WHISKY AND GOLF
Another recollection of these old days brings back the excise-officers who used to be on the watch at the English frontier to examine the luggage of passengers from the north. One of the surviving relics of Scottish independence was to be found in the inland revenue duties, which, as they differed on the two sides of the border until they were equalised in 1855, led to a good deal of smuggling. Whisky was then contraband, and liable to extra duty when taken into England. At that time, this liquor was hardly known south of the Tweed, save to the Scots who imported it from their native country. But now it has made its way everywhere, and has almost completely supplanted the gin that had previously filled its place. It is prescribed by the medical faculty as, on the whole, a safer drink than much of the wine that comes from abroad. The quantity of it made every year is enormously larger than it was fifty years ago. Not only is it to be found everywhere in this country, but on the continent, and indeed wherever English-speaking people travel. If one were asked to name the two most conspicuous gifts which Scotland has made in recent times to the United Kingdom, one could hardly go wrong in answering Whisky and Golf.
There used to be, and probably still are, many quiet, unpretending, but remarkably comfortable little inns in Galloway. The innkeepers were also farmers, and probably in many cases their farms formed the chief and most profitable part of their avocations. Fresh farm produce was supplied to their guests with the amplest liberality—excellent beef and mutton, fowls, eggs, butter, milk, and such cream as one seldom met with in other parts of the country.
A notable reform of the last half century in the Highlands has been seen in the improvement of the inns. I can remember the primitive condition of some of them which have been enlarged into what are now pompously called hotels. Many years ago I had occasion to spend a night or two in one of these antique and uncomfortable houses in Skye. One Sunday morning I was in bed and awake, when the bedroom door was quietly opened, and by degrees a half-dressed female figure stealthily entered. She looked at the bed to see if I were still asleep, and as I kept my eyes half closed, she thought herself unobserved. Stepping gently across to the dressing-table, she opened my razor-case, and having possessed herself of one of the razors, as quietly retreated. I lay conjecturing what use the landlady (for it was she) would make of the implement. Visions of murder floated through my mind, but after a time the door once more opened, and my hostess, as quietly as before, stalked across the room and replaced the razor in the case. She seemed too calm for a murderess, and there had been no noise in the house, but the razor had evidently served some definite purpose. I got up, dressed, and came down to breakfast. My host met me at the foot of the staircase with a smile on his face, which on the previous evening had been ‘rough and razorable,’ but had now lost its stubbly beard of a week’s growth. I then saw one use at least to which my razor had probably been put. Whether the old lady had any further private manipulations of her own in which the implement played a part, I never found out.
INNS IN SKYE
One of the defects of the old Skye inns was the absence of any weights to the window-sashes, and commonly also the want of any means of keeping the windows open. The glass was seldom cleaned, though the outside surface was washed more or less clean by the battering of the rain. The doors, too, could not always be fastened, and the visitor who wished to secure privacy might have to barricade the entrance by getting some chairs and his portmanteau piled up against the door. Even these precautions, however, were sometimes of no effect. I was once in an inn at Portree where one of the guests, on awaking in the morning, found another head reposing on the pillow near him. His first impulse was to kick out the intruder, who was sound asleep, but on second thoughts he jumped out of bed and rapidly dressed. Before leaving the room he recognised that the head in question was that of the waiter, who had evidently pushed the door open during the night and got into bed. After taking a walk for an hour the tourist returned to the inn, which he found in great commotion. On enquiring of the landlord, he was told that their waiter, a most respectable and trustworthy man, had disappeared; he had left his clothes in his own room, and must have gone out and drowned himself in the loch, for they had been searching for him everywhere, and he could not be found either in the house or anywhere else; if it were not the Sabbath they would have the loch dragged for his body, but they would do that next morning. The visitor, after expressing due sympathy with the distress of the household, asked whether they had looked into his bedroom. ‘Your bedroom!’ exclaimed the host somewhat angrily, as if he thought fun were being made of him, on such a solemn occasion, ‘Your bedroom! No, of course we haven’t. What should make us look there?’ ‘Well,’ said his guest, ‘you might at least try.’ And there sure enough was the somnolent waiter, still asleep, and happily unconscious of all the stir he had caused. It then turned out that, unknown to the family at the inn, who had recently engaged him, he was liable to occasional fits of sleep-walking. All’s well that ends well; but the only consolation the injured visitor ever received from the landlord was the remark, ‘What a blessing it was your room; it might else have ruined my business.’
OLD HIGHLAND INNS
There is a small inn on one of the north-western sea-lochs, where in the year 1860 I spent a night with my old chief, Sir Roderick Murchison. It was in a shocking state of neglect and dirt, with little more in the way of provisions than oat-cakes, potatoes, and whisky. It boasted of only one bedroom, which had two beds that did not appear to have been slept in for many a day. Twenty years later I came back to the same inn, hoping that the general improvement would have reached that place too, but I found that as nothing in the way of repair had been done to it in the interval, it was more dilapidated and untidy than ever. I had as a travelling companion a well-known man of science, who, never having been up in that part of Scotland, was glad of the opportunity of seeing it. We occupied the same double-bedded room as I had formerly known. Awaking betimes in the morning, I lay for a while contemplating the ceiling and the undulations and cracks in its plaster. There was a large downward bulge, like a full-bellied sail, right above my friend’s head. As I was looking at it, this piece of the plaster suddenly gave way and fell in a mass upon him, with a shower of dust all over the bed. Of course he started up in great alarm, but fortunately he had received no serious injury. It was his first experience of a Highland inn of the old type.
A distinct revival of the roadside inn can be traced to the wide spread of bicycle-riding. Wheelmen appear to be ‘drouthy cronies,’ who are not sorry to halt for a few minutes at an inviting change-house; but many of them take up their quarters for a night at such places, and this demand for sleeping-room has led to the resuscitation of little inns that had almost gone to decay. It is to be hoped that this revival will continue to spread, and that not only will the old inns come to life again, but that new and better houses of entertainment will be erected in parts of the country where the attractions are many, while the accommodation is but scant.
AN IRISH PUBLICAN IN SCOTLAND