CHANGES IN SKYE.
At the Hotel at Broadford, I was struck by the change that has come about since Johnson’s time, “in this verge of European life,” to use the term which he applied to Skye. Corrichatachin remains almost as he saw it. A house had fallen in ruins and had been replaced by another, and a small grove of trees had been planted. A garden had been made, and patches of ground which once were pasture had been ploughed up. But the broad face of nature is unchanged. This “region of obscurity,” is, however, obscure no longer. Where he was nearly ten weeks without receiving letters, now even the poor, far from their homes, by means of the telegraphic wire can, as it were, “live along the line.” A maid-servant who goes to distant services, on her arrival, by means of a telegram, at once frees her mother from her “heart-struck anxious care.” The owner of the hotel, from whom I learnt this fact, said that “Rowland Hill had done more for the poor man than all the ministers since, and that many of the Highlanders in gratitude had called their sons after him.”
CORRICHATACHIN.
[Raasay (September 8-12).]
From Corrichatachin our travellers rode down to the sea-side at Broadford, two miles off, where they took boat for the island of Raasay. The Macgillichallum, or laird of Raasay, John Macleod, had politely sent his coach and six, as he called his six-oared boat, to fetch them over. Though it was “thus dignified with a pompous name,” writes Johnson, “there was no seat, but an occasional bundle of straw. I never,” he adds, “saw in the Hebrides a boat furnished with benches.” In it had come the learned Donald M’Queen, a minister, and old Malcolm Macleod, who had been out in the ’45, and had aided the Young Pretender in his escape. THE HIGHLAND DRESS. I had at one time thought that it was to him that Johnson alludes, when he speaks of having met one man, and one only, who defied the law against wearing the Highland dress. “By him,” he adds, “it was worn only occasionally and wantonly.”[615] I now believe, however, that it was Macdonald of Kingsburgh who was meant. Ever since the last rebellion the national garb had been suppressed. It had been enacted that “no person whatsoever should wear or put on those parts of the Highland clothes, garb, or habiliments which are called the plaid, philibeg,[616] or little kilt, or any of them.” Any offender “not being a landed man, or the son of a landed man” shall be tried before a justice of the peace “in a summary way, and shall be delivered over to serve as a soldier.”[617] Even the loyal Highlanders in the Duke of Cumberland’s army had been compelled in part to adopt the southern garb. “Near Linlithgow,” writes Henderson, “the whole army passed in review before their illustrious General. When the Highlanders passed he seemed much delighted with their appearance, saying, ‘They look very well; have breeches, and are the better for that.’”[618] Some years later when Pitt “called for soldiers from the mountains of the North,” “to allure them into the army it was thought proper to indulge them in the continuance of their national dress.”[619] Numerous were the devices to evade the law, and great must have been the perplexities of the magistrates. One of Wolfe’s officers wrote in 1752, that “one of his serjeants had taken a fellow wearing a blanket in form of a philibeg. He carried him to Perth, but the Sheriff-substitute did not commit him, because the blanket was not a tartan. On his return he met another of the same kind; so, as he found it needless to carry him before a magistrate, he took the blanket-philibeg and cut it to pieces.” Another officer wrote two months later: “One of my men brought me a man to all appearance in a philibeg; but on close examination I found it to be a woman’s petticoat, which answers every end of that part of the Highland dress. I sent him to the Sheriff-substitute, who dismissed him.”[620]
Smollett, in his Humphry Clinker, pleads the cause of the dejected Highlanders, who had not only been deprived of their ancient garb, but, “what is a greater hardship still, are compelled to wear breeches, a restraint which they cannot bear with any degree of patience; indeed the majority wear them, not in the proper place, but on poles or long staves over their shoulders.”[621] In 1782 the Marquis of Graham brought in a bill to repeal this prohibitory Act. One of the English members asked that if it became law, the dress should still be prohibited in England. When six Highland soldiers had been quartered at a house in Hampshire, “the singularity of their dress,” he said, “so much attracted the eyes of the wife and daughters of the man of the house that he found it expedient to take a lodging for them at another place.”[622] A Lowland friend tells me that one day at church her grandfather turned two Highland officers out of his pew, as he thought their dress improper where there were ladies. This she learnt from her aunt who had been present. Old Malcolm Macleod, if he did not return altogether to the ancient dress, nevertheless broke the law. “He wore a pair of brogues; tartan hose which came up only near to his knees, and left them bare; a purple camblet kilt; a black waistcoat; a short green cloth coat bound with gold cord; a yellowish bushy wig; a large blue bonnet with a gold thread button.” Sir Walter Scott tells us that “to evade the law against the tartan dress, the Highlanders used to dye their variegated plaids and kilts into blue, green, or any single colour.”[623] Malcolm had done this with his kilt, but in his hose he asserted his independence. Yet so early as the beginning of last century, according to Martin, the Highland dress was fast dying out in Skye. “They now,” he writes, “generally use coat, waistcoat, and breeches, as elsewhere. Persons of distinction wear the garb in fashion in the south of Scotland.”[624]
