An Island Odyssey. Hamish Haswell-Smith
pier and pedalled off down the road. Rounding a bend near the Mill Loch we met an enormous bull in the middle of the track who looked decidedly unfriendly. There was no easy retreat and no time to think so we muttered a greeting and cycled past – one on each side of him. He merely snorted.
No description of Gigha should end without mention of the worthy Seumas McSporran. Apart from hiring bicycles and running a well-stocked store, he held, until his recent partial retirement, fifteen official posts including postman, policeman and registrar of births, marriages and deaths. As far as I know he has not yet conducted a church service – but give him time.
Ruins of the Augustinian Priory
ORONSAY
. . . The natives of Colonsay are accustomed, after their arrival in Oronsay Isle, to make a tour sunways about the church, before they enter upon any kind of business.
. . . My landlord having one of his family sick of a fever asked my book, as a singular favour, for a few moments. I was not a little surprised at the honest man’s request, he being illiterate; and when he told me the reason of it I was no less amazed, for it was to fan the patient’s face with the leaves of the book, and this he did at night. He sought the book next morning, and again in the evening, and then thanked me for so great a favour; and told me the sick person was much better by it. . .
Oronsay is separated from Colonsay by a wide expanse of shell sand – The Strand – which can be crossed on foot when the tide is out. If a fugitive could reach the sanctuary cross, which is halfway across, before being caught by pursuers or the tide, he was granted immunity from punishment – or so it is said.
These linked islands have been inhabited for 7000 years. Many early Christian and pre-Christian relics have been discovered including the bones of primitive domestic animals and Neolithic flint tools. The pagan ship-burial of a Viking warrior in 855 complete with his weapons, horse and coins, had been given extra insurance cover for the hereafter by the incision of two Christian crosses on stone slabs. It was uncovered in the sand dunes in 1882.
Oronsay is a tidal island, and the name normally means just that in Gaelic, but in this particular case it refers to St Oran who founded a monastery here in 563. Later, about 1380, a fine Augustinian Priory was built on the site and the ruins today run a close second to those of Iona. Some human bones from the neighbouring graveyard are kept by the high altar in the chapel and beautifully sculpted medieval tombstones are protected in a roofed building. From an architectural point of view the delightfully proportioned miniature cloisters are particularly worth seeing and in front of the group of buildings there is a remarkable 3.7 metre (12 feet) high Celtic cross on a mound. The whole island is suffused with a feeling of tranquillity and it is easy to understand why St Oran chose it for a retreat, although Columba is reputed to have rejected it because it was too near Ireland.
MacNeil of Knapdale acquired both the islands from the Campbells in 1700 and sailed over with his cattle in an open boat to take possession. MacNeil’s wife is said to have given birth during the voyage and he slaughtered a cow so that mother and child could lie inside the carcass to keep warm. The MacNeils were good landlords but, unfortunately, in the manner of the time, raided the existing buildings for stone so the spacious farmhouse and outbuildings which they built next door to the Priory are part of the reason for the Priory’s ruined state today. Likewise, he is thought to have completely demolished an abbey and convent in order to build Colonsay House.
This was one of the few Hebridean islands which was fortunate enough to escape the 19th-century clearances thanks to the liberal approach of John MacNeil, the laird at the time. But this was partly because so many families had already been driven by poverty to emigrate to America and the Statistical Account lamented, ‘Pity it is that such numbers should bid farewell to their native country, when there is so great a demand for useful citizens’. By 1904 debt had forced the MacNeils to put the island up for sale and it was bought by Lord Strathcona in 1905. The Strathcona family still own Colonsay but sold Oronsay in the 1970s.
A reef of islets and some skerries lie parallel to the east coast of Oronsay, creating a channel, Caolas Mór, which is the only partially sheltered anchorage in the area. There are a number of Mesolithic shell mounds near the shore as it was the site of a Stone Age settlement. A small sandy beach and boat house face the kyle and it was here we anchored Jandara. Unfortunately there are no secure anchorages round Colonsay or Oronsay and we’ve spent uncomfortable nights on several different occasions off the ferry pier at Scalasaig.
Oronsay’s American owner runs a trim farm on the island and it is pleasant to see well-repaired dykes and fences. The flat area to the south is used as an airstrip but landing must be hazardous as ponies wander across it and thousands of excavating rabbits are hard at work. Beyond the airstrip is a long reef ending with the ruin of an old kelp-gatherer’s cottage on Eilean nan Ron – ‘seal island’ – which is well-named and a nature reserve. A thousand or more grey Atlantic seals converge here every autumn and the roar of battling bulls can be heard for miles.
EILEACH AN NAOIMH
. . . In the ninth year of Meilochen, son to Pridius, King of Picts, a most powerful king, Columbus, by his preaching and example, converted that nation to the faith of Christ. Upon this account, they gave him Iona to erect a monastery in. . . and where he was buried in the 77th year of his age. . .
He built a noble monastery in Ireland before his coming to Britain, from both which monasteries he and his disciples founded several other monasteries in Britain and Ireland, among all which the monastery of the island in which his body is interred has the pre-eminence. . .
If the madding crowd of tourists on Iona get you down then why not escape, like St Columba, to his private island paradise? He would slip away for a rest cure on tranquil Eileach an Naoimh, the southernmost of the chain of small islands known today as the Garvellachs. It was here that his uncle, St Brendan of Clonfert, had founded a small rural monastery in AD542 – twenty-one years before Columba himself founded Iona – and it offered him a blessed place of peace.
Eileach an Naoimh is early Gaelic for the ‘rocky place of the saint’ and when Adomnan, Abbot of Iona, wrote about his predecessor he mentioned Columba’s great love of ‘Hinba’ – the ‘Isles of the Sea’. It is almost certain that this refers to the Garvellachs. The early Celtic monks tried to emulate the devotion of St John the Baptist by looking for spiritual uplift in the wilderness, and what better place in the Scottish context than a small island in the ocean wastes?
But although this island is a ‘rocky place’ much of the rock is limestone, so the soil is fertile and the grass green. As the strata tilt upwards, ending in steep cliffs, the south-facing slopes and rocky crevices are sheltered from the prevailing winds and covered with a riot of scarlet pimpernel, primrose, yellow iris, meadow-sweet and honeysuckle. A splendid natural sandstone arch, An Chlàrsach – ‘the harp’, at the north end of the island can be reached by an interesting but rough walk along the shore, or on the springy turf along the top of the ridge with the sea frothing at the foot of the cliffs below you.
The anchorage is in a lagoon formed by a line of skerries where a tiny creek with a shingle beach is called the ‘port for Columba’s church’. Beside it a fresh-water spring runs into a stone basin overgrown with watercress and beyond can be seen the low broken ruin of the monastery and a church with a chancel and mortared walls. These are thought to date from the 9th century (St Brendan’s original structures would almost certainly have been