Suspension and Disbelief: The Story of the Slighe Sioman
An Lanntair, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, November 19 to January 17, 2017
www.anlanntair.com
A HISTORIC cable car on Lewis? It’s easy to imagine it, in a way. Out there, on the bristly moors of Lewis under leaden skies, the paths between the crofts and the places sodden in the wind and the weather, the peoples split and isolated before the advent of a proper modern transport infrastructure, the resources of generations trapped in scattered crofting communities. A place waiting – so some would have it – for a visionary with money and ideas of rural emancipation, albeit probably connected to the generation of personal wealth.
And so here An Lanntair present Hugh Morrison, the putative creator of the Hebridean Cable Transit Co, whose cable cars are said, by artists Phillipa Thomas and Hector MacInnes, to have stretched the length of Lewis and Harris in its mid twentieth century heyday, hastening the rural populace – and their assorted ruminants – to market. “If ever a vehicle was driven in defiance of God’s will, it was across the Barvas Moor!” comes his rallying cry. You can almost hear the clattering of hammer on steel now.
Carefully assembled “artefacts” and reminiscences make up the weft of Suspension and Disbelief, alongside a reconstruction of the “last surviving cable car”, creating a walk into an apparent history ghosted over the memories, perhaps, of those who know better.
For the idea isn’t so completely outlandish. There is a similar and very real functioning cable car linking mainland Ireland to Dursey Island. It carries cows and sheep and people (6 at a time) over the choppy waters of the Dursey Sound. It is the transport of the short hop, subject to wind and weather. Visitors to An Lanntair can make up their own minds as to the viability of the Lewisian model. Just don’t look for any archaeological remains on the ground.
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