THE HOLY ISLES
Our critical age, while it develops a new reverence for the past,
has worked havoc among time-honoured etymologies of place-names. A
letter stolen into _Hebudes_, the old form of Hebrides, makes unstable
base for derivation from a heathen goddess represented in Christian
mythology by St. Bridget or St. Bride, whose name turns up so often
in the Highlands. But from time immemorial these warring seas clashed
around island sanctuaries. Christianity here took over many shrines of
an older worship, and long sacred fires to burn on new altars, with
ministrants and vestal virgins bound by holier vows. In books like Mr.
Frazer’s _Golden Bough_ we learn what outworn superstitions still lurk
in disguise about the walls of manse and schoolhouse; how children
having the Shorter Catechism by heart may play all unsuspecting with
relics of heathendom; how their fathers, while banning the sign of the
cross, preserve in ugly obelisks the idols of pagan high places; and
how the festivals of forgotten Baals may still command maimed rites
among those who frown at Christmas or Good Friday as recalling Romish
superstition. Mourners who abhor a form of prayer at the grave will
take a funeral out of its way that it may follow the course of the sun
after ancient custom. There are sacred wells in the Highlands, long ago
baptized by some Christian saint, that have not wholly exhaled their
ancient virtue in this or that disorder, and, at least within a few
years back, had yet their votive offerings of pins or bits of rag. It
is a question whether the renowned Loch Maree gets its name from the
Virgin Mary, or from a certain saint, Mourie, _alias_ Malruba, whose
memory became so confounded with that of a heathen bugbear that as late
as Covenanting days the Presbytery was scandalised to find bulls still
sacrificed to this dubious evangelist.
Old books speak of the western islands as sacred, some of the smallest
among them appearing specially hallowed ground. How did successive
adorations come to be concentrated on the low, bare islet of Iona,
lying a mile off the farther point of that long promontory called the
Ross of Mull? From the dawn of legend it seems to wear a misty halo.
Its oldest name means _the_ island; in Gaelic it is the Isle of the
Druids; then its _alias_ Icolmkill embalms the memory of St. Columba,
who from this beacon-fire lit the Gospel all over the Highlands. What
task that was may be guessed by the picnic pilgrims whose passage from
Oban often turns out so rough that not all of them are at ease to
indulge Dr. Johnson’s elevated mood among such sacred ruins.
[Illustration: THE ISLANDS OF ORONSAY AND COLONSAY]
Palladius is said to have been the earliest missionary to Scotland.
He was closely followed by St. Ninian, whose light seems to have
smouldered on the savage shores of Galloway, till from his dying hand
St. Patrick in the fifth century carried it over to Ireland to blaze
up before half of Europe. From this school of piety and learning in
the next century came St. Columba, as penance for sin devoting himself
to the conversion of the wild Picts. The legend goes that he first
disembarked on Oronsay, but quitted it because thence he could still
catch sight of his beloved Ireland. Landing on Iona, he buried his boat
lest he should be tempted to return. But he had no sooner settled his
little band in rough wattled buildings than they were building other
coracle craft of wicker-work covered by skins, in which to launch forth
on the perilous Hebridean seas and up the long inlet of lake and glen
that opens the heart of the Highlands. In the second half of his busy
life he pushed repeated journeys to the far north, to the Orcades,
even, it is said, as far as Iceland, preaching through interpreters,
founding mission stations, and planting civilisation as well as faith
among barbarous people. With the double text _laborare_ and _orare_, he
taught his followers to make the best of that poor soil of Iona, from
which such pregnant seeds went forth on every wind. He is said to have
copied the Gospels three hundred times with his own hand.
This saint had his weaknesses, those of his creed and time. He would
allow no woman on Iona, nor even a cow, for “where there is a cow,
there is a woman; and where is a woman—” we know what monks thought
of Eve’s daughters. An adjacent islet was given up to a nest of nuns
who had fluttered towards this cold halo. So great waxed the fame of
Columba’s sanctity that pilgrims sought his retreat from all parts of
Western Christendom; and a sore pilgrimage that must have been that
ended at the point of Mull, where a miraculously strengthened hail
would bring over a boat from the island. Still the saint’s memory looms
through a cloud of miracle and fable, behind which we catch the human
proportions and qualities of a strong good man, who had such power of
winning hearts.
[Illustration: IONA CATHEDRAL]
It is possible that his part in the conversion of Scotland has been
exaggerated. In his lifetime St. Kentigern was at work among the
Cumbrian Britons, and the two evangelists are said to have met at
Glasgow. About the time of his death landed in Kent those Roman
missionaries who were long on such dissenting terms with the native
church that the Anglian saint Guthlac, after spending a night of
terror, beleaguered as he believed by Welsh Christians, gave thanks
in the morning to find how the assailants of his hermitage had been
no worse than devils. The Culdees, whom Presbyterians have claimed as
spiritual forefathers free from Popish error, are taken for disciples
of St. Columba, though some Roman writers go about to invest them
with Augustinian orthodoxy. Into heathen Northumbria also went his
missionaries, to encounter those of Rome over a great part of
England; and on the east coast the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne grew to be
another Iona.
While Scotland went on being dotted with the Culdee chapels and
monasteries, Iona became a Christian Mecca, as well as a centre of
education and missions. The bodies of princes and chiefs were brought
here to be buried in sacred ground, as Persians to-day undertake long
perilous pilgrimages to lay the bones of their dead beside those
of Hussein or of Imam Reeza, whose tombs, as Iona was, are still
sanctuaries of refuge from human justice or revenge. Sixty kings of
Scotland, Ireland, and Norway have been counted as buried in this
little isle, some of them perhaps since before Columba’s time. Duncan
and Macbeth are fabled to lie here side by side; yet when we come
to more authentic kings, this royal sepulchre seems no longer in
reverence, for even Alexander II., who died conveniently on the island
of Kerrera, was carried for burial all the way to Melrose.
There can be no more impressive sight than the burial-ground with its
sculptured stones and worn crosses that mark now the undistinguished
dust of men who at least “did not expect to be so soon forgotten.” By
the twelfth century Cluniac monks had taken the place of the original
garrison, more than once broken up by raids of Norse pirates. The
oldest building is St. Oran’s Chapel, believed to have been erected by
the pious Margaret, Malcolm Canmore’s English queen, who built also the
chapel in Edinburgh Castle. The Nunnery appears to be later work, and
the Cathedral to date from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century.
These memorials, hastily visited by drenched and sea-sick tourists,
make but fragments of the ecclesiastical state that once flourished
on Iona. Its monuments came to be rudely treated at the Reformation,
when all but two of 360 crosses are understood to have been thrown into
the sea by an iconoclastic Presbytery, unless some of them had been
transported to the mainland, as perhaps was that fine one preserved at
Campbeltown. The memorial chapels seen by Dean Munro at the end of that
century have since disappeared. The high altar of white marble still
stood at the time of Pennant’s visit. About 1830 vanished obscurely
the last of the black stones on which Highlanders of old swore their
most binding oaths, perhaps the oldest of all Iona’s relics, once as
sacred as the corner-stone of the Kaâba. So late as the English reign
of James I., at the prompting of that pacific king, two clans met here
to make a solemn covenant of peace after centuries of bloodshed. Now
the Cathedral, given up by the late Duke of Argyll to the Church of
Scotland, is being restored; and the choir has been already turned into
a place of Presbyterian worship for its small congregation. The marble
quarries of the island, one hears, are again to be exploited for the
adornment of other churches.
[Illustration: INTERIOR, IONA CATHEDRAL]
Nine miles to the north of Iona lies Staffa, whose columned caves can
hardly have escaped serving as pagan fanes—
Where, as to shame the temples decked
By skill of earthly architect,
Nature herself, it seemed, would raise
A minster to her Maker’s praise!
Like the kindred scene of the Giant’s Causeway, this island is
dedicated to the dim memory of Fingal, and has a reversible legend of
the tricks played by a comic Scottish on an Irish giant, whose parts
are exchanged in Paddy’s version of the story. Fingal’s Cave is entered
by tourists when the weather allows; but sometimes they cannot even
land, and in any case will be so pressed for time on their day-trip
from Oban that one may quote to them Miss Gordon Cumming’s more
leisurely taken view of a famous spectacle, which moved Scott’s friend
Erskine to tears:
A wondrous fane indeed, with the perfect symmetry of its countless
gigantic columns, and marvellous roof, formed (like the strange
pavement outside, and like the gallery on which we stand) of the
broken bases of hexagonal pillars, which fit together in faultless
honeycomb. The colouring, too, is a marvel of beauty, for this basalt
combines every tint of rarest marble that ever human skill brought
together to decorate the costliest temple. Warm red and brown and
richest maroon tones prevail, but the whole gleams with green and gold
lichen and seaweed, while here and there a mosaic of pure white lime
has filtered through, encrusting the pillars, which seem transformed
to snowy alabaster. Ever and anon, the innermost depths of the great
chancel gleam with a sudden flash, as the clear green wave comes
swelling in, overflowing the causeway of broken pillars that forms so
marvellous a pavement, and breaking in pure white foam, which shows
more dazzling against the gloom of that sombre background, and casting
trembling reflecting lights, which trickle and waver over every
hidden crevice of roof, or clustered columns. Quick as thunder-roar
follows the lightning-flash is that white gleam succeeded by a booming
sound, louder than the thunder itself, yet mellow as the sweetest note
of some huge organ, and wakening echoes deeper and more sonorous than
ever throbbed through dim cathedral aisles;—echoes which linger and
repeat themselves on every side, and are but hushed for one moment of
awful silence while the exquisite green water recedes, only to rush
back again with renewed force, re-awakening that thrillingly-solemn
chorus, which, in ages long gone, earned for this cave its old Gaelic
name of _Uaimh Bhinn_, “the melodious cavern.” Altogether it is a
scene of which no words can convey the smallest idea, and as we pass
suddenly from the glaring sunlight into that cool deep shade, and
look down into the wondrous depths of that world of clear crystalline
green, we cannot choose but believe that we have invaded the chosen
home of some pure spirit of the sea—some dainty Undine, whose low
musical notes we can almost think we discern, mingling with the voice
of the waves.
[Illustration: STAFFA]
Johnson did not take the trouble to turn aside to Staffa, which had
been brought to notice about that time by Sir Joseph Banks; and there
is reason for belief that the title “Fingal’s Cave” was imposed by this
savant. But indeed the Doctor had passed unwittingly near other marvels
of columnar basaltic formation, such as are found in many parts of
the Hebrides, sometimes on a more enormous scale, if not so regularly
finished as at Staffa. MacCulloch, who says much the same of Ulva,
declares that had Staffa remained unknown, the caverned promontory of
Duin, near Duntulm at the north-east corner of Skye, would have
won like celebrity. Then all round the eastern side of this headland
the same formation is continued, where Loch Staffin’s name proclaims
its relationship with that “Isle of Columns,” and the “Kilt Rock” takes
its title from a chequered display of many-coloured strata crossed by
lines of grass, bearing up monstrous plaits and stripes of stone, red,
brown, and yellow. The Shiant Isles between Skye and Lewis show another
grand columnar façade rising out of the sea. The island of Eigg abounds
in small ranges of basalt more or less exposed, all overshadowed by
the mile-long organ-face of its Scuir, that at one point towers to a
height of about 1300 feet, a more gigantic Giant’s Causeway piled up in
tiers to the clouds, till often its head seems to hang in air, like an
enchanted castle beleaguered at its base by glooms and mists, whirling
forth from the fearsome peaks of Rum.
Skye has as many memories of Columba as if here had been the home of a
saint whose name has been associated with more West Highland chapels
and caves than there are modern churches in that wide diocese of his.
Near Iona, Colonsay is named after him, as Oronsay from his companion
Oran, the ruins of a monastery still visible on the latter, and the
abbey on the former not yet forgotten. But one cannot enumerate all
the remains of ancient piety scattered over the Hebrides, in most
cases ill accessible to hasty curiosity. The chances of reaching and
in rough weather of landing on those islands give consideration how
cut off from the world they were before the days of Watt and Macadam,
and under what difficulties the sturdy apostles carried on their work.
Some out-of-the-way islands may still have to go without ordinances of
the Church for months or years together. Some islets are garrisoned
by a single family, or by the crew of a lighthouse, who in one case
were swept away together by the cruel Atlantic waves, an accident
proclaimed by the dying out of their lantern. There are parishes like
that of the “Small Isles,” where the minister has to be sailor as well
as divine; yet often his boat must turn back in sight of an expectant
congregation. On the mainland, too, inlets and swollen rivers may make
getting to church no matter of course. Norman Macleod tells of Morven,
where his grandfather’s stipend began at £40 a year, that it contained
2000 souls scattered over 130 square miles with a seaboard of 100
miles, and not a road in the parish. I have known cases where people
walked a dozen miles or so to church; I have had farther to go myself,
but that was to a “chapel,” attendance at which, one fears, made excuse
for a Sabbath drive. It is no wonder if Highlanders are found a little
behindhand in theological fashions, while zealous for the faith as they
understand it to have been once delivered to Presbyterian saints.
[Illustration: THE ISLAND OF EIGG]
Even in sight of Oban hotels one may still find them so near and yet
so far. I once spent some time on the green island of Lismore, “the
great garden,” that lies as one of the breakwaters of that smart
tourist-haven. Not so much of a garden now, this island was an
old seat of the Argyll Bishops. The _Book of the Dean of Lismore_
is a famous sixteenth-century collection of Gaelic poems. Later on,
the Presbyterian minister of the island had a grandson who became
Lord Macaulay. Forty years ago its only mansion preserved what had
been for a time the Catholic College now flourishing on the Dee, its
Refectory, fitly enough, being used as a dining-room, while the chapel
was desecrated by division into a smoking-room and a carpenter’s shop.
The then owner was a lady who without scandal may be called peculiar.
Though herself from the Lowlands, if I am not mistaken, her whim was
to play the Highland chieftainess of the good old time. The tenants
were encouraged to bring cases before her for decision, Donald’s hen
scratching in Duncan’s garden, or such like; and as the judgment, along
with a mild admonition to the offender, usually included a bottle of
whisky presented to each party, there was no lack of recourse to her
amateur jurisdiction. As became her state, she kept a barge in which
to go shopping at Oban, but the crew were always hard to get together,
still more so from the whisky shops of the town. One day, on the way
back, a midshipman of our party took upon himself to steer and give
orders in such a quarter-deck tone that the offended Highlanders
mutinied by lighting their pipes, folding their arms, and sullenly
letting us drift about a long afternoon at the will of the currents,
till either Celtic pride relented or some touch of Caledonian prudence
counselled keeping us all out of mischief, when the presuming youth had
humbled himself so far as to own that it takes local experience to
navigate those waters. The distance across in a straight line may be
some half-dozen miles, and the alternative way to Oban was by walking
or driving a score of miles and passing three arms of the sea.
[Illustration: THE ISLAND OF CANNA]
The only other house of anything like gentility on the island was
the minister’s, who took in dipsomaniacs to board, shut off from
temptation by rushing tides. My fellow-guests were, all but one, lads
of my own age, who in this social solitude had a grand time of it,
fishing, swimming, and crawling over rocks to stalk shy seals that
basked on the outer side of the island, cheerfully drenched and tanned
by turns, like ourselves. Our hostess we hardly saw, as one of her
peculiarities was being invisible all day, and haunting the house by
night. It may seem ungracious to tell such tales of a too hospitable
lady, dead many a day, but the fact is that I do not remember even
her name, which I never heard till she haled me, almost by force, to
her fortress, whence it was quite an adventure to get away. I had to
bribe an English servant, another remarkable “character,” who played
the part of masterful factotum in this domain. With his connivance
I was to slip out at 2 A.M., to be driven to the farther end of the
island, and there by boat to waylay a steamer on its zigzag course
from the Outer Isles. At the moment of escape, to my confusion, the
_châtelaine_ turned up, who did not try to detain me, but insisted on
being my companion, and caused such delay by her vagaries that I nearly
missed the steamer, then much offended the Highland boatmen by too
peremptorily bidding them haste, as if I were a chief of Ulva’s Isle
with Lord Ullin’s daughter on board instead of an eccentric widow lady.
That strange imprisonment on Lismore would have been a more irksome
experience later in life; yet I have often thought what a chance of
making “copy” was there lost to a writer of books.
What travel among those broken shores was before steamboats—the
boarding of which from pierless islands may still be adventurous—we
may guess from David Balfour’s troubled wanderings, from the delays
of Dr. Johnson’s difficult tour, and from the fact that when old Dr.
Macleod went to college at Glasgow the journey from Morven by land
and water took ten days. Inns also are still few and simple in such
poorly peopled wilds, where to guard the distressful Celt against a
besetting sin his lords have sometimes enacted a private prohibition
of liquor law. Nor has this stretch of the southern Hebrides much to
tempt the general tourist from his lines of more luxurious travel. Some
points well deserve an hotel and guide-book notice, such as the grand
quartzite masses of the Paps of Jura, commanding a view from Skye to
the Isle of Man; and the map of islets and inlets spread out, weather
permitting, below the triple-crested Ben More of Mull, whose little
white capital Tobermory has been compared to a damp Naples in respect
of looking its best from the sea. Professor Blackie, with his sanguine
optimism, proclaimed Mull “the most beautiful of the western isles”;
but that is not a generally received tenet. Its coast makes a fretwork
of rocky patterns that become monotonous, repeated in miniature upon
some of the adjacent islets and peninsulas. But striking scenes may
be too widely scattered among what at first sight seem featureless
stretches of sea, moor, and rock, that will not take every stranger’s
fancy in their common setting of mist and rain, out of which hasty
comers and goers at Oban often carry away the impression of nothing
more cheerful than its red-funnelled arks of escape from a hopeless
deluge.
[Illustration: TOBERMORY]
To have the coy charms of these landscapes picked out for us, we must
go to a fervent West Highland amateur like William Black, who himself,
in glorifying the prospects of Mull, is fain to hint how they may
strike another’s eye less winningly:
Where he, eager to please her and show her the beauties of the
Highlands, saw lovely white sands, and smiling plains of verdure, and
far views of the sunny sea, she only saw loneliness, and desolation,
and a constant threatening of death from the fierce Atlantic. Could
anything have been more beautiful? he said to himself—than this
magnificent scene that lay all around her, when they reached a far
point on the western shore, in face of them the wildly-rushing seas,
coming thundering on to the rocks, and springing so high into the air
that the snow-white foam showed black against the glare of the sky;
the nearer islands gleaming with a touch of brown on their sunward
side, the Dutchman’s Cap, with its long brim and conical centre, and
Lunga, also like a cap, but with a shorter brim and a high peak in
front becoming a trifle blue; then Coll and Tiree lying like a pale
stripe on the horizon; while far away the mountains of Rum and Skye
were faint and spectral in the haze of the sunlight. Then the
wild coast around them, with its splendid masses of granite, and its
spare grass a brown-green in the warm sun, and its bays of silver
sand, and its sea-birds whiter than the white clouds that came sailing
over the blue.... And could anything have been more magical than the
beauty of that evening, after the storm had altogether died away? The
red sunset sank behind the dark olive-green of the hills; a pale,
clear twilight took its place, and shone over those mystic ruins that
were the object of many a thought and many a pilgrimage in the far
past and forgotten years; and then the stars began to glimmer as the
distant shores and the sea grew dark; and then, still later on, a
wonderful radiance rose behind the low hills of Mull, and across the
waters of the Sound came a belt of quivering light as the white moon
sailed slowly up into the sky.
Montalembert, in his _Monks of the West_, is very positive as to the
austerity of scenes that, beheld by a wave-tossed scholar, might well
seem the antipodes of _La Belle France_:
Nothing less attractive, on first approach, than this harsh and stern
scenery. Its picturesque is without charm, and its grandeur without
grace. One sadly traverses an archipelago of desert naked islets,
like so many extinct volcanoes, scattered upon a dull leaden sea,
sometimes broken by rapid currents and whirling gulfs. Except on rare
days when the sun, that pale sun of the north, comes out to enliven
these coasts, one’s eye wanders over a vast surface of brackish water,
here and there streaked by whitening wave crests, or by a foamy line
of surf breaking now upon a long reef, then against huge cliffs
from which one hears afar the lugubrious roar. Through the fogs and
incessant rains of this rude climate, it is hard to catch the summits
of the mountain chains, whose steep, bare slopes fall down into these
cold waters, always kept astir by the shock of contrary currents and
of the squalls that burst from the lakes and narrow defiles inland.
Yet these Highland coasts, dull or forbidding as they may look from the
sea, warm into charmingness under loyal eyes like Norman Macleod’s,
that can never forget the wild play-place of a happy boyhood:
A castled promontory, a range of dark precipices supporting the
upland pastures, and streaked with white waterfalls, which are lost
in the copse at their base, form a picture not very imposing compared
with “what one sees everywhere.” A long ridge of hill rising some
two thousand feet above the sea, its brown sides, up to a certain
height, chequered with green stripes and patches of cultivation;
brown heather-thatched cottages, with white walls; here and there
a mansion, whose chimneys are seen above the trees which shelter
it—these are the chief features along its seaboard of many miles. But
how different is the whole scene when one lands! New beauties reveal
themselves, and every object seems to change its size, appearance, and
relative position. A rocky wall of wondrous beauty, the rampart of
the old upraised beach which girdles Scotland, runs along the shore;
the natural wild wood of ash, oak, and birch, with the hazel copse,
clothes the lower hills and shelters the herds of wandering cattle;
lonely sequestered bays are everywhere scooped out into beautiful
harbours; points and promontories seem to grow out of the land, and
huge dykes of whinstone fashion to themselves the most picturesque
outlines; clear streams everywhere hasten on to the sea; small glens,
perfect gems of beauty, open up entrances into deep dark pools, hemmed
in by steep banks hanging with ivy, honeysuckle, rowan-trees, and
ferns; while on the hillsides scattered cottages, small farms, and
shepherds’ huts, the signs of culture and industry, give life to the
whole scene.
Perhaps few of us can rightly learn to love West Highland scenery
who have not in youth grown familiar with every blush of heather,
every skin of copse or bracken, every brown rib bared amid the turf,
and all the moods of those stern features under changing lights and
shadows. One surpassing glory of this region is the evening skies
that may reward patient sufferers under rain, for which see William
Black’s cruises, _passim_. I have travelled in four continents without
elsewhere catching a more brilliant glow of summer sunset than on the
hills of Ardnamurchan or Appin, where short winter days will sometimes
die out in a rosy glory diffused all round the horizon. Waller
Paton’s Highland skyscapes were accused of being too Turneresque in
their gorgeous hues; but they make indeed no exaggeration of what a
Gaelic bard calls “the tartan of the sky.” The more lovely for their
uncertainty are the day-long or week-long spells of fine weather
that may come in the heart of a stormy summer, sometimes lasting for
a month or two while the plains of the south seem to draw away the
freakish mountain clouds. Then in late autumn the west has often a
truce of halcyon days brooding peacefully over horizons where Italian
blue, touched with native softness, melts into a glassy sea among the
openings of richly tinted hills. And at all times the clearing after
rain may produce effects which a city poet aptly compares to the
raising of the curtain on a pantomime transformation scene.
More often the face of this region shows overcast, in too true keeping
with its gloomy traditions. The Christianity spread among these
islanders seems long to have been but skin deep, where every ruin is
haunted by memories of cruelty and hatred from days when the cross
itself was dearest as a fiery summons to bloodshed. Between Lismore
and Mull rises the Lady’s Rock, on which Maclean of Duart let his
wife, Argyll’s daughter, be exposed to the mercy of the tide, by one
account for no worse crime than that of being a Campbell; but a more
elaborately romantic version brings in jealousy of a Spanish _señora_
which urged this dame to procure the historical blowing up of an Armada
ship, whose guns were recovered in the last century, and at our own day
fresh attempts are on foot to dredge out her long-buried treasures,
as to which has been suggested the knotty legal question whether they
should not be the property of the king of Spain, then at peace with
Scotland. The lady’s peril had a dramatic ending which made this an
oft-told tale: she was rescued by fishermen of her father’s clan, and
when the husband came to Inveraray clad in hypocritical woe, what
seemed her ghost confronted him at the funeral feast that proved his
own.
[Illustration: THE HILLS OF JURA]
It was the Macleans of Mull who slaughtered their MacIan guests at the
wedding feast of their chief’s daughter. On the same shore, Bloody Bay
is named from a fierce battle between father and son. On another side
of the island is shown the cliff over which a vindictively smarting
clansman leaped with the infant son of his chief, who had caused him
to be scourged. On Eigg may be visited the cave where the whole
population of Macdonalds were suffocated by the Macleods of Skye,
in revenge for their having set some Lotharios of the latter clan
adrift, bound and starving, in an open boat. Another atrocity of
the Macleods turned out less successful, when they sought to burn a
shipwrecked Macdonald crew in the barn that offered false hospitality;
but the intended victims got warning in time through one of those love
intrigues that so often laughed at hereditary feuds. Of different
castle dungeons the story is told how a prisoner here was fed on salt
beef, then left to agonising thirst, as many another captive has
starved to death, gnawing his own flesh in solitary despair. The annals
of more than one clan give it as exterminated in a day of slaughter,
but for posthumous sons borne by defenceless widows. Adamnan, the
ninth abbot after Columba, is credited with a humane law against women
being exposed to death in battle; but long after his time innocent
children were not spared by Highlander nor by Lowlander in the glut
of vengeance. The severance of creed at the Reformation seems to have
whetted those bloodthirsty lusts. The more famous massacre of Glencoe
is outdone by one of Covenanting times, when hundreds of Macdonald
prisoners, Cavalier partisans and “Amalekites,” were in cold blood
dashed from the rocks of Cantyre by Presbyterian soldiers of Argyll.
Tradition, be thou mute! Oblivion, throw
Thy veil, in mercy, o’er the records hung
Round strath and mountain, stamped by the ancient tongue
On rock and ruin darkening as we go—
Spots where a word, ghost-like, survives to show
What crimes from hate or desperate love have sprung;
From honour misconceived, or fancied wrong,
What feuds, not quenched, but fed by mutual woe.
[Illustration: BEN NEVIS]
So Wordsworth was moved to exclaim in the Sound of Mull; and we may
take his example to pass quickly over a catalogue of sickening deeds
that go to show how, with all their unenlightened devotion, the far
Highlands were half heathen up till the time of the Jacobite risings.
Then a vigorous enforcement of law was accompanied by a movement of
civilising evangelisation, that put the people on a higher level both
in Protestant and in Catholic districts. In some parts the Catholic
faith has never been ousted. In some its adherents have vanished only
by migration, as on the island of Canna, with its conspicuous tower
of a modern fane, erected as memorial of a Catholic peer. In some
cases the chief was able to lead over or to lead back his people in
a body, an easy process of conversion that does not speak much for
their principles. In the parish of the Small Isles, Pennant heard of
congregations “indifferently” attending the services of priest or
pastor, whichever happened to turn up. As a rule, the two communions
live more kindly together in the Highlands than do the Orangemen and
Papists of Ireland. In certain nooks the Episcopalianism of Stuart
days still obstinately survives, where in many cases the first
Presbyterian preachers had a rough induction, as that one who, on
his presenting himself a second time at Kinlochewe, was stripped naked,
tied to a tree, and left to be tortured by midges; or that Perthshire
presentee that could find no shelter but in the house of the charitable
divine whom he came to displace, who held his own for years after the
intruder had been marched, under escort of bagpipes and drawn swords,
to the bounds of the parish, and there dismissed unhurt only after
taking an oath never to return.
In most parts of the Highlands, however, the Kirk took its place with
more or less acceptation, the thinly-placed ministers helped by an
inferior order of “catechists” and by the schools promoted through
a Christian Knowledge Society. This church had the name of being on
closer terms with lairds, tacksmen, and factors than with the mass of
its flock. About a century ago began to pass over the Highlands waves
of evangelical revival, by which dissenting and other missionaries
stirred the souls of an excitable people. In the north especially great
influence was exerted by self-appointed censors of morals and doctrine
called the “Men,” of whom the ministers themselves often stood in
awe, and who, by their insistence on the sternest aspects of a stern
theology, preluded to that revolt against “moderate” religion that came
to a head in early Victorian days.
Since then the most active and most attractive body of faith in the
Highlands has been the Free Church of Scotland, whose ministers
succeeded to much of the loyalty lost by chiefs turned into unpopular
landlords. As the Free Church was the austerer wing of the Old Kirk,
so itself is lately split into two branches, of which the more rigid
has taken deeper root among the mountains and islands where the old
Calvinistic and Covenanting views, banished from city pulpits, now
find asylum. And when not even the more liberal section of their own
church seems pure in the sight of Gaelic zealots, it might be expected
that they would look on the Erastian Establishment as Moabite and
Philistine, albeit its nominal doctrines and ritual are the same
as their own. The struggle between these two has been marked by an
acrimony transferred from the former clan feuds, and in most cases the
Old Kirk went down like the Macdonalds before the Campbells. Where
means of grace are so hard to come by, the Free Church might be thought
to do well in garrisoning some neglected end of huge, wave-sundered
parishes; but often it has chosen rather to gather its congregations
beside the emptied parish church. In Iona, for instance, with its two
or three hundred inhabitants, there rose both an Established and a
Free Church in the face of the Cathedral, whose long-deserted stones
silently preached such a moving sermon for hearts open to “the still,
sad music of humanity.”
The communion, now so powerful in the Highlands, is accused by its
enemies of provoking more to “sound” faith than to good works, but
it appears to have raised the moral character of the clergy, perhaps
at the expense of their culture, while it too indiscriminately sets
its face against the joys of life fostered by divines like Norman
Macleod’s forebears. The Free Church has done its best to frown down
not only bogeys and fairies, but the bagpipes, fiddling, dancing, and
other alleviations of a hard lot, on which is imposed the burden of
the Mosaic or Babylonian Sabbath, so patiently taken up by Scotsmen in
exchange for the penances of the monkish dispensation. The Catholic
priests are more tolerant: in at least one island the bagpipe summons
the people to mass; but the orthodox Calvinist frowns at music unless
the pseudo-Biblical strains of the Jew’s harp, which, under the name
of the trump, has long been popular in the Highlands. Here lingers
the prejudice against instrumental music in church, not so long ago
strong over all Scotland, as was the childish objection to hymns, even
scriptural paraphrases, or any sacred songs but those believed to be
written by David. Thus the prevalent theology has become accomplice
with hard times and sad surroundings in deepening the cloud that lies
over Highlands and Islands.