SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE
& RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON
IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & CIE. PARIS.
CORRICHATACHIN NEAR BROADFORD SKYE
The Highlanders were more seasoned drinkers than he was, for the following night they had another drinking-bout.
“They kept a smart lad lying on a table in the corner of the room, ready to spring up and bring the kettle whenever it was wanted. They continued drinking, and singing Erse songs, till near five in the morning, when they all came into my room, where some of them had beds. Unluckily for me, they found a bottle of punch in a corner, which they drank; and Corrichatachin went for another, which they also drank. They made many apologies for disturbing me. I told them, that, having been kept awake by their mirth, I had once thoughts of getting up and joining them again. Honest Corrichatachin said, ‘To have had you done so, I would have given a cow.’”
Johnson was better lodged than Boswell, for he had a room to himself at night, though in the day it was the place where the servants took their meals. Yet he was pleased with the kindness shown him, and discovered no deficiencies. “Our entertainment,” he wrote, “was not only hospitable but elegant.” The company he describes as being “more numerous and elegant than it could have been supposed easy to collect.” He gave as much pleasure as he received, and when he left, “the Scottish phrase of honest man, which is an expression of kindness and regard, was again and again applied to him.”
The house he describes as “very pleasantly situated between two brooks, with one of the highest hills of the island behind it.” Boswell with good reason remarks on the entire absence of a garden. “Corrichatachin,” he writes, “has not even a turnip, a carrot, or a cabbage.” Where these were wanting, there would be no roses clustering on the porch, no flower-beds before the door. This scene of hospitality and jovial riot is now a ruin. We walked to it from Broadford across a moorland, the curlews flying round us with their melancholy cry. The two brooks were shrunk with the long drought, and flowed in very quiet streams. Yet one of them, I was told, in a time of flood once broke into Mackinnon’s house. We crossed it on a bridge formed of two trees, with a long piece of iron wire for a railing. There we rested awhile, now looking down at the sunlight dancing in the shallows, and now gazing at the ruined farm and the mountain rising behind in steep crags of barren rock. Far up the valley to the west a flock of sheep was coming white from the shearing, bleating as they spread out along the hill-side. Another flock the dogs were gathering into what had been the yard of the old house. It had been solidly built, two stories high, about thirty-six feet long by fifteen broad in the inside measurements. On the outside, over the door, was carved:—
L. M. K. J. M. K.
1747.
Johnson’s host was Lachlan Mackinnon, and the initials are, I suppose, his and his wife’s. It was but a small place to hold the large and festive company that was gathered at the time of our traveller’s visit; but, as Boswell says, “it was partly done by separating man and wife, and putting a number of men in one room and of women in another.” As I looked up at the windows which still remain, though the floors have fallen in, I wondered which was the room which was Johnson’s chamber at night, and the ladies’ parlour by day, where Boswell sat among them writing his journal.