HEBRIDEAN JOURNEY

This long and interesting piece of writing is fascinating as a piece of contemporary observation on the island in the 1930's. It has been extracted from a book 'Hebridean Journey' by a man called Halliday Sutherland. The date of publication is not clear in the front of the book, the page appears to be missing and nor is there any potted biography' of the author, but he would apear to be one amongst a number of solitary and rather eccentric gentlemen of that time who liked to travel 'off the beaten track'.

Due west and eight miles from the Sound of Mull is the Island of Coll, and to the south-west, two miles distant, the adjacent Island of Tiree. Coll is twelve and a half miles long, for the most part about three miles wide and lies northeast by south-west. At all seasons and in all weathers I have crossed to the Hebrides, but the most memorable crossing was in December 1933.

The Lochearn leaves Oban at 6.00am and I had slept on board. At 7.00am, I dressed and went on deck into the night, for the sun had not yet risen. The night was calm, cold with five degrees of frost and the sky so ablaze with stars as to remind me that the constellations in the north are more numerous and brilliant than those of the southern hemisphere. Behind the mountains of Scotland a long faint streak of light appeared and slowly rose until all the stars were extinguished save Venus. The sun rose in a cloudless sky over a calm sea as blue as the Mediterranean on a clear day. On that day the visibility was eighty miles and the first officer said, "This weather is sensational." He was right.

At Coll the Lochearn stops at the entrance of Loch Ithiurne, one and a half miles long, three-quarters of a mile wide at the mouth, two-thirds dry at low water and so shallow that a motor boat from the stone jetty at Arinagour ferries passengers and goods, cattle and sheep, from and to the shore. Last summer I landed in heavy rain and, amongst those who came on board was a boy scout escorted by two companions. From the vacant look on his face I wondered if he was suffering from the second stage of sunstroke, in which there is drowsiness and even coma.

Arinagour is on the south-western shore of the Loch which lies between low rocky hills with patches of grass. On the north-eastern shore are a few acres of meadow land with a derelict farmhouse whose roof is falling in and whose windows are broken. At low tide it may be reached by a cart track, at other times by boat, and it looked a desirable abode for a modern anchorite.

The village, two hundred yards in length, consists of a row of a dozen well-built whitewashed cottages roofed with galvanised iron, painted terracotta, facing the road and the loch, and extending from the post office to two semi-detached two-storied villas, one of which is the shop where one can buy almost anything from a newspaper to a pair of boots. On the roadside opposite one of the cottages were seven small lime trees, which planted from cuttings taken from the manse garden by a visitor forty years ago. Beyond the villas is the smithy, and beyond that a small hill where the loch becomes very narrow. At the foot of the hill is the Coll Hotel, half-way up is the Church of Scotland, and on the top is a small cairn of stones to commemorate the men of Coll who fell in the Great War.

As I have said, rain was falling fast, but so contrary is my nature that I feel exhilarated when walking in the rain. Yet I do not enjoy looking for lodgings, although such a quest is good for the soul, in as much as it teaches humility and hope, and would make an ex cellent penance for all to whom life is a personally conducted tour with accommodation booked in advance.

Beyond the Smithy I went up a steep rough road, now running with water like a shallow burn, and knocked at the door of a dairy farm, where doubtless there would be plenty of cream, which I like although it does not like me. The door was only half-opened by a woman, who looked tired and anxious.

"I was told you take lodgers and I'd like to stay for a week." She shook her head decisively. "No, I cannot take anyone. My daughter is very ill and I'm nursing her. If the minister was at home he'd give you room at the Manse. There's a divinity student there now, and he only comes here for meals. Have you tried in the village? No, well you might try Miss MacLean, Mrs MacKinnon, Mrs MacFadyen or Miss Kennedy."

Having thanked her I returned down the watery road to the village, only to find Miss MacLean and Mistresses MacKinnon and macFadyen had each two visitors and could not take a third.

Miss Kennedy seemed the last chance. She was of medium height, stout, in age between fifty and sixty, with grey hair and large eyes, and gave the impression of being a hard worker with a kindly disposition, and yet: "No, no, I can't manage it. I'm very busy. There's visitors coming on Monday and I've got to get their house ready. I'd have no time to look after you."

"But Miss Kennedy, I don't need any looking after."

At this point, her brother, a tall, lean man of seventy with a white moustache, came from the kitchen, looked at me and spoke to her in Gaelic.

"Would you not try some other place first and then...?"

"Ah," said I with a smile, "now you're thawing, Miss Kennedy. I've tried four already - and surely it's an awful thing for a Highlander to be looking for lodgings in the rain?"

"Well, you'd better come in and get your wet things dried." The door was opened wide, and my cottage was opposite the lime trees.

My bed-sitting room was to the left of the front door, a fairly large room with a double-bed, a circular table, two chairs, one an easy chair, a wash-stand, above it a small shaving mirror on the wall, a sideboard on which stood a large paraffin lamp and an old gramophone, a china cupboard, a clothes cupboard, a chest of drawers, and on the floor waxcloth and rugs. In the window were two geraniums, and in the corner of the room a palm that had known better days. On the mantelshelf were china ornaments, also wax roses underglass and on the wall above, a plaster bas-relief of Glasgow University in a frame of clam shells. On the other wall was a picture text of, "I will praise Thee with my whole heart", with the coloured picture of a woodland scene and a waterwheel. Another picture was of a sunset behind a windmill, and the whole room was dominated by a composite engraving of "Queen Victoria and the Royal Family of Great Britain in 1897".

Assuredly the room was not underfurnished, and the advantage of a bedsitting room is that you may read and write in peace and more comfortably than in the bedrooms of small hotels. Nevertheless I told Miss Kennedy that if she had no objection I would prefer to have my meals in the kitchen with her brother and herself, and to this she agreed.

At supper I learnt that her brother's name in Gaelic was Malcolm, son of Charles, son of John. I told them my name and that I was a Doctor.

"Oh, you're a doctor," said Miss Kennedy, and "that's strange because our last visitor was a professor from London with ten letters after his name! He collected flies on the island and sent them away in bottles - a nice gentleman. Many visitors? Most of them are travellers selling meal, flour, clothes, butter and baking soda."

"Is your tea to your liking Doctor? If it looks black it's only the peat. Where we had our farm there was a spring of clear water, but here it is peaty. I spoke to the old Doctor, the one before Dr Somerville, about the water, and he said, "It is good water. I sent a bottle to the Professor in Edinburgh and had word that it is very good water. The colour does not matter."

My hosts had good manners, self-possession, and treated me as their equal. After supper we sat around the kitchen peat-burning range, she knitting, he smoking a pipe and I cigarettes.

After a pause in our talk, I asked: "Are there many fairies on the island?"

She looked at me sharply. "You don't believe in fairies?"

"I do believe in fairies," said I, and told them of the Phantasmagoria I had seen in a Lapland forest.

"Well, well," she said, "You're as bad as my brother."

I rejoiced that the ice was broken and asked if he'd ever seen them.

" No, I've never seen them myself, but I had a friend who often saw them. He was a piper, and there is a steep rock beyond the Windy Gap - you'll see it if you go there - that used to open, inside the fairies were dancing, and he'd go inside and play the pipes to them. Mind you, I believe what my friend said, but I cannot understand how a solid rock can open."

"Anything may happen in fairyland." Next day I called on Dr Somerville and found him in a new house, or rather in the garden around a new house half a mile from the village. He and his brother, a skin specialist from Glasgow on holiday, were planting a rock garden on the ground which the builders had littered. In three days the brothers had constructed a large rock garden, bringing the rocks in a car from a quarry a mile off. Both are keen gardeners and first class botanists. They were planting the rockery with wild flowers - thyme, a pale heliotrope, blue geraniums, purple orchis and the yellow mignonette.

"At the moment," said Dr Somerville, "there's not much sickness on the island, but two days ago I had a sad case - a boy scout in the camp from Glasgow - dementia praecox - a poor ending for a holiday and rotten for his parents."

"I saw him taken on board the Lochearn and thought of sunstroke."

"Yes, I had that in mind, but there's been no sun for a week."

In the afternoon we motored to Arnabost on the western side of the island, and turned north-east through the grazing lands of Gallanach, a large farm which carries 100 cattle, 1000 sheep and once produced fifteen ton of cheese a year. Beyond the farm a steep hill, whose gradient is one in ten, rises to a narrow pass at the top of the hills, the Windy Gap through which, against strong north-easterly or south-westerly winds, pedestrians have difficulty in making their way.

From the Windy Gap I saw a strange country the like of which I had never seen, because it was Highland scenery in miniature. The road looked long, the heather-clad hills were high, the lochans lochs, the rocks huge, and to the north-east was a range of great mountains. Yet on coming near the mountains I found them to be hills not more than 200 feet high and once the illusion was dispelled I felt like Gulliver in Lilliput. To the little people who at twilight come out of their mounds, of which there are many, the small hills would be real mountains.

A mile and a half north of the Windy Gap the road approaches the western shore near the site of a Norwegian fort, the Dun a' Bhuird, and nearby is the entrance to a cave which is supposed to be one entrance to a subterranean passage that runs under the island for two and a half miles to the eastern shore of Dun Lorachain. Once upon a time a piper, accompanied by his dog, entered the cave at Lorachain with the intention of playing his way under the island from sea to sea, but at the Dun a' Bhuird only the dog emerged.

From the Piper's Cave the road continues north-east and then crosses to the top of the island to end at Sorasdal Bay on the eastern side - a white sandy bay, guarded by red gneiss rocks not too precipitous. On the turf above the shore wild flowers were in bloom, sea pinks, summer-snow, deep blue speedwell and pale forget-me-nots. Around the bay were about a dozen crofters houses, all of which save two were in ruins, and the children who once lived there must have kept rabbits for, in addition to wild rabbits, the place was over-run with black, white and speckled rabbits, all now reduced to the size of the wild rabbits.

In one of the houses an old woman still cards and spins wool dyed from seaweeds, and sends it to Helmsdale for weaving. I saw no young people, and outside I spoke to her husband, aged seventy-two. "No, there's no young people left. They're not content to work on the land. It gives you a living but little money. There's no money in the `lazy fields'." In that he was right because a `lazy field' is a small plot where furrows to grow corn are ploughed between strips of turf. Of the fishing he said: "There's no fishing and no ling. It's the trawlers. In a westerly gale I've seen them within half a mile of this shore."

"Might they not be taking shelter?"

"No, no, they're taking the fish."

The truth of the matter as I see it is that anyone could get plenty of fish around these islands, where the seals flourish. There are flounders in the bays, ling, whiting and mackerel further out, but the people of the islands will not eat mackerel as it feeds, so they say, on drowned bodies. A man could supply his own household with fish, but he has no means of bringing fish to the markets where money is made. If there were more people on the island there might be a local market, but the population is now under 300, with only thirty children of school age in the four schools. Today only three MacLeans and two MacKinnons, names native to Coll, hold land on the island, whereas prior to the evictions of 1856, twenty six Macleans and fourteen MacKinnons were paying rent for land. In the south-western corner of the island, in the township of Feall, there were 200 people, until they were cleared out by Captain Donald Campbell in the middle of the last century. The place is now uninhabited. Of the evictions the old man had heard when a boy: "When the first Stewart laird bought the main part of the islands from the MacLeans, he raised the rents. The tenants could not pay, so he had them evicted. In one place ten holders and six sub-tenants were evicted. Many went to America. Now you can go from Glasgow to America in ten days. At that time, the time of sailing-ships, it took one year. Yes, one year to get to America."

To the north of Sorasdal is a small hill, called in Gaelic the Cnoc Mor, or Great Hill, since everything here is relative, and from the top of this hill there is a view to the north-east of a cluster of small skerries and islands, of which Eilean Mor, the Great Island, is almost circular and less than a quarter of a mile in diameter.

On the coast of Coll north of the Cnoc mor, is a small bay almost enclosed by rocks, through which there is a narrow entrance, called the Sound of the Breaking Oars. There are hundreds of place names around the coast of Coll and all the other islands, and on the maps in the local guidebooks they are printed in Gaelic. Let it be so, but I would suggest to the authors of these books that a glossary in English might also be included, because even in English these places are beautiful and almost all of them have a story.

In the southern part of Coll undulating moors lead to a sandy plain, the Field of Flowers and to the sand dunes in the south-western corners of the island . At Acha is the roofless derelict mill whose waterwheel once ground the barley and corn. Today barley and corn are raised for cattle fodder whilst flour, bleached white, is imported from the mainland.

To the south of the Field of Flowers and on the western shore of Loch Breacachaidh are the ruins of an old castle, that of the MacLeans. On the rising ground south of the old castle is the mansion house, a square bleak building with sham baronial turrets, where Doctor Johnson and Boswell were entertained by MacLean of Coll in 1773. In his Journal the doctor wrote that they lived `very commodiously' in a `neat new house, erected near the old castle'; and according to Boswell it was `a neat new-built gentleman's house better than any they had seen since they were at Lord Errol's'. Yet the Doctor in conversation with Boswell remarked, `there was nothing becoming a chief about it: it was a mere tradesman's box.' With Dr. Johnson's second thoughts I agree.

On the day that I left Coll, Miss Kennedy gave me a root of bog myrtle and of southern-wood, a fragrant herb, to send home - "In London they will remind you of Coll," but alas those fragrant plants do not thrive in the soil of cities.