On the Western Coast
Strong, L. A. G.
ON THE WESTERN COAST By L. A. G. STRONG FORTY miles from anything that can be called a town, on a strip of wild and beautiful coast facing the Hebrides, I sit, one of three left over from a family...
...The house, a long low affair of grey stone, in grounds just over a mile long by half a mile wide, which we had all rented each year for the holiday months, came into the market with the whole deer forest of which it forms a tiny part...
...Ethnologically, the people of the mainland are Celts, courteous, easy, dignified and indolent, with a sprinkling of Lowlanders from Glasgow to run the railway and direct local enterprise...
...It was strange, only this morning, to hear two men talking as they endeavored to start an ancient and balky Ford van, and hearing in the midst of a torrent of fluent Gaelic the word "ignition...
...The change has also brought us closer to our neighbors, several of whom become our tenants and- strange to think it-our servants...
...Is the word 'jewel'-derived from 'Jew...
...Then there seemed a poor chance of our ever returning here...
...Not long ago there was a bull about which regularly made people run for their lives...
...Indeed the rise and fall of the speaking voice here has often made me think I am in the Wicklow hills...
...Ah: the winter is lonely without them...
...It is a great load off our minds...
...A monthly parcel of stores, sent up from the south...
...His little daughter has won a bursary to the school forty miles away, and will in due time reach the university...
...Oh, he is a quiet bull, he would hurt no one...
...And in another week the rest of us must go...
...Even if he is not so quiet, it is hard to rouse them...
...but we can now be sure that he has his necessaries, without attempting to influence or to control him in the least...
...He lives in a stone cottage (Achatailsaig is its name, not pronounced in the least like that) on a tiny bay with the whitest of soft sand, between two rocky clumps of trees...
...They live easily, and are very casual...
...The idea of being responsible for a boat frightened the old man...
...yet wild things have happened...
...She stood in the wind at her cottage door, shading her eyes with her hand...
...but the people have been goodness itself to an Irish guest...
...Mark my words," said the mover, "Ye will no heed that bull till he has killed a man"-a prophecy soon fulfilled, for the bull killed him less than a week afterward...
...the kitchen garden has not been quite denuded...
...There is much in common between the two races, but I was surprised to find how much...
...Visitors are often complaining of the way in which bulls are allowed to wander on the highroad, and their protest is always met with a smile...
...Autumn has come down from the mountains, and the place smells wild...
...A hundred yards down the drive, round the end of the pine wood, a fresh prospect is opened: Prince Charlie's country, bays and points and a huddle of islands, stretching as far as distant and dim Ardnamurchan: all now blissfully secured to us...
...Even if we were that way minded, the word means nothing applied to such people as these...
...This work gave him the mighty muscles he keeps at sixty-eight, but it gave him also the taste that is apt to swallow most of his shillings...
...But the lesson was forgotten, and each bull is let roam until it turns savage and attacks someone...
...As long as the road remains so bad-there is only one-we shall not be overrun with visitors here: yet even if we were, the Highlands could shake them off, as the black bull in the field above shakes off his flies, and return in autumn to its savage dignity...
...This resignation, common to the race, manifests itself among the younger generation as an amiable reluctance to initiate anything which may be a trouble...
...I shall never forget her greeting as she took my hand between her two withered hands, her smile, the dreamy beautiful cadence of her voice...
...Over there on Eigg the McLeods, pretending friendship, lured their hereditary foes the Macdonalds into a cave, and burned them alive with their wives and children...
...When visitors have tried to pay Michael in kind "in his own best interests," I have been filled with rage...
...Then, the deer forest failing to find a purchaser, some of the ground was split up into parcels, and the family desperately clubbed together and bought Camus an Daraich...
...Old Michael, our fisherman, when he was eleven years old, parleyed with the excisemen in the hill and turned them at last away from the very mouth of the cave where his grandfather crouched over a still...
...For the moment, there is nothing to trouble about...
...Huge, sandy, good-natured, bosom friend of all children: ready to leave any job for a gossip: gentle with animals and trusted by them instantly, though too easy-going to train them well: Presbyterian by birth and marriage, for his wife, a devout body, drives the patient sighing man to many a meeting which would otherwise lack him: Donald has worked here all his life, and cannot imagine, or be imagined, anywhere else...
...We have a long line, with 200 hooks, and Old Michael, who is attached to the house as general retainer, will help us dig the necessary bait and set it to advantage...
...My young brother-in-law, his intimate and familiar, consulted him, but the ground was very delicate...
...Scores of dead McLeods lie beneath it, and no one hereabouts will pass that way after dark...
...A regular wage...
...Personally, I hate nothing more than interference with the private affairs of a poor man...
...Means of subsistence give us no difficulty...
...If we put it down three times in the eight days, we shall get ample for ourselves and for most of our neighbors...
...Where else in the world is there such a coast...
...Westward lies Eigg, sloping up gracefully to the Sguir on its southern point...
...Under strict pledge of secrecy, a local farmer will supply Michael with milk and butter: the village van will leave weekly supplies at his door, as it would if he himself had ordered them: a boat will be at hand early next year, and Father McCanlis will see that anything Michael catches is properly marketed...
...It is essential that he should have good food, for drink has spoiled the coats of his stomach, and his digestion is weak...
...Donald, gardener and caretaker, is a very different kind...
...Her mother, old Mistress Mclean, past eighty years old, has in her face and voice the real aristocracy of the spirit...
...The farmer near us, a retired sea captain, has crossed the Atlantic seventeen times, and is a most well-read and cultured man...
...On the smallest provocation he goes off into convulsions of laughter, slapping his leg and exclaiming, "My, my, my, my," in the indescribable soft accent of the west...
...He had gone along there in the dusk, and seen men in kilts fighting and snarling without a sound...
...He tries to teach us the Gaelic name of every hill and stream, laughing till he cries at our efforts to pronounce them after him...
...Father McCanlis made us very welcome, sympathized with our project and has managed the whole thing...
...Could you tell me, sir -we were having an argument about it last evening...
...yet it is as well to think what must be done, while there is still time...
...He sits in her cottage by the hour, telling her legends, tales from the classics, and listening to all she can tell about the history of clan and country...
...They are sad, these visits, but our hearts are much lighter than they were a year ago...
...So they're away," she repeated...
...A little boy staying at the house two years ago ran in white and terrified...
...His motion was out-voted by ten to two...
...When we were engaged, she was the first person here whom my wife told...
...Up till now we could do little, because of that pride of his, but now he will acknowledge our right as owners, and we can see to his concerns...
...My father-in-law was especially delighted to meet a big dog-seal the evening before he left...
...Here in these very grounds the Macdonalds ambushed the McLeods, in a little passage between two clumps...
...North lies a field of scanty pasture, a ridge of white sand hills and the Sound of Sleat: five miles of sea, ever changing its color, flowing like a river between the mainland and the coast of Skye...
...Indeed, most of his boyhood was spent rowing the stuff around by night, in every sort of weather, to their customers, "and two of them was justices of the peace, och, aye, sir...
...He foresaw regular work and demands for an accounting...
...Sand, cliffs and dark woods: a pattern of fields rising like a counterpane to humps of moorland: and above all, far inland, dreaming, of a different texture, a different world, the wild fantastic line of the Coolins, broken, irrelevant, jagged as the teeth of a saw...
...Education is precious in these parts...
...Then an idea came to us: we went and called on the priest...
...We have few problems...
...The washerwoman stopped my father-in-law the other day in the road...
...For a dark time it looked as if we had seen our last of it-my wife's people had known it for fifty years...
...and there are some odd tins of fruit left over in the cupboards...
...My father-in-law is devoted to her...
...Yesterday he had to return south, and we took her a farewell gift from him...
...Now, therefore, any of us, whenever we get a time off, can spend it in the loveliest part of the western highlands...
...Unconventional, perhaps: but she has seen so much...
...What he does with his money is no concern of ours...
...I am only a stranger here really, having married into it all...
...In the summer he is kept busy at the house, where he gets all his meals and a good wage besides...
...For the rest, there is a farm near by...
...In this clear air we can often see the two islands of Uist, more than sixty miles away...
...All speak Gaelic, most of them English as well: they will change from one to the other with disconcerting suddenness, and a visitor often has the impression of being in a foreign land...
...So they're away...
...A boat, so that he could fish for his own profit...
...All along the south, and curving round to the east, is a sheltering bank high enough to keep off the wind, but not to shut out the sun...
...But in the winter, when all he can hope for is a casual job here and there, whisky takes what little he has, and despite the neighbors' kindness he does not get enough to eat...
...For religion, the people are mostly Catholics, but there is a strong Presbyterian faction...
...Peaceful and law-abiding the people are...
...and, behind it, some twelve miles away, the towering peaks of Rhum...
...He has many accomplishments, prime among which is to imitate, with perturbing realism, the bleat of a ram...
...Mac-donald is the prevailing clan: there is a regular hamlet of them two miles off and, close at hand, a cottage shared by two independent and unrelated Mary Mac-donalds...
...All live at amity together, and we hear of no theological differences unless, perhaps, an occasional argument upon a Sunday: for the Protestants are fanatical Sabbatarians, and have been known even to let a boat drift from her moorings, to be rescued ultimately for them by an indulgent neighbor...
...Prince Charlie twice crossed this land, resting a bare two miles away, above Loch Morar: and from the loch island nearest the sea old Lord Lovat was dragged, stiff with rheumatism after a day and a night's hiding, to lose his head in London...
...Having to sing one day at a gathering of the people, I sang two Irish folk-songs, which superficially were quite unlike the stark melodies of the place: but every point was taken up instantly, and no one had difficulty in understanding the different idiom...
...Hebridean music has many seal tunes, which one should whistle or croon to a seal if one wishes to make friends with him...
...All this from the western windows...
...A third group, numbering seven souls only, has a place of worship in the nearest village, and endowments to maintain a minister...
...Our neighbors, for instance-one must not leave all the farewell visits till the last day, and then perhaps miss somebody who is not at home...
...At a meeting of the parish council, one man urged that it be shut up...
...ON THE WESTERN COAST By L. A. G. STRONG FORTY miles from anything that can be called a town, on a strip of wild and beautiful coast facing the Hebrides, I sit, one of three left over from a family house-party, sunning myself by the fuchsia-covered front door, and considering these last days of our holiday...
...The house faces west...
...Seals come often to the mainland, and the people, who are very fond of them, show a strange understanding of their minds...
...and the remains of a fierce pride prevent him from failing a single day...
...Oh, my dears, my dears," she said, "my two poor things: it's sad, it's very sad...
Vol. 11 • January 1930 • No. 11
