I AM standing by a low wall on a high road looking down to the township of Maraig and trying to key thoughts to a tune by Neil Gunn, words he wrote in one of his last novels, which I read once - as I used to devour his work, through the nights of winter, in one of the houses I can see below.

I lived in Maraig once, a hamlet in the north of Harris by an inlet of Loch Seaforth and, in Harris terms, remote.

There are in all our lives roads not taken, some by emphatic common sense, and some, say, 50-50, with the certainty of anguish either way. I dec-ided not to stay in Maraig and for

me, personally, that was the correct decision. My house was too small

and by October 1994 I was the youngest resident, and the next-youngest a grandmother.

There were other complications, but I doubt if these made any real difference. Correct decision, yes; the mor-ally right decision? I let people down.

I go seldom. I have not set foot in Maraig since January, nor will I today.

But this is the week that Gaelic Seafoods folded, and a week of odd hints of reconciliation, with my own past and some fellow survivors.

It will be many years, if ever, Maraig's last children return, and by then they will no longer be young, and Maraig will no longer be the Maraig we knew. But it will always be beautiful; you remember the moonlight, the flight of heron and eagle. It is lovely now, in golden haze of autumn, from this high road to Rhenigidale.

A village of 17 permanent residents whose amenities total a letter box, a telephone box, and a church hall with a service once a month.

There were once nearly 100 people in Maraig. There was once a school

in Maraig. There were once three

shops in Maraig. Oats and barley and potatoes used to grow in every rig in Maraig and weddings were held in Maraig and children were born in Maraig and there was life in all its fullness and variety and vigour in Maraig and now it is a village of grandparents and widows and the youngest resident has more grandchildren and no-one has gone from Maraig to school these four summers past.

In Eilean Anabuich, just below me, a much older settlement, there were once 30 inhabited houses. Today there is one. Both villages have two little claims to internal fame in Harris: Eileen saw the island's very first school, and Maraig saw the first working television in Harris when, by freak, 30 years ago a new lay-preacher brought up a set and twiddled it to a fair picture and signal of one channel from one newly-opened mainland transmitter.

I never saw the old, busy Maraig, I never saw a small child of the play play

nor women walk from the well. But I heard tales and I saw photographs: laughing wives plucking hens by the shore of a wedding; the Clam Mackenzie - a fast fishing boat, with its Maraig crewmen; and the Kenmore family sailing across Loch Seaforth to church; and the woman who, 50 years ago, would annually, day upon day, carry 80 creels of seaweed on her back from the shore to the rigs high above on the steep ground.

Certain things are rightly past.

Today the economy of Maraig is sheep-ranching - I cannot dignify it with the title of crofting - and a fish-farm is based here, though only the village's last sons had even casual work there. And there is the pension.

The future, as far as I can tell, is that of Mollinginish and Gearraidh a' Loteger and Scarp and Pabbay: utter desertion, as Sorley wrote of Screapadal . . .

Laughter and weeping

Love, merriment and suffering

anger, hatred and spite,

heroism, cowardice and heartbreak

have left Screapadal . . .

Green and social pride

left Screapadal without people . . .

The fish-farm cages below remind me of Gaelic Seafoods, who operated a very large Harris fish-farm elsewhere, and went into liquidation on Thursday; dozens of people now face the loss of their jobs. A dozen more local traders are owed hundreds - thousands - they may never be paid, and these are people I know and some with wives and families and none with capital of their own.

And, as the piermaster on Tiree said, if I could lay my hands on the ones behind that, I would tear the puggers [sic] in three halves.

It is hard, thinking of this, not to remember that when new fish-farms were lately proposed for Loch Seaforth the Gazette had letters from Edinburgh and Buckinghamshire bewailing the impact on the scenery.

It is hard, thinking of that, not to remember friends of my own who in recent months have had to leave Harris for work on the mainland, who may never return. Hard not to think of those who oppose the quarry and, indeed, anything that might spoil the holiday from Buckinghamshire.

Life and power are ebbing from the people of Harris, and more and more we are at the mercy of forces beyond our shores and more and more even our own rulers - be they in the Comhairle, the hotel trade, the committee junkies, the ministers - have lost touch with the people and the needs and dignity of the people. The future is mainland and the tourist is king. The Northern Constabulary is adorned by its last sons, and Maraig dies a little more.

In the West Highlands are many Maraigs.

Depopulation happened to Maraig and depopulation was born of an educational culture that made these coasts peripheral and raised generation upon generation on the notion that getting on meant getting out, and subtly, over generations, made those who had not got out feel failures.

And it was born of improved communications that brought a road (in 1953) but immediately closed the school and slowly bled away a self-

contained economy.

And it was born, I suppose, of new wealth and aspiration. Maraig could not support 100 people today in acceptable health and comfort. But it could still - in a wiser, better world - support a good many more than 17; young couples, and children.

Townships as low as this die finally by their own gerontocracy. You reach a point when the young are so few that they are marginalised and locked out, by old ones resisting any change that threatens a selfish twilight. Maybe I twisted a knife there myself.

I have looked long enough, and the clocks went back and the light is fading and it hurts too much to look down more over Aird na Gobhair and Loch Maraig to Maraig and its houses and its crofts and its resting people and the end of a world.

Gunn's hero looked down on such a place as Maraig and saw ''little fields, coloured with crops, the grazing cattle, a woman walking inside a wooden hoop carrying two buckets of water from a well, a man mending a roof, a boy rushing after a puppy dog, a trundling cart. Then he did a thing which he could never have conceived of doing before: he blessed that little community.''

Thus, seeing such less, and for what it's worth, would I.