SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE
& RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON
IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & CIE. PARIS.
McLEOD’S MAIDENS SKYE
THE SAIL TO TALISKER.
From Ulinish our travellers sailed up Loch Bracadale on their way to Talisker. “We had,” says Boswell, “good weather and a fine sail. The shore was varied with hills, and rocks, and corn-fields, and bushes, which are here dignified with the name of natural wood.” They landed at Ferneley, a farm-house about three miles from Talisker, whither they made their way over the hills, Johnson on horseback, the rest on foot. The weather, no doubt, had been too uncertain for them to venture into the open sea round the great headland at the entrance of the loch. Skirting the stern and rock-bound coast, a few miles’ sail would have brought them to Talisker Bay, within sight of Colonel Macleod’s house. Yet, had the wind risen, or had there been a swell from the Atlantic, they would have been forced to keep out to sea. Boswell describes “the prodigious force and noise with which the billows break on the shore.” “It is,” says Johnson, “a coast where no vessel lands but when it is driven by a tempest on the rocks.” Only two nights before his arrival two boats had been wrecked there in a storm. “The crews crept to Talisker almost lifeless with wet, cold, fatigue, and terror.” What could not be safely done near the end of September, might, we thought, be hazarded in June. As the day was fine and we had a good sea-boat, an old fisherman to manage it, our trusty gamekeeper to help in rowing, and an accomplished yachtsman in our artist, we boldly sailed forth into the Atlantic. We passed in sight of Macleod’s Maidens, beneath rocks such as Mr. Brett and Mr. Graham delight to paint. In one spot we were shown where, a few years before, a huge mass had come tumbling down. At the entrance to the Bay we passed through a narrow channel in the rocks with the waves foaming on each side. TALISKER BAY. Even our stout-hearted gamekeeper for a moment looked uneasy, but with a few strong strokes of the oars the worst was past, and we were out of the broken waters, and in full sight of the little bay with its beach of great black stones, its rugged and steep headlands, and its needle rocks, with one of the sunniest of valleys for its background. Johnson thought it “the place, beyond all he had seen, from which the gay and the jovial seem utterly excluded; and where the hermit might grow old in meditation without possibility of disturbance or interruption.” To us on that fine June day, with the haze lying on the hills, it was as if
“We came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.”
One sight, to which I had long looked forward, I missed. It was no longer “a land of streams.” There was no spot where
“The slender stream