I spent a month on Eigg in 2008 talking to Eiggach and recording several interviews as part of preliminary research. I caught the very end of the tourist season and then stayed for a further two weeks at the end of September as the pier café shut up shop for the season, and I continued to go to the Eigg ceilidhs. I was doing all this on the last scraps of an artist fee left over from a previous project, and as I wanted to create something while I was there, just to make it feel like it wasn’t a wasted journey if they eventually said no to me working there. So I spent several days beach combing for colour strips of plastic which I wove into costumes. I found bottles and polyester bedding that I cut to make props and hats, and I used the black bin liners, rope and bed sheets to create outfits.
One incredibly misty morning, when I could not see the fields beyond the dry stone walling of the path, I worked my way around vast pitch stone mountain of Ann Sgurr (invisible in the sea mist) to the ghost town of Grulin on the windy south of the island. Here the inhabitants had been driven from the land by the sheep farmers in the 16-18th centuries, and with ten metre visibility I performed a curious Galloshing/Mumming style play for the long-absent inhabitants of Grulin. I wanted to begin creating connections between the contemporary and historical island and performing for the dead seemed like the best place to start. Plus my play deliberately referenced a whole host of folk play traditions, and the characters were cultural stereotypes which linked back to the contemporary island. I had four costumes and a camera on a tripod. I performed my play in four parts and a week later I left the island, having said nothing of the play to any living soul.
