Gaelic Ring: Oban to Mull, Ardnamurchan and Skye

by Mairi Macarthur

Seagulls remain the most vivid memory. Throughout childhood, their squawking was the signal that Oban Bay was in sight, the final lap of an annual trek westwards to my father’s native Iona. We had traversed the country, from a small east-coast city where, it is true, gulls also wheeled and screeched in the salty air. Why then were the Oban sounds so evocative?  Perhaps it was simply that the holiday was always so eagerly anticipated and that the journey was an adventure in itself. My parents never owned a car. Therefore, to travel by train, bus and the occasional taxi was entirely normal to us in the 1950s and ‘60s. From St Andrews we chugged across to Glasgow and boarded the overnight train on the old Callander-Oban line out of Buchanan Street Station. My sister and I were tucked up in blankets, we ate sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and, I suppose, we must have slept. In the morning the train, as if by magic, had stopped on a broad wooden pier a stone’s throw from the sea. We came out through the airy, glass-roofed station to find a porter and barrow ready to haul a month’s luggage along to the North Pier. There, where smart restaurants now stand, was the ironmonger’s whose motto proudly proclaimed From a trout-fly to a steam yacht. Inside were the faintly exotic smells of oil and varnish and coiled rope. Duncan Munro greeted us with gentle courtesy and sought out the particular fishing hooks or length of twine essential to father’s island sojourn.

Then, there she was – the steamer. From the mid-19th century, a classic ring route operated out of Oban, a daily excursion around the island of Mull calling at Staffa and Iona. This was ‘The Sacred Isle Cruise’. By our day, the vessel was the King George V, her red funnels and sleek prow unforgettable. To small girls she may as well have been an ocean liner: the promenade deck with its little windows stretched for miles; the saloon had white linen and silver teapots; the engine room, into which we would stare in fascination, gleamed and hummed. Many times since I have set out on this same sea-way and the memories of half-a-century ago mix with new insights and information picked up over the years. I’m now aware of those early travellers who made for the Highlands, on foot or horseback, even before the steamship age.

The tour of Dr Samuel Johnson and James Boswell in 1773 is probably the best known. But, from our sitting-room walls at home, I was more familiar with the coastal voyage of William Daniell who sailed these waters in the summer of 1815. I loved the detail of his delicate aquatints: skiffs in full sail, diving birds, neat figures in frock-coats and top-hats surveying a romantic ruin. Dunollie Castle, on the north point of Oban Bay, was one of his subjects, a setting he found ‘wildly beautiful’. As the ferry sweeps past, I catch a glimpse of Clach nan Con, a pillar of stone where the great hero Fingal tethered his dog Bran. Legends of the old Gaelic world are locked into these landscapes. A narrow strait separates Dunollie from the green, low-lying island of Kerrera, both strongholds of the once powerful MacDougalls of Lorne. The mountains of Argyll and Lochaber rise to the north and soon, to starboard, is the white beacon of Lismore Light. Meanwhile, off to the port side, lies the south-east end of Mull, a coastline bitten into by big mouthfuls of sea. One of these is Loch Spelve on whose shores, I now know, Lachlan Livingstone was born in 1819. Lachann Dubh a’Chrògain, as he was known, (Black Lachie of Croggan) was the last Clan bard and piper to MacLaine of Lochbuie. He made his own inter-island links, back and forth in his fishing-boat, and one of his best loved songs praised the seafaring skills of Dòmhnall an Dannsair, Donald Black of Lismore. Much older ties come to mind too. On Lismore there flourished an Early Christian monastery founded by St. Moluag, as important a missionary figure as his fellow Gael and contemporary, Columba of Iona.

At Craignure I turn left towards Fionnphort and begin to pass the road-ends for places once spotted from the steamer deck: sturdy Duart Castle, seat of Clan Maclean; Grasspoint, a former ferry-point and overnight stop for cattle-drovers bound for mainland markets, via the stepping-stone of Kerrera. I used to visit Lionel and Barbara Leslie who, in 1946 and with great ingenuity, began restoring the dilapidated shell of the Drovers’ Inn. Lionel had a passion for nature well before his time. A stone seal he sculpted still lies on the rocks below the house.

A sign points to Lochbuie, with its striking circle of standing stones, and somewhere to my right is Màm a’Chlàrsair. On this hill pass one cold night, so the story goes, a Lochbuie harper burned his harp to keep his sweetheart warm, a kind but foolish gesture for by daylight she was gone, away with the young Laird. Through the big glen and another road leads off to Carsaig, where long ago a cave, marked with incised crosses, sheltered nuns from Iona. It is a delight nowadays to find, all over the islands, heritage and family history centres being set up with a great deal of local enthusiasm and native knowledge. In Bunessan and Tobermory on Mull, and on Iona, these are the starting-points for an exploration of whatever grabs your interest: historic churches or graveyards, mills or quarries, old townships or new trails rich in lore and wildlife. And it is hard to drive through Mull without humming a tune.

By the road is a memorial to Dugald MacPhail who wrote the island’s anthem, An t-Eilean Muileach (The Isle of Mull); near Bunessan stands another, to Mary MacDonald, composer of the well-loved hymn Leanaibh an Aigh (Child in the Manger). John Campbell, or Johnnie Chailein, called one of his own songs about Mull Eilean Uaine nam Bàrd (Green Isle of the Bards). He knew there had long been singers, pipers and poets galore.  Johnnie lived from 1905 until 1999 yet he could make an age-old tale come alive, as if it had happened yesterday. He would talk with glee, for example, about Blàr Phort Beathain, a bloody skirmish between the Macleans and the MacPhees of Colonsay in a cove below Scoor in the Ross. As the Mull archers stole over the moor, so skilled was their bowmanship that they could slice the white heads off the slender plants of bog cotton. And the fleeing oarsmen had little chance of rowing to safety after their thumbs were hacked from the gunnels – ‘nine buckets full!’ was Johnnie’s triumphant finale.

At Fionnphort, where visitors leave their cars before taking the short ferry-ride to Iona, a road leads to Erraid. On holiday, that word meant a boatful of cousins and a day’s picnic on a white strand, known to us all as Balfour’s Bay. On my tenth birthday I was given a small leather-bound copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped  and so, along with readers everywhere, I also knew that this tidal islet was where young Davie Balfour thought himself stranded. And for Stevenson himself, in 1870, Erraid was a hive of industry. Here, great slabs of granite were hewn and then towed out to the treacherous Torran reef where his father and uncle were building Dubh Artach lighthouse.

As the George left the Sound of Iona by the south, the Captain used to take her boldly through the narrows between Erraid and an outlying islet, Eilean nam Muc. My father and a friend once landed there, specifically to photograph the steamer passing through at top speed. The date was 3rd August 1939. On the back of one snapshot he added a note, ‘On our way we read the paper, which was full of the Polish crisis’. His pictures of a much loved ship became bound up with a world event that would change much for his generation, and cut some boyhood links for ever. Gaelic was my father’s first language and Iona was where I first heard it spoken.

Since the days of Columba, however, the island’s fame has reached far beyond Gaeldom. As a child, I wondered why so many hundreds flocked on board the George, to clamber down into the bobbing red-painted tenders for only an hour or so ashore. But even that is time enough to wander the cloister garden of the medieval Nunnery, see the restored Abbey, marvel at the flowing, intricate carving on the high stone crosses and the graveslabs of Clan Chiefs. These sites are all close together.

A Gaelic proverb says: Am fear a thèid a dh’I, thèid e trì uairean ann: the one who goes to Iona will go there three times. So, come again! Search for greenstone pebbles at Port a’Churaich, the bay of the coracle, where Columba landed. Walk the western machair where Iron Age folk built a snug fort, monks tilled the soil and crofters grazed their cattle. Climb Dun I for an amazing view on a clear day – south to the Paps of Jura, north to the Cuillin of Skye and, beyond Coll and Tiree, west to the outline of the South Uist hills. The rock-pool near the top, Tobar na h-Aois, was a favourite childhood haunt. Below was a patchwork of rock and rigs and flower-starred turf, edged by an iridescent blue-green sea. Iona is a special place of light and colour.

The direct road from Craignure to Tobermory has splendid views of the Sound of Mull but, if you can, don’t miss Mull’s own north-west circle. The way winds around sea lochs, climbs a glen called for the lovely yellow flag-iris, and skirts a spectacular coastline dotted with places named by Norse settlers – Treshnish, Calgary, Dervaig. Eas Fors neatly encapsulates Mull’s double linguistic legacy as Gaelic ‘eas’ and Norse ‘fors’ both mean ‘waterfall’! Colourful images spring up along this route. Bodach Còir Ghleann Seilisdeir (kindly old man of the glen of the iris) was a shadowy stump of hazel, which bard James Robertson addressed in song while labouring to make ends meet. Johnnie Chailein would sing with gusto, as the bodach replied: 

“James, keep your courage,
your skill lies on the sea;
There’s only hardship
digging drains in the glen.”

Catching sight of tiny Inchkenneth, its chapel dedicated to Cainneach, a contemporary of Columba, I imagine Boswell dancing a reel to the harpsichord-playing of Sir Allan Maclean’s daughter. Dr Johnson was impressed by the cultured hospitality they received there. As Ulva comes into view – named wolf-island by the Norse ­– I think about the MacArthurs who ran a celebrated piping school there, about the hundreds who had to leave, including the father of explorer David Livingston, and about Lachlan Macquarie, the Ulva native who became an early governor of New South Wales. He is still revered as ‘The Father of Australia’. And long, long before any of that, prehistoric cave-dwellers left traces of shell, flint and bone.

An occasional motor-boat expedition from Iona was to Ulva Ferry to collect a load of fence-stobs. At other times we landed on Staffa, stepping gingerly along the great big threepenny-bits of basalt rock and into the huge maw of Fingal’s Cave. Artists and musicians have been inspired by the awesome grandeur of Staffa. Daniell made no less than nine drawings. Mendelssohn heard the first chords of an overture in the sound of the waves. Early visitors often had a piper with them or their boatmen chanted Gaelic iorrams, rowing songs, as they approached Fingal’s Cave. Its original name was surely Uamh Bhinn ‘the musical cave’. Puffins and a host of seabirds colonise the cliffs of Staffa and the outlying Treshnish Isles, while various species of whale, dolphin and shark swim the waters.

These are also grand sights.

“The great seas number seven, and I’ve sailed them in my day. But there’s no place nearer Heaven, than Tobermory Bay.”

A verse by poet, banker and renowned raconteur, Angus MacIntyre, from ‘Conversation at Tobermory Pier’. Conversationalist supreme he certainly was, often from that same pier as we leaned over the rail of the George on the way back from Iona. He and my father had been at school in Oban together, competing on the sports field or tying the shoelaces of a long-legged and long-suffering classmate to the bench in front. Angus would still be talking volubly as we edged out into that undeniably glorious bay. I can hear him yet.  

From Tobermory over to Kilchoan in Ardnamurchan is the same stretch sailed by William Daniell. He engraved Mingary Castle, its stout walls commanding the waters where the mouth of Loch Sunart and the Sound of Mull meet. Daniell’s ship then had to round Ardnamurchan Point, ‘a bluff headland, rocky and wind-worn’. His engraving shows a skiff almost keeled over in heavy surge, her pennant a flash of red against forbidding cliffs. One spring we visited friends who had rented a former keepers cottage at the lighthouse, up on those same heights. It was exhilarating to stand right beneath the tower, built of rose-pink Mull granite. All around, the eye took in an unrivalled panorama of islands. We were at the most westerly tip of the British mainland and, far below, breakers rolled in from the deep Atlantic. I came to Ardnamurchan first through the pages of a book, Alastair Maclean’s elegiaic account of his parents’ later years working the family croft at Sanna. It was the twilight of a particular way of life on a particular seaboard, recorded with honesty and in prose of enduring beauty. Majestic Ben Hiant is ‘the enchanted mountain’ of Ardnamurchan and there is indeed something spellbinding about this long arm of quiet land, rich in flower and wildlife, under the broad Hebridean sky. Iona monks came here too, in their curraghs. Columba baptised a child in Ardnamurchan, bringing forth a spring of water from bare rock in order to do so.

Around the rim of Loch Sunart is an ancient, broad-leaved woodland, unmatched in Britain for its extent and its conservation value. In the past, the native population skilfully managed these woods and today the Sunart Oakwoods Initiative works with local communities to protect and enhance this unique natural habitat for the benefit of all. Near Salen, for example, is a forest trail, matching trees to their old Gaelic names to form the letters of the Gaelic alphabet.

The road now heads north through the hills of Moidart, homeland of the MacDonalds of Clanranald. Lochailort marks the turn for Mallaig, running by Arisaig and the silver sands of Morar. These names! Even read from a map or on a black and white calendar photo, they spoke of romance and adventure as far back as I can remember. I first saw this rolling moorland and tree-fringed seascape for real from the carriage windows of the West Highland Line, one of the most stunning rail journeys in Britain. By road it’s tempting to keep stopping, to gaze or to reflect. For this is Bonnie Prince Charlie country. At the old cemetery above Arisaig I find a board about Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, Alexander MacDonald, buried here. The greatest of 18th century Gaelic poets, and a fervent Jacobite, Alasdair made a Song for the Prince – Charles Edward Stuart, who stepped ashore at Loch nan Uamh in July 1745:

“O hi ri ri, He is coming,
O hi ri ri, our exiled King.
Let us take our arms and clothing
and the flowing tartan plaid.”

The quest to place a Stuart back on the British throne was in vain, however, and just over a year later Charles took ship for France from the same shore. From Mallaig it’s a short sail to Skye. Behind the ferry rise up, like a line of giant men, the mountains of Knoydart. On the other side of the Sleat peninsula are the ruins of Dunscaith, the fort of a warrior queen, Scàthach, to whom legendary Irish hero Cuchulainn came to learn the martial arts. Today, at Armadale pier, sun glints on the white tower of Arainn Chaluim Chille a short way along the coast. This is the campus of Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, a college that now draws students from all over the world to learn Gaelic and to study the world of the Gael. Some years ago I brought an international women’s group here. From Nicaragua, South Africa and the Philippines, they talked with their Skye counterparts about keeping minority languages alive, about the lot of rural women, about their life and death struggles for a right to land. It was a moving and memorable exchange.

The car soars over the Skye Bridge. Below, the sea swirls round rocky islets and behind is the village of Kyleakin, ‘Hacon’s Sound’. Picture the great fleet of King Hacon of Norway, at anchor in the narrows of Loch Alsh in 1263, committed to defend his island territories against the Scottish monarchy. Soon after, the Battle of Largs would end Norwegian rule in the Hebrides.

The road by picturesque Eilean Donan Castle and Shiel Bridge runs close beneath the jagged ridges and peaks of Kintail and deep into the Highland land mass. The right turn to Invergarry brings high, sweeping vistas of loch and mountain. But, as the road descends, I am as eager to catch a glimpse of a tiny graveyard at Munergie where a huge stone lies, said to have been carried there – on his own back – by Alasdair Mòr a’ Bhòchdain.

I came across the quirky tale of ‘Big Sandy of the ghost’ when researching song and story along the Caledonian Canal. Plagued for years by an apparition who boxed with him at every opportunity, Sandy was only free of his tormentor when he finally said out loud: O Dhia, beannaich mi! Tha mi fas sean...Bless me! I’m getting too old for this... The bòchdan stepped back and the spell was broken.

I travel this part of the road quite often now and never tire of it, especially in the rich colours of autumn or the pearly light of a still winter’s day. For a change and for the finest view of the mighty Nevis range, I sometimes turn off at Spean Bridge and continue south by the parallel B-road from Gairlochy.

At Banavie is the imposing Neptune’s Staircase, eight locks stepping down to the sea at the end of the Caledonian Canal. Many a Gaelic-speaking navvy wielded a pickaxe on these massive stone blocks. Nearby is Corpach, where the coffins of kings and chiefs were rested before continuing by galley to Iona.

The A82 hugs water most of the remaining way, through Duror and Appin, homeland of the real-life Alan Breck Stewart of Stevenson’s Kidnapped. A shot fired here was the final spark of rebellion in the aftermath of Culloden. The monument to James of the Glen, hanged as accessory to the crime, stands on a knoll just above the south end of the Ballachulish Bridge. Here his bones swayed from the gibbet for years, a grim warning to remaining supporters of the Jacobite cause. It’s a sombre and powerful spot.