by John Prebble
The cairn is a lonely monument to a good writer whose homeland was here in Argyll. By its side one can look southward to the steep slope of Scardon where the best of his Highland characters, John Splendid and young Elrigmore, took refuge from the Lochaber Men who came to burn the Campbell town of Inveraray. It is not a cairn Munro would admire, I think. Like too many now, its ugly rocks are cemented together, not assembled in the traditional loose pile that invites all men to add their tribute. I put a stone at its foot, wishing I knew the Gaelic that should be said, and moved on to the outcrop of Craig nan Sassenach. I do not know why this is called the Rock of the Englishman, more exactly of the Saxon, but it was perhaps a fitting place to be, although my distant ancestors in the gentler valleys of Kent were Jutes not Saxons.
Below me, Loch Awe was black with the shadow of Brander’s dark clouds, and the green isle of Inishail was misted with rain. A rainbow curved from the shell of Kilchurn Castle, south-westward to the loch-head in a perfect arc, clear and pure. As I looked at it in wonder another appeared above it, and then faintly and briefly a third. I watched until this sweet miracle faded beneath the widening bowl of blue sky. The clouds were gone from Brander, and beyond the now shining water was the high majesty of Cruachan, sunlit in a saffron plaid.
Loch Awe is the most consoling of Scotland’s inland waters, and the longest – twenty-five and a half miles from the Glenorchy Campbells’old stronghold of Kilchurn to the pier-head below Sron Mhor. Before the Ice Age it was open to the sea, perhaps, making an island of what is now the Knapdale peninsula, but all that is left of this outlet is the tear-drop of Loch Ederline, tree-rimmed and reed-fringed below Beinn Bhan, a refuge for darting water-fowl and the winter visits of whooper swans. The loch now finds its seaward way to the north by the River Awe, through the narrow defile of Brander. The deep surge of water here is powered less by nature than by machines inside the belly of Ben Cruachan, great hydro-electric turbines in a rock chamber three hundred feet long, one hundred and twenty wide and seventy-seven high. The triple-crowned mountain above and about this cavern gave the Campbells their battle-slogan and protected the loch and castle where they first set a possessive foot on Argyll, five hundred years ago. So secure and remote did it make them feel that they answered all threats with a defiant boast, “It’s a far cry to Loch Awe!” Their confidence was never justified, and three times in one black century the northern clans came by Brander or the Strath of Orchy to burn the steadings of Argyll. The last of these terrible invasions was by Royal authority and with orders as merciless as those which sent Campbell soldiers against the people of Glencoe seven years later. Destroy what you can … all men who are not come off on your advertisement are to be killed or disabled … burn all houses except honest men’s … let the women and children be transported to remote islands …
Lochaweside is now the tranquil heart of Argyll. It is also the dead heart of the old Gaidhealtachd, and of the Stone, Iron and Bronze Age settlements which were here before the coming of the Gaels in the fifth century, before the three sons of Ere, High King of Dalriada in Ireland, grounded their galleys on the coast of Knapdale and agreed to divide their new conquest equally. The tiny islands of the loch, fallen fragments of the green hills above, are set with the grey jewels of ruined keeps and empty chapels, but beneath the monotonous plantations of Sitka spruce are the remains of burial-cairns and hill-forts built by those earlier and nameless tribes of pre-history. The narrow road which almost encircles Loch Awe is infrequently used, except by vehicles of the Forestry Commission which, to confound my dark dislike of what it has done and will do to the Highlands, has established an animal infirmary at Inverinan. Red deer and roe, squirrel and badger, hawk, raven and owl, all creatures that the foresters find sick or injured, are compassionately restored here and offered their freedom. It is some compensation for the changes which afforestation has brought to the Highlands, and not without irony. The night I first dined with Hamish at Corrimony, far from Argyll, he took me up the hill to the edge of a new plantation of spruce. In the moonlight, beyond the protective deer-fence, was a puzzled stag and its hinds. The old grazing-walk which they had taken for centuries, from the high braes of Guisachan to Loch Garbh, was now closed to them. In time they found another way, no doubt, but everywhere their freedom of movement is decreasing, and the mercy of the annual cull, by which man keeps a bloody balance between the deer and their available grazing, is made necessary by his encroachment upon the latter.
In twenty years I have seen much of Lochaweside changed by well-dressed ranks of alien trees, but unlike other parts of the Highlands more of its natural past still remains. There are red-columned groves of Caledonian pine like the empty nave of a Border abbey, white-stemmed birch woods rising from a froth of delicate fern, the twisted limbs of oak and ash in grey-green rags of moss. The wild white rose flowers on dark-leafed bushes, pink clusters of wood-vetch tremble in the roadside dusk, and foxgloves bend in the wind that always blows down the narrow glen from Scammadale. There are flowercups of cloudberry on the high road by Loch Avich to Kilmelford, bog-bean and water lobelia in black lochans, lady’s mantle and purple saxifrage where the igneous rock of a mountain’s skeleton breaks through its thin skin of soil. The land is rich with their innocent colour, and because it is also too poor and unproductive for man’s hungry needs he has not yet destroyed its vulnerable beauty with herbicide and pesticide.
Loch Awe is the centre of Argyll, and Argyll was the generative spirit of Scotland, the old Dalriadic kingdom of incoming Gaels who gave the nation its name. It has a majestic coast-line of long green peninsulas and smooth-flanked mountains stepping down to the tidal waters of its sea-lochs. Never more than thirty miles in breadth, it stretches one hundred and forty northward from the Mull of Kintyre, by the green walls of Knapdale and Lorn to the mouth of Loch Linnhe, the dark hills of Morvern and the storm-braving Point of Ardnamurchan. Open to sea and sky it shimmers with clean light on a blue day in summer, but in winter it wraps its white head in clouds and outfaces the driving winds that brought its founding warriors from the south-west. Its name maintains their claim to it, earr a’Gaidheal the boundary of the Gael, and one they held and lost, then took again in three warring centuries before Kenneth the Hardy, son of Alpin and the descendant of forty tribal princes, merged his people and the Picts into one kingdom of Albainn, the land of the Scots. Time and dynastic ambition moved its centre eastward from Dunadd to Scone, then southward to Edinburgh and Westminster. Now bureaucrats have reduced Argyll from a country to a meaningless District within an absurd Region that also embraces the city of Glasgow and the shires of Dunbarton, Renfrew, Lanark and Ayr. This they have called Strathclyde, perhaps remembering that much of it was once part of that Brythonic kingdom, but ignorant or unmindful of the fact that to include the mountains of the old Gaidhealtachd makes nonsense of their history and geography.
The sea was always the open highway of Argyll, the only safe and comfortable approach to it until the coming of the railway. Because of this its contact with the European continent was often closer and warmer than with the rest of Scotland, and when the MacDonalds peopled Kintyre, Jura, Islay and Ardnamurchan, maintaining their independence as Lords of the Isles, they defied the authority of the Scottish Crown and made treaties with the Kings of England and France. In the east Argyll has always been protected and sometimes imprisoned by the rolling wasteland of Rannoch, and by an aloof and magnificent barrier of mountains from Ben Arthur’s black-stone cobbler above Loch Long to the granite knot of Orchy, across the Black Mount where Maclain’s people summer-herded their cattle to the cliff-wall of Aonach Eagach and the sleeping mountains of Mamore. The roads that enter Argyll do so cautiously and circuitously – over the summit of Rest-and-be-Thankful down to the head of Loch Fyne, a moorland way past Crianlarich to the brown slopes of Glen Lochy, and thirdly north-about by Achallader and Glencoe to the old slate town of Ballachulish and the wide sea-water of Loch Linnhe.
Most of Argyll’s probing sea-
lochs – Leven, Etive, Creran and Fyne – end in the shadows of these eastern mountains, or in narrow straths that lead to hostile escarpments or the heart-stopping sight of yet more marching hills, high corries and snow lingering late into summer. Loch Etive in the glen of that name is perhaps the most beguiling, deep black water, bare walls rising steeply above a sentinel stand of Caledonian pine, and the pink-purple flowers of wild rhododendron bending to the water’s edge. Beyond the loch-head is the corrugated cone of the Great Herdsman, a narrow track moving by its foot to Kingshouse and the eastern entrance to Glencoe. There is a belief that Deirdre of the Sorrows, in exile from Ireland and waiting for her lover to take her home, lived here at Invercharnan on a river bend, and the legend is maintained by some of the Gaelic names given long ago to falling streams and broken stones. One of the papers I found in the archives of Inveraray Castle was a treaty signed at Invercharnan in 1669 between Maclain of Glencoe and Archibald Campbell of Inverawe who held land at the bend of Loch Etive. They swore “to live in all good neighbourhood and to assist and succour one another in all our lawful affairs in so far as it lies in us both, in protection and defence of one another’s person.” This did not save Maclain when Campbell soldiers were sent to slaughter him and his clan, and no fugitive MacDonald came over the high snows of Benderloch to ask for the protection of Campbell of Inverawe.
It was at Dalness in Glen Etive that we filmed some sequences for John Macnab, and one morning all shooting stopped as we watched two golden eagles rising and falling above us, great leaves in the still air. When they were gone, wheeling suddenly into the darkness of the rock-face, a stalking-party appeared on the misted sky-line like the opening sequence of a Western film. They brought a stag we needed for the episode we were filming, its head roped back to keep its antlers from the feet of the pony that carried it, and its eyes wet with inanimate grief.
I first heard a fox bark in Glen Etive, twenty years ago at dusk when I was driving back to the Kingshouse Inn. I have heard its harsh, appealing cry many times since, sometimes across the garden shrubs of a London suburb, and it always recalls that evening, with a catch in my throat. There is no better place than Glen Etive to hear a fox for the first time, for Duncan Ban Macintyre, Yellow-haired Duncan of the Songs who worked here as a forester two hundred years ago, composed a fine poem in honour of it. He was possibly the best of the old bards, although I have no Gaelic to be a proper judge. He could neither read nor write and carried the six thousand lines he created in his head. Although he was Highland and passionately attached to his race and its past, he died in Edinburgh where he kept a little howff, selling whisky distilled by his wife, Mary MacNicol. He was buried in Greyfriars churchyard, far from Inveroran where he and Mary were born, where Roddy McMillan sat beside me that day in Sabbath black. The village is long gone from the green shore of Loch Tulla, but when the Wordsworths visited it there were still men and women who remembered Duncan Ban. The sharp-nosed, prick-eared animal he admired is now hated by Highland shepherds, and for the same reason, but his song is more than a eulogy, it is a fierce protest against the coming of sheep, the burning of homes and the dispersal of men.
The foxes have my blessing
because they hunt the sheep,
the sheep with brindled faces
that cause confusion throughout the world,
laying in waste our land
and increasing our rents.
Now there is no place left for the farmer,
his living is gone
and he is forced to leave the home
where his forebears lived.
The townships and the shielings
where there was warmth and welcome
are now in ruins,
and the fields are unfilled.
When the 18th-century traveller John Knox came to Argyll he was excited by its promising future. New towns, well-placed and pleasantly designed, were being built at Inveraray and Lochgilphead, and the sea-lochs were white with the sails of square-rigged ships, moving out with the tide. He thought more yet could be done, that somewhere on this coast there should be “a Royal dock-yard where squadrons and transports could be secretly fitted out and from whence they could sail at all times of the year … before the enemy could have the smallest intelligence of the design.” He could interest no one in this imaginative proposal, but today he at least might be pleased to see the black tower of a Polaris submarine slipping down into the sea beyond Ardnamurchan Point.
A less unnerving guardian of Argyll’s coast is a buckler of islands great and small, each with its conical or wedge-shaped hills, and with names like sharp fragments of granite – Islay, Coll and Tiree, Jura, Colonsay and Scarba, Luing, Mull and the Garvellachs. Remote and reassuring in a black swirl of storm-clouds, the Inner Hebrides break the force of the western weather, but sometimes when the sea is still and the sun is bright they lie upon the water like yellow flowers. The greatest of them is Mull, Mull of the Trees. On a map it is shaped like a frond of beech-fern, but eastward from the sea, when its headlands and wide inlets are hidden by mist, it is a clansman’s targe with the volcanic boss of Ben More at its centre. It was here that Johnson, wet and miserable, decided that the Highlands were a most dolorous country, and was put in a worse temper by a drunken ship-master who talked “great nonsense about Wilkes and Liberty.” But he warmed to Mull before he left, and to his host, the chief of the Macleans. On Inchkenneth, the pleasant isle in Loch na Keal where Maclean had his house, the Doctor allowed Boswell to put a blue bonnet over his grey wig. He then strutted about the room with a broadsword in his hand. “However unfavourable to the Lowland Scots,” said his companion, “he seemed much pleased to assume the appearance of an ancient Caledonian.” Before they took the branch-strewn ferry from Lochbuie to the mainland, Johnson’s heart was deeply moved by a visit to the holy soil of Iona, its low hills and yellow machair of wind-bent grass, cold abbey stones and the graves of sixty Celtic kings. “The man is little to be envied,” he wrote in his account of the Tour, “whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.”
Fifty years later, Felix Mendelssohn’s first sight of Mull was from the shell of Dunollie Castle above the town of Oban, and in a flush of responsive emotion he declaimed some appropriate stanzas from The Lord of the Isles. The first notes of his overture, however, were not inspired by the green surge of waves against Staffa’s rocks but by the piston-throb of the little steamer Highlander as he lay below, sick in heart and stomach. He spent much of that miserable voyage about the coast of Mull wrapped in a blanket and revolted by the smell of onions frying in the ship’s galley. He did not go ashore on Staffa, unlike his healthful friend Klingemann who leapt onto its wet stones and shouted his elation against the basalt columns of Fingal’s Cave.
Few things I write give me much pleasure at the time of composition, but I enjoyed writing a television documentary about the visit these idealistic young men made to Scotland. We filmed where they had happily and sometimes painfully travelled, by Dunkeld, Rannoch and the Pass of Glencoe. The greater part of their journey followed the old Road to the Isles which was traced for me on a map forty-five years ago by a monk from the Benedictine Abbey at Fort Augustus. He walked it once a month, he said, from one small congregation to another as priests had done in the years of persecution. He was a Kintail man, I think, a jovial monk, and before I went aboard the canal steamer he gave me a brisk blessing in Gaelic and an English-language tract published by the Catholic Truth Society.
The Highlander was recreated for our use from an old schooner in Campbeltown. She looked fine from the Ross of Mull, moving northward out of Loch Scridain, but for days low mist or rain made filming on Staffa impossible. At dusk one evening, her engine suddenly dead, she drifted seaward past the grey necklace of the Treshnish Isles and was approaching Tiree before she was taken under tow. When the production crew and the actors came ashore that night at Bunessan they were wet and cold,
with no love for Mull or any part of the Highlands, and not even my flask of Lagavulin, dark Islay malt and the best of talking-whiskies, could change their mood. I left them with regret for their despair and drove thirty-five miles to my hotel on the eastern shore of the island, taking the high cliff road by Loch na Keal where every bend threw the beam of my headlamps across the water to Inchkenneth and the nippled hills of Ulva. I came late to the darkness of the hotel, where candles were lit. There had been a ceilidh that night, but all were now gone except a young islander and his wife. They had waited, they said, to sing a song for me, a Gaelic song she had composed about the Clearances.
The Clearances made it no longer possible to call the island Mull of the Trees. Most of its natural woods were long ago replaced by sheep-walks, but here and there in a hill cleft where the white-eyed whinchat flies, by a falling burn or quiet lochside, there is a reminder of their beauty – oak, ash and birch, white bark and scarlet berries, lemon and olive-green leaves against wet black rock. The islanders were proud of their trees, and it was perhaps their vanity which provoked Johnson’s ungenerous sarcasm. “Sir,” he said, when Maclean invited him to admire a distant wood, seen from the boat that was taking them across the mouth of Loch Tuath, “I saw at Tobermory what they called a wood, which I unluckily took for heath. If you show me what I take for furze, it will be something.” That something is there now, dark plantations of conifers above Salen and Loch Frisa, and the sweet curling road by Dervaig to Calgary Bay. Timber has replaced sheep, as sheep once removed men, and the lingering memory of the Clearances is further embittered by southern incomers who still buy, sell and mismanage the land, much as others did a century and a half ago when the bard Angus MacMhuirich lamented the burnings and the evictions they brought to his island.