It’s when we’re travelling that we’re most and least certain of who we are. Who we think we are is a security blanket constantly motheaten by revelatory experience en route. That’s a large part of what makes travel tales so compelling.

Here, Graeme Murdoch and Harry McGrath tour from Argyll to the Western Isles with the introduction to their photographic exhibition, This Is Who We Are. Writer, photographer and tale spinners both, they traverse not only place but time and thought.

Their exhibition itself does the same thing It starts from enabling people living in each of two places with the same Scottish name, one here and one in Canada,to tell the story of their own lives today, through photographs they take themselves. Behind that and reverberating through and between the two narratives is the journey between places and times that saw them share a name.

Harry McGrath begins the tale from Calgary in Argyll

Ten months ago Graeme Murdoch and I were on Canadian television in Calgary, Alberta. We spoke live on the noon news about the connection between their thriving oil metropolis and a sandy bay on the edges of the Island of Mull, Scotland. Neither of the co-anchors knew that their Calgary was named for ours nor, judging from the subsequent reaction, did many of their viewers.

Now the cycle is complete and Graeme and I are in the gallery at the Calgary Hotel, Mull to talk about the Canadian connection as well as all the other links we have explored or created through the ‘This is who we are’ photography project. The people here know more about the Canadian link than the Canadians seem to know about them.

In the audience is one of only two people who was born in Calgary, Mull and still lives there. Susan McPhail has a fresh take on the old story of Colonel James Macleod, Commissioner of the North West Mounted Police, visiting Calgary House and returning to Canada to change Fort Brisebois to Fort Calgary. I have often heard it said in Canada that Macleod had relations at Calgary House. We are now told a local legend that he had a woman friend at the house which creates a new possibility: that he had relations in more ways than one!

Our new acquaintance tells us to go and see the ruined village of Inivea which we do, though from the cliffs on the other side of the bay. From here you can make out the remnants of the pier from which the people departed and imagine the Highland Clearances in action. Inivea has been the subject of considerable interest since David Tennant (Dr. Who) discovered in the course of the ‘Who do you think you are’ television programme that his mother’s forebears were tenant (!) farmers there.

And so ‘This is who we are’ and ‘Who do you think you are’ come together in perfect synchronicity on this cliff top. Research done in the wake of the Tennant revelation shows that the people of Inivea were cleared from there in 1832 by Hugh MacAskill nephew of Allan MacAskill who bought the Calgary estate from the Duke of Argyll. One theory has it that the clearance was done very quickly and that is why the cottages remained intact when the people were shipped furth of Scotland or went south to Glasgow like David Tennant’s ancestors.

I detect a little echo down the centuries when we are told to look for the clearer’s grave (pictured above) ‘though he was not a nice man’. I later check a website dedicated to the history of Calgary Castle and it says: ‘Calgary did not escape the clearances but they appear to have been comparatively civilized by the standards of the time.’ To the victor, I suppose, goes the history.

We spoke in Calgary after similar talks at the Islay Columba Centre and at the Craignish Village Hall in Ardfern. I have now returned to Edinburgh but Graeme has moved on to Easdale and will go from there to Harris and to Lewis. While on Lewis, I’ve asked him to visit the Blackhouse Museum in Arnol. A friend in Vancouver called Murdo was born in just such a black house in Arnol almost eighty years ago and remembers his parents talking about Canada when they held ceilidhs in the house on weekends. Now he’s been a Canadian himself for sixty years.

We will interview Murdo when we go to Canada in September and deliver the interview for our ‘This is who we are’ exhibition at the Scottish Parliament in November. And we will show the interview we do here with the last ‘Calgarians’ of Mull to the Calgarians of Alberta when we go there. ‘Link to our past, bridge to our future’, as Alex Haley once said of the family.

Graeme takes up the story from Easdale…

I cross the Atlantic to Seil and putter over to Easdale on the little boat with a few other wanderers. My arrival on the small island of around 70 inhabitants is, I imagine, the closest to what it must have been like for Lucy Pevensie when she went through the wardrobe into Narnia. What a magical place, luminous and bright.

As I step off the ferry I spot the red phone box, which I learn is the only payphone in the area. Except this one is also a greenhouse full of herbs and tomato plants, verdant in their red propagator. Steve Brown welcomes me at the Community Hall where I will give the talk later that vening, and I hook up the computer with the Hall projector and the pictures beam out onto the biggest screen we have had so far on this tour. I have seen these images many, many times now but am struck by how grand they look at this size.

I spend an hour circling the island catching the laid back (almost Canadian) mood and check out the Puffer pub. The owner Keren gives me some historical pointers and after the talk I head back to the bar with Mike McKenzie, who has lived on Easdale for 30 years and is the SNP’s candidate to fight the parliamentary seat of Argyll & Bute. We have a lively chat for half an hour before I return on the last ferry and not for the first time I am impressed by the openness and candour of the SNP frontline troops. No evasion of tricky questions here and I depart hoping he gets to Westminster.

The next morning I get an email from Tina Jordan who was at the Easdale talk. Tina describes herself as an ‘affinity Scot’, and has been Googling and confirms, as I expected, that there is no Easdale in Canada but she makes an interesting observation that the slate from Easdale quarries will have made its way to Canada. I chalk this up for further research.

After a splendid night in the small Glenburnie Hotel in Oban, ably and cheerfully tended to by Agnes who has been there for thirty years, and her team of spring-heeled girls in crisp pale blue tunics I head for Ullapool and the ferry to the Western Isles.

… to Eilean Siar

The ferry due to leave at 10pm is nearly two hours late, because I learn later a woman’s body has been found in the harbour. I get a restful hour’s sleep on the three hour crossing and arrive just before 3am with nowhere to stay.

As I head out of Stornoway for south Harris I miss a sign and circle a roundabout for the second time to get my bearings. Within seconds I am aware that the local constabulary are flashing me to pull over. The two young officers must have thought, at 3am on a Saturday morning, that this was a collar for sure. They were polite but enquiring. The WPC asked: ‘Tell me sir why did you drive in and out to the Co-op at 3am in the morning?’ Because I am lost, I said. They seemed satisfied having had a good sniff of the car interior and I went on my way, only for a few miles before pulling over and climbing into the back seat for some more sleep.

As dawn breaks I head down the Golden Road to Rodel, hugging the coast against the shadowy, rocky, almost alien terrain on my right. Just as well folk here can enjoy a livelihood drawn from the sea because this blasted landscape will be unforgiving and unyielding. After a gratifying bacon roll and tea at the Butty Bus on the quay at Leverburgh, I am still cheekily early at my lodgings in the village of Northton where I am made welcome with another brew of tea.

Bella and David Jones have family staying and for the next three days I blend in with this happy group which is joined by two sprightly young nephews who arrive on the ferry from Uig after a long journey from England.

That evening, with genealogist Bill Lawson standing in for Harry, I give the last of the roadshow talks at the Seallam Centre to the biggest audience yet, more than half of whom are Canadians, with a couple of Kiwis, who have seen the posters helpfully scattered around Leverburgh and Tarbert by Bill’s wife Chris. Afterwards I am promised photos from a family from the Canadian Tobermory and have a blether with two local councillors and Michael Russell the Culture Minister who has swung by on his way to the Scottish Cabinet meeting in Stornoway.

The talking over, I am staying on for two days for some rest and relaxation and spend the time walking the area and meeting the locals. Out on the machair I pick a couple of pounds of mushrooms which Bella will cook for next day’s breakfast and that evening I have the best cod and chips ever at the Anchorage in Leverburgh.

On my last day I photograph Donald John Mackay (above) in Luskentyre, the last of a family line of Harris Tweed weavers who has just completed a bolt of cloth bound for Canada. I am lucky to see him as he has had to close his doors to visitors so that he can finish a big contract for Clarks Shoes.

In the nearby cemetery (below) I note that many of the headstones bear the family name of MacLeod and I ask three lads building a dry stone wall nearby how many MacLeods are buried there. ‘Ach I don’t know’, says Angus, ‘but it is a cleody hill’.

On the drive to Stornoway for the ferry I call in on local artists Willie and Moira Fulton in Drinishader who I haven‘t seen in 42 years since we graduated together in Edinburgh. As we talk the years just fall away. My visit to the Isles is complete.

All photographs accompanying this article are by copyright holder Graeme Murdoch.

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