Who Said What About the Scottish Isles

Sunsets to die for on the Scottish Western Isles' beaches

THE ISLE OF SKYE, Inner Hebrides

They climbed the foothills and Iron Age hillforts, explored the chambered cairns, birdwatched, fished for salmon and feasted from wicker picnic baskets, collected fossil ammonites and pressed wildflowers. They stayed for a whole month to take in Skye's bewitching atmosphere and diverse geological splendors.

Reluctant to leave they were, and lines of a poem by Rev. J. F. Marshall lamented those predawn departures:

O misty isle, it seems as if
No time to leave thee could be found
More fitting than the hour in which men turn from sleeping,
And reluctant, lose their dreams.

Mrs Mackinnon told me that last year when the ship sailed from Portree for America, the people on shore were almost distracted when they saw their relations go off; they lay down on the ground and tumbled, and tore the grass with their teeth. This year there was not a tear shed. The people on shore seemed to think they would soon follow. This is a mortal sign.

......James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, 1773 (1785)

The Western Isles of the Inner Hebrides

THE ISLES OF RUM, EIGG AND MUCK
Those islands which sound like a new cocktail — Rum, Eigg and Muck.
.....H.V. Morton, In Search of Scotland, 1929

THE ISLE OF MUCK

A visit was paid by the laird and lady of a small island south of Skye, of which the proper name is Muack, which signifies 'swine.' It is commonly called Muck, which the proprietor not liking, has endeavoured, without effect, to change to Monk.
It is usual to call gentlemen in Scotland by the name of their possessions, as Raasay, Bernera, Loch Buy, a practice necessary in countries inhabited by clans, where all that live in the same territory have one name, and must be therefore discriminated by some addition.
This gentleman, whose name, I think, is Maclean, should be regularly called Muck; but the appelation, which he thinks too coarse for his island, he would like still less for himself, and he is therefore addressed by the title of, Isle of Muck.

.....Samuel Johnson, Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, 1775

Some of those islands might be considered as the hell of Great Britain, where all evil spirits should be sent.

.....Hector St John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 1782

There is still something of an Odyssey up there, in among the islands and the silent Lochs: like the twilight morning of the world, the herons fishing undisturbed by the water, and the sea running far in, for miles, between the wet trickling hills, where the cottages are low and almost invisible, built into the earth. It is still out of the world like the very beginning of Europe.

.....D.H. Lawrence, Letter to Else Jaffe, Newtonmore, 20 August 1926

A man of the Hebrides, for of the women's diet I can give no account, as soon as he appears in the morning, swallows a glass of whisky; yet they are not a drunken race, at least I never was present at much intemper­ance; but no man is so abstemious as to refuse the morning dram, which they call a skalk.

.....Samuel Johnson, Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, 1775

The Western Isles of the Outer Hebrides

The conjoined ISLES OF LEWIS (Leodhas)and HARRIS Na Hearadh)

The difference between Harris and Lewis is not as great as the difference between whisky and wine, or even the difference between whisky and other ardent spirits. It is rather like the difference between two neighbourly malts - marginal and almost indefineable, but very real to the connoisseur.

...James Shaw Grant, Discovering Lewis and Harris, John Donald Publishers Ltd., Edinburgh

When the Queen visited Lewis in 1956, the official gift from the Stornoway Town Council was a golden replica of a cutag. Only an island like Lewis, devoid of any sense of class or status - ministers of religion apart! - could have thought of presenting a queen with a [herring] gutting girl's knife [cutag] as the symbol by which the community wished to be remembered.

......James Shaw Grant, Discovering Lewis and Harris, John Donald Publishers Ltd.,Edinburgh

The Shetland Isles

The town of Lerwick

Mr Collector Ross tells me, that from the King's books it appears that the quantity of spirits, tea, coffe, tobacco, snuff, and sugar, imported annually into Lerwick for the consumption of Zetland, averages at sale price, £20,000 yearly at the least. Now the inhabitants of Zetland, men, women, and children, do not exceed 20,000 in all, and the proportion of foreign luxuries seems monstrous, unless we allow for the habits contracted by the seamen in their foreign trips. Tea, in particular, is used by all ranks, and porridge quite exploded.

......Sir Walter Scott, Diary, 5 August 1814, in Lockhart,'Life of Scott,' 1838

What struck me in these islands was their bleakness, the number of ridiculous little churches, the fact that bogs do not require a level surface for their existence but can also run uphill, and that ponies sometimes have a black stripe like the wild ass; the local fashion off eating mutton chops and tea in the afternoons, and! pronouncing words such as 'whatever' like 'quatever.'

.....Norman Douglas of the year 1891 in Looking Back, 1933

Orkney

At oure landing the people fled from their poore cottages, with shrikes and alarms, to warne their neighbours of enemies, but by gentle persuasions we reclamed them to their houses. It seemeth they are often frighted with Pirats, or some other enemies, that moove them to such sudden feare.

Their houses are very simply builded with Pibble stone, without any chimneis, the fire being made in the middest thereof. The good man, wife, children, and other of their family eate and sleepe on the one side of the house, and the cattell on the other, very beastly and rudely in respect of civilitie. They are destitute of wood, their fire is turffes, and Cowshards.

.....Dionise Settle (1577) in Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations . . . of the English Nation, 1598-1600

Kirkwall, Orkney

This bloody town's a bloody cuss —
No bloody trains, no bloody bus,
And no one cares for bloody us,
In bloody Orkney
The bloody roads are bloody bad,
The bloody folks are bloody mad,
They'd make the brightest bloody sad
In bloody Orkney.
Everything's so bloody dear,
A bloody bob for bloody beer,
And is it good, - no bloody fear,
In bloody Orkney. . .
No bloody sport, no bloody games,
No bloody fun; the bloody dames
Won't even give their bloody names,
In bloody Orkney.
Best bloody place is bloody bed,
With bloody ice on bloody head,
You might as well be bloody dead,
In bloody Orkney.

...Captain Hamish Blair, attrib. In Bloody Orkney, c. 1940'

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