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Issue 28 - Scott in Skye

History & Heritage

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Scotland Magazine Issue 28

Scotland Magazine Issue 28
September 2006

 

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Scott in Skye

In the latest in our series, Ian Mitchell reports on Sir Walter Scott's love affair with the Isle of Skye

Scott in Skye (Issue 28)
There have been many visits to Skye, but few have had the impact which Walter Scott’s visit to the island in 1814 did.

The wanderings of the Pretender had given Skye its romantic aura, and the visits of travellers and authors Boswell and Johnson in the 18th century had encouraged a trickle of tourists to the Misty Isle.

But Scott was an international celebrity, the first millionaire writer whose poems sold in hundreds of thousands. When his poem The Lord of the Isles came out in 1815 it put Skye on the international tourist map. Coupled with the development of steamship routes to the island, its tourist boom had begun – and the tourists had Scott’s works in their pockets.

Scott came to Skye in 1814 from Harris, on board a vessel of the Northern Lighthouse Commissioners, commanded by Robert Stevenson. Scott’s first port of call was at Dunvegan Castle. Stemming from the lesser lairds of the Borders, Scott was a dreadful snob and worshipped the aristocracy, so paying his respects to the Macleods was an obligation.

Scott saw the revival of feudal practices as a barrier against threatening democracy, and he notes approvingly the efforts of Macleod to “medievalise” his castle, “by making a portal between two advanced towers and an outer court, from which he proposes to throw a drawbridge over to the high rock in front of the castle.” Yet while admiring this unauthentic addition to the castle, Scott remarks in passing that the MacCrimmon piping college was no more; the reason being that Macleod refused to continue funding it. While real traditions in the Highlands were dying out, new ‘traditions’ were being manufactured.

Scott was shown the historic relics of Dunvegan, including the Fairy Flag and the drinking horn of Rorie More, both of which were to feature in his poem Lord of the Isles, and his hosts, knowing Scott’s penchant for the Gothic, offered him the haunted room of the castle as his apartment. However, rather prosaically, after weeks at sea, Scott had only thoughts for the comfortable bed, and slept “without thinking of ghost or goblin, till I was called by my manservant.” During the day Macleod accompanied Scott and his companions to the Church of Kilmore, where they observed women preparing cloth. Again, our poet was rather underwhelmed by the scene, “we heard the women singing as they waulked the cloth by rubbing it with their hands and feet and screaming all the while in a sort of chorus. At a distance the sound was wild and sweet enough, but rather discordant when you approached to near the performers.” In fact Scott was possibly suffering from boat-lag, and he confessed to himself that his feelings accorded with those of Dr Johnson at Dunvegan, “I looked around and wondered that I was not more affected; but the mind is not at all times equally ready to be moved.” On the afternoon of August 24, the boat set sail from Dunvegan, Scott admiring the views of Macleod’s Dining-Tables (actually mountains) and “the much higher and more romantic mountains called Quillen, or Cuilllen, a name which they have said to no less a person than Cuthullin, or Cuchullin, celebrated by Ossian.” If Scott was underwhelmed by Dunvegan, he was overwhelmed by the Cuillin, and especially Loch Coruisk, which The Lord of the Isles made into a tourist honeypot. And who would not be overwhelmed, sailing into Loch Scavaig on a spendid morning under the “weather-beaten and serrated peaks” of the Cuillin which in Scott’s words “seemed to consist of precipitous sheets of naked rock, down which the torrents were leaping in a hundred lines of foam. The tops, apparently inaccessible to human foot, were rent and split into the most tremendous pinnacles.” Seeking for a guide to lead them to Coruisk itself, Scott and his party first of all had the problem that the locals suspected them of being excise men when they landed, at “a house which might afford us information” – the present Camasunary.

Once this problem was overcome they found someone to lead them “a couple of miles” – though to the wrong location “because the honest man seemed jealous of the honour of his own loch,” compared with Coruisk! From Scott’s description this stretch of water was Loch na Creitheach, and the incident an interesting example of the Gael’s local patriotism.

Re-embarking, they rounded the headland between Scavaig and Camasunary in their rowing boat, and at the outlet joining Loch Scavaig to Loch Coruisk found “hundreds of trout and salmon struggling to get up into fresh water; with a net we might have had 20 salmon at a haul.” Following this outlet, Scott’s eyes opened in wonder. “We found ourselves in a most extraordinary scene; we were surrounded by hills of the boldest and most precipitous character, the mountains rose so perpendicularly from the water’s edge that Borrowdale is a jest to them.” Scott and his companions walked a mile and a half up the loch (which he designated Loch Corriskin) enjoying the “exquisite savage scene” as far as the foot of “an inaccessible mountain, the top of which seemed to contain the crater of an exhausted volcano.” Forgiving Scott his dubious geology, this was probably the mountain now known as Sgurr Dubh.

In The Lord of the Isles, Scott would describe to a huge audience a description of this previously little-known spot: For rarely human eye has known Ascene so stern as that dread lake With its dark edge of barren stone And wilder, forward as they wound, Were the proud cliffs and lake profound.

Huge terraces of granite black A footnote to Scott’s visit to Skye was a trip to Macallister’s cave on the shores of Loch Slapin.

Scott found that the local proprietor had erected an iron gate over the cave to prevent vandalism, however it was late in the day and a three mile walk to get the key. Scott “with the assistance of a rope and some ancient acquaintance with orchardbreaking” clambered over the gate to investigate the cave. Here he found an early example of tourism destroying what it came to find, for the stalagtites of the cave had been blackened by the torches of visitors, many of whom had broken off the “dropping of the calcareous water” for keepsakes. But enough remained for Scott to compare the cave to “the bathing grotto of a Naiad.” Encountering the proprietor’s sons, the cave-breakers stuffed the childrens’ pockets with almonds and raisins and fired the ship’s guns to amuse them, “as a letter of apology for storming the exterior defences of (the) cavern,” then set sail for more cavern questing on Eigg.

But it was Coruisk which had made the most profound impact on Scott’s mind.

Stevenson later wrote a memoir of their voyage, noting that Scott had wandered off alone at Coruisk and was (unusually) late returning for the boat. A sailor was sent to fetch him, and remarked that “it was strange that he did not look at me though he saw me coming.” Stevenson himself noted Scott “was still quite absorbed in thought and said little” after his return from Coruisk.

Soon his thoughts would pour forth into poem, Scott’s last real effort in that genre before turning to fiction.