Part 17

Taking leave of these inoffensive, if wild-looking people, our travellers rode on, much refreshed by their repast. They had, as Johnson complained, “very little entertainment, as they travelled either for the eye or ear. There are, I fancy,” he adds, “no singing birds in the Highlands.” It is odd that he should have looked for singing-birds on the 1st of September. Had it been earlier in the summer he would have found melody enough. Nowhere have I heard the thrushes sing more sweetly than at Glenelg. Wesley, visiting Inverness on an early day of May, “heard abundance of birds welcoming the return of spring.”[609] If so late in the summer there was no music for the ear, the eye surely should have been something more than entertained, when in the evening light the first sight was caught of Loch Duich and the waters of the Atlantic, and the barrier of mountains which so nobly encloses them. Yet they are passed over in silence by both our travellers. So fine is the scenery here that I longed to make a stay in the comfortable inn at Shiel, near the head of the loch. [Sidenote: SHEEP-SHEARING IN SHIEL.] But we were forced to press on, having first witnessed, however, sheep-shearing on a large scale on a farm close by. In front of a storing-house for wool fifteen men were seated all hard at work with their shears, their dogs lying at their feet. They wore coloured jerseys in which the shades of blue and green were all the pleasanter to the eye because they were somewhat faded. Young lads were bringing up the sheep from the fold. The forelegs of each animal were tied, it was then lifted on to a narrow bank of turf which had been raised in front of each shepherd, thrown on its back, and in a moment the busy shears were at work. In the long summer day a quick hand could finish eighty, we were told. As soon as the fleece fell loose, an old woman came forward, folded it up tight, and carried it into the store-house; while a boy, dipping the branding-iron into boiling pitch, scored the side of each sheep with a deep black mark. From time to time the farmer went round with a bottle and a small glass, and gave each man a dram of pure whisky. Not far from here on the banks of the loch was an old house where it was said that Johnson made a halt. It is so pleasant a place, with its grove of trees and its garden of roses, and so kindly was I welcomed, that I would willingly believe the tradition. I could wish, however, that he and Boswell had not treated it with the same neglect as they did the view. Had their reception been as kind as mine they would certainly have expressed their gratitude. [Sidenote: MAM RATTAKIN.] It was here that I was told of the address which he made to the mountain at the foot of which the house stands, and up which he was now to climb, “Good-bye, Mam Rattakin, I hope never to see your face again.”[610] They did not reach it till late in the afternoon. Both Johnson and the horses were weary, and they had “a terrible steep to climb.” Going down was almost worse than going up, for his horse now and then stumbled beneath his great weight. On the edge of one of the precipices he was, he thought, in real danger. He grew fretful with fatigue, and was not comforted by the absurd attempt made by his guide to amuse him.

“Having heard him, in the forenoon, express a pastoral pleasure on seeing the goats browsing, just when the doctor was uttering his displeasure, the fellow cried, with a very Highland accent, ‘See, such pretty goats!’ Then he whistled _whu!_ and made them jump. Little did he conceive what Dr. Johnson was. Here now was a common ignorant Highland clown imagining that he could divert, as one does a child, _Dr. Samuel Johnson!_ The ludicrousness, absurdity, and extraordinary contrast between what the fellow fancied, and the reality, was truly comic.”

At the bottom of the mountain a dreary ride of six or seven long miles through a flat and uninteresting country still awaited them. They were too tired even for talk. Boswell urged on his horse so that some preparation might be made for the great man at the inn at Glenelg.

“He called me back,” he writes, “with a tremendous shout, and was really in a passion with me for leaving him. I told him my intentions, but he was not satisfied, and said, ‘Do you know, I should as soon have thought of picking a pocket, as doing so.’ BOSWELL. ‘I am diverted with you, Sir.’ JOHNSON. ‘Sir, I could never be diverted with incivility. Doing such a thing makes one lose confidence in him who has done it, as one cannot tell what he may do next.’”

Even after he had reached the inn his violence continued. “Sir,” he said, “had you gone on, I was thinking that I should have returned with you to Edinburgh, and then have parted from you, and never spoken to you more.” The next morning “he owned that he had spoken in passion; that he would not have done what he threatened; and that if he had, he should have been ten times worse than I; and he added, ‘Let’s think no more on’t.’” As we drove down the mountain on a summer afternoon the peacefulness of the pastoral scene, the sheep dotted about quietly nibbling the grass, with their lambs by their side, the hazy air on the hills, all seemed to contrast strangely with the violence of his passion. To an old man, however, tired with a long day’s ride over rough ways, and in want of his dinner, something must be forgiven. He is not the only tourist who, in his need of rest and food, has relieved his feelings by quarrelling with his companion.

[Sidenote: BERNERA BARRACKS.]

When they were not far from the end of their ride they passed the barracks at Bernera. “I looked at them wistfully,” writes Boswell; “as soldiers have always everything in the best order; but there was only a sergeant and a few men there.” Pennant, who had visited them a year earlier, describes them as “handsome and capacious, designed to hold two hundred men; at present occupied only by a corporal and six soldiers. The country lament this neglect. They are now quite sensible of the good effects of the military, by introducing peace and security; they fear lest the evil days should return, and the ancient thefts be renewed as soon as the banditti find this protection of the people removed.”[611] The banditti were the Highlanders of this district in general. Less than thirty years earlier “the whole country between Loch Ness and the sea to the west had been,” he says, “a den of thieves. The constant petition at grace of the old Highland chieftains was delivered with great fervour in these terms: ‘Lord, turn the world upside down, that Christians may make bread out of it.’”[612]

The country had to lament a loss of trade as well as of security. The cottagers who had been drawn together to supply the wants of the soldiers are described by Knox, a few years later, as being in the utmost poverty. The barracks had fallen into so ruinous a state, that it justified the report that the building of them had been “a notorious job.” Even the sergeant and his six soldiers had been removed. “I was entertained,” says Knox, “by the commanding officer and his whole garrison. The former was an old corporal, and the latter was the corporal’s wife: the entertainment snuff and whisky.”[613]

[Sidenote: THE INN AT GLENELG.]

When at length our travellers, “weary and disgusted,” reached Glenelg, “our humour,” writes Johnson, “was not much mended by our inn, which, though it was built of lime and slate, the Highlander’s description of a house which he thinks magnificent, had neither wine, bread, eggs, nor anything that we could eat or drink. When we were taken upstairs a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed where one of us was to lie. Boswell blustered, but nothing could be got. At last a gentleman in the neighbourhood, who heard of our arrival, sent us rum and white sugar. Boswell was now provided for in part, and the landlord prepared some mutton chops which we could not eat, and killed two hens, of which Boswell made his servant broil a limb, with what effect I know not. We had a lemon and a piece of bread, which supplied me with my supper.” Boswell’s account of the place is no less dismal. “There was no provender for our horses; so they were sent to grass with a man to watch them. A maid showed us upstairs into a room damp and dirty, with bare walls, a variety of bad smells, a coarse black greasy fir table, and forms of the same kind; and out of a wretched bed started a fellow from his sleep, like Edgar in _King Lear_, ‘Poor Tom’s a cold.’” Johnson slept in his clothes and great coat, on a bed of hay; “Boswell laid sheets upon his bed which he had brought from home, and reposed in linen like a gentleman.”

Here, again, was I struck by the contrast between the past and the present. Of the old inn, with all its magnificence of lime and slate, not even the site is known. In its place stands a roomy and comfortable hotel. It was on the 21st of June when we visited it, and we found it half-asleep and almost empty, for the season had not yet begun. At the most delightful time of the year, when the days were at their longest and no candles were burnt, there was scarcely a single stranger to enjoy the quiet and the beauty. There were woods and flowering shrubs, rhododendrons and the Portugal laurel, and close to the water’s edge the laburnum in full bloom. There were all the sights of peaceful country life—the cocks crowing, the sheep answering with their bleats their bleating lambs, the cows with their calves in the noonday heat seeking the shade of the tall and wide-spreading trees. The waves lapped gently on the shore, and in the distance, below the rocky coast of Skye, the waters were whitened by the countless sea-birds. We drove up a beautiful valley to the Pictish forts, and saw an eagle hovering high above us.

CORRICHATACHIN (SEPTEMBER 6-8; 25-28).

[Sidenote: LANDING ON SKYE.]

On the morning of Thursday, September 2, our travellers took boat at Glenelg, “and launched into one of the straits of the Atlantic Ocean.” Rowing along the Sound of Slate towards the south-west, they reached the shore of Armidale in Skye early in the afternoon. They had intended to visit in his castle the owner of half the island, Sir Alexander Macdonald. But, wrote Johnson, “he had come from his seat in the middle of the island to a small house on the shore, as we believe, that he might with less reproach entertain us meanly.” Boswell was so much disgusted with this chieftain’s parsimony, that he “meditated an escape from his house the very next day; but Dr. Johnson resolved that we should weather it out till Monday.” [Sidenote: CORRICHATACHIN.] When the day of escape at length came, they started on horseback in a north-westerly direction for Corrichatachin, a farm-house near Broadford,[614] belonging to Sir A. Macdonald, but tenanted by a Mackinnon, a clan to which all this district had formerly belonged. “Here they were entertained better than at the landlord’s;” here “they enjoyed the comfort of a table plentifully furnished, and here for the first time they had a specimen of the joyous social manners of the inhabitants of the Highlands.” Books, too, were not wanting, both Latin and English; among them was a copy of the abridgment of Johnson’s Dictionary. He might have said here, as four years later with some eagerness he said at Lord Scarsdale’s, when he discovered the same book in his lordship’s dressing-room, “Quæ regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?” Here, too, he wrote that Latin Ode to Mrs. Thrale, which so caught Sir Walter Scott’s imagination, that when he first set foot on Skye, it was the thing which first came into his thoughts. And here on their return after a lapse of nearly three weeks, Boswell got so tipsy and so piously penitent next day. He had not gone to bed till nearly five o’clock on a Sunday morning, by which time four bowls of punch had been finished.

“I awaked at noon,” he records, “with a severe headache. I was much vexed that I should have been guilty of such a riot, and afraid of a reproof from Dr. Johnson. I thought it very inconsistent with that conduct which I ought to maintain, while the companion of the _Rambler_. About one he came into my room, and accosted me, ‘What, drunk yet?’ His tone of voice was not that of severe upbraiding; so I was relieved a little. ‘Sir,’ said I, ‘they kept me up.’ He answered, ‘No, you kept them up, you drunken dog.’ This he said with good-humoured English pleasantry. Soon afterwards, Corrichatachin, Col, and other friends, assembled round my bed. Corri had a brandy-bottle and glass with him, and insisted I should take a dram. ‘Ay,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘fill him drunk again. Do it in the morning, that we may laugh at him all day. It is a poor thing for a fellow to get drunk at night, and sculk to bed, and let his friends have no sport.’ Finding him thus jocular, I became quite easy; and when I offered to get up, he very good-naturedly said, ‘You need be in no such hurry now.’ I took my host’s advice, and drank some brandy, which I found an effectual cure for my headache. When I rose, I went into Dr. Johnson’s room, and taking up Mrs. M’Kinnon’s Prayer-book, I opened it at the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, in the epistle for which I read, ‘And be not drunk with wine, wherein there is excess.’ Some would have taken this as a divine interposition.”

Before the afternoon was over, by the help of good cheer and good society, he felt himself comfortable enough, and his piety was drowned in philosophy.

“I then thought,” he says, “that my last night’s riot was no more than such a social excess as may happen without much moral blame; and recollected that some physicians maintained, that a fever produced by it was, upon the whole, good for health.”

The Highlanders were more seasoned drinkers than he was, for the following night they had another drinking-bout.

“They kept a smart lad lying on a table in the corner of the room, ready to spring up and bring the kettle whenever it was wanted. They continued drinking, and singing Erse songs, till near five in the morning, when they all came into my room, where some of them had beds. Unluckily for me, they found a bottle of punch in a corner, which they drank; and Corrichatachin went for another, which they also drank. They made many apologies for disturbing me. I told them, that, having been kept awake by their mirth, I had once thoughts of getting up and joining them again. Honest Corrichatachin said, ‘To have had you done so, I would have given a cow.’”

Johnson was better lodged than Boswell, for he had a room to himself at night, though in the day it was the place where the servants took their meals. Yet he was pleased with the kindness shown him, and discovered no deficiencies. “Our entertainment,” he wrote, “was not only hospitable but elegant.” The company he describes as being “more numerous and elegant than it could have been supposed easy to collect.” He gave as much pleasure as he received, and when he left, “the Scottish phrase of _honest man_, which is an expression of kindness and regard, was again and again applied to him.”

The house he describes as “very pleasantly situated between two brooks, with one of the highest hills of the island behind it.” Boswell with good reason remarks on the entire absence of a garden. “Corrichatachin,” he writes, “has not even a turnip, a carrot, or a cabbage.” Where these were wanting, there would be no roses clustering on the porch, no flower-beds before the door. This scene of hospitality and jovial riot is now a ruin. We walked to it from Broadford across a moorland, the curlews flying round us with their melancholy cry. The two brooks were shrunk with the long drought, and flowed in very quiet streams. Yet one of them, I was told, in a time of flood once broke into Mackinnon’s house. We crossed it on a bridge formed of two trees, with a long piece of iron wire for a railing. There we rested awhile, now looking down at the sunlight dancing in the shallows, and now gazing at the ruined farm and the mountain rising behind in steep crags of barren rock. Far up the valley to the west a flock of sheep was coming white from the shearing, bleating as they spread out along the hill-side. Another flock the dogs were gathering into what had been the yard of the old house. It had been solidly built, two stories high, about thirty-six feet long by fifteen broad in the inside measurements. On the outside, over the door, was carved:—

L. M. K. J. M. K. 1747.

Johnson’s host was Lachlan Mackinnon, and the initials are, I suppose, his and his wife’s. It was but a small place to hold the large and festive company that was gathered at the time of our traveller’s visit; but, as Boswell says, “it was partly done by separating man and wife, and putting a number of men in one room and of women in another.” As I looked up at the windows which still remain, though the floors have fallen in, I wondered which was the room which was Johnson’s chamber at night, and the ladies’ parlour by day, where Boswell sat among them writing his journal.

[Sidenote: 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.”

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. [Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: THE ROW TO RAASAY.]