educational establishments of the country that a turf-hut bears to a
stone-and-lime cottage. These schools are scattered thinly up and
down the Island, and the pupils are unable to attend steadily on
account of the distances they have to travel, and the minor
agricultural avocations in which they are at intervals engaged. The
schoolmaster is usually a man of no surpassing intelligence or
acquirement; he is wretchedly remunerated, and his educational aids
and appliances, such as books, maps, &c., are defective. But still a
turf-hut is better than no shelter, and a Skye school is better than
no school at all. The school, for instance, which we had just
visited, was an authentic light in the darkness. There boys and
girls were taught reading, writing, and ciphering--plain and homely
accomplishments it is true, but accomplishments that bear the keys of
all the doors that lead to wealth and knowledge. The boy or girl who
can read, write, and cast up accounts deftly, is not badly equipped
for the battle of life; and although the school which the Landlord
has established is plain and unostentatious in its forms and modes of
instruction, it at least, with tolerable success, teaches these. For
the uses made of them by the pupils in after life, the pupils are
themselves responsible.
_ORBOST AND DUNVEGAN._
Punctually at nine next morning there was a grating of wheels on the
gravel, and Malcolm and his dog-cart were at the door. After a
little delay I took my place on the vehicle and we drove off.
Malcolm was a thick-set, good-humoured, red haired and whiskered
little fellow, who could be silent for half a day if needed, but who
could speak, and speak to the point, too, when required. When
driving, and especially when the chestnut mare exhibited any
diminution of speed, he kept up a running fire of ejaculations. "Go
on," he would say, as he shook the reins, for the whip he mercifully
spared, "what are you thinking about?" "Hoots! chit, chit, chit! I'm
ashamed of you!" "Now then. Hoots!" and these reproaches seemed to
touch the mare's heart, for at every ejaculation she made a dash
forward as if the whip had touched her.
[Sidenote: View from the dog-cart]
On the way from Grishornish to Dunvegan, about a couple of miles from
the latter place, a road branches off to the right and runs away
downward through the heathery waste; and about forty yards onward you
come to a bridge spanning a gully, and into this gully three streams
leap and become one, and then the sole stream flows also to the right
with shallow fall and brawling rapid, the companion of the descending
road. The road up to the bridge is steep, but it is steeper beyond,
and at the bridge Malcolm jumped down and walked alongside with the
reins in his hands. In the slow progression your eye naturally
follows the road and the stream; and beyond the flank of a hill
sloping gradually down to the purple gloom of undulating moorland,
you catch a glimpse of a bit of blue sea, some white broken cliffs
that drop down into it; and, leaning on these cliffs, a great green
sunny strath, with a white dot of a house upon it. The glimpse of
sea, and white cliffs, and stretch of sunny greenness is pleasant;
the hill, which you have yet to climb, keeps the sun from you, and
all around are low heathery eminences. You stare at the far-off
sunlit greenness, and having satisfied yourself therewith, begin to
examine the ground above and on either side of the bridge, and find
it possessed of much pastoral richness and variety. The main portion
is covered with heather, but near you there are clumps of ferns, and
further back are soft banks and platforms of verdure on which kine
might browse and ruminate, and which only require the gilding of
sunshine to make them beautiful. "What bridge is this?" I asked of
Malcolm, who was still trudging alongside with the reins in his hand.
"The Fairy Bridge"--and then I was told that the fairy sits at sunset
on the green knolls and platforms of pasture chirming and singing
songs to the cows; and that when a traveller crosses the bridge, and
toils up the hill, she is sure to accompany him. As this was our own
course, I asked, "Is the fairy often seen now?" "Not often. It's
the old people who know about her. The shepherds sometimes hear her
singing when they are coming down the hill; and years ago, a pedlar
was found lying across the road up there dead; and it was thought
that the fairy had walked along with him. But, indeed, I never saw
or heard her myself--only that is what the old people say." And so
in a modern dog-cart you are slowly passing through one of the
haunted places in Skye!
[Sidenote: The spoiling of the dikes.]
I fancy Malcolm must have seen that this kind of talk interested me.
"Did you ever hear, sir, about the Battle of the Spoiling of the
Dikes down at Trompon Kirk, yonder?" and he pointed with his whip to
the yellow-green strath which broke down in cliffs to the sea.
I answered that I never had, and Malcolm's narrative flowed on at
once.
"You see, sir, there was a feud between the Macdonalds of the
Mainland and the Macleods of Trotternish; and one Sunday, when the
Macleods were in church, the Macdonalds came at full of tide, unknown
to any one, and fastened their boats to the arched rocks on the
shore--for it's a strange coast down there, full of caves and natural
bridges and arches. Well, after they had fastened their boats, they
surrounded the church, secured the door, and set it on fire. Every
one was burned that Sunday except one woman, who squeezed herself
through a window--it was so narrow that she left one of her breasts
behind her--and escaped carrying the news. She raised the country
with her crying and the sight of her bloody clothes. The
people--although it was Sunday--rose, men and women, and came down to
the burning church, and there the battle began. The men of Macleod's
country fought, and the women picked up the blunted arrows, sharpened
them on the stones, and then gave them to the men. The Macdonalds
were beaten at last, and made for their boats. But by this time it
was ebb of tide; and what did they see but the boats in which they
had come, and which they had fastened to the rocky arches, hanging in
the air! Like an otter, when its retreat to the sea is cut off, the
Macdonalds turned on the men of Macleod's country and fought till the
last of them fell, and in the sheughs of the sand their blood was
running down red into the sea. At that time the tide came further in
than it does now, and the people had built a turf dike to keep it
back from their crops. Then they took the bodies of the Macdonalds
and laid them down side by side at the foot of the dike, and tumbled
it over on the top of them. That was the way they were buried. And
after they had tumbled the dike they were vexed, for they minded then
that the sea might come in and destroy their crops. That's the
reason that the battle is called the Battle of the Spoiled Dikes."
"The men of Macleod's country would regret the spoiling of the dikes,
as Bruce the battle-axe with which, on the evening before
Bannockburn, and in the seeing of both armies, he cracked the skull
of the English knight who came charging down upon him."
[Sidenote: The Sciur of Eig.]
Undiverted by my remark, Malcolm went on, "Maybe, sir, you have seen
the Sciur of Eig as you came past in the steamer?"
"Yes, and I know the story. The Macdonalds were cooped up in a cave,
and the Macleods ranged over the island and could find no trace of
them. They then in high dudgeon returned to their boats, meaning to
depart next morning. There was a heavy fall of snow during the
night, was there not? and just when the Macleods were about to sail,
the figure of a man, who had come out to see if the invaders were
gone, was discerned on the top of the Sciur, against the sky line.
The Macleods returned, and by the foot-prints in the snow they
tracked the man to his hiding-place. They then heaped up heath and
what timber they could procure, at the mouth of the cave, applied
fire, and suffocated all who had therein taken shelter. Is that not
it?"
"The Macdonalds first burned the church at Trompon down there. The
bones of the Macdonalds are lying in the cave to this day, they say.
I should like to see them."
"But don't you think it was a dreadful revenge? Eig was one of the
safe places of the Macdonalds; and the people in the cave were
chiefly old men, women, and children. Don't you think it was a very
barbarous act, Malcolm?"
"I don't know," said Malcolm; "I am a Macleod myself."
[Sidenote: Macleod's Tables.]
By the time I had heard the story of Lady Grange, who sleeps in the
Trompon churchyard, we had toiled pretty well up the steep ascent.
On our way we heard no fairy singing to the kine, nor did any
unearthly figure accompany us. Perhaps the witchery of the setting
sun was needed. By the time we reached the top of the hill the
pyramidical forms of Macleod's Tables were distinctly visible, and
then Malcolm took his seat beside me in the dog-cart.
Macleod's Tables, two hills as high as Arthur's Seat, flat at the top
as any dining-table in the country--from which peculiar conformation
indeed they draw their names--and covered deep into spring by a
table-cloth of snow; Macleod's Maidens, three spires of rock rising
sheer out of the sea, shaped like women, around whose feet the foamy
wreaths are continually forming, fleeting, and disappearing--what
magic in the names of rocky spire and flat-topped hill to him who
bears the name of Macleod, and who can call them his own! What is
modern wealth--association-less, without poetry, melting like snow in
the hot hand of a spendthrift--compared to that old inheritance of
land, which is patent to the eye, which bears your name, around which
legends gather,--all vital to you as your great-grandmother's blue
eyes and fair hair; as your great-grandfather's hot temper and the
corrugation of his forehead when he frowned! These bold landmarks of
family possession must be regarded with peculiar interest by the
family. They make the white sheet on which you--a shadow of fifty
years or thereby--are projected by the camera obscura of fate. The
Tables and the Maidens remain for ever bearing your name, while
you--the individual Macleod--are as transitory as the mist wreath of
the morning which melts on the one, or the momentary shape of
wind-blown foam which perishes on the base of the other. The value
of these things is spiritual, and cannot be affected by the click of
the auctioneer's hammer, or the running of the hour-glass sand on the
lawyer's table after the title-deeds have been read and the bids are
being made. Wealth is mighty, but it can no more buy these things
than it can buy love, or reverence, or piety. Jones may buy the
Tables and the Maidens, but they do not own him; he is for ever an
alien: they wear the ancient name, they dream the ancient dream.
When poverty has stripped your livery from all your servants, they
remain faithful. When an Airlie is about to die, with tuck of drum,
they say, a ghostly soldier marches round the castle. Rothschild,
with all his millions, could not buy that drummer's services. What
is the use of buying an estate to-day? It is never wholly yours; the
old owner holds part possession with you. It is like marrying a
widow; you hold her heart, but you hold it in partnership with the
dead. I should rather be the plainest English yeoman whose family
has been in possession of a farm since the Heptarchy than be the
richest banker in Europe. The majority of men are like Arabs, their
tents are pitched here to-night and struck to-morrow. Those families
only who have held lands for centuries can claim an abiding home. In
such families there is a noble sense of continuity, of the unbroken
onflowing of life. The pictures and the furniture speak of
forefather and foremother. Your ancestor's name is on your books,
and you see the pencil marks which he has placed against the passages
that pleased him. The necklace your daughter wears heaved on the
breast of the ancestress from whom she draws her smile and her eyes.
The rookery that caws to-night in the sober sunset cawed in the ears
of the representative of your house some half-dozen generations
back--the very same in every respect, 'tis the individual rooks only
that have changed. The full-foliaged murmur of the woods shape your
name, and yours only. As for these Macleods--
[Sidenote: The house at Orbost.]
"That's Orbost, sir, the house under the hill," said Malcolm,
pointing with his whip, and obviously tired of the prolonged silence,
"and yonder on the left are the Cuchullins. The sea is down there,
but you cannot see it from this. We'll be there in half an hour,"
and exactly in half an hour, with Macleod's Tables behind us, we
passed the garden and the offices, and alighted on the daisied sward
before the house.
After I had wandered about for an hour I made up my mind that, had I
the choice, I should rather live at Orbost than at any other house in
Skye. And yet, at Orbost, the house itself is the only thing that
can reasonably be objected to. In the first place, it is one of
those elegant expressionless houses in the Italian style with which
one is familiar in the suburban districts of large cities, and as
such it is quite out of keeping with the scenery and the spiritual
atmosphere of the island. It is too modern, and villa like. It is
as innocent of a legend as Pall Mall. It does not believe in ghost
stories. It has a dandified and sceptical look; and as it has not
taken to the island, the island has not taken to it. Around it trees
have not grown well; they are mere stunted trunks, bare, hoary,
wind-writhen. There is not a lichen or discoloration on its
smoothly-chiselled walls; not a single chimney or gable has been
shrouded with affectionate ivy. It looks like a house which has
"cut" the locality, and which the locality has "cut" in return. In
the second place, the house is stupidly situated. It turns a cold
shoulder on the grand broken coast; on the ten miles of sparkling sea
on which the sun is showering millions of silver coins, ever a new
shower as the last one disappears; on Rum, with a veil of haze on its
highest peak; on the lyrical Cuchullins--for although of the rigidest
granite, they always give one the idea of passion and tumult; on the
wild headlands of Bracadale, fading one after another, dimmer and
dimmer, into distance;--on all this the house turns a cold shoulder,
and on a meadow on which some dozen colts are feeding, and on a low
strip of moory hill beyond, from which the cotters draw their peats,
it stares intently with all its doors and windows. Right about face.
Attention! That done, the most fastidious could object to nothing at
Orbost, on the point of beauty at least. The faces of the Skye
people, continually set like flints against assaults of wind and
rain, are all lined and puckered about the eyes; and in Skye houses
you naturally wish to see something of the same weather-beaten look.
Orbost, with its smooth front and unwinking windows, outrages the
fitness of things.
Of the interior no one can complain; for on entering you are at once
surrounded by a proper antiquity and venerableness. The dining-room
is large and somewhat insufficiently lighted, and on the walls hang
two of Raeburn's half-lengths--the possession of which are in
themselves vouchers of a family's respectability--and several
portraits of ladies with obsolete waists and head-dresses, and
military gentlemen in the uniform of last century. The furniture is
dark and massy; the mahogany drawing depth and colour from age and
usage; the carpet has been worn so bare that the pattern has become
nearly obliterated. The room was not tidy, I was pleased to see. A
small table placed near the window was covered with a litter of
papers; in one corner were guns and fishing-rods, and a
fishing-basket laid near them on the floor; and the round dusty
mirror above the mantelpiece--which had the curious faculty of
reducing your size, so that in its depth you saw yourself as it were
at a considerable distance--had spills of paper stuck between its
gilded frame and the wall. From these spills of paper I concluded
that the house was the abode of a bachelor who occasionally smoked
after dinner--which, indeed, was the case, only the master of the
house was from home at the time of my visit. In the drawing-room,
across the lobby, hooped ladies of Queen Anne's time might have sat
and drunk tea out of the tiniest china cups. The furniture was
elegant, but it was the elegance of an ancient beau. The draperies
were rich, but they had lost colour, like a spinster's cheek. In a
corner stood a buffet with specimens of cracked china. Curious
Indian ornaments, and a volume of Clarissa Harlowe, and another
volume of the Poetical Works of Mr Alexander Pope--the binding faded,
the paper dim--lay on the central table. Had the last reader left
them there? They reminded me of the lute--it may be seen at this day
in Pompeii--which the dancing girl flung down in an idle moment. In
a dusky corner a piano stood open, but the ivory keys had grown
yellow, and all richness of voice had been knocked out of them by the
fingerings of dead girls. I touched them, and heard the metallic
complaint of ill-usage, of old age, of utter loneliness and neglect.
I thought of Ossian, and the flight of the dark-brown years. It was
the first time they had spoken for long. The room, too, seemed to be
pervaded by a scent of withered rose leaves, but whether this odour
lived in the sense or the imagination, it would be useless to inquire.
[Sidenote: The garden at Orbost.]
Orbost lies pleasantly to the sun, and in the garden I could almost
fancy Malvolio walking cross-gartered--so trim it was, so sunnily
sedate, so formal, so ancient-looking. The shadow on the dial told
the age of the day, clipped box-wood ran along every walk. Trees,
crucified to the warm brick walls, stretched out long arms on which
fruit was ripening. The bee had stuck his head so deeply into a rose
that he could hardly get it out again, and so with the leaves--as a
millionaire with bank-notes--he impatiently buzzed and fidgeted. And
then you were not without sharp senses of contrast: out of the sunny
warmth and floral odours you lifted your eyes, and there were
Macleod's Tables rising in an atmosphere of fable; and up in the wind
above you, turning now and again its head in alert outlook, skimmed a
snow-white gull, weary--as tailors sometimes are with sitting--of
dancing on the surges of the sea.
Orbost stands high above the sea, and if you wish thoroughly to enjoy
yourself you must walk down the avenue to the stone seat placed on
the road which winds along the brow of the broken cliffs, and which,
by many a curve and bend, reaches the water level at about a quarter
of a mile's distance, where there is a boat-house, and boats lying
keel uppermost or sideways, and a stretch of yellow sand on which the
tide is flowing, creamy line after creamy line. From where you sit
the ground breaks down first in a wall of cliff, then in huge
boulders as big as churches, thereafter in bushy broken ground with
huts perched in the coziest places, each hut swathed in the loveliest
films of blue smoke; and all through this broken ground there are
narrow winding paths along which a cow is always being gingerly
driven, or a wild Indian-looking girl is bringing water from some
cool spring beneath. Here you can quietly enjoy the expanse of
dazzling sea, a single sail breaking the restless scintillations; far
Rum asleep on the silver floor; and, caught at a curious angle, the
Cuchullin hills--reminding you of some stranded iceberg, splintered,
riven, many-ridged, which the sun in all his centuries has been
unable to melt. In the present light they have a curiously hoary
look, and you can notice that in the higher corries there are long
streaks of snow. [Sidenote: The glen at Orbost.] On the right,
beyond the boat-house, a great hill, dappled with brown and olive
like a seal's back, and traversed here and there by rocky terraces,
breaks in precipices down to the sea line; and between it and the
hill on which you are sitting, and which slopes upward behind, you
see the beginning of a deep glen, in its softness and greenness
suggesting images of pastoral peace, the bringing home of rich pails
by milkmaids, the lowing of cattle in sober ruddy sunsets. "What
glen is that, Malcolm?" "Oh, sir, it just belongs to the farm." "Is
there a house in it?" "No, but there's the ruins of a dozen."
"How's that?" "Ye see, the old Macleods liked to keep their cousins
and second cousins about them; and so Captain Macleod lived at the
mouth of the glen, and Major Macleod at the top of it, and Colonel
Macleod over the hill yonder. If the last trumpet had been blown at
the end of the French war, no one but a Macleod would have risen out
of the churchyard at Dunvegan. If you want to see a chief
now-a-days, you must go to London for him. Ay, sir, Dun Kenneth's
prophecy has come to pass--'In the days of Norman, son of the third
Norman, there will be a noise in the doors of the people, and wailing
in the house of the widow; and Macleod will not have so many
gentlemen of his name as will row a five-oared boat around the
Maidens!' The prophecy has come to pass, and the Tables are no
longer Macleod's--at least one of them is not."
After wandering about Orbost we resumed our seats in the dog-cart,
and drove to Dunvegan Castle.
As we drew near Dunvegan we came down on one of those sinuous
sea-lochs which--hardly broader than a river--flow far inland, and
carry mysteriousness of sight and sound, the gliding sail, the
sea-bird beating high against the wind, to the door of the shepherd,
who is half a sailor among his bleating flocks. Across the sea, and
almost within hail of your voice, a farm and outhouses looked
embattled against the sky. Along the shore, as we drove, were boats
and nets, and here and there little clumps and knots of houses.
People were moving about on the roads intent on business. We passed
a church, a merchant's store, a post-office; we were plainly
approaching some village of importance; and on the right hand the
chestnuts, larches, and ashes which filled every hollow, and covered
every rolling slope, gave sufficient indication that we were
approaching the castle.
[Sidenote: The garden at Dunvegan.]
In the centre of these woods we turned up a narrow road to the right
along which ran a wall, and stopped at a narrow postern door. Here
Malcolm rang a bell--the modern convenience grating somewhat on my
preconceived notions of an approach to the old keep; if he had blown
a horn I daresay I should have felt better satisfied--and in due time
we were admitted by a trim damsel. The bell was bad, but the
brilliant garden into which we stepped was worse--soft level lawns, a
huge star of geraniums, surrounded at proper distances by half-moons
and crescents of calceolarias rimmed with lobelias. The garden was
circled by a large wall, against which fruit-trees were trained. In
thinking of Dunvegan my mind had unconsciously become filled with
desolate and Ossianic images, piled and hoary rocks, the thistle
waving its beard in the wind, flakes of sea spray flying over
all--and behold I rang a bell as if I were in Regent Street, and by a
neat damsel was admitted into a garden that would have done no
discredit to Kensington! After passing through the garden we entered
upon a space of wild woodland, containing some fine timber, and
romance began to revive. Malcolm then led me to an outhouse, and
pointed out a carved stone above the doorway, on which were quartered
the arms of the Macleods and Macdonalds. "Look there," said he,
"Macleod has built the stone into his barn which should have been
above his fire-place in his dining-room."
"I see the bull's head of Macleod and the galley of Macdonald--were
the families in any way connected?"
"Oftener by a bloody dirk than by a gold marriage ring. But with all
their quarrellings they intermarried more than once. Dunvegan was
originally a stronghold of the Macdonald."
"Indeed! and how did the Macleods get possession?"
[Sidenote: The sinking of the barge.]