[Sidenote: DR. JOHNSON’S CUPS OF TEA.]
On the morning of Tuesday, September 21, our travellers took advantage
of a break in the stormy weather to continue their journey to Ulinish,
a farm-house on Loch Bracadale, occupied by “a plain honest gentleman,”
the Sheriff-substitute of the island. Here they passed the night, and
here, if we may trust report, Johnson’s powers as a drinker of tea
were exerted to their utmost pitch. “Mrs. Macleod of Ulinish,” writes
Knox, “has not forgotten the quantity of tea which she filled out to
Dr. Johnson, amounting to twenty-two dishes.”[660] Surely for this
outrageous statement some of those excuses are needed “by which,”
according to Boswell, “the exaggeration of Highland narratives is
palliated.” From an old tower near the house a fine view was had of the
Cuillin, or Cuchullin Hills, “a prodigious range of mountains, capped
with rocky pinnacles in a strange variety of shapes,” which with good
reason reminded Boswell of the mountains he had seen near Corte in
Corsica.
[Illustration: THE CUCHUILLIN HILLS FROM THE CAVE ON WIA ISLAND SKYE
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON.
IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & C^{IE.} PARIS.]
[Sidenote: A GREAT CAVE.]
On the afternoon of the following day “an interval of calm sunshine,”
writes Johnson, “courted us out to see a cave on the shore famous for
its echo. When we went into the boat one of our companions was asked
in Erse by the boatmen who they were that came with him. He gave us
characters, I suppose, to our advantage, and was asked in the spirit
of the Highlands whether I could recite a long series of ancestors.
The boatmen said, as I perceived afterwards, that they heard the cry
of an English ghost. This, Boswell says, disturbed him. We came to the
cave, and clambering up the rocks came to an arch open at one end, one
hundred and eighty feet long, thirty broad in the broadest part, and
about thirty feet high. There was no echo; such is the fidelity of
reports; but I saw what I had never seen before, mussels and whelks in
their natural state. There was another arch in the rock open at both
ends.” This cave was not on the shore of Skye, as Johnson’s account
seems to imply, but in the little island of Wia. From Boswell we learn
that it was to an island they were taken. We were fortunate enough on
our visit to this wild part of the coast to have as our guide one of
Macleod’s gamekeepers. “A man,” to borrow from Johnson the praise which
he bestowed on one of his guides, “of great liveliness and activity,
civil and ready-handed.”[661] We had passed the night in the lonely
little inn at Struan on the shore of an arm of Loch Bracadale, where
we had found decent, if homely, lodging. In a fisherman’s boat we
rowed down the loch, sometimes in mid-channel and sometimes skirting
the cliffs, which rose like a wall of rock to a great height above us.
We passed little islets, and the mouths of caverns which filled with
clouds of spray as the long rolling waves swept in from the Atlantic.
On the ledges of the rocks, hovering over our heads, swimming and
diving in the sea, were cormorants, puffins, oyster catchers, gulls,
curlews and guillemots. We had none of us looked upon a wilder scene.
When we reached our island we were pleased to find that the narrow
beach at which we were to land was guarded by a huge headland from the
swell of the sea. Whether we visited the cave which our travellers
saw I do not feel at all sure, for it does not correspond with their
description. My friend, the gamekeeper, was sure that it was the place,
and I was willing to advance my faith more than half-way to meet his
assertion. We scrambled up the steep beach, and then over rocks
covered with grass and ferns, between the sides of a narrow gorge. At
the top a still steeper path led downwards to a cave, at the bottom
of which we could see a glimmer of light. Scrambling upwards again,
we reached a place where we could hear the sea murmuring on the other
side. We afterwards climbed to the top of the cliff and sat down on
the ground which formed the roof of the cavern. It was covered with
heather and ferns, and patches of short grass; a pleasant breeze was
blowing, the sea birds were uttering their cries, far beneath us we
could hear the beating of the surge. Across the Loch on both sides, the
dark cliffs rose to a great height, and in the background stood the
mountains of Skye and of the mainland. Had the air been very clear, we
might have seen on the north-west the wooded hills of Dunvegan.
[Sidenote: PRINCE CHARLIE’S CAVES.]
Two or three days later, when I was giving two Highlanders an account
of this cavern, one of them asked with a humorous smile: “Did they not
tell you it was Prince Charlie’s Cave? He must, I am thinking, have
been sleeping everywhere.” His companion laughed and said: “They have
lately made a new one near an hotel which they have opened at ——.”
The innkeepers should surely show a little originality. Why should they
not advertise Dr. Johnson’s Cave, and show the tea-pot out of which
he drank his two-and-twenty cups of tea when he picnicked there? They
would do well also to discover the great cave in Skye which Martin
tells of. “It is supposed,” he writes, “to exceed a mile in length. The
natives told me that a piper who was over-curious went in with a design
to find out the length of it, and after he entered began to play on his
pipe, but never returned to give an account of his progress.”[662]
[Illustration: M^{c}LEOD’S MAIDENS SKYE
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON.
IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & C^{IE.} PARIS.]
[Sidenote: THE SAIL TO TALISKER.]
From Ulinish our travellers sailed up Loch Bracadale on their way to
Talisker. “We had,” says Boswell, “good weather and a fine sail. The
shore was varied with hills, and rocks, and corn-fields, and bushes,
which are here dignified with the name of natural _wood_.” They landed
at Ferneley, a farm-house about three miles from Talisker, whither
they made their way over the hills, Johnson on horseback, the rest
on foot. The weather, no doubt, had been too uncertain for them to
venture into the open sea round the great headland at the entrance of
the loch. Skirting the stern and rock-bound coast, a few miles’ sail
would have brought them to Talisker Bay, within sight of Colonel
Macleod’s house. Yet, had the wind risen, or had there been a swell
from the Atlantic, they would have been forced to keep out to sea.
Boswell describes “the prodigious force and noise with which the
billows break on the shore.” “It is,” says Johnson, “a coast where no
vessel lands but when it is driven by a tempest on the rocks.” Only two
nights before his arrival two boats had been wrecked there in a storm.
“The crews crept to Talisker almost lifeless with wet, cold, fatigue,
and terror.” What could not be safely done near the end of September,
might, we thought, be hazarded in June. As the day was fine and we had
a good sea-boat, an old fisherman to manage it, our trusty gamekeeper
to help in rowing, and an accomplished yachtsman in our artist, we
boldly sailed forth into the Atlantic. We passed in sight of Macleod’s
Maidens, beneath rocks such as Mr. Brett and Mr. Graham delight to
paint. In one spot we were shown where, a few years before, a huge mass
had come tumbling down. At the entrance to the Bay we passed through
a narrow channel in the rocks with the waves foaming on each side.
[Sidenote: TALISKER BAY.] Even our stout-hearted gamekeeper for a
moment looked uneasy, but with a few strong strokes of the oars the
worst was past, and we were out of the broken waters, and in full sight
of the little bay with its beach of great black stones, its rugged and
steep headlands, and its needle rocks, with one of the sunniest of
valleys for its background. Johnson thought it “the place, beyond all
he had seen, from which the gay and the jovial seem utterly excluded;
and where the hermit might grow old in meditation without possibility
of disturbance or interruption.” To us on that fine June day, with the
haze lying on the hills, it was as if
“We came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.”
One sight, to which I had long looked forward, I missed. It was no
longer “a land of streams.” There was no spot where
“The slender stream
Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.”
[Illustration: LANDING PLACE.]
Boswell had counted “fifteen different waterfalls near the house in the
space of about a quarter of a mile.” “They succeeded one another so
fast,” said Johnson, “that as one ceased to be heard another began.”
This one thing was wanting on that beautiful afternoon which we spent
in this delightful spot. The voice of the cascades was still. There
were no waterfalls streaming down the lofty hills. One indeed we found
by following the course of a river up a fine glen, but owing to the
long drought its roar had sunk into a murmur.
[Illustration: VIEWS AT TALISKER.]
[Sidenote: COLONEL MACLEOD OF TALISKER.]
Johnson’s host, Colonel Macleod, was the good kinsman who had
befriended the young Laird in the troubles which he encountered on his
succession to the property.
“He had,” writes Boswell, “been bred to physic, had a tincture
of scholarship in his conversation, which pleased Dr. Johnson,
and he had some very good books; and being a colonel in the
Dutch service, he and his lady, in consequence of having lived
abroad, had introduced the ease and politeness of the continent
into this rude region.”
Pennant, writing in the year 1774, thus describes these Scotch
regiments in the Dutch service:
“They were formed out of some independent companies sent over
either in the reign of Elizabeth or James VI. At present the
common men are but nominally national, for since the scarcity
of men occasioned by the late war, Holland is no longer
permitted to draw her recruits out of North Britain. But the
officers are all Scotch, who are obliged to take oaths to our
government, and to qualify in presence of our ambassador at the
Hague.”[663]
In the war which broke out between England and Holland in 1781, this
curious system, which had survived the great naval battles between the
two countries in the seventeenth century, at last came to an end. In
the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for December, 1782, we read, that on the
first of that month:
“The Scotch Brigade in the Dutch service renounced their
allegiance to their lawful Sovereign, and took a new oath of
fidelity to their High Mightinesses. They are for the future to
wear the Dutch uniform, and not to carry the arms of the enemy
any longer in their colours, nor to beat their march. They are
to receive the word of command in Dutch, and their officers are
to wear orange-coloured sashes, and the same sort of spontoons
as the officers of other Dutch regiments.”[664]
Colonel Macleod, if he was still living, lost, of course, his command.
At the time of our travellers’ visit he was on leave of absence,
which had been extended for some years, says Johnson, “in this time
of universal peace.” The knowledge which he had gained in Holland he
turned to good account in Skye. [Sidenote: THE GARDEN AT TALISKER.]
He both drained the land which lay at the foot of the mountains round
Talisker, and made a good garden. “He had been,” says Knox, “an
observer of Dutch improvements. He carried off in proper channels
the waters of two rivers which often deluged the bottom. He divided
the whole valley by deep and sometimes wide ditches into a number of
square fields and meadows. He now enjoys the fruits of his ingenuity
in the quantity of grain and hay raised thereon.” He had made it “the
seat of plenty, hospitality, and good nature.”[665] To few places in
our islands could Dutch art have been transplanted where it would find
nature more kindly. Johnson noticed the prosperous growth of the trees,
which, though they were not many years old, were already very high and
thick. Could he have seen them at the present day he would have owned
that even in the garden of an Oxford College there are few finer. The
soil is so good, we were told, “that things have only to be planted and
they grow.” So sheltered from all the cold winds is the position, and
so great is the warmth diffused by the beneficent Gulf Stream, that
the whole year round flowers live out of doors which anywhere but on
the southern coasts of Devonshire and Cornwall would be killed by the
frosts. The garden is delightfully old-fashioned, entirely free from
the dismal formality of ribbon-borders. Fruit trees, flowers, shrubs,
and vegetables mingle together. It lies open to the south-west, being
enclosed on the other sides with groves of trees. A lawn shaded by
a noble sycamore stretches up to the house. Boswell would have been
pleased to find that smooth turf now covers the court which in his
time was “most injudiciously paved with round blueish-grey pebbles,
upon which you walked as if upon cannon-balls driven into the ground.”
The house “in its snug corner” has been greatly enlarged, but the old
building still remains. Unfortunately no tradition has been preserved
of the room occupied by Johnson. Much as he admired this sequestered
spot—“a place where the imagination is more amused cannot easily be
found,” he said—nevertheless it was here that he quoted to Boswell the
lines of the song:
“Every island is a prison
Strongly guarded by the sea;
Kings and princes, for that reason,
Prisoners are as well as we.”
If Talisker is a prison, it is a goodly one. There are few places which
linger more pleasantly in my memory. To the beauty of the scenery and
the delightfulness of the weather was added the hospitality which we
received from our kind hostess, Mrs. Cameron. Time, alas, failed us
to climb “the very high rocky hill” at the back of the house, whence
Boswell had “a view of Barra, the Long Island, Bernera, the Loch of
Dunvegan, part of Rum, part of Raasay, and a vast deal of the Isle of
Skye.” According to Pennant, who had made the ascent the year before:
“It has in front a fine series of genuine basaltic columns,
resembling the Giant’s Causeway. The ruins of the columns at
the base made a grand appearance; they were the ruins of the
creation. This is the most northern basalt I am acquainted
with; the last of four, all running from south to north—the
Giant’s Causeway, Staffa, the rock Humbla, and Briis-mhawl. The
depth of ocean in all probability conceals the lost links of
this chain.”[666]
This mountain, which he calls Briis-mhawl, in Boswell’s narrative
appears as Prieshwell.
[Illustration: SLIGACHAN THE CUCHUILLIN HILLS SKYE
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON.
IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & C^{IE.} PARIS.]
[Sidenote: A RIDE ACROSS SKYE.]
At Talisker Johnson made the acquaintance of young Macleane of Col,
that amiable man whose death by drowning the following year he so much
lamented. Under his guidance, taking leave of their kind hosts, they
rode across the island to Sconser, on the coast opposite to Raasay.
Of this part of their journey they tell us next to nothing, though
they passed through the wildest scenery. For the first two or three
miles their path wound up a valley that is not unworthy of the most
delightful parts of Cumberland. It is altogether free from the utter
desolation which casts a gloom over so much of Skye. The sloping sides
of the hills are covered with short grass and fragrant herbs. All about
in summer time are dotted the sheep and lambs, answering each other
with their bleats. When we travelled along this way we passed a band of
five-and-twenty shearers who had been hard at work for many days. The
farm of Talisker keeps a winter stock of between five and six thousand
Cheviot sheep, and the clipping takes a long time. Dropping into the
valley on the other side of the hills the road leads beyond the head of
Loch Harport across the island to Sligachan, where amidst gloomy waste
now stands a comfortable hotel. In the little garden which surrounds
it is the only trace of cultivation to be anywhere seen. It would have
seemed impossible to add anything to the dreariness of the scenery;
nevertheless something has been added by the long line of gaunt
telegraph posts which stretches across the moor. Perhaps at this spot
stood the little hut where our travellers made a short halt, as they
watched an old woman grinding at the _quern_. With one hand she rapidly
turned round the uppermost of two mill-stones, while with the other she
poured in the corn through a hole pierced through it. A ride of a few
more miles brought the party, through the gloom of evening, to Sconser,
where they dined at the little inn.
[Illustration: ON THE ROAD TO SCONSER.]