KERRERA ISLAND.
[Oban and Inverary (October 22-26).]
THE FERRY FROM MULL TO OBAN.
On the morning of Friday, October 22, our travellers set out for the ferry by which they were to cross to Oban—a distance of about twelve miles. According to Dr. Garnett, travellers were conveyed first to Kerrera, an island lying off the mainland. Crossing this on foot or horseback they found awaiting them another boat to take them to Oban. At Auchnacraig in Mull there was an inn about half a mile from the ferry. Here he and his companion could procure, he says, neither oats for their horses nor straw for their litter. They wanted to give them a mess of oatmeal and water, but the woman, who acted as hostler, at first refused, “asking whether it was proper to give the food of Christians to horses.” After a long dispute she yielded. “In these islands,” he adds, “horses seldom taste oats.”[713] “The bottom of the ferry-boat,” says Boswell, “was strewed with branches of trees or bushes upon which we sat. We had a good day and a fine passage, and in the evening landed at Oban, where we found a tolerable inn.” This place, which I have seen recommended to cockney tourists in huge advertisements as The Charing Cross of the North, was then a little hamlet. In 1786 Knox found “about twenty families collected together with a view to the fisheries.”[714] It boasted of a custom-house and a post-office. In the islands no customs were paid, for there was no officer to demand them.[715] Faujas Saint-Fond gives a curious account of his stay in the inn, a few years after Johnson’s visit. He would have got on very well, for the food though simple was good, and his bed though hard was clean, had it not been for a performer on the bag-pipes—“un maudit joueur de cornemuse” who played “une musique d’un genre nouveau, mais bien terrible pour mon oreille.” The day of their arrival this man had strutted up and down before the inn with haughty and warlike looks, and had stunned them with his airs. “Nous crûmes d’abord que ce personnage était une espèce d’insensé qui gagnait sa vie à ce métier.” They were informed that he was an accomplished musician, “de l’école highlandoise,” and that in this display of his talents he was shewing the joy which he felt on seeing strangers in a place where they came so rarely. Touched by his friendly sentiments Saint-Fond had not only applauded him, but had even pressed on him “quelques shelings,” which he accepted, it almost seemed, merely out of complaisance. Taking pity on the stranger’s solitude he came and played under his bed-room window in the silence of the night. It was all in vain that Saint-Fond rose, went out of doors, took him by the hand and led him away. “Il revint au même moment, me donnant à entendre qu’il n’était point fatigué, et qu’il jouerait toute la nuit pour me plaire, et il tint parole.”[716]
DUNOLLY CASTLE, OBAN.
OBAN ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO.
The bagpiper was surely the direct ancestor of those bands of musicians who at Oban distress the peaceful tourist. But there are things worse even than musicians. How melancholy is the change which has come over the whole scene in the last quarter of a century! A beautiful bay ruined by man! That it should become thronged was inevitable; it need not have been made vulgar. It was on no scene of overgrown hotels that Johnson looked, as, with the tear starting in his eye, he repeated those fine lines in which Goldsmith describes the character of the British nation:
“Stern o’er each bosom reason holds her state,