Mingulay and the Barra Isles

This is a 20 minute read, which is longer than most posts will be. I got immersed in the history of the Hebrides. You can always just scroll the photos.

Vatersay's east facing beach wrapped up in sea fog, photo Eve Goolden

The Hebridean Islands are the scrambled north western edge, not just of Scotland but of Eurasia. The next landfall is the coast of Labrador in Canada. At the southern tail of the archipelago the Barra Isles tumble out like broken vertebrae. The distances between the islands is not great but the Atlantic swell pours through the caolas or narrow straits.

On Mingulay and Pabbay massive cliffs plunge vertically into the sea. There are few natural landing places. Barra has a natural harbour at Castlebay. Vatersay comes next, from North to South 5km long pulled in at the middle to form two long silvery beaches, one facing west, one east. This has been an important harbour since the nineteenth century. Mingulay has no easy landing or sheltered anchorage. Vatersay is the southernmost inhabited island and this is where we started our journey, parked up in the community-run camping spaces in the machair behind the beach among the stolid munching cows.

Photo Neil Buckland

You can plan all you like to go to Mingulay but you have to strike lucky with the weather. We hadn’t struck all that lucky. It had been windy, around force 5/7.There was a let up for just one day. The sea was going to be pretty bouncy with the swell coming in from the Atlantic but it was do-able. We would have to chop down our bigger ambition: to paddle to Mingulay, make a base there from which to explore the sheer cliffs, chasms, caves and tunnels of the Western side and circle Berneray/Barra Head before exploring every island on our way home. Instead we would make it to Mingulay village beach on this one day, come back to a camp spot on Pabbay before nipping out for an early return before the worst of the weather arrived.

As we launched the sea was pearly blue over the silver sand, there was a soft grey mist over the outer bay. It was pretty as can be, but I was cold. I was excited. And I was scared.

I’d lost my nerve a few months earlier on the N Wales coast. I’d gone out with some friends and I hadn’t been able to keep up. That matters. I’m getting old. I don’t want to let pals down. Sea Kayaking trips go at the pace of the slowest person. You can’t leave anyone behind and if we couldn’t keep up a decent pace the trip would be scuppered for everyone.

So that Spring I’d got onto my local river, the Severn, to see whether I could train my way back to fitness. I needed strength, skill, speed, stamina and distance. I started on strength: paddling against the winter flow, picking up on skill using eddies to nip through tight spots, slogging to increase my distance every time. Twelve miles up there’s a bridge. Turn under the bridge. Work on speed on the way back. Do it again a few days later. By mid-April I was working on distance, starting higher and higher up river till I reached 25 miles non-stop. I hadn’t rebuilt my sea confidence. But I had rediscovered the love of “my” river. I had close encounters with otters and counted kingfishers galore. If it turned out I was going to have to give up sea expeditions I would still find joy and beauty on the water.

So there I was, literally sick with apprehension, leaving Vatersay on a bright, bouncy day that we knew was our only weather window that week. We would, if we kept up a decent pace, reach that famous silvery beach with the deserted village behind. The west coast would have to wait for another time should we be so lucky in our lives.

Pen and Gillian head across the Sandray Sound, Caolas Shanndraigh, photo Neil Buckland

Emerging from the arm of Vatersay you start island hopping. And that’s fun. And when you’re having fun you forget to be scared. Anyway the training was paying off. There were six of us. We’re a loose group. We know and trust each other. We don’t follow along like ducks in a row. There’s freedom to branch out a little. But Alan is the boss, everyone knows that. Then there’s Spike who is the finest sea paddler I know. That means he usually takes life at a stroll “because” he says, “I can”. But you’ll see him put on a phenomenal turn of speed if any one of us gets in a tight spot or if he takes a crazy turn. Then Neil, the best of all companions who always has a beer in his hold for everyone. Keith has an invaluable skill: he could make a dead parrot laugh. Gillian I didn’t know yet but I’d noticed already that she can collapse a tent and pack a boat neater and faster than should be humanly possible. We were sadly missing Amy, but she had asthma and stayed ashore.

Gillian and I were exploring a little rock gulley along Eilean Mor on Sandray island when Neil, Alan and the rest started to yoller at us. Assuming they were telling us not to rock hop I took absolutely no notice. It was our first bit of playtime. Gillian, better behaved than me, looked back and was rewarded with the magnificent fin of a basking shark moments behind us. The others got to see the whole beast open jawed diving behind us passing directly below Neil’s boat. Neil’s a photographer but he said he didn’t even think about getting his camera. He was too happy: “I could have died and gone to heaven” he said. And the sun came out and that load of miserable fear had just slid from my shoulders. Just like that. We were on an adventure. I wasn’t a dead weight. I was part of a team, the best kind of team: with friends.

photo Neil Buckland

Another hop over to Pabbay, and then Mingulay. There’s a lovely kind of swell that is so big and gentle that it’s like being on the back of a giant beast that rolls so gently in its sleep that you only notice it when you are running alongside rocks. Honestly there is no other way than in a flimsy kayak to experience this extraordinary moment of the vast energy of the ocean meeting the land. It’s not crashing, it’s more like stroking. I recommend it. This is how it was as we ran down the northern end of Mingulay. Using Gillian, who was just ahead of me, as my measuring rod I tried to work out the height of the swell (maybe 6 foot?) but was distracted by the coruscated magic blue of the rock face: an uncountable  wealth of seeded blue mussels. At low tide the haul would be magnificent if you were able to get up close. And then a turn into the most beautiful silver new moon of beach I have ever seen. Mingulay. A deep in-take of breath. We were there.

The thing about Mingulay is that, although it was inhabited for so long, it has never had a harbour or even a slip. There is no easy landing place, just this silvery beach. Even on a day when the beach should have been sheltered from the swell the landing was not particularly easy.

Wikipix

The resident seals watched as we made our landing. This is how you land a carbon sea kayak: you hang about around fifty yards out and count the waves in. How many seconds apart are they? How long will you have to be out of your boat before the water sucks you back out again? My boat is made of fast and light but brittle. I can’t afford to “drive” her up the beach as you might a plastic boat. So some forty feet out I quieten my breathing and lift my bum out to sit on the back cockpit. At this moment I am very unstable because all my weight is in the wrong place so quick but steady I hitch my legs out so I’m astride my boat. At this moment I can breathe easy. Then, as I  paddle in I don’t let the wave take me, I stay in charge, don’t surf, take the back of the wave, slowly now…judge the moment I can get my feet down and stand up quickly so that my little boat can scoot ahead onto the beach and…and I’m safely landed. Course if you get it wrong you’ll just tip in and all your pals will help you and no harm done except you feel a prat. Whatever, we’ve landed. it’s snack time.

photo Craig Easton

The Hebridean Islands are full of ruined villages. Ruins tell a story. Above the beach in the thick grass I find house walls of rough stone once put together by human hand. Today they make a perch for me, a place to survey the island. Later, with the help of a map from a village survey done by Ben Buxton. 1) I can work out that the last inhabitant of these walls was Calum MacPhee. Ben’s two books, Mingulay and The Vatersay Raiders excellent. I recommend them.

Mingulay was inhabited for five thousand years before it was abandoned in 1910. From Neolithic times to the early twentieth century, in fact to the year my Dad was born, 1910. Having just landed I try to imagine what type of craft these earliest inhabitants had arrived in. Remember I’m not a historian, I’m not local, I’m just trying to connect with the island’s people. It’s likely that the prehistoric settlers came by sea, man’s earliest highway. In dugout canoes? Well yes, I can imagine landing a canoe, it would be pretty much the same as my own landing technique. But the crossings would have been formidable in a shallow sided open canoe. There would have to be something worth coming for and staying for - and there was. We know that because around Mingulay there are ruins of roundhouse settlements. Some of them were built over or the stone reused by later inhabitants. Archaeological surveys of middens have shown that what the Iron Age inhabitants found worth staying for is much the same as what the twentieth century Mingulay crofters stayed for. The island could sustain a diet of grains, fish, wild birds, shellfish, sheep and cattle.

The island was fertile. Apart from the lack of washed up seaweed to fertilise the fields there was enough good ground and fishing to support a fair sized community. The crop that seems strange to us today was sea birds. The high western cliffs support a massive population which the crofters saw as an important part of their diet as well as a source of income. They were eaten, feathers were sold for bedding, the oils were extracted, even the beaks were used (as thatching pegs). Barrels of shearwater chicks paid the rent to their clan chief MacNeil. Now we celebrate the fantastic Mingulay bird population in a very different way.

Early Christianity was brought to us from Ireland in coracles and we know they came to  these islands. Well that’s enough to make me believe God and the weather Gods must have been with them. I can imagine a coracle landing here, lost in the swell until it came close in and then to be watched in awe bobbing in on the waves. A wild, crazy man hops out, hoists it on his shoulder and takes the island with his religion and charisma. No wonder people listened to him. Christianity flourished here and endured alongside a practical belief in Giants, Faeries and magic cures. The Scottish Reformation did not take hold here. In the late nineteenth century Donald Buchanan described Mingulay residents as “the most devout Catholics I have ever known.”

Next came the Vikings, even to little Mingulay. A Viking long boat beached here? That’s hard to imagine. There’s a replica longboat outside the museum on South Uist and it is a magnificent thing, massive too. They did come and they did stay. According to legend the first Viking to land on Barra was Onund Wooden Leg in 871 with 5 of these ships. He stayed for years “on warfare in the Summer and in the Barra Isles in the winters.” Vikings settled and Norse became the language of the islands until the thirteenth century when Gaelic reasserted itself. The two languages get on well together. The Barra islands, including Mingulay have Norse or Norse/Gaelic in many of their place names. For example Sloc Heisegeo on the southwest coast of Mingulay has the suffix sloc, Gaelic for an inlet or chasm with geo, Old Norse for a chasm or cleft. I would still like to know where they kept their boats on Mingulay. Maybe at Skipisdale a valley at the Southern end of the island which goes down to a deeply indented narrow bay. The “dale” at the end of Skipisdale is from the Norse word “dalr” valley. It doesn’t look wide enough on the map. I hope I get to come back here and find out. One day, if I’m lucky.

By the seventeenth century the MacNeils were chiefs of the Barra Islands, ruling from Kisimuil, a name derived from old Norse ciosamul, castle island. The castle still looks very romantic in Castelbay, Barra. The MacNeils claimed descendance from Niall Naoigiallach, King of Ireland in the fourth century. Whether or no the MacNeils mattered to the nineteenth century MacPhee family, whose wall I was sitting on, because that was whom they paid rent to, probably in barrels of “faitlings” Manx Sheerwater chicks. The MacNeils could call on the crofters when young men were needed to go to war for them, for example in the Jacobite rebellion. The last clan chief, Colonel Roderick MacNeil thought nothing of taking men from Mingulay to what amounted to slave labour in his kelp factory on Berneray. His rule was pretty brutal. But the MacNeil’s were held in some respect by the crofters compared to the absentee landlords who came after him.

By the nineteenth century the boats that would have landed below me on the beach would have been wooden row boats. They must have known the water so well that judging when to land would have come naturally to them. But weather still often made launching impossible and you could be stuck for weeks. A good few villagers must have come out to help drag such sturdy boats ashore. Did they have special boat hauler songs? Their Boats feel somehow familiar. Their hulks are to be seen gently subsiding into the mud or drying out on the shore throughout the Hebrides. Later my granddaughter Eve and I found a beauty on Vatersay where once the herring curing station would have been a very busy place. There's a lovely oral history account of how the boats were built and used here. These sturdy boats went as far afield as Shetland and Ireland with a crew of 5, oars and a sail.

photo Eve Goolden

What was life like for the MacPhee family living here through the nineteenth century? The women would have their work cut out for them, especially as the men started working away, as farm hands on the mainland or with the herring fleet, often far away on the east coast. Women would have the crofts to manage as well as the usual women’s stuff of spinning and weaving, cooking and keeping the home fire burning and having babies. Having a baby in one of these little earthen-floored houses sounds terrifying. There were no privies on the island till the century had turned. Everything went into the stream. There were epidemics of all sorts of horrible kinds yet the reputation of Anne MacNeil, midwife in the 1860s was such that women were known to return to Mingulay to have their babies. She attended each birthing mother for three days and would let no-one else near. Infection, the cause of child bed fever, which took so many women, was only discovered in the mid nineteenth century. She must have maintained admirable standards of cleanliness despite the circumstances.

As a Granny I think my job might have been keeping the home fire going and getting the children off to school. I can imagine the MacPhee children tipping out for school, barefoot but on time. Education was highly valued. The Free Church of Scotland established “The Ladies School” here in 1859. One of their objectives was to bear down on “the Popery that still exists in some Highland districts.” It was very naive of them to attempt this in Mingulay where the Catholic faith was of fundamental importance in all aspects of life from birth to marriage to where you could be buried. The teacher the Free Church chose was a Protestant: John Finlayson. He taught in Mingulay until the last school closed in 1887. He lived there until his death in 1904. Far from converting any of the islanders he married a Mingulay woman and was only buried off the island because he was a Protestant. The Free Church were deeply disappointed: although the School was well attended and the children had excelled none of them had ever attended Sunday School and now the teacher had married a Catholic. They closed the school in 1871. In 1885 a Board School opened with the same teacher. Finlayson must have been an excellent teacher for Neil MacPhee became the “letter writer” for the Vatersay Raiders in 1907  and his letters were well written, dignified and persuasive.

Machair, N Uist, August. photo Pen Godber

The schoolroom was described in 1877 as having a low stone wall and an “entrance formed of the door of a ship’s cabin, floated in from some wreck. The floor was covered by a layer of white coloured sand from the shore below. The whole apartment was, however, beautified by various natural gifts from the sea and land. Every crevice had a wild flower inserted in it, and these united their varied hues with pleasing effect…the window sills were stuck full of coloured shells, while a string of seabird eggs hang in a graceful curve from side to side”. Finlayson was a naturalist as well as a teacher, contributing to many learned journals of the time. In 1881 the new school was built which stands to this day which Keith to.

By 1836 Roderick MacNeil, the last Clan chief, ran short of money. He rented and then sold the Barra estate to Colonel Gordon of Cluny in 1836. Then the worst of the evictions and clearances began. Testimony by Calum Macdonald, crofter of Barra related: “They pulled down the houses over their heads, and injured them in every possible way. They valued the brutes higher than the men whom God created in his own image, and were more gentle with them. And all the respect that we have received during the last fifty years has been received from the present proprietrix. But it was difficult for her to improve our condition. We must speak the truth to all men.” (2)

People from the islands were put on boats, hunted down with dogs if they did not come willingly, families were separated, they were given no time to prepare and no support when they were landed, destitute, in Nova Scotia, Canada. Colonel Gordon was responsible for the “clearance” of 3000 Gaelic speaking people from the Outer Hebrides to Canada. After the abolition of slavery in 1833 Gordon was awarded £25,000 compensation for his slaves in Tobago. He probably needed it for his improvement of his 108 bedroomed Cluny Castle. He was not ignorant of the life and conditions of his tenants. He was present to order one man’s home to be “burnt down around his ears”. Under him crofter’s rents were doubled at the same times as holdings were halved. It was a deliberate policy to reduce the size of crofts and double the number of inhabitants so that their crofts could no longer sustain them. People were even denied the right to collect cockles, the food of desperation from the beach. Sons who went to serve in his regiment on the promise that their parents would be secure in their homes would come back to find them evicted and living in penury on the beach. Widows were evicted. His rule was of unbelievable meanness and cruelty though he was described by one of his peers as a “model landlord”. He was also described as “the richest commoner in Britain”. For him, and other great estate holders, crofters and cottars were an unprofitable nuisance. Their pitiful rents were not enough when a greater return could be made on large scale sheep farming or deer forests.

Lady Cathcart Gordon inherited the Barra estate and much else through Colonel Gordon’s son. She is the “present proprietrix” to whom Calum MacDonald refers. She no longer evicted her tenants but she was indifferent to them except to encourage them to emigrate to Canada. She did little to improve their impoverished way of life. Their holdings were too small now to support a family. MacDonald relates: “If I allowed my son or my daughter to remain even in the stable, they would deprive me of my holding... Lady Gordon Cathcart has done away with that state of matters. But they have left us so poor that when the children of the poor man grew up, not one of them could remain assisting the father.”

The people of Mingulay had a rather special relationship to their proprietrix: they simply didn’t pay the rent. Was this because they believed they did not owe her anything? Did the people of Mingulay feel that Lady Cathcart an outsider, a Protestant, a woman who had never visited the island had less claim to own the land than they did? This was a period of tumult. Land Reform was unstoppable force. There were growing movements in Ireland to that effect (4). Certainly that was part of the Vatersay Raiders claim when they  made their first “land grab” on Vatersay in 1907. Their ancestors, they pointed out, just two generations previously, had been evicted from Vatersay. Through their grandparents and their great grandparents years of working of the land they had a right to croft there. They had made many requests to Lady Cathcart and been denied.

People compare Mingulay to St Kilda. They are both remote and they both have fabulous bird colonies with birds as a primary “crop” in the nineteenth century. But on St Kilda there is an astonishing lack of diversity in plant life. On Mingulay the reverse. There was a wonder of plant life to absorb and delight the naturalist in John Finlayson. The important difference was in the way of life. On St Kilda two successive Church rectors had manage to impose a grim puritanical rule on the islanders where the vital traditions of music, singing and storytelling were repressed. Rents were paid as a result of gruelling hard work by the St Kildans. The islanders were reduced to compliance. Not so on Mingulay. Their faith was the foundation of their lives but that left room for a lively belief in their traditions and in their own self-worth. The “Ceilidh House”, home of one branch of the MacPhees, was dedicated to storytelling that could go on for days at a time while the men mended nets. Traditionally the women sang as they stretched and kneaded wool (waulking). There was singing for every task but the waulkers were the best singers on the island.

Islanders were resourceful and determined but when the island life became untenable they took things into their own hands. In an oral history one crofter said: “He loved the island dearly but he wasn’t stupid. He led the charge to leave Mingulay”

Along with Barra crofters a significant number of Mingulay crofters had set their eyes on Vatersay. After numerous attempts to persuade Lady Cathcart to allow them to start crofts there they took their fate into their own hands as “The Vatersay Raiders”. A group of islanders joined Barra crofters on Vatersay planting potato crops and building huts. They were acting out of desperation. Sherrif Wilson was sent to persuade them to leave Vatersay.  Neil MacPhee from Mingulay, told him that both his parents had died of typhoid on Mingulay in 1894, and that, he had "grown sick of waiting and would prefer imprisonment rather than go back to Mingulay to starve or be driven to the United States". Sherrif Wilson reported on the men that “They were driven by the system and circumstances that they were powerless to control. The disobedience was not due to disrespect but entirely to their environment. (They) asked him to express the hope that those who could reform the law should take note of what they had had to suffer, and so to alter the law they might have the opportunity once more to become law abiding citizens.” Lady Cathcart , in response, served them with an indictment. They ignored it.

They were charged, tried and imprisoned in Edinburgh. Sherrif Wilson’s report was read to great applause at their trial, which the Judge found “unseemly”, but their sentence was light. Public opinion was with them. They were recognised and cheered on the streets of Edinburgh. A fund was started in their support. They were released two weeks before their two month sentence was up and returned to Vatersay. They were a part of a wave of land grabs across the Highlands and Islands and beyond. Land reform was overdue.

The following year the government intervened by buying Vatersay and crofts were allocated. The law began to change, the government stepped between the massive power of the estate holders and the crofters. Within years crofters gained security of tenure, rents were set by an independent body and the wave of reform extended even until 2003 when crofters and communities gained the right to buy out their landlords, even when the landlord objected.

Keith and I looking daft as paddlers do. photo Neil Buckland

Now we were launching again. We needed to get back to Pabbay and set camp before we ran out of energy and daylight. We eased our way back along the eastern coast enjoying this last contact with the island and the shelter that it would give us from the wind that was already increasing from the south west.

The northern tip of the island breaks up into a scrabble of rocky islets. As we went between the last of these I felt the excitement of moving water with more than a promise of wildness in it. In the straits between us and Pabbay, just 3km away there’s a tiderace building. The water is running for Ireland. The freshening wind is rushing against it. On top of the swell the windblown waves are breaking. It’s hard to read, there’s an oily stretch of quiet water before we’re into turbulence. Just half an hours paddle and we’ll be sheltered behind Pabbay. Neil, Keith and I paddled together with intense focus and concentration. This is when I love my boat. I don’t have to think about balance, she looks after me, fits me like a glove. Wave coming, paddle in, where’s Neil? Right beside me. Wave coming, paddle in, gotcha Keith. Gillian and Alan are somewhere over there. They’ll be fine because, without seeing him, I know that Spike is somewhere at the back. He's with them. They’re a team.

Everything is moving and changing and your body responds. Your consciousness is heightened. Among the waves and spray a sudden down draught of birds pivoting and turning around us. Terns? Not sure but it is a unique and fabulous feeling to be out here and part of the wild Atlantic .

Camping on Pabbay, the evening sky has its own story to tell. Neil Buckland

Pabbay. Tents up, food eaten, a bit more than a wee nip taken and a short night before once more launching early to get back to the shelter of Vatersay. The wind is bigger, the waves are bigger and the sky is dirt grey (5). Enough now. Just do it. Amy is on the beach to meet us. So good to see her and suddenly we’re on Vatersay beach. We’ve done it.

The dunes between the two beaches make for a strange landscape, photo Eve Goolden.

These people are amazing: I have quite nicely advanced osteoporosis and, without making me feel like a charity case, my boat has been whisked up the beach to my van and all I have to do is stomp behind across the dunes with a bag of kit. Thank you, all of you. My eyes to the ground I am blown away by the ridiculous number of Disney coloured primroses. It's a bit surreal.

photo Amy Goolden

Amy steers us to a big second breakfast at the community centre café. The sounds and smells of cooking and chat are overwhelming. Over a bacon roll Alan says “What next?” Bit of a twinkle in his eye. Shower and sleep, I think.

During the rest of the week we paddled in the relative shelter of the northern coast of Barra. We circumnavigated a few islands: Fuday, Hellisay and Neil and I paddled over to Eriskay and nearly made it all the way round. But not quite.

So 77 Islands was born on that trip and a first donation of £23 raised for Aban. That was two islands kayaked to and slept on (Pabbay and Vatersay) at £10 a night and 3 islands (Sandray, Hellisay and Fuday) circumnavigated at £1 each. I've decided my van can count as camping so long as I paddle to it. It’s a start. I have 75 left to discover. The next island post will be Gigha, which was a community buy out island the latest stage in Land Reform?

Camping on the Barra Islands

https://campingscotland.com/campsites/vatersay-hall-cafe-campsite/

I recommend the Community camping on Vatersay. There are showers and water, the cafés super friendly and the primrose paths through the machair and dunes to those fabulous beaches are as straight as can be. We found lots of orchids in the hills and a dead whale below the cliffs. Always exciting.

https://barracampsite.com/

On the Northern end of Barra the friendly campsite is so rich in Corncrakes that you could almost get used to them. Great walking too.

Eating

Café Kisimul  in Castlebay Barra is justly popular so get your booking in.

The community garden at the Northbay on Barra has a really good café using their own home grown vegetables and other local produce.

https://www.garadh.co.uk/

Ben Buxton’s books about Mingulay and Vatersay are exceptional. I got my copies second hand from Abe books for a few quid and they opened my eyes and heart to these islands.

Reading the Napier Commission Report online was mesmerising. Like going down a rabbit hole into a long ago world.  Have fun!

Notes

(1) Ben Buxton, Mingulay, an island and its people, p288

(2) Donald Campbell, Crofter from Barra, Napier Commission Report, Volume 1, p660

All the testimony of the Napier Commission report can be downloaded online. It is extraordinary to be able to read the personal testimony of crofters. The closest the Commission got to Mingulay is Barra.

(3) I would love to be able to understand Gaelic because this is the language of the oral history collected from Mingulay women in 1960. The women of the islands must have had courage and resourcefulness in bucket loads.

https://www.tobarandualchais.co.uk/person/1864?l=en

(4)  The Vatersay Raiders were part of a movement that alarmed the governing classes. In Ireland the Fenians were a secret organisation that spread to Britain and Canada. Directly concerned with land rights were the Tenant’s Rights League and Irish National Land League. These movements were often bundled together as “Fenians” and the Napier Commission often asked those giving testimony whether they were Fenians. For example, Michael Buchanan of Castlebay, Barra Vol 1 p654 Napier Commission Report:

“There were some gentlemen present, who called us privately—but I was within hearing— Fenians, and we were not very well pleased to hear ourselves called Fenians. We do not like the name. Sheriff Nicolson. Have your ideas been in any way influenced by what you have heard from Ireland ? Not in the least, I am not an Irishman, neither have I imbibed their notions. Sherriff Nicholson. Do many of the Barra men go to the Kinsale fishing? None, all to the east coast.  Sherriff Nicholson Who was it that called them Fenians ? The medical practitioner of this island. Sherriff Nicholson I suppose the people here aren’t much given to law? No, they are very simple, harmless people.” 

5  p280 Buxton, Mingulay: Neil MacPhee’s “Song to Mingulay”, wrote this elegy to island life years after leaving. He described the sea, that defined their lives, thus:

“The open ocean with raging waves

Divided, fearsome, wide-open waves

Flowing up from the sea bottom

Streaming, peaked, spouting

Stormy, fierce, dark grey and dark blue

Bellied and pressing out

With the intense movement of thousands of aeons

Since the early centuries of this earth”