There is plenty of tidal depth and good overhead clearance at Clachan, where the builders had the local fishing craft in mind when they knit the arch together. It is a striking highway, drawing together on and across its ramparts the vivid traffic of the group of islands – squeaking and indomitable bikes; motorcycles, oddly assembled, and driven with dash; grocers’ vans, tourist buses, the mail coach, cows, cars, and lorries.
The quarries of roofing slates pit the landscapes, and all have wavered wildly in their fortunes. Easdale has the most fame and quality, and probably the most precarious history. At one time, nearly a century ago, a commune of workmen leased the quarries to work them as a co-operative enterprise, and failed to pay a dividend. Leasehold has varied to and fro, with the prospects never moving far enough back from the edge of the slump conditions which blight most endeavours in the west. A freak of wartime was the sudden appearance in Easdale of a high-grade light engineering factory.
We spent the morning in the luxury of indoors. Residence in hotels, whatever the weather, had to be a rare and diminishing treat, because of budget difficulties, and we could not afford to stay another night here, although the charges were modest enough. This morning was cruel with easterly rain and wind, which hammered even the sheltered little hotel garden. Here grew a fronded palm-tree, speaking again of the mildness of this western air, but in the high wind it was thrashing itself cruelly. Waiting for the tide, we drafted some newspaper material to be completed and sent from Oban, which we were determined to reach this time on the afternoon tide. The snug site of the hotel escaped the full blasts, and we could always hope that the day would lift with the tide.
There was no sign of this by the ebb, and we gave the returning tide half an hour to cover the bare slatey beds below the bridge. By that time the northward flow of the tide was trailing the seaweeds upstream, and it was time for us to go.
A portage, scrambling along the sharp edges of the slate packs which formed the stream bed, allowed us to rest the canoes aground below the bridge, and we got aboard there, waiting to float off. We had misjudged the time by 15 minutes. Prolonged slack water held back the rise, and we sat, scourged by grey rain, the least mobile boatmen Clachan had ever seen. Happily, the only spectator of our duck-like brooding was a solitary man with a horse and cart. He stopped on the mainland side of the road to inspect us, leaning his dripping cap into the rain, and peered for a time before splashing on.
Shortly we jarred forward an inch or two, stuck again, then lifted and ran smoothly off down the channel. One or two edged snags, wigged by seaweed but still sharp enough to pierce our hulls, held us up jolting, but the keel strips took the worst of the slashes. We were soon out of the river aspect of the sound, and into a sea bay from which the tidal rush, travelling all the way we had come yesterday, threw itself and us into the Firth of Lorne.
For a mile or two farther we had shelter from the mainland coast on our right, and the worst of the wind blew over our heads. A splendid group of islands which hold the delectable yacht anchorage of Puilldobhran grouped themselves in the drenching vista on our left. Seawards lay the biggest of them, Eileen Duin – the island of the fort – where I was able at a later time to bring in a yacht safely (after a navigator had become confused in the dusk) only because I knew the meaning of the Gaelic name and recognised its shape before night fell. On that day with the canoes, it had little shape at all, and the waves clawing its eastward side hinted at the weather which waited for us ahead. To our right the land now fell away into Loch Feochan, opening the door to a weight of wind. Ahead was a hazy four-mile stretch to the next shelter for our route, the Sound of Kerrera and the run in to Oban. It was bracing to recognise that on our left was the greatest open stretch of water we had so far sailed in, for if the day had been clear we should have seen limitlessly into the Atlantic, with the far corners of the great island of Mull as a mere milestone early on the way.
There was no occasion, however, for these satisfied reflections. Slanting right-handed into the heart of the wind, we set to the hardest two hours of our journey so far. For a spell of fully half that time we paddled only on the left hand, straining against the storm’s violent pushing of our bows out to sea. We travelled in a constant outward slew, whose only corrective was this incessant heaving inwards with the left paddle, and the right blades were never dipped. So we went across the mouth of Loch Feochan like exhausted crabs, the dead weight of the wind requiring that our effort was not so much paddling as a single-arm leverage, lifting the solid canoe like an awkward bundle rather than a boat to be sweetly propelled.
Nor did we at that moment realise how solid the canoes indeed were. We had no time to make the usual halts to bale out water which poured down our flanks and accumulated below, washing some inches deep about our thighs as we sat. Such baling was, in fact, becoming an unnecessary fad. From about this time onwards, water, unless in dangerous quantities, was baled only on account of cold, and not of wetness. And on this occasion we were by no means cold.
Rain, seawater, and sweat on the face make an uncanny blend which withdraw one gradually from the ordinary world. Not that the world is ordinary in the Firth of Lorne, and this day, as water curtains dropped and lifted patchily on all the scenery, it had the look of no known world. But there was relief coming in the tattered geography of the coast when the far point of Loch Feochan pushed at last between us and the worst of the gale.
From there we hung to the island all the way up Kerrera Sound, getting only the steady rain, and the wind in little spasms. We missed a clear sight of velvet Kerrera, with its fine little pasture valleys and shelters. It closes the bay of Oban, and is itself rich in famous harbours. In one of these assembled the Scots fleet of Alexander II when his expedition was fitting out against the Hebrides. Almost exactly 700 years later, in the same place, a fleet of Coastal Command Short Sunderlands would be assembling and operating over half the Atlantic, with the Sound of Kerrera as its war base. All the sea-kings and admirals who have had business in the western waters have known the four-mile length of Kerrera. They have their remains, too. The proud shell of Gylen Castle, built by the MacDougalls a century before Alexander, commands the Firth of Lorne southwards. Names in Gaelic and Norse remember this king and that.
Coming in towards Oban, we noted the end-of-season yachts moving uneasily at the Brandystone anchorage, and recalled that September would begin in five days. The main streets of Oban, now appearing, had an aspect which confirmed the date. Coming as we did in small boats from a desert of waters, Oban seemed to us a mighty and dripping city. We landed in the centre of it, at the stone boat-slip beside the station pier, drawing at once a cluster, and then a concourse, of bored citizens and holidaymakers glad of the diversion.
In our behaviour on arrival we fell away badly from the classic pattern outlined in the travel books. We ought to have jumped briskly ashore, run a cool eye over the natives, picked a few of the stronger ones to carry the canoes, and then shouldered a way through the jostling crowds towards the most expensive hotel.
An inability to finance such a sequence was only one of the reasons which forced a less impressive course. Not one of the spectators, to whom we granted on request several damp autographs, could have failed to outbid our total financial assets.
We stood for a moment, rain and salt water draining from the singlets and shorts which were our sole garments, and recollected that it would not be possible to pitch a tent on the esplanade of a thriving Highland town. Our first need was to change quickly, and, snatching our clothing bundles from the canoes, we strode towards the railway station, and the only free place of privacy we could think of. We were followed by the crowd, and although age and sex forced many of them to fall back at the entrance where a sign debarred all but ‘Gentlemen’, the younger males entered with us. In this oozy grotto we dried and were changing when the stationmaster came to rescue us with an invitation to use his own office. Here, before a fire, which we needed, we finished our dressing, and reconnoitr
ed the town, already so well known to us.
The first concern was to find housing for the canoes, and this we arranged in a boat-shed near the Northern Lights quay. We tried to persuade the owner to allow us to sleep there with the canoes, but this was too much, in a town devoted so fully to hotels and tourist houses. Paddling the boats round the bay we left them in this place, luckier than ourselves, with a roof over their heads, while we went uphill to the landward part of the town to look for a camping site. But we pitched no tent after all. We met casually in the street a friend of Seumas who owned a boarding house, and he played host to us for two warm-hearted days. We were able here to get a good deal of writing done in comfort, and make all ready for the next move.
A morning was spent in making much of the canoes, starting with a bitter discovery. We had been disappointed to find that our seeming fitness and dexterity was not producing an improving travel performance. The canoes felt even more sluggish at this stage than they had done in our infinitely clumsier hands at the outset many days before. During the previous day’s paddle from Clachan to Oban there had been times when they were so low in the broken water that it seemed we had to incorporate a downward thrust in our paddling to force the bows out of the water and enable them to meet and lift to the oncoming waves. As they lay in the boat-house at Oban, empty of our equipment, it was a strain for the two of us to lift even one of them. We unstranded the canoes at last and separated each into its three sections. The four end-points fell heavily to the ground – the buoyancy tanks, the sealed life-savers! – and would hardly be lifted. Each one was swilling half full of seawater, which jostled from end to end inside like a knell as the section was rocked. There had been a steady seepage where the composition fabric joined the timber bulwarks, and from each separate bow and stern point we poured the fill of two buckets of water. We did this with a great sense of elation also, as the traveller must when some heavy defect in his equipment is detected and simply remedied. So we learned a very simple principle of ship construction – perfection is keeping the water out; efficiency is keeping it from staying in. We bought several collapsible tubes of cement and fixed down our canvas again. Thereafter, every day or two, we took the canoe sections apart, prised a suitable bilge-hole where the fabric met the wooden framework, and emptied out the sample we carried of the waters safely passed. The flap was then gummed down again.
In any part of the Highlands, even in a well-poised little metropolis like Oban, such a running repair was bound to create interest, and also scepticism. This was especially marked in the case of Mr Duncan Mac-Dougall, who sold us the tubes of cement. As a thriving ship’s chandler, ironmonger, and general merchant, he was accustomed to a more orthodox process of boat maintenance. In such districts merchandising is something more than shop keeping. A store is near to the old style of trading post, and there was always, it seemed to me, a special adventure in the Oban shops. One of them had a slogan long before these sales devices were common, and it had often braced my boyhood newspaper reading – ‘everything from a trout fly to a steam yacht’. The claim seemed so much more dashing than ‘from a needle to an anchor’ that I had long looked forward to doing business in such an emporium. Here was my ambition fulfilled. We were personally attended by the proprietor, and for the most part treated almost as seamen, although our order (for patent gum to stick our boats together) was trifling, if not humiliating. He had been to have a look at the canoes, and quizzed us on our plans and route, saying levelly: ‘You’ll not go far. This is the last we’ll see of you!’ And again, pointing to the pillars of cold rain that moved and fell across the bay: ‘The weather’s broken for good. There’ll be no more summer now for your nonsense. It’s too late in the year!’ But this was said more as a gesture to the general opinion, and not from any original gloom. He had a good twinkle of benevolence for us in all our meetings, and on our way south in November, when the voyage was over, he greeted us with great heartiness and a play of mock relief.
We got away some fat packets by post to the newspapers. The whole of the West was thoroughly alert to our coming, as all our news messages, telling our progress from place to place, were being well recorded. Such adventure as we had found it expedient to describe had lost nothing in the sub-editing. The porpoises in Loch Fyne, and the perils of the Dorus Mor, were strenuously featured, and our unbowed heads were reproduced from the departure pictures in a style which could assist neither identity nor sympathy. At Oban, we found time to write some more purposive articles, holding a note of authority on our main theme – the condition of the West and its people.
Apart from this writing, and the shock repairs to the canoes, there was nothing to keep us here. In the summer Oban has the air always of a well-doing coastal resort, and certainly, at that time, the casual visitor could hardly have guessed at a hinterland of marginal farming and crofting threatened constantly by poverty and bedevilled by the booms and slumps which punched our food producers into a constant depression. Oban takes some pride in its west-endy label ‘The Charing Cross of the Highlands’, and has equipped itself for a career of tourism. There are splendid hotels – tashed a little in the war – and the taste and display of certain of the shops show forth a dignity capable of earning handsome rewards, if Scotland were to make a major industry of tourism. In such a setting, and encouraged by the eager demands of its visitors, Oban has developed some sense of pageantry, and might well allow this spirit to have its fling. The Oban Games, held in an arena whose grandstands are a ring of cliffs, are probably the best-staged event of the kind outside of Deeside. Oban is the sort of place which might well produce a voice to speak resoundingly for the West. There has been no sign of such an emergence. In a social sense, Oban’s best contribution to the adjacent Highlands is the virile sponsorship of its shinty teams. And, shinty being a winter game, the tourist rarely sees its effect.
The canoes were noticeably lighter, and biddable to our paddling, as we thrust them out of Oban Bay on the last Wednesday of August. For the past two days we had shared with the promenading holiday-makers on the seafront the beckoning spectacle of Mull, a short handful of miles over from the esplanade, and rearing a backdrop which cut off farther views of the Isles. This is the view of Mull which gave it its name, a Mull being a promontory; and certainly the bulk of bens jostling into Scotland at this coast has little appearance of an island. To the north of this mass the mainland district of Morven pressed south, leaving between itself and the huge island the narrow sea-channel of the Sound of Mull. Through here lay our route, first of all to Tobermory, and the other town-ships of Mull, and then westwards beyond Ardnamurchan Point to the Small Isles. Once out of Oban, we hoped to avoid setting foot again on the mainland for some weeks at least.
We could expect trouble at the entrance to the Sound, where the island of Lismore chokes the channel and presses the tides into disturbances. We had sailed through here in the Hebridean cargo steamers, and had watched them reel a point or two off their course in the kick of the tide stream. A straight passage from north of Kerrera Island would lead us past Duart into the open Sound of Mull. We readily advised ourselves against this venture. The worst part of the tide race sets up in the half-mile channel between Lismore Lighthouse and the Lady Rock, but the disturbance trails off well to the south of that gap, and we felt our arrival in Mull might be more comfortable if we were to give this spot a respectable offing. The day was breezy enough, but in gusts, and our plan was to canoe round the north of Kerrera and half-way down its west coast, making from there a straight dart over to Loch Don in Mull and then round into the Sound by the Duart promontory.
There was a blizzard of rain as we came into the shore of Kerrera, and we huddled against the limpets of a low rock, delaying as long as we could the cold trickles that searched our bodies. The first wetting of the day was always the worst, whether from seawater or rain, and we often found it more comfortable to be soaked in the surf while launching. These rain squalls were with us constantly on that day, and we grew f
amiliar with them, distrusting them only for the wind they signalled.
Seumas aloft.
We were in no hurry to clear the point of Kerrera, as we were hoping to catch the value of a tide which had scarcely begun. It would have been better to take our passage in the slack water between tides, but that was a piece of local navigational lore we were about to learn for ourselves. In the meantime it was pleasant to share the low weedy rocks with the rain plowtering among reefs from which the charts warn real boats frantically. We landed and climbed the channel beacon – a juvenile impulse which I preserve unimpaired despite the passing of the years. So we splashed a trippery way round the shore and southwards to leave the Lady Rock area behind. On this western shore of Kerrera we were more exposed to the periodic blashing of the squalls, and the roundabout plan on which we had embarked began to appear a lengthy method of reaching Mull. At last we grew irritated at the rain-wind which came like waves of infantry from the west, and lifted seawater as well into our right ears; and we turned and faced into it straight for Mull, for the same reason as a Highland pony with a load will run up a hill instead of walking – to get it over quickly.
We got a wet and strenuous reward for our change of plans. For the first three miles we splashed onwards in brave style, gathering much water but making progress. And then we struck a great area of tide popple, with stationary waves which erupted and subsided in the same place, blowing their tops off like volcanoes, while the wind flung this chill lava about. Here we churned for a bleak two hours, making not a half-mile of progress in that time, until it seemed we were bewitched and would be here until we died, and that could not be long. This is a dreary sort of terror, to be caught struggling in waves which are going nowhere. Whether in the end we defeated this tidal race, or it moved from us, we raised our heads at the end of two hours to greet a more normal sea, in which we were again making some headway towards the Mull shore. We drove on from there until we almost grounded on Mull, determined to shake off the tidal heave. There we moored ourselves by holding to the floating blisters of bladder-wrack while we baled, and ate bannocks to celebrate our actual coming to the Isles.
The Canoe Boys Page 9