Boswell surely not without good reason maintains that “had their tour produced nothing else but this sublime passage the world must have acknowledged that it was not made in vain.”
RUINS IN IONA.
CARSAIG ARCHES: MULL.
[The Southern Coast of Mull and Lochbuy (October 20-22).]
Sailing from Iona about midday on Wednesday, October 20, our travellers landed in the evening on the southern coast of Mull, near the house of the Rev. Neal Macleod, who gave them lodgings for the night. Johnson oddly described him as “the cleanest-headed man that he had met with in the Western Islands.” The talk ran on English statesmen. Here it was that Johnson called Mr. Pitt a meteor, and Sir Robert Walpole a fixed star, and maintained that Pulteney was as paltry a fellow as could be. Continuing their journey on the morrow, they dined at the house of a physician, “who was so much struck with the uncommon conversation of Johnson, that he observed to Boswell, ‘This man is just a hogshead of sense.’” This doctor’s practice could scarcely have been very lucrative, for there came a time when he had no successor. Garnett writing of Mull at the end of the century, says, “There is at present no medical man in the island; the nearest surgeon of eminence is at Inverary.”[687] The distance from that town to the farthest points in Mull, as the crow flies, is not less than sixty miles, but by the route taken would be perhaps one hundred. GLOOM AND DESOLATION. In the afternoon our travellers rode, writes Boswell, “through what appeared to me the most gloomy and desolate country I had ever beheld.” “It was,” said Johnson, “a country of such gloomy desolation that Mr. Boswell thought no part of the Highlands equally terrific.” Faujas Saint-Fond, a few years later, describes Mull as a country “without a single road, without a single tree, where the mountains have heather for their only covering.”[688] Amidst the beautiful plantations and the fine trees with which this island is now in so many parts adorned, the modern tourist fails to recognize the truthfulness of these gloomy descriptions. Our travellers were to spend the night at Moy, the seat of the Laird of Lochbuy,[689] at the head of the fine loch from which he takes his title. THE APPROACH TO LOCHBUY. I approached it from the north-eastern side of the island, having driven over from Craignure, a little port in the Sound of Mull. Perhaps the country through which I passed was naturally finer than that which they had traversed in coming from the south-west. Perhaps, on the other hand, the difference was chiefly due to the trees and to better weather. Certainly the long drive, though in places dreary, was for a great part of the road on a bright, windy summer day, one of remarkable beauty. I passed lochs of the sea with the waves tossing, the sea-fowl hovering and settling and screaming, great herons standing on the shore, and the sea-trout leaping in the waters. But far more beautiful was Loch Uisk, an inland lake embosomed among the mountains, its steep shores covered with trees. The strong wind was driving the scud like dust over the face of its dark waters. As I drew near Lochbuy, I caught sight of the ivy-mantled tower across a meadow, where the mowers were cutting the grass, and the hay-makers were tossing it out to the sun and wind. Beyond the castle there was a broad stretch of white sand; a small vessel lay at anchor, ready at the next tide to run ashore and discharge the hamlet’s winter stock of coal. Tall trunks of fir-trees were lying near the water’s edge ready for shipping. At the head of the loch are two beautiful bays, each with its pastures and tilled lands, its low-wooded heights and its lofty circling mountains, each facing the south-west and sheltered from the cold winds. Between these two bays rise fine crags, hidden in places beneath hazels and ivy. For most of the year it is a land streaming with waterfalls. In beautiful ravines, half hidden by the trees, wild cascades rush down, swollen by the storms that have burst on the mountains; but at the time of my visit their voice was hushed by the long drought. So dry had the springs become in some places, that I was told at Lochbuy that to one of the neighbouring islands water had to be carried in boats.
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE
& RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON