about
Fangan:
Fank: Fang (Scottish Gaelic): sheepfold; sheep pen; stell; stall; turf stell; bucht; stell enclosure.
Fangan is an ongoing work recording the stone-built fanks of Mull, Iona, and surrounding islands.
A fank is a structure in which to pen and handle sheep. The size of a fank usually reflects the number of sheep in a hirsel*.
History
In the 1830’s Mull had a population of around 10,000. By the 1880’s it was less than 4,000. What happened in between was a harrowing period of great suffering and adversity. The islands experienced ten years of potato famine, the collapse of the kelp industry, and the Clearances. During this time thousands of men, women, and children were removed, often forcibly, from their homes, and transported across the world, or relocated locally against their will.
Sheep became the new more lucrative ‘tenant’.
The Project
During lockdown I was asked by the curator at An Tobar, a community art space in Tobermory, if I would show some of my drone photographs to accompany a textiles exhibition. Around the same time, I began photographing my neighbour’s fank; he was retiring, ending a several-generations family connection with the farm. It felt like a significant chapter in island farming was coming to a close.
At the time I hadn’t made the connection between the fanks and the Clearances. It wasn’t until I flew the drone over an unnamed fank on Lagganulva Farm a few months later, that I fully understood this. I could see the shadowy impressions in the ground around the fank, of what had once been houses. The stone from their walls were used to build the fine drystone walls of the fank.
I have now recorded over fifty fanks on Mull, and three on Iona, with more still to do.
I took the exhibition to the local Mull agricultural shows where I talked to farmers and crofters whose ancestors were removed from Glen Cannel. I talked to farmers who remember working in fanks now disused all over the island.
I realise that whilst they make beautiful images, without explanatory words the significance of their existence is not informed by the photographs themselves. Theirs is an important story that mustn’t be forgotten.
*Hirsel – the land grazed by a particular flock of sheep.