Gaelic Ring: The Small Isles - Muck, Eigg, Rum and Canna |
The ‘Small Isles’ – Rum, Eigg, Muck and Canna – seem to fulfil in every sense the concept of an entity, as a ring of islands in their own sea world. In the merging of land and seascape in a natural world, in their cultural and economic history, or in the modern and mundane detail of local government, the Small Isles belong together as an archipelago of the Inner Hebrides. The Small Isles are everyone’s idea of Hebridean islands. Created partly by volcanic activity, perhaps the most dramatic moment in a vast span of geological events and time, leaving lava plateaux on Eigg and Canna, on either side of the volcano’s remains on the older rocks of Rum. This complex geological make-up is memorable for its astonishing beauty. The Sgurr of Eigg, towering up to 1,339 ft, is a geological signpost on the island’s profile as volcanic action sculpted by the action of glaciers and the ‘organ-piping’ basalt columns set on horizontal terraces in Canna are like architecture in their regularity in the wind-blown Hebridean landscape. Traditionally called Na h-Eileanan Beaga, literally ‘the small islands’ – though they are perhaps not that small in island terms – can all be embraced in a day’s travel, although we recommend that they be explored slowly! We can see them in a glance out to sea from Ardnamurchan or the Machair of Arisaig. These are the nearest mainland points where the traveller heading west will probably see the Small Isles for the first time. From such mainland vantage points nothing man made interrupts the sight-lines, giving the voyager a rare view of past and present in our islands, and seeing the same seascape and landforms in the same dramatically changing lights of sun and storm as seen by prehistoric settlers, early Christian missionaries or Viking pirates. The Small Isles have produced some of the earliest evidence for the human settlement of Scotland. A Stone Age site above Loch Scresort in Rum, unknown until disturbed by agricultural work in 1983, has been shown to be around 9,000 years old. People have lived in Scotland for a very long time and archaeology shows that they have lived longest in these remote and wild Atlantic islands. The Small Isles are not remote when you don’t need to jump into a car and not wild when they attracted such early settlement. The Small Isles must have met the needs of prehistoric lifestyles. Mesolithic peoples hunted, fished and gathered rather than grew crops, and stone provided durable tools with sharp edges. Bloodstone in Rum, a green quartz-like stone with red spots, was used with antler and bone to form tools and must have enhanced the attractions of these extraordinary islands. According to the long-established ferry timetables, our journey round the Small Isles follows the sun – deiseal air gach nì, ‘sunwise for everything’, as the proverb puts it – and we leave Mallaig for Muck as our first Small Isles landfall. Muck is the smallest of the Small Isles, without the remoteness of Canna, the grandeur of Rum or the drama of Eigg. Muck, with its greater neighbours forming a backdrop, is an island shaped like an upturned saucer, two miles long by one mile wide, with a present population of approximately thirty, a working farm whose borders are the sea. Dean Donald Monro, an early visitor (1549), found it ‘callit in Irish Ellan na muc, callit in Inglish the Swines Isle...’ – ‘Island of Pigs’ or ‘Island of Whales’? In hungrier times ‘Sea Pork’ was a description given to whale-meat, there is ambiguity in the island’s name. We have seen a vast black sow in Muck, happy in her own small wood, about to farrow and an object of excited local speculation. The first settlers, hunter-gatherers in search of new quarters, glimpsing land from mainland caves, must have been attracted by Muck’s gently sloping beaches, the seabirds and shellfish on which they knew they could survive. Perhaps the relative security offered by these islands had already created a sacred aura of holiness before the early churchmen of Iona established themselves in Muck, over which Iona then claimed ownership from the seventh century and left behind it two standing stones and a burial ground adjacent to the pier. Later still the Vikings, sweeping down the west coast of Scotland, probably in need of water and hungry for land would have glimpsed a tantalising, low green sward, ripe for cultivation. ‘... ane very fertile frutfull Ile of cornis and girsing (grass, hay) for all store.’ Dean Monro’s description was accurate. Generally, in the Hebrides, arable is a struggle. Hay-making is chancy, but Muck is an exception. In the eighteenth century, with its population at an all-time high of more than three hundred, Muck was exporting barley, oats and potatoes as well as cattle. Today she produces excellent, sweet lamb for a local market. We arrived in Muck on a hot, hot day in July. The new pier had not yet been built. The sea was perfectly clear. It was low tide. The island flit boat, The Wave, came out to meet us. We clambered in and were drawn closer to the shore until the draught was taken up and there was nothing for it but to gather up our possessions, roll up our trousers, drop into the sea and wade, just as Neolithic man, Celtic monks and Viking adventurers had done before us. On land, crops bent in the light wind. A heavy load of hay passed on the road. In the guest house garden, dark-green kale grew thick. Dean Monro would have recognised it all in 1549. More recently, from the deck of the ferry, we watched first the posts and secondly a shooting party come reluctantly aboard from the island after a happy three days at the pheasant, partridge, duck and native woodcock. Plenty of pheasants remain after the season. There are small birds enjoying themselves in the game crops and by the feeders, ducks chatting in the ponds and more Golden Eagles and Hen Harriers than ever. The hotel has extended its season. But as Martin Martin, that other great traveller in the Hebrides had already noted: ‘The hawks in the rocks here are reputed to be very good ...’ making circles still in a vast, Hebridean sky. If I had to choose among the Hebrides – and I find it desperately difficult to do so – I choose Eigg. So wrote the poet, Hugh MacDiarmid. From the sea, Eigg is dominated by its great Sgurr, the largest piece of exposed pitchstone in the British Isles, the dark and lustrous remains of a volcano flanked by softer lava columns. With its strategic position and dramatic visibility, Eigg has often caught the backwash of Scotland’s history. Poets, priests, plunderers and politicians have all left their mark. Here, in this stopping-off place between Iona and the mainland and in the knowledge that the island was ruled by a pagan authority, St. Columba’s disciple, St. Donnan, established a colony, only to be martyred on 17 April 617 by a pirate band under orders from the mainland. “Early grows the grass on the shieling of Donnan, Song: Aodann Corrabheinn For the early settlers who came to Eigg in simple boats, the Sgurr must have had a powerful attraction and in the centuries after, especially in dangerous times, it provided an important look-out point for any craft, whatever its mission. During the 1840s the geologist, Hugh Miller, voyaged here in The Betsy, the Free Church minister’s floating manse, to study Eigg’s rich supply of fossils. Nowadays, as the ferry slips out of Port Mòr and heads for Eigg, the passenger, leaning over the rail, sees the great hills of Rum and Canna beyond, secretive and distant. Then the cliffs of Eigg approach and the green grass of Kildonan Farm appears to starboard. Today, the new pier comes into view, opened in 2004 and marking the end of flit-boats. In our mind’s eye, we still see the welcoming thirsty throng of our first visit, waving the boat in from the old Clanranald pier and coming aboard for a dram. On the opposite side of the island, in the marshy area below Laig, the Vikings found welcome shelter. Here they wintered their boats, utilising local timber from woodland, long disappeared, although attempts have now been made to replant. A boat stem was found here, carved in such a way as to demonstrate the highest arts of boat-building skills and a magnificent bronze sword-hilt, now in the National Museums, was discovered in a richly-furnished Viking warrior’s grave near Kildonan. The claims of Norway over the Western Isles were finally challenged in the 1130s by Somerled whose descendants went on to establish a ‘kingdom’ within the Kingdom of the Scots. It was at Kildonan in 1386 that Donald accepted the Lordship of the Isles, confirmed by Royal Charter from the King of Scots. And it was also in Eigg that Donald Dubh, last of the line, called a conference to resolve the internal feuding of the Islesmen. After the Jacobite wars, Eigg proved itself more of a trap than a sanctuary when Hanoverian officers meted out revenge to the supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Not for 800 years had an enemy arrived by sea. Within 30 years of this debacle, Ronald MacDonald of Laig was assembling his father’s, Alexander MacDonald’s work into the first printed collection of Gaelic poetry, which has come down to us as the ‘Eigg Collection’. North of the Bay of Laig, at Camus Sgiotaig, lie the ‘Singing Sands’. They derive from the local Jurassic sandstone, but their secret lies in their high silica content, their rounded grains and their particular level of humidity. Under pressure such sand emits sound, as mysterious today as it ever was. Just as the tide ebbs and flows so the population has had its inexorable rhythms. After the ’45, potatoes began to supersede oats and ‘bere’ (a form of barley). The burning of seaweed to make kelp provided some respite from poverty, but of the 500 souls living in Eigg in 1801, by 1900, only one half remained. The fourteen families living in Grulin under the Sgurr left their township in 1853. Proprietors too, like the sea, came and went. Eigg’s population stands now around 50, anticipating in the near future mains power from ‘renewables’ and the regeneration of housing stock. They could be on the brink of closing the circle, of finally matching population to resources, where small is undoubtedly beautiful. Rum is surely the most impressive and conspicuous of the islands of the Since 1957, Rum has been a National Nature Reserve when the Nature Conservancy Council (now Scottish Natural Heritage) took over the island with the vision to recreate a habitat from a time before the destruction of its primeval forest. Given the surviving tree cover in a few areas, woodland restoration included Scots pine, birch, alder, aspen and oak. The government and the founding fathers of nature conservation in Britain purchased the island from the Trustees of Sir George Bullough whose family had owned it since 1886 and managed it as a deer forest. It was in the middle of this tenure, 1900-1902, that the exotic mansion house of Kinloch Castle, at the head of Loch Scresort, was built from imported red Arran sandstone. This extraordinary structure is seen as the ferry comes in to land. Early accounts of the Isle of Rum are to be found in Dean Monro’s Description of the Western Isles of Scotland of 1549, in an anonymous Description of the Isles of Scotland of about 1595, and in Ane Description of Certaine Pairts of the Highlands of Scotland of about 1630. All three accounts provide us with a relatively detailed picture or impression of the island and its people and agree on significant points. They give us The human population of the island was small, centred on two ‘townships’ or ‘runrig’ communities, one at Kilmory on the north-west and one at 'Glen Hairie' (Harris Glen) on the south-east side. In 1595, Rum was said to be capable of raising only six or seven men for the wars. By contrast, Canna could raise thirty men and Muck could raise sixteen men. Given the comparative sizes of the Small Isles, we see that Muck could raise more than twice Rum's capability. Rum contained a large number of small deer according to Dean Monro in 1549. They were caught and killed by being driven, perhaps by deer-hounds, into ‘tynchellis’ or deer traps, formed with stone dykes. This was in the days before firearms came into use in the Highlands and Islands. Certain fat birds the size of doves could be taken in the mountains in the spring, ‘about Beltaine’ or early in May, and this must be an allusion to the Manx shearwaters. The shearwater, in Gaelic fachach (‘fat little one’) spends all its life at sea and comes ashore only to breed. Its colonies in Rum, the largest in the world, are in excavated burrows on the highest mountain terraces. With many thousand pairs nesting annually, they are the most significant and numerous breeding species in Rum, beside other seabirds such as guillemots, fulmars and kittiwakes. The white-tailed sea eagle which used to nest in Rum was hunted to extinction by 1912. The species was reintroduced here from 1975 and is one of the success stories of conservation. Rum is associated with an incident of the early eighteenth century, which recalls the Established Church’s attempts to complete the work of Reformation in the Highlands and Islands. Their attention was particularly directed at those areas in which Roman Catholic priests and Irish missionaries had been active in the course of the preceding century and in which support for the exiled Stewart Dynasty was strongest. The laird, Hector MacLean of Coll, was said to have insisted in 1726 that the whole population of Rum attend the presbyterian church services. It was said that any recalcitrants he beat into church with a walking stick which was described as a heavy yellow stick and henceforward Protestantism was described as the ‘religion of the yellow stick’ or creideamh a’ bhata bhuidhe. By the late eighteenth century and the time of the Old Statistical Account (1794), the deer had all gone. The population had by this time reached almost 450, although there must have been considerable congestion on the few small areas of arable land. With the increase of population in the eighteenth century, other villages were established in Rum, at Guirdil on the west below Bloodstone Hill and at Kinloch round the head of Loch Scresort. In 1827 the whole population was assisted by MacLean of Coll in an emigration scheme to Canada in which they had no choice; it was said that the islanders were reluctant ‘to leave the land of their ancestors’. Let as a single sheep farm, the remaining population was gradually eliminated. In the 1840s, when Rum had been bought by the Marquis of Salisbury, the island was restocked with red deer brought from the mainland and the pattern was formed of Rum as an exclusive sporting estate, awkwardly recalling the old traditional Gaelic name or ‘kenning’ for the island as ‘the Kingdom of the Wild Forest’, Rioghachd na Forraiste Fiadhaich. The jewel-like Hebridean island of Canna lies to the north and west of its nearest neighbour, Rum. Canna is really another circle of ‘small isles’, with one or two outliers such as Humla and the lighthouse station of Heiskeir, but also with the large island of Sanday which greets and shelters you from the prevailing winds as you sail into Canna. Sanday (Old Norse meaning ‘sandy island’) is separated from Canna by a narrow channel, almost dry at low tide, encircling a large storm-haven which has always made Canna an attractive and safe destination for the traveller at sea. The conjunction of Canna and Sanday creates a beautiful harbour furnished with farmland, dwelling-houses, churches and farm buildings. Enclosed on the slopes are plantations of pine, larch and older hardwoods – sycamore, wych elm, cherry, hawthorn, ash and elder. Salt and wind-tolerant shrubbery adds a touch of colour and gentleness to the wind blown landscape. From 1938, Canna was the hospitable home of the Gaelic scholars, Dr John Lorne Campbell and his wife, Margaret Fay Shaw. In 1981 they presented the islands, their farm and crofts, together with their own libraries, scholarly collections of papers and sound archives to the National Trust for Scotland who now manage them in the interests of their Hebridean community and with the Campbells’ vision of preserving the natural and cultural assets of the islands in situ. The material, traditional and scholarly assets of Canna and Sanday represent a concentration in one place of wealth for Gaelic civilisation unequalled in the British Isles. Dr Campbell was a pioneer in the recording of Gaelic songs and stories and beginning in Barra about 1934, he amassed a collection of some 1,500 Gaelic folksongs and 350 folk tales. The library, archive and sound recordings represent great opportunities for research and scholarship. Stay in Canna and Sanday if you can and share the impressions we have gained from slowly exploring them through the years. They are fertile islands and present a rich prehistoric landscape for the Bronze and Iron Ages. The rocks of the district have their origins from Pre-Cambrian times to the present day and are complemented with a temperate, maritime flora and fauna of great beauty. Canna lies totally within the Tertiary volcanic period and has fine plateau landforms of columnar basalt eroded by ice, sea and weather, with raised beaches. Together with medieval settlements, more recent fortifications such as Coroghon and religious sites such as the ‘Nunnery’, and later structures such as kelp kilns, these islands represent one of the most complete historic landscapes in North-West Scotland, providing a basis for local and regional dating systems for archaeology and history. The early Christian stonework and the monastic site at Keill, dedicated to St. Columba, point to an early Christian mission and a possible residence in Canna of Columba himself in the sixth century. The strength of local tradition connecting Canna with St. Columba was recorded early in the seventeenth century. Canna and Sanday preserve the marks of continuous settlement from Viking and earlier times, through the Lordship of the Isles and the Clanranald era until the clearances of the nineteenth century. The development of agriculture and fisheries and of the social culture of crofting since the early nineteenth century is a further phase which is still clearly seen. The islands represent a microcosm of Highland and Hebridean culture and society awaiting the traveller. Invisible to the glance but entrenched in tradition is the residence of Alexander MacDonald, the most famous of Gaelic poets of all times. About 1750, in a sheltered spot close to the sea and in view of Rum, Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair was said to have composed his heroic verse epic, ‘The Birlinn of Clanranald’, setting the turmoil of life within the framework of his Clan chieftain’s galley sailing from South Uist, past the Small Isles and on south to Carrickfergus on the coast of Antrim. Closing the circle takes the traveller back past the south-west coast of Skye, the Point of Sleat and into Mallaig. You are in a world apart, in a panorama So many words have been written about the islands of the Hebrides, particularly in the last hundred years and with greater or lesser levels of detail; there seems to be no corner unexplored and no stones unturned. But the sense of discovery and the secrets are still there for the voyager of today and a last word surely belongs to the Gael. A song taken down in Uist in 1893 shows us how special the Small Isles were to the people of the Hebrides: “If I were dividing the land, |