Our Journey to the Hebrides

by Joseph Pennell; Elizabeth Robins Pennell

Almost all this Ross of Mull, on which we now were, belongs to the Duke of Argyll, the defender of Scotland as it was and as it is; and I think in all the Hebrides there is no place more desolate. We saw perhaps more signs of bitter poverty in Skye and in Barra. But in these islands the evicted have settled again upon the crofts of their friends or relations. Often it is because the many are thus forced to live upon land that can scarce support the few that all are so poor. But the Islander loves his home as he once loved his chief, and now hates his landlord, and he must be in extremity indeed before he will go from it. Knowing this, you feel the greatness of the misery in the Ross of Mull, from which the people have flown as if from a plague-stricken land. The greater part of it is silent and barren as the desert. We walked for miles, seeing no living things save a mere handful of sheep grazing on the hills, and the white sea-gulls perched on the low sea-weed covered rocks of Loch Scridain. And beyond the barren waste of land was the sea without a sail upon its waters, and the lonely islands, which we knew were no less desolate. The cruel climate of this far northern country has had little to do with the people's flight. Neither, indeed, has natural barrenness. The soil in the Highlands is not naturally barren, the Duke of Argyll himself has said. The few large farms by the way were good proof of what might be, even in the rocky Ross of Mull.

It seemed odd in the midst of the wilderness to meet two peddlers loaded with gay gilt frames. They thought it a "blowy" day, and so did a man who passed soon after in a dog-cart. But the women in clean white caps whom we met on the road could answer our questions only in streams of Gaelic.

We saw no one else but men and women getting in the harvest, or bending beneath great burdens of sea-weed as they toiled up the hill from the shores of the loch. There was a lonely graveyard by the way; but nowhere does death seem so great a blessing as we thought it must be here.

It was a long twelve miles, and the knapsacks were growing heavier with each day. But we were walking for our lunch; there were no inns on our road. For one reason or another, to me it was our hardest day's work. I think I must have starved had not J—— slung my knapsack on his already heavily laden shoulders. At the last,

BUNESSAN

came as a surprise. We were looking sadly at the endless line of road over the moors in front of us, when we turned a corner, and there was the little white town, with a pleasant inn, close to the waters of Loch Slach.

We had to wait—we were growing used to waiting—for our lunch; but at last when it came it seemed a banquet. We were not asked to eat either ham or eggs. Altogether, we were so well pleased that we brought the day's walk to an end. But it seemed that the maid who came to the door was less pleased with us. Our knapsacks, too large for comfort, were too small for respectability. Our clothes were weather-worn. The landlord bade her show us to a bedroom; but before we had finished our lunch she had locked every door in the house, carefully leaving the keys on the outer side, and, in her zeal, locking one man in. This, however, we did not learn until later, when English people staying in the inn told us what suspicious characters we were. They said she was stupid, which we had already found out for ourselves.

Bunessan is the show-place of the Ross of Mull; steamers occasionally land at a pier on the loch, two miles distant. Tourists come to the inn for the fishing. If they go no farther into the island, they probably carry away with them impressions of well-to-do people and benevolent landlords—the impressions, probably, the Duke of Argyll wishes to produce. After Kilpatrick and the other wretched groups of cottages we had passed in the morning, it did indeed seem happy and prosperous. It may be that we should have been less struck with it and its inn had it not been for the things we had already seen and experienced. Certainly, at dinner, dishes which we thought luxuries were found fault with by the rest of the company. But then they had their own opinion of Bunessan. They had taken it on trust, after hearing it praised; but no sooner had they come than they wished themselves away again. One suggested that friends should be induced to stay for a summer and educate the place, which might thus be made bearable for them in the future; but the others would not hear of it—one trial was quite enough. We were all very confidential about our plans, and took pleasure in mutually discouraging each other. J—— and I were foolish, they said, to go to Iona, where the cathedral was so insignificant that from the steamer they mistook it for the parish church. We, on our side, declared it worse than folly for them to go from Bunessan to Tobermory, the dreariest spot in all the dreariness of Mull. In the end we agreed that our coming to the island was a mistake, and that no one but Mr. Black could have a good word to say for it. Somehow, we made it seem—and it was a comfort to find some one else to abuse—as if he had brought us here under false pretences. But, indeed, whoever thinks to find Mull as it is described in "Macleod of Dare" cannot but be disappointed. Castle Dare must have been not very far from Bunessan, on the Ross of Mull. It was to this very inn Lady Macleod wished to send Gertrude White and her father; and when you have seen the home of the Macleods for yourself, you would have, like Mr. Black, no mercy for Sir Keith, but you would spare his sweetheart.

The fact is, Mr. Black's descriptions are misleading, though I must admit that even as we found fault with him, one of his strange things happened; for, far out beyond the loch and its purple hills we saw Staffa, and the sea below and the sky above it, turned to gold as the sun sank into the Atlantic. But then, as a rule, the things that happen in Mull are less strange than disagreeable. For one evening's loveliness, you must put up with hours of cold and damp discomfort. Of course, if you own a castle or a yacht, you can improve your point of view.

In the morning after this beautiful sunset, the wind blew the rain through the window in gusts over our toilet-table. Again no one called us. The morning hours of the Hebrides are even later than those of London, which we had hitherto supposed the latest in the working world. When we went down-stairs there were cups and saucers and plates on the breakfast-table, but nothing else; when we asked for our bill the maid said we should have it in a wee bittee, which we knew to mean long hours, and J——, as at Kinloch, took matters into his own hands.