CHAPTER IV
THE HOLY ISLES
Our critical age, while it develops a new reverence for the past, has worked havoc among time-honoured etymologies of place-names. A letter stolen into Hebudes, the old form of Hebrides, makes unstable base for derivation from a heathen goddess represented in Christian mythology by St. Bridget or St. Bride, whose name turns up so often in the Highlands. But from time immemorial these warring seas clashed around island sanctuaries. Christianity here took over many shrines of an older worship, and long sacred fires to burn on new altars, with ministrants and vestal virgins bound by holier vows. In books like Mr. Frazer’s Golden Bough we learn what outworn superstitions still lurk in disguise about the walls of manse and schoolhouse; how children having the Shorter Catechism by heart may play all unsuspecting with relics of heathendom; how their fathers, while banning the sign of the cross, preserve in ugly obelisks the idols of pagan high places; and how the festivals of forgotten Baals may still command maimed rites among those who frown at Christmas or Good Friday as recalling Romish superstition. Mourners who abhor a form of prayer at the grave will take a funeral out of its way that it may follow the course of the sun after ancient custom. There are sacred wells in the Highlands, long ago baptized by some Christian saint, that have not wholly exhaled their ancient virtue in this or that disorder, and, at least within a few years back, had yet their votive offerings of pins or bits of rag. It is a question whether the renowned Loch Maree gets its name from the Virgin Mary, or from a certain saint, Mourie, alias Malruba, whose memory became so confounded with that of a heathen bugbear that as late as Covenanting days the Presbytery was scandalised to find bulls still sacrificed to this dubious evangelist.
Old books speak of the western islands as sacred, some of the smallest among them appearing specially hallowed ground. How did successive adorations come to be concentrated on the low, bare islet of Iona, lying a mile off the farther point of that long promontory called the Ross of Mull? From the dawn of legend it seems to wear a misty halo. Its oldest name means the island; in Gaelic it is the Isle of the Druids; then its alias Icolmkill embalms the memory of St. Columba, who from this beacon-fire lit the Gospel all over the Highlands. What task that was may be guessed by the picnic pilgrims whose passage from Oban often turns out so rough that not all of them are at ease to indulge Dr. Johnson’s elevated mood among such sacred ruins.
THE ISLANDS OF ORONSAY AND COLONSAY
Palladius is said to have been the earliest missionary to Scotland. He was closely followed by St. Ninian, whose light seems to have smouldered on the savage shores of Galloway, till from his dying hand St. Patrick in the fifth century carried it over to Ireland to blaze up before half of Europe. From this school of piety and learning in the next century came St. Columba, as penance for sin devoting himself to the conversion of the wild Picts. The legend goes that he first disembarked on Oronsay, but quitted it because thence he could still catch sight of his beloved Ireland. Landing on Iona, he buried his boat lest he should be tempted to return. But he had no sooner settled his little band in rough wattled buildings than they were building other coracle craft of wicker-work covered by skins, in which to launch forth on the perilous Hebridean seas and up the long inlet of lake and glen that opens the heart of the Highlands. In the second half of his busy life he pushed repeated journeys to the far north, to the Orcades, even, it is said, as far as Iceland, preaching through interpreters, founding mission stations, and planting civilisation as well as faith among barbarous people. With the double text laborare and orare, he taught his followers to make the best of that poor soil of Iona, from which such pregnant seeds went forth on every wind. He is said to have copied the Gospels three hundred times with his own hand.