THE ISLAND OF EIGG
Even in sight of Oban hotels one may still find them so near and yet so far. I once spent some time on the green island of Lismore, “the great garden,” that lies as one of the breakwaters of that smart tourist-haven. Not so much of a garden now, this island was an old seat of the Argyll Bishops. The Book of the Dean of Lismore is a famous sixteenth-century collection of Gaelic poems. Later on, the Presbyterian minister of the island had a grandson who became Lord Macaulay. Forty years ago its only mansion preserved what had been for a time the Catholic College now flourishing on the Dee, its Refectory, fitly enough, being used as a dining-room, while the chapel was desecrated by division into a smoking-room and a carpenter’s shop. The then owner was a lady who without scandal may be called peculiar. Though herself from the Lowlands, if I am not mistaken, her whim was to play the Highland chieftainess of the good old time. The tenants were encouraged to bring cases before her for decision, Donald’s hen scratching in Duncan’s garden, or such like; and as the judgment, along with a mild admonition to the offender, usually included a bottle of whisky presented to each party, there was no lack of recourse to her amateur jurisdiction. As became her state, she kept a barge in which to go shopping at Oban, but the crew were always hard to get together, still more so from the whisky shops of the town. One day, on the way back, a midshipman of our party took upon himself to steer and give orders in such a quarter-deck tone that the offended Highlanders mutinied by lighting their pipes, folding their arms, and sullenly letting us drift about a long afternoon at the will of the currents, till either Celtic pride relented or some touch of Caledonian prudence counselled keeping us all out of mischief, when the presuming youth had humbled himself so far as to own that it takes local experience to navigate those waters. The distance across in a straight line may be some half-dozen miles, and the alternative way to Oban was by walking or driving a score of miles and passing three arms of the sea.
THE ISLAND OF CANNA
The only other house of anything like gentility on the island was the minister’s, who took in dipsomaniacs to board, shut off from temptation by rushing tides. My fellow-guests were, all but one, lads of my own age, who in this social solitude had a grand time of it, fishing, swimming, and crawling over rocks to stalk shy seals that basked on the outer side of the island, cheerfully drenched and tanned by turns, like ourselves. Our hostess we hardly saw, as one of her peculiarities was being invisible all day, and haunting the house by night. It may seem ungracious to tell such tales of a too hospitable lady, dead many a day, but the fact is that I do not remember even her name, which I never heard till she haled me, almost by force, to her fortress, whence it was quite an adventure to get away. I had to bribe an English servant, another remarkable “character,” who played the part of masterful factotum in this domain. With his connivance I was to slip out at 2 A.M., to be driven to the farther end of the island, and there by boat to waylay a steamer on its zigzag course from the Outer Isles. At the moment of escape, to my confusion, the châtelaine turned up, who did not try to detain me, but insisted on being my companion, and caused such delay by her vagaries that I nearly missed the steamer, then much offended the Highland boatmen by too peremptorily bidding them haste, as if I were a chief of Ulva’s Isle with Lord Ullin’s daughter on board instead of an eccentric widow lady. That strange imprisonment on Lismore would have been a more irksome experience later in life; yet I have often thought what a chance of making “copy” was there lost to a writer of books.
What travel among those broken shores was before steamboats—the boarding of which from pierless islands may still be adventurous—we may guess from David Balfour’s troubled wanderings, from the delays of Dr. Johnson’s difficult tour, and from the fact that when old Dr. Macleod went to college at Glasgow the journey from Morven by land and water took ten days. Inns also are still few and simple in such poorly peopled wilds, where to guard the distressful Celt against a besetting sin his lords have sometimes enacted a private prohibition of liquor law. Nor has this stretch of the southern Hebrides much to tempt the general tourist from his lines of more luxurious travel. Some points well deserve an hotel and guide-book notice, such as the grand quartzite masses of the Paps of Jura, commanding a view from Skye to the Isle of Man; and the map of islets and inlets spread out, weather permitting, below the triple-crested Ben More of Mull, whose little white capital Tobermory has been compared to a damp Naples in respect of looking its best from the sea. Professor Blackie, with his sanguine optimism, proclaimed Mull “the most beautiful of the western isles”; but that is not a generally received tenet. Its coast makes a fretwork of rocky patterns that become monotonous, repeated in miniature upon some of the adjacent islets and peninsulas. But striking scenes may be too widely scattered among what at first sight seem featureless stretches of sea, moor, and rock, that will not take every stranger’s fancy in their common setting of mist and rain, out of which hasty comers and goers at Oban often carry away the impression of nothing more cheerful than its red-funnelled arks of escape from a hopeless deluge.
TOBERMORY
To have the coy charms of these landscapes picked out for us, we must go to a fervent West Highland amateur like William Black, who himself, in glorifying the prospects of Mull, is fain to hint how they may strike another’s eye less winningly: