Time travelling road movie between Benbecula and Canada’s far west

We’ve trailed this BBC Alba show, Bothan air a’ Phrèiridh – because it caught our imagination – but the photograph above, catching one of its scenes, is so evocative we wanted to keep the transmission date of 25th December at 9.00pm upfront – because there’ll be a few other distractions on the day.

This is a tale of complex emigrations repatriated in a recovered narrative – a homecoming to round off the year.

The two 21st century Scots it features retrace the story of early 20th century emigrations and returns of the family of one of them, Benbecula-born Ewan MacKay, a joiner with a family of six who lives on Skye.

The hour-long documentary is the emigrant’s road to the ‘Far West’ of Canada and back again, with stories of families and separations both overseas and at home.

Ewen MacKay journeys to the west Canadian prairie homestead where his mother, Bealag MacKay, was born at the beginning of the ‘Dirty Thirties’. Her father, Seonaidh Paterson, had emigrated in 1924 to the Canadian province of Alberta, a year after the legendary sailing of the Marloch from Lochboisdale inSouth Uist, with almost 300 Hebrideans bound for the same destination of Red Deer.

Once there, Seonaidh set up his prairie homestead and married Flora MacLellan, also from South Uist, who later died when Bealag was only an infant. So Bealag grew up in Alberta, on the farm of her mother’s sister’s family in Clandonald. Her father was mostly absent during this time, turning his hand to various odd jobs to make ends meet from farming his own land, to working as a lumberman, to winning medals and prize money in local rodeo events as a ‘steer wrestling’ (bulldogging) Gaelic Cowboy.

At the end of the 1930s though, the Gaelic Cowboy suddenly left and brought his daughter back across the North Atlantic to live with relatives in Benbecula, a distant homeland she had never seen.

A young girl with little Gaelic at first, Bealag stayed in Benbecula throughout the 1940s and beyond, marrying a local man, Iain MacKay, and going on to raise a family of five, of whom Ewen is the youngest.

Her father, Seonaidh, also stayed on the Islands and in his remaining days, stayed with Bealag and Iain. In a poignant evocation of the power of his two homelands, in his last conscious hours he called out in Gaelic that his beloved prairie horses were escaping from his failing grasp.

The second contemporary Gael featured in the documentary is Iain MacPherson, a friend of Ewen MacKay’s from his years living in the Isle of Skye. Iain first met Ewen’s mother, Bealag, on a Hogmanay trip to Benbecula. Pulling out her Alberta birth certificate and her father’s rodeo cup, she had told him part of her life story of coming and going. It is her story, known differently to each of the two men, that binds them to the exploration.

In this tale, both Benbecula and Red Deer in Alberta are simultaneously an end and a beginning. In the documentary, Ewen and Iain (an Alberta native like Bealag) set off from the Western Isles and the Isle of Skye, in search of these entwined threads in the endless prairie of Red Deer and the dusty hills of Clandonald.

Iain MacPherson himself wrote and presents Bothan air a’ Phrèiridh, (made for BBC ALBA by Pelicula Films and directed by Mark Littlewood.

Remember you can get BBC ALBA on Digital Satellite, on Sky 168, Freesat 110 and live on BBC iPlayer – where you can also recover the programme if you’ve dined too well to remeber its transmission time on the 25th.