DUN CAN.
Of the ancient crosses which he mentions I fear but one is remaining. Martin, who looked upon them as pyramids to the deceased ladies of the family, found eight. Malcolm Macleod thought that they were “false sentinels—a common deception to make invaders imagine an island better guarded.” The learned M’Queen maintained that they “marked the boundaries of the sacred territory within which an asylum was to be had.” In this opinion Boswell concurred.
Delightful as the mansion at Raasay seemed to the travellers, with “the rough ocean and the rocky land, the beating billows and the howling storm without, while within was plenty and elegance, beauty and gaiety, the song and the dance,” yet it had seen another sight only seven-and-twenty years earlier. In the island the Young Pretender “in his distress was hidden for two nights, and the king’s troops burnt the whole country, and killed some of the cattle. You may guess,” continues Johnson, “at the opinions that prevail in this country; they are, however, content with fighting for their king; they do not drink for him. We had no foolish healths.” AN EARTHLY PARADISE. Pleased as our travellers were with their four days’ residence here, in the midst of storms and rain, how much would their pleasure have been increased could they have seen it as I saw it in the bright summer weather! No one who visited it then would have said with Johnson that “it has little that can detain a traveller, except the laird and his family.” It has almost everything that Nature can give in the delightfulness of scenery and situation.[635] Like Boswell, as I gazed upon it, I might “for a moment have doubted whether unhappiness had any place in Raasay;” but, like him, I might “soon have had the delusion dispelled,” by recalling Johnson’s lines:
“Yet hope not life from grief or danger free,
Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee.”
PORTREE HARBOUR.
[Portree and Kingsburgh (September 12-13).]
Much as Johnson had delighted in the patriarchal life at Raasay, yet after four days’ stay he became impatient to move. “There was,” writes Boswell, “so numerous a company, mostly young people, there was such a flow of familiar talk, so much noise, and so much singing and dancing, that little opportunity was left for his energetic conversation. He seemed sensible of this; for when I told him how happy they were at having him there, he said, ‘Yet we have not been able to entertain them much.’” The weather, which had been very wet and stormy, cleared up on the morning of September 12. “Though it was Sunday,” says Johnson, “we thought it proper to snatch the opportunity of a calm day.” THE ROW TO PORTREE. A row of some five or six miles brought them to Portree in Skye, a harbour whose name commemorated the visit of King James V. The busy little town on the top of the cliff, with its Court House, hotels, banks, and shops, which has grown up at the end of the land-locked harbour, did not then exist. Sir James Macdonald, “the Marcellus of Scotland,” as Boswell called him, had intended to build a village there, but by his untimely death the design had come to nothing. There seems to have been little more than the public-house at which the travellers dined. “It was,” Johnson believed, “the only one of the island.” He forgot, however, as Boswell pointed out to him when he read his narrative, another at Sconser, and a third at Dunvegan. “These,” Boswell adds, “are the only inns properly so called. There are many huts where whisky is sold.”[636] HIGHLAND VOLUNTEERS. On the evening which I spent at Portree, a company of Highland volunteers were going through their yearly inspection, in tartan plaids and kilts, with the bagpipes playing as only bagpipes can. Had it been as it was in the days of their forefathers, when twelve Highlanders and a bagpipe made a rebellion, there was ample provision made here for at least five or six. Each volunteer, in addition to his guilt as a rebel, both for the arms which he carried, and the garb which he wore, would have been liable to be sent off by summary process to serve as a common soldier. But happily we live in loyal days, and under milder laws. These bold citizen-soldiers ran but one risk, which no doubt was averted by a good-natured and sympathetic magistracy. To a fine of five shillings for being drunk and disorderly some of them certainly became exposed as the evening wore away. Let us hope that their excess was little more than an excess of loyalty in drinking the health of a Hanoverian queen.
