EARLY TRAVELLERS TO COLL PART III 1790-1820
byW. R. McKay

The visitors to Coll in the late eighteenth century took up many of the familiar themes - the strangeness (to them) of Hebridean society, the beauty of the flowers, and the often inhospitable landscape. Sometimes they even commented on the same views which their predecessors had mentioned.

In the hot summer of 1794, with the Sound of Mull recalling the deep blue of the Aegean, Edward Daniel Clarke stood on the side of Ben Feall, looking down on the village at its foot. A generation before, Boswell had described the thatched roofs as resembling stacks of corn in a barnyard. Clarke saw 'several heaps of straw like a cluster of anthills; not arranged in streets but facing all directions and looking much like the South Sea villages so recently described by Captain Cook. According to Clarke, a hut could be built in two days, but the result was so Lilliputian and insignificant that a stranger could walk all over the island without seeing any of them. Even when he managed to creep inside one of the huts, the intrepid visitor was not much more enlightened. He found the interiors filled with smoke, in the midst of which 'a group of nondescript beings squatted on their haunches... surrounding a peat fire.' At the other end of the social scale Clarke visited the laird, the brother of young Coll who had piloted Boswell and Johnson into Loch Eatharna. He was particularly impressed by the laird' s practice of showing a light in the top storey of the new Castle, and by the hospitality which was offered to the crews of all vessels entering the Loch.

Dr John Macculloch visited the Hebrides at various times between 1811 and 1821, and described his experiences in letters to his friend Sir Walter Scott. He found the surface of Coll 'most extraordinary.' The north part of the island was strewn with bare rounded rocks, 'scarcely to be called hills', so that the whole looked like 'a wide pavement on a most gigantic scale.' A more hopelessly barren outlook could not easily be imagined, yet the areas between the hills were filled with green pastures and small pools and lakes, 'amounting in number, as is said, to forty-two.' Among the sand hills at the Westend, hefelt he could 'wander through the waste and suppose ourselves in the plains of Africa.' Like Boswell, Macculloch was fascinated by the abundance of flowers on Coll. The plains between the Castles and the Garden was 'an enamelled carpet of indescribable gaiety, painted with all the usual plants of spring, and more - the snowy brilliancy of the clover and the daisy being intermixed with the bright yellow of the ranunculus (buttercup), the lovely azure of the veronica, the deeper blue of the hyacinth, and the splendid crimson of the geranium sanguineum.' He went on to visit the now established Garden, which he found, 'a little paradise... Trees had been planted, and though they could not surmount the rocks which protected them from the westerly gales, they gave an air of freshness and ornament and comfort. . . The roses were bursting from their buds, and every flower bloomed as bright as in more favoured climates.' Another visitor at about the same period, Hon Mrs Murray, added that the Garden 'abounded in vegetables and fruit, the former as fine as any grown in the London market.'

Macculloch observed that most of the grain on Coll was raised on the flatter, more open land at the West end, though crops were also to be found in small patches or isolated rigs in rocky spots elsewhere. There was a little rye, rather more oats, but the principal crop was barley.

It is clear from the account of another traveller what became of at least some of the barley, In 1828, when he was travelling on Mull, Lord Teignmouth came across a small and very bleak settlement near Bellachroy, on land belonging to the laird of Coll. On asking why the inhabitants clung to such a dreary spot, aptly named Siberia, he discovered that the laird of Coll was in the habit of banishing there those of his tenants whom he found guilty of making and exporting untaxed whisky, or other high crimes and misdemeanours. Such a survival of a much older relationship between chief and clansman no doubt seemed surprising against the background of an Old Etonian laird's hospitality to well-heeled visitors from the south, and the Coll family's backing for 'progressive' agricultural practices. Teignmouth expressed astonishment that the laird still received 'a portion of that homage which the chiefs in times not beyond the memory of living man received from their clansmen, and which, it cannot be denied, produces occasionally an obsequiousness and adulation on the part of inferiors to which an Englishman' - he added pompously - 'is unaccustomed.'

All the visitors mentioned here came to Coll before customs such as these had entirely disappeared, and at a time which later generations came to regard as something of a golden age. But the more perceptive visitors also saw how the old society was coming under increasingly severe pressure from rising numbers, land hunger, poverty and famine. Mrs Murray lamented that the poor Highlander's alternative was often to starve or fly from his native land. Dr Macculloch pointed out that small scale improvement would ultimately be useless. Whenever emigration thinned the labour force or the lairds were obliged to look for a better return on their capital, the crofts which in the previous generation had replaced the common farms would have in their turn to go. 'The labours of the costing system are therefore merely. .. temporary: so far from being the first stage of general improvement, they are but the last improvements of an ancient system which may be repaired but cannot be rendered perfect.' This gloomy observation will be the background to the next set of travellers' tales.