Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster

by William W. Starr

  Boswell and Johnson, the latter seated high on the stern “like a magnificent Triton,” were rowed across the sound in a boat sent by John MacLeod, the laird of Raasay. The crew sang as they rowed, and the words echoed those of reapers laboring on the shore. The crossing turned rough, as usually happens. Johnson likened it to being in an open boat on the Atlantic, as the wind roared and water splashed into his face, but he held his good humor, imagining the day’s short journey compared to one across the Atlantic in an open boat and laughing at how Londoners would shudder with fear at his recklessness. Johnson at this moment hardly seemed an ailing, melancholic man of sixty-four.

  He and Boswell were accompanied by two marvelous companions who would be with them throughout Skye: the Reverend Donald Macqueen, a minister in the Church of Scotland, and Malcolm MacLeod of the House of Raasay, who was said to have helped Bonnie Prince Charlie escape his pursuers on this island in 1746. Boswell’s oft-quoted description of Malcolm’s person gives us a much admired prose portrait of a keen Highlander:

  He was now sixty-two years of age, quite the Highland gentleman; of a stout, well-made person, well-proportioned; a manly countenance browned with the weather, but a ruddiness in his cheeks, a good way up which his rough beard extended; a quick lively eye, not fierce in his look, but firm and good-humoured. He had a pair of brogues, tartan hose which came up only near to his knees and left them bare, a purple camblet kilt, a black waistcoat, a short cloth green coat bound with gold cord, a yellowish bushy wig, a large blue bonnet with a gold-thread button. I never saw a figure that was more perfectly a representative of a Highland gentleman. I wished to have a picture of him just as he was. I found him frank and polite, in the true sense of the word.

  Boswell could have done no better had he snapped a camera’s shutter.

  Boswell liked the view of the rocky coast with fine houses in the near ground, trees, and beyond them hills ascending into mountains. The island prompted from him rare comments on the beauty of the physical and natural world he observed. Johnson’s doubts about the expedition were quickly laid to rest, too: “We found nothing but civility, elegance, and plenty. The general air of festivity … struck the imagination with a delightful surprise.”

  On the first night the travelers enjoyed a feast with plenty of drink. There was dancing (“nor did ever fairies trip with greater alacrity,” wrote the bemused Johnson) and singing, and Boswell and Johnson relished good conversations, warm hospitality, and a people “polished” and “pleasing” in all manners.

  Johnson wrote about the island’s topography, admired its wooded areas, and drifted off to a discussion of national culinary preferences when he noted the presence of eels in Raasay waters and the population’s disinclination to eat them. (They were believed to cause madness.) “It is not easy to fix the principles upon which mankind have agreed to eat some animals, and reject others; as the principle is not evident, it is not uniform,” he wrote. “That which is selected as delicate in one country, is by its neighbors abhorred as loathsome.”

  Johnson then turned philosophical, examining the prevalence or absence of certain wildlife and the suitability of land for harvests before offering a concise portrait of a small eighteenth-century community. He guessed the population numbered between six hundred and nine hundred, down from the previous centuries, and while there may have been little about the place to stimulate his intellectual curiosity, he concluded his observations with an affectionate note, hailing the hospitality of his hosts and the vividness of the setting: “Such a seat of hospitality, amidst the wind and waters, fills the imagination with a delightful contrariety of images. Without is the rough ocean and the rocky land, the beating billows and the howling storm: within is plenty and elegance, beauty and gaiety, the song and the dance.”

  Boswell, meanwhile, so full of energy, could not restrain himself. With several hardy companions he took a long walk around the island—apparently close to twenty-four miles in all, a task that hard-bodies still find formidable today—exploring the coast and the island’s highest peak, Dun Caan. There occurred a most unforgettable moment: “We mounted up to the top of Dun Caan, where we sat down, eat cold mutton and bread and cheese and drank brandy and punch. Then we had a Highland song from Malcolm; then we danced a reel to which he and Donald and Macqueen sang.” My goodness! Think of it: Old Bozzy, half a day on foot, climbing to the top of a 1,400-foot peak to dance a Highland reel and sing boisterously! The description conjures up a very special scene, and in fact many artists have offered their views of that moment, both seriously and comically, over the centuries since.

  There was more fun, more dancing—every night, in fact—and more talk, but Johnson was eager to get away, and Boswell reluctantly concurred. They had stayed at the Raasay House, still intact but now an outdoor center (and closed when I visited; it was damaged in a 2009 fire). I stayed at the nearby Isle of Raasay Hotel, a short, curving drive uphill from the ferry pier, passing small houses and their neatly tended gardens. It was a charming hotel, usually full, but I was the only guest this evening. David, who has owned the hotel since 2006, was conversant with Boswell and Johnson. He had carefully explored the Raasay House and other places where the two men spent time, but he admitted “There’s not a lot left that really connects directly to them. You can go to the top of the mountain where Boswell danced. That’s fun, and you can get a nice view on some days, but it doesn’t look like it did back then.”

  I walked back to a small chapel behind Raasay House, but it was impossible to tell if it was the one referred to by Johnson, and nearby was a graveyard, again similar to one he briefly described. With rain beginning to come down heavily, I took a short drive to a thickly wooded area toward the middle of the island; the sight of so many trees in this one spot, Raasay Forest—when there have been so few on the island—was arresting, even as the rain poured in my half-open window. The forecast called for storms and discouraged me from further exploration, though I confess I had imagined myself doing a few twirls on the mountaintop.

  I savored a terrific dinner of tuna steak prepared for me exclusively by Giovanni, the Italian chef recently hired for the hotel. It felt quite luxurious to have the chef checking in with me to discern my levels of satisfaction every few minutes, though I appeared to be the only diner. After dinner David talked with me more about the island and its fewer than two hundred residents. He says he gets on with them well, but that most are strict fundamentalists in their religious practices. He told about a friend who died recently and was buried on the island. The friend’s name could not be spoken aloud in the church during the service “because he wasn’t a religious person,” David said. That seemed harsh, but times have been harsh on Raasay and its most immediate neighbors, an archipelago of three islets, Rona, Fladda, and Eilean Tighe. Raasay is far and away the largest at fourteen miles in length and two and one-half miles across; Eilean Tighe at half a square mile is the smallest. Roger Hutchinson calls this group “the Hebrides in tiniest microcosm,” and I’ll use his splendid book Calum’s Road to excerpt a bit of the islands’ tortured history. Rona is mostly rock and today uninhabited; it has been little fit for humans throughout its past. Nevertheless in 1841—half a century after Boswell and Johnson—987 people lived on Raasay, a productive land, and 110 on Rona. Fifty years later, in 1891, Raasay’s population had fallen to 430 and Rona was home to 181 people, jammed together and trying to eke out a living. Why?

  What happened was the mass eviction of the crofters of the land on southern Raasay by their nineteenth-century landlords, who wanted to improve their bottom lines by converting the land to raising sheep and breeding deer. The tenants, who had held to their land for centuries, were resettled to the less desirable parts of northern Raasay and to Rona. One owner of Raasay constructed a stone fence across the island, a precursor to the hated Berlin Wall, if you will. To the south sheep, deer, and rabbits grazed; to the north, men and women attempted to use their miserable slices of land for their animals and crops and to re
mit an annual rental, which, if defaulted on, would ensure another eviction.

  The owners of Raasay after World War I were absentee landlords, and servicemen returning from their military duty were angry at the existing state of affairs. Five men sailed from Rona in 1921 to claim squatter’s rights on land they had been denied in southern Raasay. The brave, decisive action by the “Raasay Raiders” led to arrests, court decisions, anger and ultimately lots of bad publicity for the island’s owner, but it finally worked. The population began to decline; people living in northern Raasay and Rona moved back south. But not everyone.

  As the population dwindled Calum MacLeod and his wife became the only two people left in the north of the island of Raasay. And MacLeod—a crofter, postman, and tender of the Rona lighthouse—wanted a road to his isolated house. A group of crofters who had lived in the area had sought repeatedly road-building assistance from the government, but it was never forthcoming, and they had slowly drifted away to the south. Only Calum was left, and he decided to undertake the creation of the road by himself. He began in the mid-1960s, and worked, six days a week, through galeforce winds and rain, until the road was done, in 1982. His story is a chronicle of great personal achievement and persistence, and Hutchinson’s book tells it memorably.

  What happened on Raasay happened all over the Highlands and Islands. Mass evictions, the banishing of crofters from good lands in favor of mostly sheep. The tragic process is known as the Highland Clearances and it requires some explanation. Maybe it’s best to begin with the Rising of 1745, to which I’ve referred several times in connection with its most famous participant, Bonnie Prince Charlie. The Jacobite Rising possesses a powerful resonance, as it certainly must have for Boswell and Johnson, traveling through the heart of a proud, independent nation torn and bloodied by the rebellion a mere twenty-seven years earlier.

  In early-eighteenth-century Scotland warring with England had become a fact of life. The relationship between the English crown and Scotland was unsettled, to put it charitably. The Stuarts had been on the throne, except during the nasty, forgettable period when Oliver Cromwell seized power. When Charles II died in 1685, he was replaced by James, the seventh Stuart king of the Scots and the last. James was Catholic and willfully and pointlessly alienated non-Catholics in Scotland and England. It wasn’t exactly a surprise when he was overthrown in the largely bloodless Glorious Revolution of 1688 and succeeded by his daughter Anne and her husband, the Dutchman William of Orange. James fled to France, where he proceeded to nurture grudges and plot his return. Meanwhile many of the Highland clans found encouragement from James’s political policies, even as he sat in exile, and their backing of the banished ruler gave rise to the Jacobite (derived from the Latin Jacobus, or James) faction. There were clashes beginning in 1689 at Killiecrankie; clan members were killed—Glen Coe became a rallying cry in 1692—and resentment and antagonism against the English hardened. James VII died in 1701 and passed the torch of Jacobitism to his son James, who became known as the Old Pretender and who would press his case—his pretensions, if you will—as the rightful heir to the throne. Disputes between the Scots and the English abounded. Many were unresolved bloodbaths. There was some hope that approval of the Treaty of Union between the two countries in 1707 would settle issues, but it resolved little. England assumed responsibility for external affairs for the two nations, and the Scots were supposedly allowed to run their own internal affairs as they had been. The treaty quickly provoked more anger than hope; the Scottish parliament that affirmed it was branded as “bought and sold with English gold.” Historians have some disagreements over its impact, but hardly any Scots liked the fact that promised economic benefits from the treaty weren’t forthcoming.

  The treaty, however, did reliably set the stage for escalating political and battlefield clashes. The Catholic Old Pretender continued to agitate from France, hungry to regain the crown for the Stuarts the way a dog is hungry for a bone. Protestant English remained deeply suspicious of him. There was a short-lived war in 1715 between the Jacobite supporters and the English that brought James back to Scotland in hoped-for triumph, but he hotfooted it back to France when his men were defeated. Another such venture in 1719 also failed.

  And so we come to James’s son, Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Silvester Severino Maria Stewart, our Bonnie Prince Charlie, also known as the Young Pretender because he was, of course, younger and was beset with the same pretensions. Born in 1720, he arrived in Scotland from France in 1745 at the inexperienced age of twenty-four to proclaim his father king and himself as regent. Many of the Highland clans, nursing their grievances against the English, lined up in support of the prince, though many Lowland Scots had little use for the pretenders and were loyal to the King. Nonetheless, Prince Charles and his army advanced deep into England, threatening the crown and forcing Londoners into a panic. The government put evacuation plans into effect. But the army stalled and was forced to begin a ragged retreat back to Scotland, pursued by the vengeful English. In the early spring of 1746 the two armies clashed for the final time at Culloden near Inverness in the Highlands, and the men of William, duke of Cumberland—soon to be known as “the butcher”—triumphed in a massacre that forever smashed the authority of the Highland chiefs. The victorious English banned the playing of bagpipes and the wearing of tartans, took land away from the chiefs, and forbade them to raise an army. The clan system was effectively destroyed.

  As for Bonnie Prince Charlie, he scrambled to escape from the duke’s armies, hiding successfully all over the Highlands and Islands over the next year with the help of a small but dedicated group of loyalists, until he was able to slip back to France. The episode was extremely bloody and vicious, but over time it became quite a romantic yarn spun by the Highlanders and eventually picked up by others.

  The clearances didn’t quite follow the same easy-to-see timeline, but in general they began in the wake of the Jacobite downfall when the clan chiefs no longer needed armies or could afford tenants. The Oxford Companion to Scottish History calls the clearances “one of the most evocative and symbolic but least understood episodes of Scottish history.” It is, however, hard not to sympathize completely with the men, women, and children who were evicted from their land and separated from their families. The clearances occurred primarily between 1770 and 1860; landowners used their unrestricted authority in the absence of legal obstacles to evict and relocate people who had been occupying their lands for generations. They acted in their own economic self-interest, in many cases by introducing sheep to lands previously tilled by their tenants, and the consequences were devastating for the poor victims. Imagine you and your family have lived on a parcel of land for as long as you remember, and one morning someone shows up and announces that you have to leave immediately. There is no option, no choice; your livelihood is over. You may either be sent to another place you have never heard of, or you may simply be told to go. Period. No more land. No more earning a living as you have become accustomed to doing.

  Some men thus evicted joined the English army and fought and died in America. Many of the tenants tried to immigrate to America; some made it. For others, their fate was like that of the Scots who perished in a terrible accident at sea off the coast of Skye in 1853 when 333 of 385 immigrants on board drowned. Landowners recognized the need for redistributed labor, and successfully lobbied the government to tighten the restrictions on anyone trying to depart Scotland. Tenants in Sutherland in the northeast Highlands, for instance, were resettled into coastal crofting communities where tiny pieces of land could not support the people living on them, thus forcing them into laboring in the landlords’ kelp and fish exploitation. The Sutherland clearances were particularly cruel—the homes of tenants who refused to leave were burned in front of them—and there were tens of thousands of Highlanders and Islanders whose lives were forever altered. Once-populated areas became pastures for sheep or simply stood empty; between 1745 and 1811 the population of the Outer Hebrides fell from
nearly twenty-five thousand to just over thirteen thousand. Famine resulted, and in spite of the difficulties leaving the country posed, many did so.

  There is a vivid firsthand account of an eviction on Skye in 1854. A witness observed this tragic scene recorded in Eric Richards’s book The Highland Clearances:

  There were old men and women, too feeble to walk, who were placed in carts; the younger members of the community on foot were carrying their bundles of clothes and household effects, while the children, with looks of alarm, walked alongside…. Everyone was in tears; each wished to clasp the hands that had so often befriended them, and it seemed as if they could not tear themselves away. When they set forth once more, a cry of grief went up to heaven, the long, plaintive wail, like a funeral coronach [Highland dirge]…. Not a soul is to be seen there now, but the greener patches of field and the crumbing walls mark where an active and happy community once lived.

  The tragic results of the clearances remain into the twenty-first century, witnessed in still-declining populations and the lack of employment opportunities for those who remain in certain places throughout Scotland. There is nothing amusing about this process, and I can only hope that government and private efforts to reverse these problems will ultimately succeed.

  10

  Skye, Part II

  Boswell and Johnson departed Raasay in good spirits with the aim of traveling across Skye to the northwest coast and Dunvegan Castle, home of the MacLeods. They found no roads, no paths. “A guide,” wrote Boswell, “explored the way, much in the same manner as, I suppose, is pursued in the wilds of America, by observing certain marks known only to the inhabitants.” The weather was miserable; stretches were so boggy they had to dismount from their horses and walk. Part of their journey was taken by boat, or else they would have spent days winding through the island. On the way they stopped at a farmhouse in tiny Kingsburgh on Loch Snizort (Scotland’s funniest-named loch; say it out loud several times and you’ll hear why. It sounds like someone sneezed in German).