Pentland Road - 2

One of men buried there, Duncan Macleod, died in 1943 whilst held in a POW camp in Burma. He himself is interred near the camp on the infamous Burma railway, where so many Allied POWs perished. His name is mentioned on one of the private gravestones at Bragar, and as I had him on record for the World War II memorial for Lewis, I looked into it further. I had little information on him, save that he came from Lochcroistean, a schoolhouse in the Uig district of Lewis. His father was one of the school's headmasters, Norman Macleod, who held sway there until 1923. He died 20 January 1938 at the age of 75. He was married to Bell Ann Mackay, who died 8 December 1944 at the age of 69. The website for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission interestingly state that they came from Tighnabruaich in Argyll. They had four children, two of whom (Iain and Chirsty Mary) died in infancy. Jessie died in May 1980 at the age of 73; their son Duncan died on 19 September 1943 at the age...

I have been going round a few of the island’s cemeteries in recent times, looking for and photographing tombstones of victims of the Iolaire Disaster in 1919. On my visit to Bragar’s cemetery this week, I came across the tombstone for Kenneth MacLeod of Shawbost, an important figure in the Harris Tweed industry. He died in 1949 at the age of 67. Standing there on a cloudy, windswept day, the news came back to me about ongoing developments in the industry today. And what would he make of it now? Mr Macleod got local weavers to weave tweed for him in the first half of the 20th century. Late in 2006, Yorkshire industrialist Brian Haggas bought over the remaining Harris Tweed mills in Lewis, of which the largest stands in Stornoway. Shortly beforehand, the closure of the mill in North Shawbost was announced, with the loss of about 30 jobs. Last week, plans were announced to shrink the range of tweeds to 5, although not directly in such words. The announcement was to the effe...