Hic secura quies, hic et honestus amor.”
“Why should we further roam? here what all seek we gain,
Both peace without a care, and love without a stain.”
INCHKENNETH CHAPEL.
Sir Allan had chosen well his hermitage. The landing-place is on the south-eastern side of the island, in a little bay with a sandy beach, sheltered by a low point from the storms coming from the north-west, while the cold blasts from the north and the north-east are kept off by a low hill. The ground slopes up from the shore in pleasant meadow land. At the bottom of the slope, a little above the beach, Sir Allan, I conjecture, had his habitation. Here are the ruins of a farmhouse which was burnt down a few years ago. It is very likely that it occupied the same site as his cottages. THE CHAPEL ON INCHKENNETH. The road marked with cart-wheels, as on the main land, at the sight of which Dr. Johnson’s heart was cheered, I failed to discover. We wandered up the little path to where on the rising ground the ruined chapel stands within the hearing of the wave.
“We walked uncovered into the chapel,” writes Johnson, “and saw in the reverend ruin the effects of precipitate reformation. The floor is covered with ancient grave-stones, of which the inscriptions are not now legible. The altar is not yet quite demolished; beside it, on the right side, is a bas relief of the Virgin with her child, and an angel hovering over her. On the other side still stands a hand-bell, which, though it has no clapper, neither Presbyterian bigotry nor barbarian wantonness has yet taken away. The chapel is thirty-eight feet long and eighteen broad. Boswell, who is very pious, went into it at night to perform his devotions, but came back in haste for fear of spectres. Near the chapel is a fountain, to which the water, remarkably pure, is conveyed from a distant hill through pipes laid by the Romish clergy, which still perform the office of conveyance though they have never been repaired since Popery was suppressed.”
Our boatman, whom I had in vain questioned about Johnson’s host, led me up to the tomb of an old knight, clothed in armour, with a dog lying at his feet, and said, “That is Sir Allan.” The little fountain, in spite of the lapse of years and the long drought, still ran with a stream of pure water. Besides the chapel, there had once been on the island a seminary of priests. “Sir Allan,” writes Johnson, “had a mind to trace the foundations of a college, but neither I nor Mr. Boswell, who bends a keener eye on vacancy, were able to perceive them.” Where they failed we could not hope to succeed. We next explored, as they had done, a neighbouring islet.
SANDILAND.
“Even Inchkenneth,” says Johnson, “has a subordinate island, named Sandiland, I suppose in contempt, where we landed, and found a rock, with a surface of perhaps four acres, of which one is naked stone, another spread with sand and shells, some of which I picked up for their glossy beauty, and two covered with a little earth and grass, on which Sir Allan has a few sheep. I doubt not but when there was a college at Inchkenneth, there was a hermitage upon Sandiland.”