spirit of peacefulness,
And of grace.
Sprinkle down on us like dew
The gracious wisdom of the mild woman,
Who neglected never the guidance,
Of the High King.
Ward away every evil eye,
And all people of evil wishes,
Consecrate the woof and the warp
Of every thread.
Place Thou Thine arm around
Each woman who shall be waulking it,
And do Thou aid her in the hour
Of her need.
Give to me virtues abundant,
As Mary had in her day,
That I may possess the glory
Of the High King.
Since Thou, I God, it is who givest growth,
To each species and kind,
Give us wool from the surface
Of the green grass.
Consecrate the flock in every place,
With their little lambs melodious, innocent
And increase the generations
Of our herds.
So that we may obtain from them wool,
And nourishing milk to drink,
And that no dearth may be ours
Of day clothing.”
Daily life in Gaelic society have been punctuated by short rituals, rites and prayers, such as this one, for most everyday tasks. There appeared to be no obvious separation between the sacred and the everyday. Alexander Carmichael began collecting these “charms of the Gaels”: hymns, rites, incantations and customs in 1855 which he realized were very rapidly dropping out of use. He continued his collecting until the 1899, when he compiled much of what he had collected into his book “Carmina Gadelica”. In the preface to my copy, John MacInnes writes that “here it would seem was a lost lexicon of piety which almost miraculously had survived into modern times. It had been discovered on the verge of extinction, in remote places and in an obscure tongue.” Carmichael had managed to collect the content of his book when this was of life was on the point of disappearing.
When the warp was set, and further blessings were given to the loom, the weaving could begin. According to Carmichael, in Uist, when a weaver would stop their weaving on Saturday night to rest on the Sabbath, they would carefully tie up their loom and suspend a crucifix above it. “This is for the purpose of keeping away the brownie, the banshee, the peallan, and all evil spirits and malign influences from disarranging the thread and the loom. And all this is done with loving care and in good faith, and in prayer and purity of heart.”
WAULKING THE CLOTH
Once the weave was finished the resulting cloth needed to be fulled. Rather than being called fulling, this process was referred to as waulking (luadhadh). This was a laborious process where women would work together to beat the soaking wet, newly woven cloth against a table in order to shrink it. This was hard and exhausting work and in order to both keep and to pass the time, this work was always accompanied by singing. As it was seen as bad luck to make a “songless-web” (clo-bodaich) or to repeat any song in a waulking session, this has led to a phenomenal volume of songs. ‘Tobar an Dualchais’ a website containing the audio archives from the School of Scottish Studies, contains 2181 different Gaelic recordings in a search for ‘waulking songs.’ This rich treasure-trove of material makes up one of the world’s great work song traditions and is one of the more iconic features of traditional Gaelic society. In describing a waulking scene, John Lorne Campbell, who compiled a three-volume collection of these songs, writes that “the talk is intimate and yet a certain ceremony and dignity are observed, and the customs, probably many centuries old, are adhered to rigidly.” As well as documenting the lyrics and musical notation for 135 waulking songs, Campbell paints a vivid picture of the walking process:
“Five to each side they sit, and the dripping cloth is passed from hand to hand, while the moisture runs down the sloping boards to the floor. The movements of the women, at first slow, are in perfect rhythm, and, like all co-ordinated movements in these islands, their direction is deiseil — sunwards. It is only at first that we can observe the details of their operations, for soon the process becomes so rapid that we can distinguish nothing but the swaying of their figures, and the rapid thud of the cloth, keeping time to the rhythm of their song.”
The time it would take to complete the waulking was not measured in minutes or hours but in the number of songs needed.
CONSECRATION OF THE CLOTH
Once the required number of songs had been sung and the cloth had been shrunk, the clò-mòr was almost finished. The final step of the calanas was to consecrate the cloth. Campbell describes the ritual as one where “the women who had been engaged in the fulling then gathered round it and sang the following charm seven times. During the singing they kept time to the music by raising their hands simultaneously and beating the cloth with the tips of their fingers. After each repetition of the charm the cloth was turned over end.
Well do I say my verse
As I descend the glen,
One verse, two verses, third verse,
Fourth verse, fifth verse, sixth verse,
Seven and a half verses.
Let not the wearer of the cloth be wounded
And may he never be torn,
And when he goes to battle or conflict
The full succour of the Lord be his.
(The little seagull yonder swimming
And the white wave that she loves,
She swims pleasantly
And I swim cheerfully spinning;
When I sow my flax
And spin my lint
I will make linen from the awns
And get seven marks for the yard.)
Watercress pulled through flagstone
And given to wife unawares,
Deer’s shank in the herring’s head
And in the slender body of the speckled salmon.
Then, striking the cloth faster, the singers say:
Let this be second cloth, and not enemy’s spoil
Nor property of clerk or priest
But his own property, and may he enjoy and wear it.”
With the consecration performed the Clò-mòr was complete and the calanas was finished.
PROGRESS
Today, the calanas described above no longer happens. Tweed cloth is still made in the Hebrides and still made in a fascinating and culturally distinct way. But very rarely, if at all, are the complex steps of the process now carried out as described above. Should we want woven cloth we go to the shops or order some online. In today’s society with few exceptions, we no longer know who makes our textiles, nor the processes that go into them.
Perhaps, all in all, this is for the best. We need not go through all these elaborate, inefficient and convoluted processes and rituals in order to obtain a similar end product today so why bother. I for one, do not wish to return to a world where this is the only way to cloth ourselves. However, I do questions just how much we lose when we strive for speed and efficiency above all else.
In the Gaelic worldview there exist two essentially untranslatable concepts: ‘Dùthchas’ and ‘Dualchas”. Alice Starmore defines Dùthchas as “a concept that encompasses the intimate bonds that exist between the natural world and all beings that live within it — including the bonds between the land and its people. These bonds connect people through a network of cultural traditions. The knowledge and understanding built over the centuries, and passed from generation to generation, is known as dualchas.” The various steps historically involved in the making of the cloth where good examples of how these twin concepts could be seen to be lived out day to day.
Today songs are no longer needed to waulk the cloth. The last authentic waulking took place in the 1950’s. One of the world’s great work song repertoires is now confined to the archives or if sung it is taken out of context and performance on stage rather than used as a genuine work song. Volume of work is no longer measured by how many songs it will take to complete and today new waulking songs are no longer appearing. Synthetic dyes have now, in the main, replaced natural dyes and fewer and fewer folk know the properties of dye plants or how to go out into the landscape and gather them. In modern society the idea of integrating prayers, offerings and rites into our everyday work tasks would, at best, be received as quirky or insincere. With the loss of things such as these, these essential cosmological components of Gaelic culture, “Dùthchas” and “Dualchas”, have become weaker.
It’s also worth considering I.F. Grant’s above wording when she describes the late transition from the spinning spindle to the spinning wheel. “Spinning with the spindle is, however, a slow process and wherever attempts to introduce spinning for the market were made, every effort was made to teach the women to use a wheel.” (my italics). This was a period when traditional society was in free-fall and being restructured and incorporated into industrial society in a way that these women had very little control over. The transition from spindle to spinning wheel was one brought about by the need for this cloth to reach new commercial markets and to make the production process quicker and more efficient, and not necessarily because these women independently wished to speed the job up.
Every traditional culture will have its own examples of something like calanas: processes where the activities of material culture are blended with the social practices and spiritual traditions which make that culture distinct and rooted in place, but yet have been lost under the wheel of progress. When these are lost, not only do we begin to lose the things that make these cultures special and unique but these cultures begin to lose their abilities to maintain their connection with the more-than-human world.
A FRAMEWORK FOR CONVIVIALITY
In his classic book “Tools of Conviviality” Ivan Illich defines this word ‘convivialty’ as “autonomous and creative intercourse among persons and the intercourse of persons with their environment.” This is about working relationships and ongoing conversations and interactions with the human and the more-than-human world. Inspired by Illich’s ideas, archaeologist Michael Given uses this idea of conviviality as a framework to think about how the tools we use allow us to have these convivial relationships or if they allow us to overshoot the limits needed to maintain these relationships. His thinking notes 6 different but interlinked stages to these processes: interconnectedness, vitality, tools, limits, precariousness and politics. This framework is useful for thinking about how to live within our ecological limits, and how to engage in a more meaningful and reciprocal way with the places we find ourselves.
1. By interconnectedness he’s referring to how the actions and interactions “within a “human-non-human working group” are all connected and how various living forms, materials and environmental processes are all connected by complexly woven webs and networks. These webs are made up of collaborative interaction between these various elements.
2. Vitality is the constant interactions between us (humans) and all these different elements that enables us to live and live together, whether that is the air we breath, the bacteria in our guts or the cloths we wear. “Conviviality as vitality helps us escape from our centuries-old fantasies of uniqueness in the eyes of God, of mastery of nature, of human supremacy. These fantasies have spread us on to break the limits of our tools.”
3. Tools being defined as the things that direct or enable our ways of interacting with the world.
4. Limits. There are natural and appropriate scales for these tools which allow them to operate within specific ecosystems carrying capacities. “If tools transgress their social and environmental limits, they break down the interconnectedness.”
5. Precariousness takes into account how easy it is to overshoot these limits. “We inhabit a turbulent, difficult world where materials and relations are continually colliding, changing, merging, disintegrating. Tensions, dissonances, competition and violence are part of the interaction, part, even, of the conviviality, for all the positive associations of its common contemporary usage. It therefore needs constant work, vigilance and even suffering to maintain conviviality.”
6. Politics — “This work to maintain conviviality is inevitably political. This means that conviviality is not just a way of understanding society, but also itself a tool for generating rhetoric and critique, for making change, for reaffirming a collaborative social and environmental agency.”
If we want to take steps towards being more interconnected and in balance with the more-than-human world we need to recognise that our tools can and have transgressed the natural limits within which this is possible. In many cases these limits were overstepped long ago. Our paradigm of progress over the previous few centuries has privileged speed, volume and efficiency over almost everything else and many people today are questioning what we have lost in the process and how we might recover some of what is no longer.
There’s obviously a danger of falsely romanticising or being overly nostalgic about the past and its many, many hardships, but I think it’s worth questioning the trajectory of our “progress.” I should be clear here that I’m not a luddite, and am not in any way against new technologies or innovations. But when we think about how mechanised and efficient most modern work is, work which was once carried out by labourers and from who’s labour emerged endless numbers of great work song traditions, it’s very hard to imagine new forms of convivial cultures developing. We are currently moving so fast and so efficiently that there’s no time or place for these songs. If we are trying to imagine what regenerative cultures might look like is it worth attempting to design into them the conditions and contexts which allow things like these songs to happen? If we wish them to be a part of any future world we might inhabit these conditions must be taken seriously and given a priority. Any reading of history will tell us that a laisse-faire approach to this is unlikely to be sufficient to the task. This issue of maintaining or rediscovering the conditions for “conviviality” with place needs to be seen as political.
Is ‘hardship’ a condition of authentic culture and the maintenance of convivial relationship with the more-than-human world? To some extent it may well be. But if that is the case, is it a valid question to ask whether or not it is worth living with a certain level of hardship in order to allow these cultures to have space? Perhaps a question is “what is the maximum scale, speed and efficiency we can operate under while still providing space for songs, blessings and celebrations?”
This kind of questioning may be useful if we are going to consciously attempt to restore worldviews such as the ‘Dùthchas’ of the Gaels, or Given’s ‘conviviality’. Dr. Iain MacKinnon, a researcher who’s work seeks to understand and support traditional knowledge systems and the land-based cultural practices of Scottish Gaels, advocates “using cultural concepts to make people question their relationship to place, both in terms of how they understand that place but the way that we’re living in place. We are obliged, for future generations, to institute a profound transformation. Another profound transformation because it’s already happened. We’re living in the debris of traditional society. We’re living in the wreckage.”
Making these transformations will require us to actively choose that we wish for this to happen. Today we have the luxury of being able to make this choice. For possibly the first time in human history we no longer need to do things the old ways. The hard ways. Speed, scale and efficiency have, for the time being anyway, delivered us cheap and secure abundance. But we now have to weigh up the benefits that these things have brought to us alongside the things that have been lost in the process. In a paradigm that gives exclusive privilege to volume and efficiency, choosing to take the time to integrate singing songs, making offerings, and giving thanks into our everyday life and work are both political and radical acts.
References -
Bateman, Meg & Purser, John — Window to the West: Culture and Environment in the Scottish Gàidhealtachd
Cameron, John — The Gaelic Names of Plants
Campbell, John Gregorson — The Gaelic Otherworld
Campbell, John Lorne — Hebridean Folksongs: Vol. 1
Carmichael, Alexander — Carmina Gadelica
Grant, L.F — Highland Folk Ways
Grierson, Su -The Colour Cauldron: The History and Use of Natural Dyes in Scotland
Milliken, William & Bridgewater, Sam — Flora Celtica: Plants and people in Scotland
Private recorded exchange with Dr. Iain MacKinnon
